Getting to 6 encounters in a day

Oofta said:

There were times in college when I pulled all-nighters. But that was because I procrastinated or was taking too many credits. That doesn't mean cramming is the best way to learn, many studies have shown that it's one of the worst.

I think changing a basic assumption of how we learn and advance skill is incredibly ham-fisted and transparent way of trying to justify motivating the players, not the PCs. If you want to take the route of motivating the players to get a desired in-game result, just say so. I'm not going to judge you. I'll just disagree.

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I'm fully on-board with motivating the PCs rather than the players. Meta-gaming is bad. Maybe I'm just not getting my point across.

Trivial encounters are trivial. A level 1 character learns nothing from stepping on an ant, and a level 17 warlock learns (effectively) nothing by blasting four goblins before any of them get a chance to move. You learn more by challenging someone who has skill equal-to or greater-than your own, than you could learn by challenging someone whose skill you already exceed. It's true of fencing, tennis, and chess. That is an aspect of real-world learning which the game happens to model sufficiently well, and we don't want to sacrifice that.

If you're a level 9 warlock, and you can cast two fireball V spells (per short rest), then your first two encounters against six orcs (per short rest) are trivial. You learn nothing by killing them all before they have a chance to move, and that's what my hypothetical learning curve is supposed to reflect. In the same way that you learn more from fighting a beholder than you learn from fighting an ogre, you learn more from fighting without access to your best moves than you learn from fighting with them.

Granted, putting the cut-off at exactly four encounters might seem pretty artificial, but it's just to demonstrate the general point. A better-balanced version of the rule would give the DM discretion over whether or not any given encounter was trivial. You could also say that all encounters are worth less XP until such point as the listed XP would push you over the threshold of half-expected value for the day, at which point they start awarding more; but that sounds like a lot of work for very little payoff.

Ratskinner said:

Generally, I would agree. However my current group has adult life attendence interference that really makes it difficult on the narrative to span a series of tightly-packed events across multiple sessions:

"There's no time to rest, comrades! We must press our attack against the fiendish Koalamen! Onward to the next Eucalyptus!

*pop*! "oh hi, Ranger. Um....good to see you again? Wait, was he with us this whole time? Also, has anyone seen the Barbarian? I swear he was right here a minute ago."

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Real life gets in the way. It happens. You have two choices: Write a PC out for the period where the player is MIA, or NPC the PC when the player is MIA. When you have short sessions and attendance is not very consistent, I have found that the NPC the PC approach is the only viable option most of the time, although the PC wandering off while the party is in town is an approach you can use for some of these issues.

And, yes, it does suck when a PC dies when the player is not there. It happens, even though we use conservative tactics for the PC when the player is not there.

OTOH, I think people don't give enough credit to encounters with hordes of lower powered adversaries. IME, those drain a lot more party resources than they usually get credit for. Sure, no one's life is in jeopardy with one of them, but the fourth one seems to get them pretty well. They also go pretty quickly at table.

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They're also highly variable in difficulty. A battle between 5 wizards and a series of hoards is very different compared to 5 similarly leveled rogues fighting the same horde.

I've run the same adventure for multiple groups. In it, there is a large battle when a leader and 2 lieutenants stand behind an army of undead and spend several rounds adding more undead to the combat. In one game, this was a one round combat - Two fireballs and a moon beam(Wizard, Light Cleric, Druid) cleaned the fodder and wounded the leaders enough that the melee PCs could finish them - and in another it was a TPK (the PCs were buried under skeletons that appeared faster than they were destroyed, and then died when hold persons started flying).

Oofta said:

Others? Others are just doing what's necessary. The fact that they slowly get better at it is icing on the cake, not the motivation. My AL character recently leveled up, his motivation to fight wasn't to gain that level. His motivation was to stop those gosh darn cultists (isn't is always cultists?) from destroying the world.

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If your motivation is to stop the cult, and the cult is being led by a beholder, then you need to level up in order to stop that cult.

Saelorn said:

If your motivation is to stop the cult, and the cult is being led by a beholder, then you need to level up in order to stop that cult.

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Nitpick: A player may be motivated to level up. A character would be motivated to learn more magic, get better with their weapons, get tougher, etc... so that they can handle the beholder in combat. Or they may be motivated to find a non-combat way to deal with the beholder.

Giltonio_Santos said:

In a "6-8 encounters before a long rest" model, many encounters only exist to put pressure on character resources.

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I find most stories contain at least 6 combat encounters that are organic to the story.

I don't have a lot of interest in an adventure shorter than that.

Now, if you're playing in an open world, I believe using the 6-8 encounters model is not really possible.

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Open world games can still contain stories. I'm currently in one.

ad_hoc said:

I find most stories contain at least 6 combat encounters that are organic to the story.

I don't have a lot of interest in an adventure shorter than that.

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One of the things I've been considering is that a Long Rest is something which takes place between adventures. It takes an indefinite amount of time, during which you can prepare all of your spells, and all of your injuries heal up, and that's just not something you can do while other events are in motion.

Saelorn said:

If your motivation is to stop the cult, and the cult is being led by a beholder, then you need to level up in order to stop that cult.

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But if there's no time constraint, then there's no reason to push myself. I only ever pulled an all-nighter in college because I had run out of time, if the option to go to sleep and hit the books fresh in the morning had been available I would have taken that. If I already have a sense of urgency then extra XP is not necessary.

In the campaign I'm currently playing in there are a variety of reasons to push beyond 3-4 encounters per day. A sense that if we waste a day or so here and there resting is not one of them because we know of no "ticking clock". At least not yet. Yes, I could potentially stop the bad guys more quickly if we rush but if I die in the process they're going to win anyway.

There are plenty of ways to encourage PC behavior outside of meta-game rewards.

iserith said:

I've been saying for a while on the forums that you can do this by granting the PCs a cumulative XP bonus that increases with every encounter past a certain benchmark. The more they do in an adventuring day, the bigger the bonus gets.

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If you're using xp, I like this idea a lot

Oofta said:

There are plenty of ways to encourage PC behavior outside of meta-game rewards.

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What do you think is a meta-game reward, in this scenario? Because I'm positing that experience is an in-game reward, for the characters, which they earn as a result of taking actions which make sense to them.

Fighting six encounters in a day is not like pulling an all-nighter in college. It's not about the quantity. It's about the objective difficulty, and how hard you need to overcome that challenge. It's like studying chapter six, specifically, where chapters 1-5 are just a review to bring you up to speed so you can tackle it. The point of the first five encounters is that they get you to a place where you might learn something from the sixth encounter.

5e's mix of short and long rest classes f*cks things up. I think the solution is:

1. All short rest abilities become twice/long rest abilities instead.
2. Long rest is a week or 1d6 days or 24 hrs .... or leave it as overnight.
3. If overnight, some kind of check has to be made to see how many (if any) resources are refreshed. I suggest:

2d6 ABILITIES RESTORED
2-5 None of the character’s expended abilities are restored.
6-8 Half of the character’s expended abilities are restored (round down).
9-10 Three quarters of the character’s expended abilities are restored (round down).
11-12 All of the character’s expended abilities are restored.

If players cant get reliable, easy overnight access to their abilities refreshing, you no longer need 6-8 enc per day, because you don't have to worry about novaing. You can have 1 or none per day and it's fine. Every time a resource is spent, it becomes a meaningful decision, because it isnt coming back in a hurry (week or 1d6 day rest) or there is a significant chance it wont come back anytime soon (8 hr rest, but roll on refresh table).