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

[Flamestrike]

If you have a party where one PC seems to be underperforming, and his resource schedule is the odd man out, that could be a place to look for solutions

QFT.

Same deal if your encounters are getting smashed all too often.

Lengthen your ADs, amke platyers rely on at-wills (cantrips and basic attacks) and see what happens.

 

[Libramarian]

It boils down to closer to a short rest every other encounter on a 6-8 day, or after each encounter on a 3-4, but, yes, with symmetrically longer & more challenging encounters that would seem to make sense. One factor that could mess with the idea, though, is whole-encounter effects.

Yes, you're right. When I said a short rest whenever I was thinking whenever the players like, which will be after almost every encounter when your adventure model is 3-4 deadly+. The important variable for balancing short and long rest classes is the ratio between short and long rests (assuming equivalent resource depletion).

That makes very little sense, even as rationalizations go.
[snip]
It's a natural-language interpretation, and 5e favors natural language over obscure jargon - and, I should hope, over intentionally deceiving both players & DMs.

I don't find it hard to believe that the designers would want to let the DM know how many encounters the typical party can get through while knowing that this won't happen in practice most of the time. To get the number of encounters the PCs do get through to consistently align with the number of encounters they can get through requires rest restriction (of the sort @Flamestrike advocates), which is not a trivial modification of the game and the DMG doesn't give an advice on how to do that. So I find it hard to believe that the designers expect that to occur.

In the typical adventure the players get a "free" rest at the end--when you clear the dungeon and go back to town you rest whether you need to or not. So if the DM prepares a 6-8 encounter dungeon, and the party takes one long rest during (say when they feel that the "boss fight" is coming up) and one after completing it, that's like 5 or 6 encounters before the first long rest, and then 1 or 2 tougher ones at the end. I'm sure they realize that's how the typical adventure plays out.

But, it's none of it set in stone. If you have a party where one PC seems to be underperforming, and his resource schedule is the odd man out, that could be a place to look for solutions, for instance. OTOH, if you have one mostly-daily character dominating and another languishing, changing encounters/day around is unlikely to help. There's a lot of ways the DM can tweak his game to keep it fun for everyone. Encounters/day is one of them, and it's one that tweaks several things at once - including intraparty class balance based on resources, and encounter difficulty - and not always conveniently in all the directions you need.

Yes, trying to control encounters per day is a clumsy way to troubleshoot the game. I think in most cases it's better to encourage the party to take more short rests than to try to prevent them from taking long rests.

Over 3-4 encounters with 1 short rest:

That changes the ratio of short to long rests. If you run the numbers comparing 6 encounters with a short rest after every second vs 3 encounters with a short rest after each (same 2:1 ratio of short to long rests), you will find the classes are balanced similarly.

There are a few additional considerations: long rest classes have more AoE abilities and (slightly) weaker basic attacks, which is an advantage with fewer encounters, and with longer adventuring days they're also more likely to be too conservative using their abilities, "wasting" them more often. So I would expect the short rest classes to come out a bit ahead when you look at damage inflicted and healed with 2 short rests per long rest to account for that. If not, I would admit that implies the game is balanced to some extent in favor of longer ADs.

No-one is saying it's a 'hard' limit mate. Its a guideline that you build encounters around (and you can frequently ignore it or intentionally tinker with it if you want). You dont cram 6-8 encounter adventuring days down your parties throats day in day out. You mix it up, limiting some adventures, leaving it in the parties hands for others, pushing shorter ADs on the party from time to time, and pushing longer ones on them from time to time.

Planning encounter by encounter is too on-the-nose for me. I prefer the sandbox approach where you leave the choice of when to rest in the hands of the players but add more variables and greater variance into the encounters and the environment to make it a more interesting choice. My focus is on giving the players interesting decisions to make, not depleting the PCs' resources. A game that's hard on the PCs is not necessarily hard on the players.

I don't like to plan for variety in general. That's inefficient. If more variety would make the game better you should use more randomness in your adventure design procedure.

And as for spells that allow the party safe rest (rope trick etc), they are all well and good. [snip]

Yes, I don't disagree with the rest of your post. If you ramp up encounter difficulty to the point where you get 5MWD issues then you do have to start restricting rests, either with hard limits or stiff disincentives. I'm pointing out that the DMG doesn't advocate this, and by default rests are only very mildly disincentivized, not to argue that restricting rests is a bad idea but to cast doubt on the notion that the statement that the party has enough resources to last 6-8 encounters constitutes advice that the game plays best with 6-8 encounter days.

There's nothing magical about 6-8 encounters/day. The magic number, to the extent that there is one, is 2 short rests per long rest.

The game seems designed to play well with a variety of encounters per day.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yes, you're right. When I said a short rest whenever I was thinking whenever the players like, which will be after almost every encounter when your adventure model is 3-4 deadly+. The important variable for balancing short and long rest classes is the ratio between short and long rests (assuming equivalent resource depletion).

And that ratio seems to be 2-3 short : 1 long. Which means no actual day will ever hit it exactly.

