D&D 5E 6-8 encounters/day - how common is this?

[TwoSix]

I guess I just don't subscribe to the balance obsession. I had as much fun playing a 1st level fighter in a 4th/5th level group as I have with my 8th level Necromancer in a group where everyone is lvl 7/8.

And that's fine. Many people on these forums don't agree with you, but many do!

The important thing to remember is that the topic of "balance" has been discussed here for years in a lot of erudite threads by people who are quite crusty from years of the Edition War and have sharpened their rhetorical weapons into razor edges. Cries of "Balance, what the heck, guys?" are going to be torn apart like orphaned lion cubs by the new alpha male.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I don't get what your point is in telling me this. That I'm playing the game wrong?

That people who do play that way aren't playing it wrong.

A lot of things "work" in modern D&D but Gygaxian D&D, what I'm assuming you're referencing as the "classic game", was primarily focused on large dungeon crawls.

D&D in the 20th century is what I think of as 'classic,' so not just Gygaxian treasure-hunting dungeon crawls.

And 5e's clearly open to other styles, edition-referent or otherwise. It just has to start somewhere.

 

[Sunseeker]

That people who do play that way aren't playing it wrong.

D&D in the 20th century is what I think of as 'classic,' so not just Gygaxian treasure-hunting dungeon crawls.

And it's clearly open to other styles, edition-referent or otherwise. It just has to start somewhere.

I don't recall saying or implying that they were. But clearly D&D 5E is more than "classic" D&D, which by your count wouldn't even include 3rd edition. So, again, I guess I'm just missing what the point was.

 

[CapnZapp]

The issue is this:

Poster A (this could be me) says "the game encounter guidelines create laughably easy combats"
Poster B (who will remain nameless) counters "you're not using enough encounters. Try 6-8"
Poster A sighs at the well-meaning but far too generic advice

The real solutions, of course, are to acknowledge the game rules are way too inflexible to work for those of us that aren't blessed with a perfect ability to come up with a compelling 6-8 encounter day, every day of the week.

Such as, I don't know, pretty much every single published 5e module ever written...!

The rules would have been vastly better IF the PHB explitly laid the power to grant rests in the hands of the DM or scenario writer, rather than uneqivocally stating "you can take a long rest to end the day". At the very least saying "the rate of rests vary with the adventure's needs". Or have a DMG variant that puts the issue to its final rest: "you can only short-rest after every other encounter and you can only long-rest after two short rests"

IF the DMG was set up acknowledging many of us like fewer more meaningful encounters than more rote ones, and the consequences thereof: guidelines on how to tweak the balance between short resters and long resters: "if your campaign is a wilderness hexcrawl where heroes very rarely have more than three encounters in a day..." or "if you simply dislike routine non-challenging fights and thus skip the easy/medium ones to save time..."

At the very least we wouldn't have had all these endless discussions where people insist "just do 6-8 encounters"

Thank god this thread exists. Now I shall always point to it every time I get that particular pearl of wisdom.

 

[meshon]

The issue is this:

Poster A (this could be me) says "the game encounter guidelines create laughably easy combats"
Poster B (who will remain nameless) counters "you're not using enough encounters. Try 6-8"
Poster A sighs at the well-meaning but far too generic advice

The real solutions, of course, are to acknowledge the game rules are way too inflexible to work for those of us that aren't blessed with a perfect ability to come up with a compelling 6-8 encounter day, every day of the week.

Such as, I don't know, pretty much every single published 5e module ever written...!

The rules would have been vastly better IF the PHB explitly laid the power to grant rests in the hands of the DM or scenario writer, rather than uneqivocally stating "you can take a long rest to end the day". At the very least saying "the rate of rests vary with the adventure's needs". Or have a DMG variant that puts the issue to its final rest: "you can only short-rest after every other encounter and you can only long-rest after two short rests"

IF the DMG was set up acknowledging many of us like fewer more meaningful encounters than more rote ones, and the consequences thereof: guidelines on how to tweak the balance between short resters and long resters: "if your campaign is a wilderness hexcrawl where heroes very rarely have more than three encounters in a day..." or "if you simply dislike routine non-challenging fights and thus skip the easy/medium ones to save time..."

At the very least we wouldn't have had all these endless discussions where people insist "just do 6-8 encounters"

Thank god this thread exists. Now I shall always point to it every time I get that particular pearl of wisdom.

Other than the assertion that less encounters automatically means the encounters are more meaningful, and the implication that a "6-8 day" means every day of every week has to be filled with combat, this is pretty reasonable.

The rules in the PHB and DMG come across as pretty inflexible. The wording isn't that helpful to people looking to increase the challenge between rests. The categories of encounter difficulty are particularly problematic and really (in my experience) only add up to hard or deadly or whatever. I'm definitely interested in trying out the p84 guidelines on Adjusted XP per day to see if meeting that target, as opposed to a particular number of combats, achieves the result of the characters feeling tapped out and in need of a rest. For example, three deadly combats before a long rest.

Does your "solution" that the rules are too inflexible mean you would just play a different ruleset? It actually sounds like you're playing D&D though, and having fun, in which case I would suggest that it isn't all that broken, or that the rules are amenable enough that you can adjust them to make the game work for the way you like to play. Hopefully people can get enough information from a thread like this that they can try some new things that others have suggested if they're having trouble, or having "not fun."

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

Some of those things might take a minute or two to resolve at most. Most should be resolved within seconds. The majority of time wasted in encounters is not the maths (roll+bonus) its in the making decisions on what to do.

Like I said above, at my table you get a few seconds to decide what to do (you should already know at the start of your turn what youre doing) then a prompt/ warning. After a few more seconds have passed of real time, your turn ends due to indecision and you take the dodge action.

Works a treat.

