D&D General How many encounter do you complete before getting a Rest?

[el-remmen]

I find that generally if it's not feasible to rest for 8 hours it's not feasible to rest for 1 hour either.

The way I see it, long rest in the wilderness is 8 times more dangerous than a short rest.

I offered my group the opportunity to adopt a house rule in our game that just started, wherein short rests would only be 10 minutes long, but long rests would take a full 24 hours - but while they considered it, they ultimately rejected it. While they knew resting for an hour could be dangerous, having to find a place to hole up for 24 hours or return to town in order to get a long rest was a lot more onerous and potentially dangerous than 8 hours.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The way I see it, long rest in the wilderness is 8 times more dangerous than a short rest.

I offered my group the opportunity to adopt a house rule in our game that just started, wherein short rests would only be 10 minutes long, but long rests would take a full 24 hours - but while they considered it, they ultimately rejected it. While they knew resting for an hour could be dangerous, having to find a place to hole up for 24 hours or return to town in order to get a long rest was a lot more onerous and potentially dangerous than 8 hours.

If it's wilderness, there is rarely more than one encounter per day, and I certainly wouldn't be checking for encounters more than once per night. That just gets silly and tedious. Just how many monsters are there in these woods anyway? If it's a populated dungeon, then any picnicking would almost certainly be interrupted in much less than 1 hour, unless (as is usually the case) a spell like rope trick is used. In which case a rest can be for as long as the food lasts.

The main reason for the party not taking a long rest is they don't need one.

 

[TheSword]

I have to answer 1 to this because most of the time players get to take a short rest after encounters in my game - unless there is a set piece or good reason why they couldn’t.

Per long rest I would say the average is 2. Mainly because I play less dungeon crawl in my campaigns. So probably 2/3 of days that have encounters only have a single one in a a day. About 1/3 to 1/4 have 3-5 encounters.

I do think D&D difficulty should do more to take single encounter days into account.

 

[el-remmen]

A definite playstyle difference. The frequency of checking for me depends on the environment they are in and what they have done to pick a campsite (including a system of survival checks in choosing/finding one - and whose result also modifies the chance of an encounter within that frequency). No one in my groups has gotten Rope Trick or Leomund's Hut despite my not restricting them.

 

[jmartkdr2]

A couple of points: going nova in round 1 can often lead to fewer resources being used in total (especially healing related).

In all the years I have been playing 5e, no one has ever played a warlock. And everyone ignores the monk. So the players don't have any reason to ask for short rests.

It’s worth noting that warlocks are overall a fairly popular class; fighters are much hogher and artificers are lower but everything else is really close. Monks, IIRC, are a little lower but not by much.

Which tracks with my own experience: the cast majority of players pick what seems cool and learn the mechanics afterwards. They don’t opt away from a class for mechanical reasons until they learn their dm unduly punishes it.

 

[AnotherGuy]

I have no idea how that would follow.

Presumably if attrition is not utilised, it would mean characters are relatively at maximum power at any one time which means if combat would occur and for it to be challenging it would have to be deadly+
Otherwise one could just narrate through it and treat combat as colour if there were no stakes.

For me, a combat encounter is a setpiece; a fun thing to show off a monster or give the players something to blow off steam with.
I rarely do dungeons. Probably because the setup is mostly there to facilitate attrition.

Fair enough, your approach to combat appears to be different to mine hence the disconnect.