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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Getting to 6 encounters in a day
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<blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7427210" data-attributes="member: 6775031"><p>I'm fully on-board with motivating the PCs rather than the players. Meta-gaming is bad. Maybe I'm just not getting my point across.</p><p></p><p>Trivial encounters are trivial. A level 1 character learns nothing from stepping on an ant, and a level 17 warlock learns (effectively) nothing by blasting four goblins before any of them get a chance to move. You learn more by challenging someone who has skill equal-to or greater-than your own, than you could learn by challenging someone whose skill you already exceed. It's true of fencing, tennis, and chess. That is an aspect of real-world learning which the game happens to model sufficiently well, and we don't want to sacrifice that.</p><p></p><p>If you're a level 9 warlock, and you can cast two <em>fireball V</em> spells (per short rest), then your first two encounters against six orcs (per short rest) are trivial. You learn nothing by killing them all before they have a chance to move, and that's what my hypothetical learning curve is supposed to reflect. In the same way that you learn more from fighting a beholder than you learn from fighting an ogre, you learn more from fighting without access to your best moves than you learn from fighting with them.</p><p></p><p>Granted, putting the cut-off at exactly four encounters might seem pretty artificial, but it's just to demonstrate the general point. A better-balanced version of the rule would give the DM discretion over whether or not any given encounter was trivial. You could also say that all encounters are worth less XP <em>until</em> such point as the listed XP would push you over the threshold of half-expected value for the day, at which point they start awarding more; but that sounds like a lot of work for very little payoff.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="The Crimson Binome, post: 7427210, member: 6775031"] I'm fully on-board with motivating the PCs rather than the players. Meta-gaming is bad. Maybe I'm just not getting my point across. Trivial encounters are trivial. A level 1 character learns nothing from stepping on an ant, and a level 17 warlock learns (effectively) nothing by blasting four goblins before any of them get a chance to move. You learn more by challenging someone who has skill equal-to or greater-than your own, than you could learn by challenging someone whose skill you already exceed. It's true of fencing, tennis, and chess. That is an aspect of real-world learning which the game happens to model sufficiently well, and we don't want to sacrifice that. If you're a level 9 warlock, and you can cast two [I]fireball V[/I] spells (per short rest), then your first two encounters against six orcs (per short rest) are trivial. You learn nothing by killing them all before they have a chance to move, and that's what my hypothetical learning curve is supposed to reflect. In the same way that you learn more from fighting a beholder than you learn from fighting an ogre, you learn more from fighting without access to your best moves than you learn from fighting with them. Granted, putting the cut-off at exactly four encounters might seem pretty artificial, but it's just to demonstrate the general point. A better-balanced version of the rule would give the DM discretion over whether or not any given encounter was trivial. You could also say that all encounters are worth less XP [I]until[/I] such point as the listed XP would push you over the threshold of half-expected value for the day, at which point they start awarding more; but that sounds like a lot of work for very little payoff. [/QUOTE]
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