Getting to 6 encounters in a day

[Bawylie]

I do have the "play a character that makes sense" discussion during my session 0, along with a few other things like "no evil" and "don't play a jerk". But once a character is created I want to run games where decisions made by the PC are made from the perspective of the PC.

Other styles are just as valid, just not my preference.

Of course there is never a problem when players make decisions from the perspective of their characters. That’s good.

I argue only that a player’s motivation to play is as important as the character’s. Ignoring that interest is generally undesirable, even at the expense of in-character motivations.

 

[Oofta]

Of course there is never a problem when players make decisions from the perspective of their characters. That’s good.

I argue only that a player’s motivation to play is as important as the character’s. Ignoring that interest is generally undesirable, even at the expense of in-character motivations.

Well hopefully the fact that I'm an awesome DM and we're creating fantastic stories is enough motivation for my players. Well, that and they like our cats. The fact that my wife likes to cook has nothing to do with it.

But as far as rewarding players for PC actions, I guess that's what inspiration is for. If I ever remember to hand it out.

I will gladly admit that the players making decisions for PCs based on things not from the PC's perspective is a pet peeve. Whether that's flipping through the monster manual to let me know that my monster doesn't work the way I'm running it or that if they make a decision based solely on whether I'm going to give them a cookie. YMMV, which is fine.

 

[Rhenny]

It's easy if the following are true:
A: the fights are small.
B: the party does not have control over when they can rest.

The 6-8 fights works well for a dungeon where the enemies are actively seeking to expel the party, or the party is forced to move forward.

It doesn't work well for an open-world explory type game.

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All true, but as long as a campaign has a mix of dungeon experiences and overland travel/exploration, there should be no problems with balance. Also, understanding that a party may only have a few encounters in any given day, the DM can make them more difficult, or the DM can include a few terrain obstacles/traps that take the place of encounters, or the DM can combine obstacles/traps with one or more combat encounter.

Interestingly, old D&D took some of this into consideration when it introduced wandering monster tables. With the wilderness encounters, there was a higher probability that the party would encounter monsters that were much more difficult (bullette, dragon, dinosaur, Catoblepas (can't remember spelling), etc.

Personally, I hate imposing game solutions to the equation when trying to reduce resting. For me, if the party rests in inappropriate places at in appropriate times the story will progress naturally and creatures will harry them. If they try to avoid exploring or they try to wait out longer periods of time so that they can get a long rest, trouble will find them unless they are in a civilized area and no heat is on.

 

[devincutler]

What is different is how long those turns should take to resolve. A 5e turn shouldn’t take anywhere near as long to resolve as a 3e or 4e one. As a player or a DM, pushing your table to resolve combat turns more quickly will pay huge dividends in your enjoyment of 5e.

Unless my players are fighting a deadly encounter with a creature at or above their CR, I push for turns to take no more than a minute. I call out who’s on deck in initiative order and expect that player to be ready when their turn comes up. Know what your spell or ability does, have relevant dice ready, etc. And I will put a PC on dodge if they can’t decide or roti Ely have to go to their PHB to look up their ability.

They all resisted at first, but now combat has an immediacy and urgency about it that everyone loves. And everyone pays attention to what’s going on.

I envy you. I have tried to get my players to do this, but they are old grognards and wargamers (as am I, BTW) and they like to tactic every move out. This makes even 5e encounters drag a bit (nothing like 3e...oh my God!). I find it difficult to believe people cannot pre-plan their actions ahead of time and then deviate from that plan if necessary, but my players act as if the world is entirely created at the start of each of their turns. Kinda exasperating.

 

[Harzel]

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.

Nah. You would have gone to sleep and procrastinated some more in the morning.

(Said as a fellow procrastinator.)

 

[Harzel]

One thing that comes close to the "carrot" of bonus XP in D&D official rules is inspiration. You can justify it after the fact, but there's no in-game-world reason a PC should be extra-lucky for being themselves.

Yes, if you look at it as luck. But you could look at it as the boost you get from acting in accord with your personal proclivities or values - essentially "feeling good about yourself".

I dislike any house rule that basically tells the players "play the way I want you to play, change your character's motivations to be what I want them to be, or you don't get any cookies".

My house rule is that no matter what the players do I always have first dibs on the cookies. They only get some if I am not very hungry.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I envy you. I have tried to get my players to do this, but they are old grognards and wargamers (as am I, BTW) and they like to tactic every move out. This makes even 5e encounters drag a bit (nothing like 3e...oh my God!). I find it difficult to believe people cannot pre-plan their actions ahead of time and then deviate from that plan if necessary, but my players act as if the world is entirely created at the start of each of their turns. Kinda exasperating.

Well the longer the party takes to run encounters, the less encounters you have to make.

If you want to change their behaviour, you can use a carrot like bonus xp if they finish an encounter in a certain amount of time. A stick would be that all monsters in an encounter gain +1 to hit\+1d6 damage for every 4 minutes of real life time that passes during an encounter.

 

[5ekyu]

"I reward players for PCs achieving goals. I don't care how those goals are achieved and whether or not they are achieved the way I want them to be achieved."

While i am known to not be an xp advocate at all, i do prefer when forced to worry about xp to see it as goal/accomplishment focused regardless of how it is accomplished.

If our job is to stop the wolves from raiding the town, if we do it by drawing the wolves off to easier hunting, perhaps another village, or by some other means - we should get the xp. If we buy off the orcs instead of killing them - same xp.

If the gm wants us to rush to get it done, the GM should at least do a little work to have reasons and trade offs to make it so the characters want to get it done quickly.

A gm who expects the players to rationalize the odd things the gm likes **into their character build and background and day to day play choices** so they dont have to build scenes that make it make sense - seems like just passing the buck.

In my games, advancement rate has nothing to do with in-game stuff. Its a rate we agree on... Varies by tier.

In game choices are only based on in game aspects, not an xp hunt. Rewards are in game, in character.

 

[5ekyu]

Ideally, the game would be designed and balanced to allow any kind of encounter number from zero to 10 (or more) on an adventuring day. Which most likely means "encounter-based, quickly repleneshing resources" other than maybe HP.

Because when I read the thread's title, I immediately thought "Maybe I don't *want* to get to 6 encounters per day" because encounters take too much time for my taste. And we usually have 0-4, depending on the situation of the characters.

I think ideally the dmg would never have used the term adventuring day - which has led to a lot of confusion - and had made it clear this was just the assumptions used in balancing.

Add a paragraph about what to expect from more frequent rests and less frequent rests... So a gm can adapt... And we are good to go.

 

[5ekyu]

Or the short version of my previous post.

I think decisions made by the PCs should be made from the perspective of the PCs. I don't want to implement anything that discourages that or encourages different behavior.

I tend to agree that i don't want to intentionally add a rule to alter rewards based on choices so as to favor one choice.

There are a bounty of ways to design encounters to reflect a circumstance that gets pcs to press on **by making it matter**.

Dnd worked that way for decades... "Daily recovery" has bern there for longer than many of its current players have lived without a ***need*** for adventuring day escalating encounter rewards.