D&D 5E How to Think About 6-8 Encounters Per Day

[I'm A Banana]

I'm not totally shocked that the move from encounter-balanced D&D to daily-balanced D&D is catching some folks off guard. It's different than the last 15 years of D&D have been, for a lot of tables. But it's meshing really nicely with how I DM, without feeling limited or constrained at all, and I think it's worth exploring what this looks like in practice, and how it might be different from or similar to the presumptions of earlier-e D&D.

A note before we get started: this thread is not about whether the Adventuring Day assumption is "correct" or not. It's about what it looks like when you put that model into practice, and how to plan your adventures for it, if you want. It's about putting it to use and seeing it in the wild, what you can do with it and how you use it. It is not about whether or not you personally feel that it's a good idea. There's other threads for that.

So without further preamble, the biggest idea I've found to be useful can be summed up as "trolls with goals." What's this mean in practice?

"Random Encounters" generally become "Random Side-Stories" or "Random Lairs"
You know that old OotS joke about every party having exactly one (fairly meaningless) encounter when going from Point A to Point B? There's still a point to some of these encounters (mostly, they give you a sense of flavor and environment), but personally, I feel they lack significant stakes. They're easy to win (even in 4e, where you nova with your dailies), they're pretty generic, and they can be tedious in that "roll dice to continue the plot" kind of way.

So screw those. No amount of "These guys are DEADLY XP TIMES TEN and are +5 CR ABOVE THE PARTY'S LEVEL" are going to make up for the encounter being basically superficial.

When I'm in a "main plot" kind of campaign, I might roll for random encounters between Point A and Point B, but rather than just "here are some trolls, how do you deal?", it becomes a story. What's the difference? Well, they're trolls with goals, and those goals often link up to my main plotline in some way. Like, it's not just a group of wandering trolls, it's a clan of trolls displaced by dragons / elementals / demons and in search of a new home. Or its a lair of trolls who some cultists have run afoul of. It's a short mini-quest, complete with like 6 encounters and treasure and a goal (the DMG's random tables make this pretty slick). And, usually, it's skippable. But the thing is, if they skip it, or if they can't complete it in one rest, they suffer some narrative loss for that. A village is destroyed. The party loses the element of surprise. A villain's plot advances a bit. The reward for participating is usually the treasure, and often some story goal (the village is at risk, the monsters might be telling the villain about you, you have a chance to stop the villain's machinations, etc.).

When the campaign is a little more "sandboxy," these might still tie into my campaign's overall themes, but they're more likely to just be lairs with a few quest hooks. "Trolls live here. You remember being told back in town that they've been raiding caravans, and the merchant's guild has offered quite a substantial reward for clearing them out."

One of the big differences is that if the party is "clearing out a lair," 6-8 encounters isn't the WHOLE lair, it's just what it takes to drive off the critters. There's HUNDREDS of goblins, but if you wipe out a few handfuls of them, the rest of 'em will take off into the forest again, and that's a success!

This isn't always necessary - sometimes, I'm cool with the party encountering a group of monsters that they can trounce (especially if the only goal is to provide some context to the world), if they're into that. But if I'm looking to challenge the party with the interlude, I'll make a dungeon, not an encounter.

Enemies Are Pro-Active and Re-Active
The central idea is that monsters don't sit around waiting to be killed by PC's. Because they are "trolls with goals," they've got things they want to do, and that they are actively working towrads. They're not just sitting around being vaguely evil, they're DOING BAD THINGS, and on course to do more. I think of it like this: every time the party rests, the monsters get a "rest action."

What do they do with their "rest action?" With an hour, they might cast some spells in preparation, or do some rituals to find out more information. They might build a quick trap or flee to a more defensible position. If they don't already know the party is there, they might conduct their normal scouting routes and potentially discover the party. Some encounters might even flee, taking treasure / macguffins / etc. with them.

Their goals feature into this. If the trolls want to destroy the town, they might wake up halfway through their long rest to the town half ablaze.

This ALWAYS creates some time pressure for the party, because the enemies use the time the party rests to do their own thing. There's always a cost to resting, always something you're giving the enemy when you recover, and that emerges naturally out of thinking what do the enemies do here?

The natural consequence of enemies that want things is that they want to do things that the players want to stop.

The Dungeon is a Chronology
There's no structural distinction between a city adventure, a dungeon adventure, and a wilderness adventure when you see gameplay through this lens. Dungeons do it almost automatically, but the others fall into the same narrative pattern: beginning, middle, and end. Even "sandboxy" adventures have this structure (often baked into the geometry: outside, inside, and deep inside).

