D&D 5E Resting and the frikkin' Elephant in the Room

[Tony Vargas]

Sure, some classes will have more at their disposal if numerous short rests are allowed, others will benefit if there are a small number of encounters per day.

To a point. The game assumes 2-3 short rests/day, for only 6-8 encounter, so roughly every-other encounter. A short rest after every encounter is thus twice the 'expected resources' for the short-rest-recharge class. Similarly, a 3 encounter day, even if it is three deadly encounters, means about double the daily resources available in each encounter - and a 5 MWD, six to eight times the expected resources - if you can even belt them out that fast.

I'm willing to alter rest mechanics as circumstances dictate.

That's what I consider the 'best' (most in keeping with 5e philosophy) solution.

But like I said earlier, I find that varying it up is the key. Let some characters shine one day, and others shine another day

'Spotlight' balance, yes, and there are a lot more tools you can take advantage of than just pacing. The 6-8 encounter guideline aims at a degree of mechanical balance around resources.

but most of us seem to just want a workable solution for issues we find, and are not so concerned about the source of the solutions or in laying blame for the problems.
...
My point wasn't that you don't have to do anything. My point is that, in the post I quoted by you, you said for those DMs who choose to have encounters in an area that has been established to be trivially dangerous to the PCs at their current level, it can be an issue. My point is that such DMs are choosing to create the issue.

That does sound a tad like assigning blame. But, no, it's not choosing to create an issue, it's making a story based decision - that is impacted by an existing issue with the system. (When the assassins sent by the BBEG ambush them in a 'safe' area, while their guard is down, boom, single-encounter day, with attendant issues.)

What we disagree on is the severity and/or certainty that you insist happens on the game world when shifting from 6 to 8 normal encounters to 3 deadly. I think that the impact can be minimal or nil.

We can certainly compensate for it in other ways. You can even leverage it. If you're already working towards spotlight balance in your campaign, for instance, having a single-encounter, telegraphed-threat day to let the prepped daily caster shine, a few-encounter day where the Barbarian can rage every time, a scenario in an undead-and-trap-infested tomb where the Thief & Cleric shine, and then a heist scenario where the Thief and Bard shine, is all perfectly reasonable - and pacing is just one tool you can use to make a given PC the star that time around.

That's true. I didn't mean to imply that anyone who cites a problem is making it up or exaggerating. But I've noticed that trend at times, espcially when discussing theory. We often resort to increasingly extreme examples to support an argument.

Or merely to illustrate it. It may not be painfully obvious that a barbarian will be doing better relative to a fighter in a shorter day, but compare a 3-rage barbarian to a 1-Action Surge Campion in a 3-encounter/no-short-rest day, and it becomes pretty obvious. Extreme cases, like strict inferiority, are useful in illustrating something, even if they hopefully rarely happen...

I am not disagreeing with the way anyone plays....
So I am probably a bit biased in that regard. And 5E's shift in focus was a well timed one, for me. Plenty of folks love the maths and honestly, that's fine, more power to them. But I needed the math to die. Or most of it anyway.

Sounds like there's a conflict there.

The game doesn't necessarily fall apart if you don't follow the guidelines.

It necessarily does in the sense the guidelines hold it together, in the first place. Which is not saying much, at all, really, since the guidelines are just a step towards imposing class balance and estimating encounter difficulty, not nearly sufficient in themselves.

That's one way to do it, sure. It really depends on what you're going for. You don't need to have the creatures in a given area be a threat for the PCs over their entire career. You can, if you want.

And BA helps with that, certainly, if, for instance, you can find an excuse to amp up numbers.

But if you don't want to, then you can simply have the danger in that area be so insignificant to the PCs that you don't focus on it any more.

And BA doesn't much get in the way of that, either.

I find a lot of travel play....days on the road, rolling for random encounters....to be kind of monotonous. So do my players. They lose interest. So I've lessened that in our game unless there's a reason.

And there was great rejoicing.

 

[Maxperson]

No... more likely it's a result of lack of clarity...

Not my fault if you can't understand, "No, that's not what I'm saying."

 

[LordEntrails]

You guys realize that for the last... oh ... thousand posts you guys have been pretty much going in circles?

