The encounter guidelines work OK for low levels and for newer players I suppose, theres nothing wrong with them as such. I don't expect them to work that well with feats, multiclassing and power gamers.
The encounter guidelines work better than the ones for 1e and 2e which didn't exist. Or for ones in 90% of other RPGs on the market where they also don't exist.
They work better than the ones for 3e, which were funky. And about as well as the ones for 4e.
The thing is, those rules exist
only because they were expected and for writing the published adventures, so they can be done "by the book". The designers knew that once people got a feel for designing encounters, those rules would go out the window.
Its not a deal breaker or anything. Some people round here think 5E is perfect (hint its not) and some editions did certain things better either conceptually or mechanically even if those editions had lots of other problems.
I don't think
anyone thinks it's perfect. I just think they don't see the point about complaining. Or feel the need to defend it against attack (especially from non-positive criticism where no solutions are presented).
5e is like capitalism or democracy, where they're pretty flawed—often at an inherent level—but they're the best we have at the moment. Attacking them for the sake of complaining doesn't serve much purpose.
Lots of people do not seem to buy into the 6-8 encounter thing for example or the default 2 short rests assumption but its kind of what the designers were thinking about when they designed short rest rules which may or may not play nice with long rest classes.
True. But lots of people didn't like the 4-5 encounters per day of 3e and 4e either. For many games, balancing around a single encounter per day might be preferable.
Getting the exact right encounters-per-day ONLY matters when you're trying to establish baseline balance/ effectiveness between short rest recharge classes and long rest recharge classes.
Which, even then, is only theoretical as the dice will make effectiveness vary, as will player skill, character optimisation, and a myriad of other factors. And it's pretty much impossible with the average party since you're trying to gauge the comparative effectiveness of four very different characters fulfilling four very different roles. There's no single metric that works: how do you compare how effective the tank was compared to the blaster compared to the healer?
The ideal pacing is whatever you want to achieve. The 6-8 thing doesn't work so well due to the assumption you have to grind the PCs hp down and 5E has abundant healing. I find some types of adventures easier to do with AD&D/clone etc than 5E, hexcrawls come to mind when you might only get an encounter every 2nd day for example.
5e has abundant out-of-combat healing. In combat healing is often weak, as it's hard to heal more damage than is being inflicted. A single encounter can be challenging, regardless if you're on encounter 1 or encounter 8.
The advantage of a 6-8 encounter day is that it's long. You can have a single big encounter that feels like 2 or 3 encounters and still have enough fuel in the tank for 3-4 more regular encounters or 2 scary encounters. Unlike the 4-5 encounter workday, where after an encounter like that you feel tapped and incentivized to rest. It encourages a five minute workday. Trying to have those long multi-encounter dungeons (like in 1e and 2e) felt tricky with 3e, as people exhausted their resources too quickly. So you can have something like the opening of
Lost Mine of Phandelver where you have 6 goblin encounters at level 1 without taking 2-3 days.
