So are you saying it's not possible to do a deadly encounter at the beginning of the adventuring day?
No thats not what I'm saying at all.
Im saying that monster CR's, class balance, and encounter XP budgets are based around an adventuring day [the time between long rests] featuring around 6-8 encounters, of an appoximate XP budget, and with enough time for around 2-3 short rests.
If you're only throwing the one encounter at the party, it messes with all of the above. It throws class balance out of whack, it lets PCs nova strike encounters (and they'll all create nova builds to exploit this fact) with impunity, and it devalues monster CR's (which are assigned within the 6-8 encounter adventuring day paradigm).
The natural response at this point is to 'ramp up encounter difficulty'. Which is (of course) stupid. This not only entrenches the above problems (it
mandates nova strikes just to stay alive), it creates a really boring and mindless game of rocket tag where the first to initiative, wins.
I fully understand your point of view about 5e's game design, but I don't think we need to be completely boxed in by it. If it's not possible to design a deadly solo encounter that assumes the PCs aren't low on resources, then that's a problem with the game design and one that I want to explore finding a fix for.
Im not saying you do need to be completely boxed in by it. From time to time run a single encounter adventuring day (the full casters, barbarians and paladins should dominate). From time to time you should also run adventuring days with more than 6-8 encounters (rogues and champion fighters come into the spotlight here). From time to time you should increase (or decrease) the amount and frequencies of short rests in your game as well.
Mix it up. Keep the players guessing. Keep the longer adventuring days coming with enough frequency that your players police their own resource expenditure, and avoid nova strikes.
Im saying here that if you want to run an experiment of 'How 5E runs at high level' its rather pointless conducting your experiment outside of the context of the multiple encounter adventuring day that class balance, CRs and encounter design is based around.
Many games work fine without this heavy reliance on encounter budgets. I played 1e/2e/3e for decades without worrying about this kind of stuff and I bet there's a way to do the same with 5e.
Yeah. Use the gritty realism variant. This supports game days featuring 1-3 encounters at most, with those days interpersed with days of nothing.
Note that my ogre example was specifically about whether the ogre would be encountered early or late in the adventuring day, not whether or not it would be the only encounter.
It doesnt matter really. If its the 1st encounter of the adventuring day (room 1 of the dungeon) then the PCs will likely have to hold back on using those resources (saving some gas in the tank to take down the rest of the adventuring days monsters). If its the final encounter of the adventuring day, then likely those resources will have already been used overcoming earlier encounters.
Remember; 5E DnD is a marathon and not a sprint.
This can also work in single encounter adventuring days, but only in campaigns where the DM regularly imposes 6-8 encounters on his party. The players come to expect muliple encounters in a single adventuring day, and withold resources accordingly instead of nova dumping everything in round one of the encounter.
