So I ran a 6-8 encounter day...

And it was interesting.

I'll post the encounters below, but the short of it was that a thief (technically speaking, a warlock) stole an altar with a *god* in it (a very minor one, but still) and fled into a dangerous jungle. The party had to give chase before the tail grew cold or the warlock did something dangerous with the god.

The party (All level 7):
Monk (open hand)
Monk (drunken master)
Warlock (tome/topaz dragon, missed session 2)
Paladin (order of the ancient)
Cleric (knowledge, missed session 3).

This took about 3 sessions (of 3 hours each) to do. The party had a single rest during the adventure (plus one at the end). And... it seems to really had an impact on the "long rest" classes, esp the paladin, who was out of spells, out of lay of hands and had 15 hp rest after the big fight. He complained that this really advantaged the short rest classes, but I pointed out that the reverse advantaged *him* so...

So yes, 6-8 encounters/day DOES help with class balance. But even after doing this, I can't help but note that this narrative structure does not work for all adventures...


Encounter one. Ambush by intelligent spiders, a dozen of them (bullied into doing it by the warlock). The party tangled with them at level 3 and routed them. Still took a bit of damage, used a spell or two

Encounter 2: A clearing with an ancient runic path. The party decided to avoid

Encounter 3: The island. On the island there is a hermit who poisoned/enchanted the party to go to sleep, in order to cast a ritual on them to make them his slaves. This did not succeed properly and a fight ensued. Paladin wasted a lot of lay on hand here, and the monk was hit by the wraith-like powers of the hermit, losing 22 of her max HP - ouch!. Party takes a short rest.

Encounter 4: A sinkhole with a hidden Purple Worm in it. See http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-Run-away!-quot-what-if-they-don-t&highlight=

At this point the paladin starting having trouble with his survival checks to track the warlock and ran into 2 random encounters:

Encounter 5: A deep ravine with sparkling water at the bottom. The warlock uses mage hand to grab a sample and the party moves on

Encounter 6: A jungle Ogre (they have excellent camouflage, but are just ogre) tries a "grab and run" ambush on a party NPC. The 2 monks give chase and beat it down.

Encounter 7: The party catches up with the Warlock - she has pulled the tiny god forth to ask it a question (this is the Beetle of Misplaced Memories, and the party forgot they had that altar....). She took no part in the battle, as she got her answer (not what she expected) and fled. However, her allies - chicken men (see http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2018/06/lay-little-egg-for-me.html but see bellow for stats) did not and engaged the party in battle and attempted to eat the Beetle God. The party was successful at fighting them, using Compelled Duel on the chief to pull him away from the altar.

This fight should have been a *joke* for the party (the chieftain was a reskinned veteran with 15 AC and 70 hp, there was a 40 hp shaman (a druid-ish character who managed entangle, fairy fire and feign death) and 6 tribes-chickenmen (reskinned thugs who also had javelins). But it was actually fairly difficult due to low resources.

Encounter 8. After regaining the altar and taking a second short rest, the party pushed on. They decided not to stop for the night after sun down but pressed to reach the city. They heard voices in the distance. The warlock, invisible, investigated but after falling into a pit trap, decided that these voices weren't worth it, and dimension-door-ed back the party.

I don't see what your Paladin player is complaining about. This looks like part of a typical adventuring day to any 1e player/character....

Ancalagon said:

But even after doing this, I can't help but note that this narrative structure does not work for all adventures...

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Yep. I usually need to allow one long rest every two days of game play.

We get around that by having a house rule that says 'for balance reasons between classes, we'll have the equivalent of 6-8 encounters with two short rests between long rests. That means sometimes in the narrative you won't always get a long rest by sleeping overnight. I'll narrate something as best as I can to keep the verisimilitude of the game, but this is necessary to ensure the most fun for everyone so I hope you understand and roll with it.'

I just use the alternate rules where a short rest is overnight and a long rest is several days. The only time it causes an issue is on the incredibly rare occasion where I find myself doing a dungeon crawl. In those cases, of course, there's always the option of some exceptional source of magic to let people recover.