When your trolls have goals, their goals proceed according to this structure as well: their plans start, are put into motion, and have an endpoint. The players move through these goals in that structure: they discover the plans, they see the plans in motion, and they then see what the plan would achieve when complete. These are Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 in terms of story structure. Or, to maybe put it even more simply: the setup, the moment of darkness, and the climax.

This is the rest structure in 5e: Act 1 -> short rest -> Act 2 -> short rest -> Act 3 -> long rest.

In practice, think of it this way: your players are in a city and you decide you want the local baron to make a bid for the throne while they're around. So you make a random dungeon map. This is a map not of physical space, but of the baron's plot to assassinate the king and have his puppet take over. The rooms closest to the entrance/exit are encounters where the PC's start to hear about the plot (perhaps they encounter a group of trolls who, when faced with death, admit that they were paid off by the baron's agents to distract the party). The next layer in is when the plot gets into motion (the party has a chance to stop an attempt on the kind's life by hired assassins). The third layer is when the plot either comes to fruition or fades out (the party can try to track down and apprehend the baron). As the players move between rooms in the dungeon, they move in time, not in space. And because the Baron is a troll with a goal, he's not going to wait around for the party to be well rested before he strikes: outside to the inside of the dungeon is only going to take a day. If it's going to take longer, it's multiple dungeons, each "day" being a dungeon.


Your ideas!
How do you plan for a full day of adventure? What tips and tricks do you have for those that might be more used to planning per encounter?

 

[jayoungr]

I hope you won't mind if I quote myself from a couple of other threads:

Six to eight encounters per day doesn't have to play like that [i.e. a bunch of meaningless "trash" encounters leading up to one interesting and significant one]. It could be more like ...

• You encounter kobolds. When you beat on them, they squeal for help and their bugbear buddies show up.
• Some thugs assault you. When you fight back, they retreat...luring you into an ambush set by the cultists who hired them.
• You beat up a den of thieves and question them about the head of their organization. The criminal mastermind sends assassins to kill them before they can tell you anything. You then have to fight off the assassins and defend your informants.
• You take out a party of kobold guards in a watchtower before they can let the dragon know you're there. Then you fight the dragon before he finds out his guards have been killed.
• The evil wizard has locked himself in his inner sanctum. You must defeat his guardian golems, unlock the door, and defeat the wizard before he finishes casting a crucial ritual.

Any of those scenarios is two encounters chained together. Break any large fight into a couple of smaller subsections, and you can have your 6-8 encounters per day without resorting to "trash" encounters. Separating the parts of the fight will up your party's use of resources, because each fireball (or whatever) can only be used on one group of enemies.

If you plan your fights as chained encounters, then if your party is getting really torn up by part 1, you can weaken or even jettison part 2. The number of bugbears/cultists is cut in half, the assassins don't show up, the dragon happened to be out hunting at the time, or the wizard's ritual has backfired and you find him lying seriously injured on the floor of his sanctum when you finally break through.

 

[Tony Vargas]

How do you plan for a full day of adventure? What tips and tricks do you have for those that might be more used to planning per encounter?

If I'm concerned about the 5MWD at all (and I'm often not, either because I'm running 4e and class balance isn't distorted, or I'm running 5e, and I have lots of other options to manage that balance). The first/simplest thing I'll do is set conditions for a rest. In one campaign, the PCs are ostensibly pirates and there's lots of long ocean voyages. The rule was: to get the benefits of a long rest, you have to set in (to port or a convenient island somewhere) and gather water & fresh supplies, maybe carouse in a friendly port for a day or two. If they want to rest more often, they'll have to chart a course accordingly, with more frequent stops. Pinning yourself down to long rest = 8 hours, or short-rest-per-day, long-rest-per-week, or even the 13A every 4th encounter have a full heal-up, is overly constraining. There's all sorts of ways a party could be put upon, or revived. The ol' magic fountain/pool in the middle of the dungeon for no reason could give you the benefit of a rest the first time you drink from it. When you reach the temple, the priestess can give you a blessing that revives you. You can tie it to player actions & skills. A DC 10 check lets you survive in the wilderness, more and higher DC checks let you find a place safe enough to get the benefits of a short rest, even more, a long rest. The week-long raucous festival in the city keeps you from resting - whether you're partying or being kept awake by the noise, unless you get into one of the better parties. Sleeping in the Greymoore swamp will only get you a case of filth fever, unless you're good enough at medicine. etc... etc...