You're making weird assumptions, like assuming that we let players sit there for 10 minutes to come up with an action. The DM does exactly what you are describing - though what you are saying doesn't work perfectly because the situation may have changed if a major enemy was killed before the players action. Then he might need a moment to replan - though the example I was quoting was a literal actual passage of play from a recent game which didn't have any complex decisions at all. That example was lifted from an actual passage of play

The problem is the warhammer esque problem of forcing you to break down what is basically a dicepool attack into tons and tons of smaller dice rolls. the player in question actually has multiple sets of colourcoded dice and could roll all his attacks at once if you could but the system doesn't let you, because:

A) Balanced around fighters being able to split attacks

B) Battlemaster fighters need to roll damage after attacks because they have abilities that let you 'correct' a miss.

C) Spells like bless break the simplicity of roll d20 + static and unchanging modifier as do abilities like sharpshooter

So instead of being able to roll 4d20 + 4d6 you have to roll 1d20+1d4 -> 1d6 ->1d20+1d4 -> d8 -> 1d6 etc 4 or 5 times, doing a call/response with the DM every time about the guy being dead or not. Which takes ages, givne there will always be some thinking time between rolls on the dice to process new information.

That example of play is also just playing Descent, there is no RPing in it - which is often a reflection of how combats go down. I think this in part makes combats seriously boring.

It's just painful, and we've actually started simplifying this stuff but it's not always easy. For example, if every target in the fight has the same AC the fighter can roll his 4-5 attacks at once, no problem and just count off hits until the guy is dead. But if they have different AC, that doesn't work. Similarly we've started bundling the damage dice roll with the attack roll and letting the two battle-master fighters see their damage rolls before they decide to use precision because the DM thinks they are underpowered (agree). Also, DM has just started telling people ACs out of the gate to make things quicker (this also helps battlemasters too)

But I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to do any of that.

 

[Flamestrike]

It doesn't actually say in the DMG that most adventures should have 6-8 fights per long rest. It says that a party can typically get through that many medium-hard encounters before they need to rest. If this is accurate, it would be cutting it pretty close to the bone to have most "adventuring days" actually be this long.

The assumption is that long rest resources should last you through 6-8 encounters. Short rest resources should last around 2 encounters.

With some classes being short rest dependent, and others being long rest dependent (and long rest resources being much more potent than short rest ones) if youre only getting one or two 'big' fights between long rests, youre effectively removing the distinction between the two.

Compare a long rest dependent Wizard 10 with a short rest dependent Warlock 10 over 2 'big' fights per day, or a long rest dependent Paladin 10 vs a short rest dependent Fighter 10. Its not even close.

Now compare the exact same classes over an adventuring day featuring 8 encounters, with a short rest after every single encounter. It swings the other way entirely.

I don't create gauntlets like that where the party can't rest until they get through 6-8 fights, but apparently @Flamestrike does and has found that this is a tough challenge for even optimized PCs.

What it does is it balances the party out between each other and between the encounters. It also reduces the risk of a TPK, and makes reaching for a spell/ rage/ smite etc a meaningful player choice, instead of an automatic go-to.

I personally use a 6/2 split as my default ballpark target. I frame my adventures around this baseline about 50 percent of the time, with the remainder split up among shorter (or non time limited) and the rare occasional longer AD.

If we've had a lot of shorter ADs in the campaign, then I'll design an adventure with a stricter time limit. If the PCs have just had a long AD, I'll maybe back off on imposing a time limit for a while.

If I design an adventure with 15 encounters, the time limit will often be a 2-3 day limit (allowing the players to determine when - within that meta - they want to take a long rest). The players might want to push in to the adventure as far as possible before resting, in order to be able to resolve the last few fights with nova strikes (or even just to have more options available to them when they get there).

You create very different adventures and challenges this way. It makes designing your adventures a little more challenging, but it allows for a greater spread of challenges. You can have big 'John Woo' AD's where the party are free to unleash firey doom on the monsters, or longer more tense AD's where the party are conserving resources, and trying to achieve a goal (stop the BBEG) against the clock.

As long as you are prepared to buy in, its a feature, and not a bug.

 

[Rhenny]

I mentioned this earlier, and a few others mentioned it later, but it bares repeating.

As long as the players don't know how many encounters they will face in an adventuring day, they will play as if they may encounter 6 or more.

Many games I've played in and DMd, I've had spellcasters hold back and save spells because they would rather be safe than sorry. Sometimes it pays off because they do get to use them in later encounters. Other times they basically keep them unspent and they get to recharge for the next day.

If the DM can keep this behavior consistent, then there will be less problems with warlocks, etc. being shamed when there are only 2 encounters in a day.

Remember, DMs....your players do not know what's going to happen after each encounter they have. Use variety and the fear of the unknown to keep the balance in force even when you have only 2 or 3 encounters in a day.

 

[Flamestrike]

As long as the players don't know how many encounters they will face in an adventuring day, they will play as if they may encounter 6 or more.

Unless the DM never throws more than 1 or 2 at them (in which case they'll simply ration resources according to this meta) or he lets them long rest at will, or both.

If the DM doesnt police the 5 minute AD, the players wont.

If the players come to expect 6-8 as the baseline, then thats what they'll work around even on shorter days. If they come to expect one encounter per day, they'll naturally nova the out of everything.

 

[TwoSix]

If I design an adventure with 15 encounters, the time limit will often be a 2-3 day limit (allowing the players to determine when - within that meta - they want to take a long rest). The players might want to push in to the adventure as far as possible before resting, in order to be able to resolve the last few fights with nova strikes (or even just to have more options available to them when they get there).

As always, I'm amazed at the diversity of playstyles within the hobby. I can't imagine planning 15 encounters ahead of time.