D&D 5E Where did the 6-8 encounter standard come from?

[Parmandur]

To be fair, of you watch, say, Chris Perkins run a game, that is how he manages encounters.

 

[FrogReaver]

6-8 encounters a day guideline was bad. IMO. That is one place 6th edition when it finally comes can drastically improve upon.

 

[FrogReaver]

To answer the OP. I think they pulled 6-8 encounters out of a hat. Or more likely it came from 4ed. It's been so long since I looked at 4e I couldn't say for sure.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

The goal of the 6-8 encounters is to exhaust the PCs' available resources. This includes HD from Short Rests & associated Short Rest recuperations that are 1-per-Long-Rest as well as those that recuperate from a Long Rest. So there's 2 or so Short Rests baked into this assumption. One way to deal with this is fewer but more challenging encounters where appropriate. Encounters don't need to be fights, either - they can be traps, puzzles, use of spells to bypass barriers, etc.

I'm running a Tier 3 AL mod soon and I'm looking over the encounters. The first one is a stand-alone during travel that can be immediately followed by a Long Rest. This means the players won't need to pull any punches and so I'm increasing the difficulty of the attackers enough to challenge a group of the recommended APL but maintaining the theme and purpose of the encounter itself.

Later there's a major encounter prior to the approach to the finale. Some parties would be tempted to do a Long Rest after this fight but I've annotated the encounter villain's monologue to include information that lets the players know that time is of the essence. They can rest but it will have major repercussions (a ritual is further along in casting than if they go straight on or take a Short Rest).

I know, lots of you don't want to have to do that work on a published product, it should auto-adjust or something else unattainable. Or you want to create a 'sandbox' where you shouldn't have to do this kind of balancing because it's not 'fair'.

The truth is, if you want to run a fun game with memorable challenges, it's on you as a DM to use your judgement, skill and imagination to make it so.

 

[OB1]

I disagree with the conclusion. The reason that I use the 6-8 encounters is because there is a large amount of empirical evidence across a lot of tables that shows that this is the point the at-will, short-rest-recharge and long-rest-recharge classes balance against each other as well as common attrition tactics take a toll.

Fewer, harder encounters favor some classes more and disfavor other. Number one common element in "5e is easy mode" threads is that they don't do 6-8 encounters.

BTW, I'm not defending 6-8 encounters - I really enjoy 5e and it's by far my biggest complain about the system. I'm just saying that the reason the 6-8 gets talked about is because not only do they suggest it, but it holds up. Like as if they balanced against it.

I agree this section is worded horribly and lends itself to confusion. [MENTION=6783882]Nevvur[/MENTION] correctly quoted the DMG, but in your response you are already dropping the key words of CAN along with MEDIUM TO HARD. These are all very important factors in the guideline.

When you look at the Adventure Day XP guidelines, you quickly see that what is missing from the 6-8 encounter assumption is that 3 Deadlies also give you the full adventuring day XP and equal the amount before a typical short rest. So you CAN get to the recommended maximum in 3 Deadly fights (with a short rest between each).

Now, I know there is an argument that favors LR classes. But in actually play it doesn't. Sure, a Barbarian can theoretically rage in every encounter if you are going 3 Deadlies, but that assumes first that the Barbarian knows there is going to be exactly 3 encounters and that there would be a need or desire for the Barbarian to rage in each of 8 medium encounters.

As for LR spellcasters, the fewer number of encounters per day is balanced by the fact that the number of combat rounds per day stays roughly the same. A deadly fight typically takes 5 rounds, a hard 3 rounds and a medium 2 rounds. That means that the party can handle about 5-6 rounds per short rest and about 15-18 rounds per day. Running TOM, there is no reason that a PC turn, even at higher levels, should take more than 90 seconds to resolve with the DM taking a max of 3 minutes, meaning that a full 3-8 encounter, 18 round day should have less than 90 minutes of combat table time.

To sum up, here are 4 points to keep in mind for the Adventure Day

1. The guideline in the DMG is designed to warn DMs about the MAXIMUM number of encounters a party can handle before running out of resources.
2. The guideline is for 3 five round Deadly fights, 6 3 round Hard fights, or 8 2 round Medium fights split into 3 sets of six round combats per short rest and 15-18 rounds of combat per long rest
3. Balance between classes only requires that PCs believe that they could face the maximum daily xp. If they are going Nova too often, you may be too predictable in your combat encounter structure.
4. If as a DM you haven't tried to run 5e using the Adventure Day XP guidelines from the DMG, try it!