I haven't done the whole adventures in Chult thing yet, but if I did I'd probably just give them a safe cave or village to rest in now and then while letting them know that the jungle is too dangerous to stay in one spot for the several days without a safe haven.

The key is for the players to to know that there could be more encounters. Even if the day ends up being shorter than average, the long rest classes will still have most of their abilities because it could have been longer.

As for narrative, we just have the rule where if it isn't safe then no long rest is possible. It has to actually be safe. So no long rest in a dungeon unless, for example, they have negotiated with the city of dwarfs they just found. The alternative, having the rest interrupted by monsters over and over is just not fun for anyone.

The only real house rule involved is not allowing the resting spells.

From a narrative perspective, that's a lot of things to happen in one day.

I think one of the things about the 6-8 encounters is that the encounters, individually are a joke, but it's an attrition issue, you take 5hp here and you take 2 spells there and after 6-8 encounters that's 30-40hp and 12-16 spells!

But I mean, I think what this really goes to show is how 6-8 encounters work best when the party has a reason to keep going.

Can you give us an idea of the levels of the PCs and the adjusted encounter difficulty?

I don't necessarily plan out adventures to be 6-8 encounters within the daily XP budget. But what I do is use it as a guide for what I can expect the PCs to cover in the upcoming adventure, especially if it is going to be a combat heavy session. That way, I'm not caught off guard if things are too easy or too difficult.

This is what works for me:

I try to keep max adjusted XP for a single encounter to be 2X Deadly and I try to keep the entirety of XP between long rests to be about the daily XP budget for the party. I have found that a fully rested party can generally defeat a 2X deadly encounter with no deaths but will use 75% or more of their resources (spells, HD, etc) to avoid PCs going down.

For instance: My current game is 2nd level. They are in a wilderness and found they were being tracked by a orc eye of gruumsh (who I made a druid rather than cleric...heat metal, absorb elements and healing word make for one badass orc for a low level party...or so I hoped) and his sabertooth tiger (it came about from just a couple rolls on the random tables in Xanthars). The orc was harassing them and luring other monsters to attack them for a session. The party got away from him enough to take a long rest and decided they would double back on him to try to kill him. This would be a tough fight for 2nd level PCs but not unwinnable.

Here is what I'm looking at for a 2nd level party of 4:

Easy: 200
Medium: 400
Hard: 600
Deadly: 800+
Max: 1600

Daily: 2400

Orc Eye of Gruumsh (450) plus Sabertooth Tiger (450): 1350 Adjusted XP/Deadly

So I decided that we'd run this as a sort of skill challenge. Each failed check would result in a random encounter from Xanthar's. 4 successes would result in the party getting to the shaman. The 4th failure would mean the shaman attacking on his terms.

So I rolled 5 more random encounters using the Tier I hills and forest tables and got:

3 harpies: 1200/Deadly

3 scouts: Trivial (friendly)

4 orcs: 800/Deadly

2 hippogriffs: 600/Hard

5 bandits: 250/Easy

Great...that's potentially 4200 XP worth of encounters. So that would be nearly impossible for a 2nd level party to overcome in a single day. So my plan became that the chase could take 2 days...if they failed three times they would lose track of him for the night and would have to rest to pick up the trail again in the morning. If they failed one more then he attacks them after one more encounter. I don't give HP back for long rests...just half HD rounded up plus class features recharge. So if they are low on HP/HD going into a long rest, they might not be much better off by the next morning. I don't let short rest recharge powers recharge more than twice per day...so after the third use of something like Second Wind, you need a long rest.

The encounters would just go in order from easiest to hardest (I also considered just randomizing them). The scouts I decided would just be mixed with the harpy encounter. That would give the PCs some help...they would come upon the scouts fighting off the harpies. This would fit with the current situation anyway since they were actually searching for a team of surveyors that were supposed to be mapping a route through the hills/forest to a river ford. They surveyor party (unbeknownst to the party at this point) had been attacked in killed by orcs, the survivors given to a local green hag...so I decided these three scouts had "escaped" (really abandoned their friends to their deaths) and were trying to get back to the main encampment so the party would come across them as they were attacked by the harpies. That way if the party were tired after two days that would give them at least a little boost...