The other obvious ploy is time pressure. If the mission is essentially a raid on a remotely-organized stronghold rather than a dungeon-clearing operation, for instance, there's no stopping for an hour to rest. If the city is being attacked, right now, you help defend it, right now - and with armies clashing, there are potentially a lot of encounters in rapid succession. There's all manner of genre-appropriate impending doom you could be trying to avert. Or you could just be racing rivals to a rich prize. Calling it a 'ploy' isn't even fair, it's terribly common in heroic fiction of any genre.

 

[Woas]

The Adventuring Day and it's supposed 6 -8 encounters per is something I've been thinking about a bit too. One big question I ask myself is, what actually is an Adventuring DAY? Is that an actual In Game 24 hours (or whatever time period your game world uses)? Not all adventures and quests are measured on the same scale. Assuming the 24 hour Adventuring Day, this really makes overland adventures very awkward. And on the reverse side for shorter forays into small 3 to 6 room dungeons, keeps, necromancer's towers, abandoned moat houses, and the like that may have all 8 encounters but packed together to be completed in less time than taking a short rest! There have been plenty of times I can recall having the characters trek to an adventuring site and describing the heroes arriving by late morning or mid-day. After 5 Real Life hours of gaming, one of the players asks, "How much time has passed in the game?" and you look down and realize that the combined rounds of combat over the encounters equals.... minutes!! Add in the 400 feet of tunnels and caves the party has explored and the time taken looking in nooks and crannies - and really you're stretching it if that's more than an In Game hour total!

What I've come to believe is that the Adventuring Day is malleable and dynamic, like Tony Vargas mentions, depending on the situation and adventure at hand. What's the difference if the 6 - 8 encounters happen over the course of an hour or a week In Game? Ultimately it's up to the DM to decided what the correct Length of Day is for any situation. But personally what I've found works for me is that there are 3 levels for the Adventuring Day. I call them Short-Adventure, (Regular) Adventure, and Perilous Journey. The Short-Adventure Day is as I described above. Where 6 - 8 encounters come hot and heavy and it will be assumed that the characters would handle these encounters all within an In Game hour or there about. The characters should still be able to take their short rests between a few encounters. But it would be silly if the characters had to stop and hide in a broom closet for an hour! So in this case a short rest becomes 5 minutes. A long rest is 2 hours. A regular Adventure is more in line of the classic 'dungeon'. Nothing changes here, resting would still be 1 hour/8 hour for short and long. These are the dungeons that have multiple floors, long distances between internal locations that actually end up taking several forays into the depths to fully explore. Finally the Perilous Journey is for long, multi day treks. Again I think it is hard to believe that every single day while traveling the heroes should face 6 - 8 random encounters. As if they are all lined up with a number waiting to jump out behind a rock to get the characters. And on the flip side, having a single encounter for the characters to go Super Saiyan on and then be able to long rest is equally as anti-climatic and unnecessary. So in this case a short rest is 12 hours, a long rest is 24. With this, those 6 - 8 encounters are spread across days effectively making overland trekking itself the Adventuring Day.

And of course this info shouldn't be hidden to the players. Although I don't personally tell them up front, "Oh this adventure is going to be a short-adventure!" the info does come out once the adventure is under way. And once the tempo is set, both the players and DM need to trust that the tempo won't change.

 

[I'm A Banana]

For overland journeys, there's basically a few options:

• The party reaches their destination without incident. Maybe I roll a random encounter for flavor, but it's not meant to be a real challenge. It's cool if they wipe the floor with it, or if it's noncombat.
• Getting to the destination is itself a challenge. This calls for tracking rations, getting lost, exhaustion tracking and draining non-hit-point resources. 5e doesn't support this TOTALLY well out of the box, but it does have rules for things like rationing, starvation, and the weight of food and water. I think 5e could use a better rules option or two here, but it's not really much of the focus of most D&D games. Encounters and HP attrition don't work here.
• The party has some big challenge on the way to the destination. This calls for a lair/side-story, with the full encounter suite and a dungeon.

I think some people's problems come in trying to use HP attrition for that second bullet point, but 5e doesn't support that very well. You're better off tracking food and water, rolling to get lost, having environmental hazards (weather, cliffs, difficult terrain) that cause exhaustion, etc.

 

[TwoSix]

I think some people's problems come in trying to use HP attrition for that second bullet point, but 5e doesn't support that very well. You're better off tracking food and water, rolling to get lost, having environmental hazards (weather, cliffs, difficult terrain) that cause exhaustion, etc.

Well, it can, you just have to use the variant resting rules.

