I'd love for your characterization to be true, and I would love for the adventure writers to have taken your 6-8 a day guidelines into account, but I simply don't see it.
Then hold the telescope up to your good eye Lord Nelson!
Official 5E adventures do feature dungeons, but also feature travelling for weeks (if not months), and quite commonly feature what I for want of a better word call "sidetreks" (things not extensive enough to be called a dungeon, that more pertinently does not feature "enough" encounters according to your dogma).
Yeah. Weeks (or even months) of nothing (down time, fast forwarded travel, hanging in town etc) interspersed with short action packed adventuring days usually in something resembling a 'dungeon' featuring around half a dozen encounters.
Soo.. exactly what I was saying.
The point here is that if you religiously adhere to the DMG advice like it was the ten commandments, you will fail to set up anything resembling a challenge.
I do it all the time. Maybe I'm just super awesome or something
We've had this discussion before. A lot. You're ignoring the elephant in the room here. I run published adventures. I run AD+D and 3E adventures, homemade ones and the odd 5E one. I stick to the DMG advice including encounter building, 6-8 encounter AD, 2-3 short rests per long rest etc and I dont fail to set up challenges.
My (experienced) playing group are often challenged. We've had a few deaths.
My point is twofold:
a) having to populate your adventures with 6-8 encounter days is a huge drag. Not only in itself, but because the PHB is so exceedingly generous in allowing players to chop one day (that indeed might be challenging) into two absolutely trivial and thus boring ones.
You dont have to do it all the time. In fact
dont do it all the time. That would be boring and not fun.
Aim for a 50 percent mark of roughly 6-8 and 2 short rests. Throw the odd single [deadly] encounter day at them. Throw them in a meat-grinder where they have 2 hours to [do quest] and have a dozen encounters to handle to win. Use a 3 encounter day [but no time for short rests]. Throw them in a gritty adventure where they're is no time for long rests, only the occasional short rest here or there and monsters coming at them from all sides.
Mix it up. Weave that stuff into the story. Takes trial and error, but once you get your settings right, it comes together pretty darn well.
Also,
place time constraints on the lions share of your quests. If you dont do it, you're a bad (lazy) DM. Everything the players do they should be doing for a reason, with clear timelines for success and failure. Get home by midnight or you turn into a pumpkin.
Examples (here are 10 you can use, and variations of the first three can be re-used over and over again):
1) NPC has been captured by lizard folk. Needs to be saved by dawn or she get eaten
2) NPC needs PCs to recover macguffin so he can present it to the King on his inauguration at midday tomorrow.
3) BBEG intends to use macguffin to summon powerful demon, destroying the PCs home. Needs to be stopped by midnight or else everyone dies.
4) Rival group of NPC adventurers are after the same macguffin as the PCs. If they get it first, the PCs dont get paid
5) PCs are trapped in a dungeon on a desert island. They know their ship will leave in 3 days time. If they cant escape by then and get to the ship, they'll be marooned.
6) A plague is sweeping the town. The PCs are hired to find a cure before it wipes out the town, recovering 3 ingredients from Darkwood forest.
7) A flying castle of the Dragon lords has appeared out of town. The local mayor hires the PCs to inflitrate it before it flies off and learn its secrets
8) The PCs find themselves in a siege, working through the night to save the keep (HoTDQ anyone?)
9) The PCs are captured and must find the escape before their guards are alerted to their presence.
10) The evil artifact the PCs have found must be destroyed before [time] by throwing it in the fires of the volcano from where it was forged. In addition, servants of its creator are hunting the party making rest difficult.
Your problem is you dont use any of the above, anywhere near often enough. Try it and see how it goes. It enhances verisimilitude, places temporal (in addition to spatial and physical) restrictions and challenges on the party, and makes the game so much more fun.
Imagine if in Star Wars the Death Star was parked on the other side of the Galaxy and just sitting there, and not
seconds away from destroying Yavin when it was blown up?
Destroying it was a desperate race against the clock by the heroes.
Just like in every other action movie ever made ever.
b) that official adventures doesn't give a damn about these guidelines. They don't follow them.
No, they leave them up to the DM to follow (or not to). They dont push a play style on you.
If you don't care about nova strikes and the 5 minute AD, you can play it that way. If you want a more balanced game, you can enforce the AD and play it that way.
At the end of the day, policing the Adventuring Day is in the hands of the DM taking into account a range of factors that an adventure writer cant.
If they enforced 6-8 encounters on you ad-nauseum we would have a ton more complaints than we do at present. The guys that like the 5 minute AD would be complaining all the time.
As it stands its up to the individual DM (You). If you want the party resting less, thats on you (time limit your quests, make the environments more dangerous, and use 'random' monsters if nothing else). If you want them resting more, thats also on you (you're going too hard on them). If through no fault of their own the party are halfway through the adventure and out of resources (or you just feel like a break from the longer ADs) give them a break for a while.
I am quite emphatically concluding that your cherished advice might well be well-meaning, but it is also hugely impractical.
It simply is not good for the game, and needs to go.
See what I mean? You would be complaining even more if they did force the 6-8 encounter AD in every adventure. Youd be crying out it needs to go, is artificial and breaks verisimilitude.
The designers have said, if you want to enforce it (and preserve balance) use it. If you don't care about balance as much, don't.
Most adventures published have it built in via a soft approach [periods of nothing, the odd single encounter, followed by 6ish encounters all in a row in a dungeon somewhere, rinse and repeat]. They leave it in the hands of the DM to decide how much he wants to police the AD within that paragigm.
You complain they dont do it for you, but I hazard a guess if they did do it for you, you would complain that they dont let you (as DM) decide for yourself how to run your games, and what style of game you want.
But you never question whether its any good. You never talk about downsides, and you never talk about alternatives. You really should do that more, Flamestrike.
This is actually a good point. Personally (as a design decision) I find it a mixed bag. They've left it in the hands of DMs to decide (in accordance with their whole policy this edition of DM empowerment and being all things to all people).
I would have preferred a resource management system that is more aligned (all classes have more or less even number of short and long rest abilities, meaning that all classes are evenly advantaged or disadvantaged by changing up the number and frequency or rests and encounters).
I can see why they went the way they did. They tried the above method last edition via the encounter/ daily/ at will thing, and it wasn't well received. Enough people loudly complained it felt to 'samey'.
That said the big strength of the current resource management/ encounter paradigm is it provides the DM the ability to dial up the number of encounters and add more short rests (if he wants to favor short rest classes) or dial the number down (if he wants to give long rest classes a leg up). This is a useful tool IMO, as it lets a DM tweak any imbalanced he finds to suit his personal taste.
It requires a little finesse to get your settings right, but at least the system provides the tools for an individual DM to adjust the [encounter/ resource management/ class balance] meta to suit his own and his groups preferences by simply turning a few dials [adding or removing encounters, and adding, lengthening, shortening or removing rests].
The difficulty is, getting the sweet spot. It requires a little trial and error, but the rewards are worth it.
Think of the game as a stereo. You want your stereo with fixed factory presets of 'this is how it is', or do you want the ability to dial it into your own preferences?