Anyway...none if it mattered. They succeeded 4 DC 15 skill checks in a row and thus ambushed Torug (they orc eye of Gruumsh) and his cat. The battle was difficult but the PCs pretty much went nova on them and won without anyone getting seriously injured. The cleric succeed on his save vs heat metal TWICE (dang it!), they focus fired on the cat and brought it down, the only hit it scored was on their onyx dog from a figurine of wondrous power they found last adventure (just a random tier I treasure hoard...). They did manage to interrogate the orc and got out of him the presence of the harpies so they decided to press on and attack the harpies too...by this time, I decided the harpies had already captured the scouts and had tied them to some dead trees on a hilltop to let them "ripen" a little. This actually turned out to be the tougher fight. The ranger went down, the fighter was down to 2 hp at one point. The elf wizard had to resort to using his shortsword to drive one of the creatures off...So it ended up just two encounters as 2550 adjusted XP. The the party was completely out of spells, had most of their HP, less than half their HD and had used up one of their two healing potions, 6 out of 10 goodberries. If they had to, they could have handled another medium or hard encounter. A third deadly+ one might have overwhelmed them.

Anyway...the short of it is the 6-8 encounter/XP budget, IMO is a great tool for DMs to just guide them in setting up scenarios that are challenging but not too challenging. They let us determine if the party has a good chance to face the challenges ahead or do we need to introduce a chance to rest, signal to the party they might be getting in over their head or are things going to be too easy and we need to look to increase the challenge. To me, things break down if you are just doing 1 encounter per day...then you really favor the classes that have mostly long rest recharge abilities and leave your players feeling like they have to nova in every fight which, imo, takes away some of the interesting choices players face.

Uller said:

Can you give us an idea of the levels of the PCs and the adjusted encounter difficulty?

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I'm so sorry, I forgot to mention that they are all level 7 (edited the OP for clarity)

I don't know the difficulty level, I just eyeball things usually, and some have custom monsters. Like the jungle Ogre's ambush ability... how does that change the CR?

Sunseeker said:

From a narrative perspective, that's a lot of things to happen in one day.

I think one of the things about the 6-8 encounters is that the encounters, individually are a joke, but it's an attrition issue, you take 5hp here and you take 2 spells there and after 6-8 encounters that's 30-40hp and 12-16 spells!

But I mean, I think what this really goes to show is how 6-8 encounters work best when the party has a reason to keep going.

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Yes. The DM has to provide a reason why the PCs can't rest. Resting invites more danger or loss of precious time or some such. It also, IMO, requires a bit of player buy-in.

In a game I am playing in currently, we have sneaked into a fortification to steal something while our allies attack the main entrance. So the longer it takes us, the more our allies suffer...we're low level, low on spells (my character is down to one 1st lvl spell slot) and a bit low on hp. Can we stop and take a short rest? Maybe...I don't know. I suspect the DM would allow us to without trouble but as a player, I've bought into the notion that we have a time crunch. So we press on...

Uller said:

Yes. The DM has to provide a reason why the PCs can't rest. Resting invites more danger or loss of precious time or some such. It also, IMO, requires a bit of player buy-in.

In a game I am playing in currently, we have sneaked into a fortification to steal something while our allies attack the main entrance. So the longer it takes us, the more our allies suffer...we're low level, low on spells (my character is down to one 1st lvl spell slot) and a bit low on hp. Can we stop and take a short rest? Maybe...I don't know. I suspect the DM would allow us to without trouble but as a player, I've bought into the notion that we have a time crunch. So we press on...

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It's one thing I noted - the long rest spellcaster still has cantrips (why there should always be one combat cantrip...), a paladin "out of juice" is still a solid warrior that boost staves, etc etc.