That being said, hit point attrition is still easy to manage even with the variant rules if someone has the Healer feat.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think some people's problems come in trying to use HP attrition for that second bullet point, but 5e doesn't support that very well. You're better off tracking food and water, rolling to get lost, having environmental hazards (weather, cliffs, difficult terrain) that cause exhaustion, etc.

Seems like a lot of bookkeeping just for a chance to get stuff 'wrong' (unrealistic). But, hp attrition could be made to work, as long as you consider that it's not just hps, it's hps and the HD, spell slots, & potions that restore them. If you stick to 6-hr long rests, and let every night camping in the wilderness provide one, sure, hp attrition is going to fail, because you get back all those slots and half those HD. But, if you restrict long rests due to the hardships of the journey (you might even restrict short rests if it gets particularly bad), then those resources are finite, and attrition works.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Yep, variant rules (restricting rests due to hard environments, or making a long rest a week) make HP as a wilderness resource more viable, and 5e could DEFINITELY use some better exploration rules (falling back on previous e's hasn't done 5e many favors in this regard). But in the default rules, wilderness travel just ain't a big deal most of the time, and where it is, it's because you can run out of food/water or encounter specific challenging features. Which just means that if you want to make wilderness travel a significant challenge, having a fight with trolls ain't gonna do it all on its own.

 

[TwoSix]

Yep, variant rules (restricting rests due to hard environments, or making a long rest a week) make HP as a wilderness resource more viable, and 5e could DEFINITELY use some better exploration rules (falling back on previous e's hasn't done 5e many favors in this regard). But in the default rules, wilderness travel just ain't a big deal most of the time, and where it is, it's because you can run out of food/water or encounter specific challenging features. Which just means that if you want to make wilderness travel a significant challenge, having a fight with trolls ain't gonna do it all on its own.

I look at it this way. If you turn down the recovery knobs quite a bit (so that short rests are a night, long rests are multiple days in a safe place), you make EVERYTHING a challenge, whether that be overland adventures or site-based ones. If you think you might have more than 6-8 encounters before you make it back to a safe place, you give the option to the players to stock up on healing potions and/or mana potions or some other consumable magic item. As the DM, you can tweak the price and availability of restoratives to allow more encounters between rests to fit your game style. I think of it as the Final Fantasy I style.

 

[Rhenny]

Ugh, I typed a response on my phone and lost it all. Back to the drawing board...

I think both DMs and players need to celebrate the choice that adventuring day planning affords over encounter planning. One of the reasons why WoTC designed the 6-8 encounter day and moved away from encounter by encounter design was to put the decision to take short and long rests firmly in the hands of the players. Now, it really is a choice. Do you stop for an hour to recover slightly, or do you keep pursuing foes? Do you as a party feel as if you've found a safe enough place to rest either for 1 hour or for a full 8 when you feel exhausted an nearly drained? These are substantial questions that each party should face. I'm finding that when we give ourselves over to this mentality, we are more immersed in our character experience and the mechanics of resting rarely break my immersion. When we played with milestones (4e) the game always intruded and it felt more mechanical and less organic. So, to get the most out of 6-8, everyone has to buy into it.

I've also found that when players expect more in a day, I feel much more free to throw anything at them that fits with the story/situation, rather than try to balance encounters. Like you mentioned in the original post, [MENTION=2067]I'm A Banana[/MENTION], it gives the DM more freedom. With adventuring day, I feel perfectly fine just having the party encounter 2 guards. Most of the times, this is a triffle, but it fits the story, and with some random rolls it is quite possible that even against 2 guards, the party may need to blow some resources, or an alarm can be raised or one of the guards can escape, etc. I can also introduce them to an encounter where they are severely outmatched and depending on their condition or time of day, they have a different set of decisions that they must decide between. 6-8 encounters basically opens up the design space for a DM and allows the DM to use variety and diversity to make the adventure more interesting. To capitalize on this, all DMs need to pay more attention to variety and building encounters that have meaning and fit within the story of the campaign rather than worry so much about developing each and every encounter as a test that pushes the party to its limits.

Also, it is so easy now to have an easy encounter escalate into a more difficult battle as reinforcements join the fray. This is definitely a positive in my book. It gives DM much more control to raise and lower the level of tension during the game session. And, related to the escalation of a single encounter, one of the best tricks for taking advantage of 6-8 is to use deadly, easy, hard, easy (or combinations like that) to raise tension and provide relief, raise tension again, and provide relief. For any good story, tension and relief work hand in hand to enhance the story and make it more memorable. 6-8 encounter/day gives a DM more chances to use this technique.

Overall, the key to enjoying 6-8 encounter/day design is to be conscious of the variety and diversity it affords.