Finally, I routinely throw my PCs into situation where there is far more XP between them and their goal then they could handle by taking a kill them all approach. Only by trying to avoid combat can they hope to reach their objective. This really focuses them on using resources wisely throughout the day.

 

[robus]

The goal of the 6-8 encounters is to exhaust the PCs' available resources. This includes HD from Short Rests & associated Short Rest recuperations that are 1-per-Long-Rest as well as those that recuperate from a Long Rest. So there's 2 or so Short Rests baked into this assumption. One way to deal with this is fewer but more challenging encounters where appropriate. Encounters don't need to be fights, either - they can be traps, puzzles, use of spells to bypass barriers, etc.

I'm not sure its goal is to exhaust the available resources but to inform the DM, while designing encounters (either for an adventure or for a session), when the party will be running out of resources at their current level. If the DM is super keen and wants 10 hard encounters in a row (with no opportunity to long rest) the math will show them that the party has little chance of surviving.

In other words it's a design guide and not an execution plan IMHO. Given player agency, there is little control the DM can exert on the execution of the encounters either in which order/manner or whether they manage to get a long rest somewhere in between. Once players start losing a lot of resources they will only push on if there is a powerful reason (i.e. they are --or something they care about is-- doomed if they linger).

 

[Sacrosanct]

Given player agency, there is little control the DM can exert on the execution of the encounters either in which order/manner or whether they manage to get a long rest somewhere in between. Once players start losing a lot of resources they will only push on if there is a powerful reason (i.e. they are --or something they care about is-- doomed if they linger).

I disagree. The DM controls the world, and it's a living world. That means everyone and everything in it would act like they would reasonably act in a living world. That means that often, players don't have the choice on whether or not they get a long or short rest. Often they don't need a powerful reason to push on. Often they have to, because the monsters in the surrounding areas just attacked them 30 minutes into their rest once they discovered the PCs location.

So in that sense, the DM have a lot of control. Player agency means the player has control over their PC, not control over the game world or its inhabitants. (well, I grant that some groups do that in a shared story, but that's not how D&D is assumed to be played).

 

[robus]

Another reason why you really don't want to enforce the 6-8 encounters per adventuring day is that your game will become routine. The pattern will become obvious and the players will start to play to the pattern rather than the adventure.

And of course not every day is an adventuring day. Some are travel days, some are social interaction/exploration days and some days the hits the fan. The last of those is the adventuring day where combat is mostly the way to get through.

The guideline is there so that you can mix up the adventuring days using whatever combination of encounter difficulties suit your needs. For example: Will the adventuring day will likely end with the big boss battle? Design that final encounter to be deadly - but then make sure you don't blow your budget in whatever encounters lead up to that final battle on that day.

 

[Lord_Blacksteel]

To answer the OP. I think they pulled 6-8 encounters out of a hat. Or more likely it came from 4ed. It's been so long since I looked at 4e I couldn't say for sure.

No, 4E was ten encounters per level so it didn't come from there. That was intended to be a mix of combat encounters, skill challenges, and quest rewards so it was typically 5-8 combat encounters per level in practice. Combat could take a while, but from an "encounters" perspective you leveled up faster.

From a design perspective if you balance the game by having some abilities available all of the time, some available with an easy recharge (a short rest), and some available with a more difficult recharge (long rest) then you need enough encounters to make those a meaningful difference. As others have pointed out if you're doing a lot of cross-country travel and going with one encounter per day then those differences largely disappear. To a degree that means a DM can explore the upper limits of the enemy CR range and challenge the PC's a little harder.

I'm sure it does stem from the dungeon as "peak environment" for the game. Pretty much every adventure has at least one significant dungeon and that's traditionally the most challenging piece - where your character is the most in danger of dying - and the heart of the game so that's where balance comes into play the most. It's not the only part we play, but it's the part that requires the finest degree of balance. Even there, the DM can moderate it with wandering encounters, reinforcements, and morale considerations.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

BTW, check out the new subclasses in Xanathar's. A Significant number of key class abilities are only Long Rest refreshable, whereas they were Short Rest refreshable in the Play Test. For example, the Samurai can only use their Fighting Spirit only 3 times per Long Rest (or gain one if they're out when Initiative is rolled when they reach 10th level). Same with the Cavalier's ability to Mark (based on a Stat Bonus).