Getting to 6 encounters in a day

[Sadras]

Most people over think this.

It's pretty simple. The story either pushes the action forward or it is a boring story.

Just think in terms of action movies. There needs to be rising tension. A story where the characters have complete control should just be handled off screen.

Extra rules aren't needed because no amount of rules will make a good story. Extra rules will just push the game further into a tactical combat game rather than a story driven one which is what 5e is designed for.

Pretty much this.

Too many of us worrying about ability refresh rates or by incentivising 'pushing' with XP instead of building tension and raising urgency within our the adventure/story.

Personally, I find ability refresh rates assist more with determining the grittiness of the game (similar to slower healing). As for XP incentivisation, well that is a rather crude method of 'manipulation' which introduces a meta into the game/story which many of us prefer to limit/avoid.

 

[Oofta]

I use time pressures and random encounters/wandering monsters (though they are also just forms of time pressure) generally. If I wasn't running a game with little to no time pressures, a bonus XP mechanic works well to achieve the same end by a different means. And, for those for whom it matters, some thought can be given to why that makes sense to them in the game world.

On the justification being a sham or breaking immersion, I disagree - I think it enhances what some may think of "immersion." When a player tries to actively square up his or her desire for doing a thing with the motivations or fictional circumstances which make sense to their idea of the character, the result I see is an exploration of that character's likely thoughts, history, goals, allegiances, and all manner of traits to justify the outcome. That's a player thinking hard about being that character in my view. I think it results in better fleshed-out characters at the table. And if you identify immersion as that feeling of connecting with the game world through your character, that process of squaring up player and character I describe is a pretty easy way to get there in my experience.

At best I see it as a player coming up with an excuse after the fact, or no excuse at all. At worst the DM dictating character motivation. No thanks, I think there are better ways of achieving my goals as a DM.

 

[Oofta]

Hypothetically, imagine a rule in the book where the first four encounters in a day were only worth a quarter of their listed XP, and all encounters after the first four were worth double the listed XP. On average, if you had seven encounters in a day, then you'd get XP equivalent to the listed XP for seven encounters; if you called out before that point, then you'd get much less, and if you went longer then you'd get much more.

If the game world actually worked that way, then people living in that world would notice. They would observe that the cautious adventurer, who gives up as soon as things start getting tough, would not advance as quickly as one who kept going as far as they could on a daily basis. Given that the latter would advance at about seven times the rate of the former, anyone could ask them how they did it, and observe that data.

In our real world, skill and experience aren't quite as important as they are in the game world. They're still important, but it's balanced by the slow accumulation of injuries (which never heal quite perfectly) that eventually force people to retire. There are games which attempt to model that reality - GURPS and Traveller both come to mind.

D&D doesn't work that way. The rules aren't trying to model a reality where people break down and become more decrepit over time. The rules are trying to model a reality where cool heroes get into 6-8 battles-to-the-death every day without it being a big deal. That's the intended design goal. But the rules fail to meet that goal, because they don't give the characters a reason to have so many battles in a day, while they do give the characters a reason to call it a day after just one or two battles.

Given that XP and levels already don't work realistically (giving too significant of a benefit, relative to physical deterioration), adding in the hypothetical rule I mentioned above would not make the world any less realistic, but it would encourage the behavior that we're looking for. (Rather, it does make the world less realistic, but it does so in specifically the way we want it to be unrealistic.) If we just say that this is a world where achieving superhuman competence at arms requires pushing yourself to your limit, then everything is fine and internally consistent, without any need to meta-game.

Most of the rules in D&D are an attempt to simplify a fantasy world into a playable game. People do (or did) swing weighted pieces of metal to try to defeat their enemies. People do learn new skills and gain new capabilities. I certainly hope that if I ever have to have surgery, the person doing it has skills and abilities that they've gained through training and experience. Experience points and leveling model that expertise. Not perfectly of course, the rules are vast simplifications of what really happens.

There were times in college when I pulled all-nighters. But that was because I procrastinated or was taking too many credits. That doesn't mean cramming is the best way to learn, many studies have shown that it's one of the worst.

I think changing a basic assumption of how we learn and advance skill is incredibly ham-fisted and transparent way of trying to justify motivating the players, not the PCs. If you want to take the route of motivating the players to get a desired in-game result, just say so. I'm not going to judge you. I'll just disagree.

 

[ad_hoc]

Here’s the problem as I see it - how many hours of real time does this series of encounters take? My group meets for about three hours per session. The described actions would take at least two sessions to resolve, including time for role play. I really can’t plausibly see every single session where the PCs must have a breakneck series of challenges as if it were a season of the TV show 24. The situation described should be an exception rather than a rule in my opinion, otherwise it strains credulity.

By the way, the Gnoll scenario is an almost perfect recounting of a scenario from Critical Role, and even then it took them two sessions of four hours each to complete the actions you described.

Game time is not the same as real time.