I don't find it hard to believe that the designers would want to let the DM know how many encounters the typical party can get through while knowing that this won't happen in practice most of the time.

Setting the game to 'balance' at a point you expect it will rarely reach is essentially the same as intentionally creating a broken game.

Does that make it any harder to believe? ;P

Another thing to consider is that we're talking about how encounters/day impacts class balance and can be a pain for DMs to enforce. Those aren't the only issues, and may not be the main reason 5e was designed around the assumption. 6-8 encounters mean relatively small encounters, that are likely both relatively easy for the PC, and relatively quick to play through - and 'fast combat' was a significant 5e goal (more so than 'balance,' at least, it got mentioned a whole lot more). 3-4 encounters or 1 encounter can be a lot tougher, which probably means a lot larger in terms of number of enemies, and more complex to resolve - and almost certainly slower, in any case.

Yes, trying to control encounters per day is a clumsy way to troubleshoot the game.

I think in most cases it's better to encourage the party to take more short rests than to try to prevent them from taking long rests.

Both sound workable, with different considerations. Getting closer to the 6-8 guideline gives you more/faster combats, and it encourages even the short-rest types to consider saving a resource for the next encounter if the current one seems easy. The 3-4 alternative gives you tougher/longer encounters, and with a rest essentially after each, short-rest types can cut loose, while the daily types still have to be careful, what's more, daily resources that tend to last a whole encounter are more likely to be available in every single encounter. The 5MWD means everybody novas, but the daily novas are better than the short-rest novas are better than optimal use of an unlimited resource.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Setting the game to 'balance' at a point you expect it will rarely reach is essentially the same as intentionally creating a broken game.

That all depends on whether your expectation that said point will rarely be reached is an expectation that people will choose not to reach that point, or an expectation that reaching that point will actually be difficult. In the former case, all the group not reaching the designed balance point has to do is choose to reach it (or to accept that they want a different balance point than the game is designed to have, and adjust the design for their use). In the latter case, and not the former, the game is actually broken because even people choosing to reach the intended balance point will have actual difficulty in doing so.

 

[NotActuallyTim]

or to accept that they want a different balance point than the game is designed to have, and adjust the design for their use

QFT.

 

[Tallifer]

Big or small, we never have more than two or three fights in a day; and usually only one or two in a session.

The only campaign I ever played in that had more was the Dragonlance modules back in the 1980s: I vowed never to grind through a TSR/WotC module again.

 

[S'mon]

The problem is though that playing the published adventures skews the balance towards the long rest classes. I dunno about you but we noticed that straight way (well.. except moon druids, which own at low levels no matter which resource schedule you play on tbh) playing HoTDQ and mines of phandelver.

The 'module' I would really like to see is rules to make all the PCs Long Rest based, balanced to work with 1-3 encounters/day which is more like what most groups actually play (according to the poll I ran here awhile back, I think 3/day was modal).
I'm not sure what that would look like; making short rest based abilities 3 times as many long rest abilities, maybe? So Fighter Action Surge would be 3/day not 1/short rest? Would make Moon Druids even more OP and do nothing for Rogues, though.

Edit: For dungeon exploration, maybe more short rests is best? So make them 10 minute rests and assume the PCs can take one after each encounter, then you can have 3-4 encounter days, with reasonable class balance? Short-rest healing then becomes an issue, but can be limited (eg to 3/day).
Even that wouldn't solve the disparity between the warlock with 2 spells per short rest and the moon druid with 3 wildshapes per short rest (& daily spells on top), though. 5e inter-class balance seems pretty wonky all round.

 

[S'mon]

• Save the princess by (x),
• prevent the ritual from summoning the demon before (x),
• find the escape to the dungeon by time (x),
• stop the BBEG from escaping by (x).

All of which should feature in your adventure design around 50 percent of the time.

So, this requires a mission-based campaign. I'm running
(a) Sandbox Wilderlands - time critical missions occasionally arise in play, but the default is exploration & travel that is not time critical on a scale of hours/day or two.
(b) Pathfinder AP conversion - Shattered Star & Rise of the Runelords. Mostly dungeons, good balance of exploration, combat and social. Again mostly not time critical.

These are not IMO unusual or marginal/weird ways to play D&D, and the game ought to be able to accommodate them.

Funnily enough my 4e D&D campaign actually does default to mission-based 'fantasy superhero team' play, and yes some of those missions are time-critical. But I shouldn't have to run every campaign like that.

 

[CapnZapp]

The DM immediately recognises that he has players who are blatantly using metagame reasons to try and avoid going on a quest (the whole damn point of the game). Theyve wasted his time, and are acting like giant douches.

He sits down with them and explains to them as players why this is not on.

Players that accept this as true, and quit acting like tools kick on, stop treating the game as some kind of contest, quit metagaming and have fun.

The rest are politely asked to never come back to the table again.

Sorry but that's my way or the high way, and that's obviously a no go.

I would much rather have rules that does not draw this behavior out of DM's like you.

 

[CapnZapp]

with the adventure overall being pretty easy

Right on