How Many Encounters?

[MeMeMeMe]

Do the rules - or designers - tell us how many encounters we should be having on average between Extended Rests?

 

[small pumpkin man]

Nope. Doesn't matter.

My limited experiance says regularly having one encounter a day isn't something you want to do regularly, as it removes the resource management of dailys and healing surges, but otherwise, not really, it doesn't effect class balance anywhere near as much as it used to.

 

[ForbidenMaster]

Nope. Doesn'y matter.

My limited experiance says regularly having one encounter a day isn't something you want to do regularly, as it removes the resource management of dailys and healing surges, but otherwise, not really, it doesn't effect class balance anywhere near as much as it used to.

If not one, then how many? Take the Kobold Hall for instance. Is a party supposed to clear that out in one day?

 

[MeMeMeMe]

Nope. Doesn't matter.
<snip>
it doesn't effect class balance anywhere near as much as it used to.

I'm not really concerned with class balance. I'm thinking about adventure balance. How many encounters a team is allowed per extended rest directly impacts adventure difficulty. I was wondering what the game's default assumption is.

 

[Runestar]

Nope. Doesn't matter.

My limited experiance says regularly having one encounter a day isn't something you want to do regularly, as it removes the resource management of dailys and healing surges, but otherwise, not really, it doesn't effect class balance anywhere near as much as it used to.

But there would still be an impact. Between limited healing surges and daily powers, there clearly is a cap on many encounters your party can face at any one time before running out of resources. It also appears to be very difficult to exceed this cap, considering that even healing potions expend surges, so in the very least, you will eventually run out of hp, even if you still have your at-will and encounter powers.

I am guessing you should be able to stomach 6-8 equal-lv fights before having to rest if you pace yourself properly, though in reality, it can be much less due to factors such as the liquidity of healing surges (it does not matter if the rest of the party still have most of their surges unexpended if the fighter has already used up all of his, for example, you all will still have to stop for the day, even if it is only the 3rd fight of the day).

 

[Charwoman Gene]

If not one, then how many? Take the Kobold Hall for instance. Is a party supposed to clear that out in one day?

Mine has.

 

[Shabe]

Lets see, I've only run one proper day of adventuring and the party got through 5 encounter before being mostly beat up, that did include irontooth.

Hmmm with the next days adventuring the fighter and cleric have already burned through 4 healing surges each on the 1st fight, and the paladin has burnt through 2, me thinks I need to spread the damage around a bit more, although the defenders are doing a good job.

 

[malacapricornis]

For some reason I was thinking the number expected was around 4-6 with the breakdown of the encounters following the template in the DMG pg 104. If you can take ERs after every encounter it would trivialise a lot of the encounters. How do you convey the expected pacing to the players without a bunch of metagaming?

 

[Andur]

4 is a pretty good number for Party x 1.25-1.5, less than that and you can get up around 6. Hitting Party x 2 you are in the 1-2 range.

 

[lukelightning]

I say it's up to the players. There are normally some logical places to rest, and some obvious times/places where you don't want to.