Why can't you go 3 sessions until having a long rest? That often happens at our table. They will often short rest at the end of a session. Long rests happen at the end of the adventure (or at a safe spot in the middle of a long adventure).

 

[Oofta]

Game time is not the same as real time.

Why can't you go 3 sessions until having a long rest? That often happens at our table. They will often short rest at the end of a session. Long rests happen at the end of the adventure (or at a safe spot in the middle of a long adventure).

We regularly end game sessions without a long rest. All it requires is making sure you keep track of your current status. Heck, we've ended sessions in the middle of battles. It's never been a problem.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For my tables we are pretty much all story-centric. As a result I and the players don't really care how many "encounters" any of them go through in a day, because the story dictates what happens. If the adventuring day is such that 12 hours of that day are "interaction" and "exploration" wherein they don't lose any game mechanic numbers that could "kill" their character, and 5 minutes of that adventuring day is a "combat" where they could lose game mechanic numbers that could "kill" them... and those five minutes are such that they don't even come close to being "killed" and they then regain all those game mechanic numbers back after they "rest"... so be it. If that's what makes sense for the story, then that's how it goes.

I rarely concern myself with trying to challenge the players by running game mechanic numbers in such a way that it might "kill" them. That doesn't matter to me. What does matter is challenging their characters in the story. Forcing them to make dramatic decisions, character-changing choices, and maybe threatening their lives on occasion.

So the fact that the combat mini-game that D&D has can be "hacked" by the players by fighting in one combat and then taking a long rest to get back all their game mechanic numbers is of little concern to me. Because the story will determine whether or not that was an intelligent thing to do. And thankfully I have players that understand and are concerned about story-first gaming like I am, and as a result they don't worry so much about game mechanic numbers either. If the story tells them they should continue on, they will. Because they care about story consequences much more than game mechanic number consequences.

 

[iserith]

At best I see it as a player coming up with an excuse after the fact, or no excuse at all.

So the player would have to come up with an excuse before the fact and you'd be cool with it? Like a criminal background PC with the personality trait of "I don’t pay attention to the risks in a situation. Never tell me the odds."

 

[Oofta]

So the player would have to come up with an excuse before the fact and you'd be cool with it? Like a criminal background PC with the personality trait of "I don’t pay attention to the risks in a situation. Never tell me the odds."

Which then falls into the "at worst" scenario. The DM's house rule is dictating PC characteristics and motivations.

There's nothing wrong with having a house rule that reinforces D&D is a game first, RP tool second. It's just not my preference. If I can't think of ways to challenge my PCs as a DM without artificially putting my thumb on the scale to force behavior I want, then I think I'm failing as a DM. YMMV.

 

[iserith]

Which then falls into the "at worst" scenario. The DM's house rule is dictating PC characteristics and motivations.

There's nothing wrong with having a house rule that reinforces D&D is a game first, RP tool second. It's just not my preference. If I can't think of ways to challenge my PCs as a DM without artificially putting my thumb on the scale to force behavior I want, then I think I'm failing as a DM. YMMV.

Sure, that's all well and good - people have their preferences. It's just your specific objections strike me as being really easy to address. And they're even stranger in my view in light of the fact that you seem to have no problem with XP in and of itself as a motivator for PCs to do certain things (fight monsters, do certain non-combat challenges). All I'm talking about is an increased rate of accumulation - the more you overcome, the more experience you get. You don't appear to object to the former, but do object to the latter which seems inconsistent to me.

 

[Oofta]

Sure, that's all well and good - people have their preferences. It's just your specific objections strike me as being really easy to address. And they're even stranger in my view in light of the fact that you seem to have no problem with XP in and of itself as a motivator for PCs to do certain things (fight monsters, do certain non-combat challenges). All I'm talking about is an increased rate of accumulation - the more you overcome, the more experience you get. You don't appear to object to the former, but do object to the latter which seems inconsistent to me.

I think your confusing how I view XP. I put the horse first, the cart second so to speak. The horse is encounters, the cart is XP. Yes, sometimes PC's motivation is to become the greatest swordsman in all the world and the only way to do that is to fight a lot. Some PCs are adreniline junkies that always want to push themselves to the extreme to prove that they can to it.

Others? Others are just doing what's necessary. The fact that they slowly get better at it is icing on the cake, not the motivation. My AL character recently leveled up, his motivation to fight wasn't to gain that level. His motivation was to stop those gosh darn cultists (isn't is always cultists?) from destroying the world. Other characters have been motivated to collect bright shiny things, like gold and gems. Some have been motivated by increasing their skill enough to finally confront the man who killed his mother and kidnapped his sister.

Different characters have different motivations.

As an aside, this wouldn't work for my personal campaign because I don't use XP based advancement. As part of my session 0 we discuss how quickly people want to level and then I do it when it makes sense for the story (kind-of-sort-of milestone leveling). But it still wouldn't be my preference in an XP based game because the conversation "If we do one more encounter we get more XP" would inevitably arise.