Hopefully you also know it does not make you less of a person if you withdraw from a useless debate on an internet forum and that you value yourself based upon yourself, and not if you "win" or "score points" on some forum debate with some other user who will never withdraw or admit anything less than "victory".

 

[LordEntrails]

*dup*

 

[OB1]

Certainly not 'every day' but the 'adventuring days' that actually matter.

...hmmm... it might be fair to have occasional 'false start' adventuring days - single-encounter, or trivial-encounters days that could be leading into full days, but peter out with no real challenge - that yield no XP...

It really depends on your goal. The only time a full adventuring day is necessary is when you want to push the PCs to their limit and potentially cause a retreat from their goal. If you instead are concerned about keeping the players honest in encounters so that they have the right difficulty feel, you only need to ensure that there is uncertainty in the minds of the players as to how many more encounters they will face that day so they don't overspend resources in any fight. In fact, done well, the players should underspend resources and make fights more difficult on themselves than need be.

I typically take this one step further, creating 'Adventuring Days' in which there are far more potential encounters than the party will have resources to overcome and reach their goal. If they can find a way to get through a mission having only fought half or two-thirds of their level appropriate daily encounter total, they have earned it and are ecstatic about it. To me, that's the whole point of the adventuring day discussion in the DMG, not to tell DMs how many encounters they need to have, but to provide a guideline on how many may be too many for any give party to handle without rest.

Of course, I also use milestone leveling based on accomplishing goals appropriate to their current tier, so I don't have to worry about them gaining 'easy' XP in shortened days. I'm not sure it would be a big issue either way, but its certainly another thing to consider when deciding how to deal with the elephant.

You guys realize that for the last... oh ... thousand posts you guys have been pretty much going in circles?

Hopefully you also know it does not make you less of a person if you withdraw from a useless debate on an internet forum and that you value yourself based upon yourself, and not if you "win" or "score points" on some forum debate with some other user who will never withdraw or admit anything less than "victory".

Sorry our forum badwrongfun is a bother to you!

 

[Tony Vargas]

It really depends on your goal. The only time a full adventuring day is necessary is when you want to push the PCs to their limit and potentially cause a retreat from their goal.

Not what the guideline sounds like, to me. Around the 6-8 encounter norm, a party should feel challenged, have had to manage their resources carefully, and have each had to step up. They could certainly be pushed further, with increasing risk, and, just as with a shorter day, with distortions to class balance & encounter difficulty, just in the opposite directions with encounter difficulty actually greater than indicated, and classes penalized instead of over-rewarded (the caster forced to rely on cantrips exclusively for encounter after encounter will be under-performing, where the one blazing away with spells on every round of a 5MWD would be over-performing, for instance).

 

[Hussar]

Whether we defined 'worldbuilding' narrowly enough (as Hussar does, for instance) that sticking dogmatically to one encounter-pacing scheme "doesn't impact it" or not, it still doesn't make sticking dogmatically to one encounter-pacing scheme at all flexible.

I honestly didn't think I was defining world building in a particularly narrow way. I've still not seen a single example of how encounter building impacts world building. It of course works the other way, but, at what point do the mechanics of the game impact world building?

Going back to the Tigers example - the mechanics say that there are tigers in jungles. However, not every jungle has a tiger. So, if you decide that THIS jungle has tigers, that's on you. That's not the mechanics. And, if you decide that this desert encounter has tigers in it, you better come up with some reason why because the players are probably going to have a believability issue.

But, again, even if the PC's ONLY EVER encounter 3 deadly encounters per day, that in no way means that everyone in the world has only ever 3 deadly encounters per day. Why would that even be a consideration?

 

[Tony Vargas]

I honestly didn't think I was defining world building in a particularly narrow way. I've still not seen a single example of how encounter building impacts world building.

We've seen many such examples. They can be easily dismissed as 'encounter building not world building' or casually blame-shifted to the hypothetical DM, but then, so can any valid example.

Frankly, I find any definition of world-building too narrow, in context, because it's not all that DMs do, and not all that trying to impose balance & consistency in a system via following pacing guidelines will limit the DMs options with, either.

 

[OB1]

Not what the guideline sounds like, to me. Around the 6-8 encounter norm, a party should feel challenged, have had to manage their resources carefully, and have each had to step up. They could certainly be pushed further, with increasing risk, and, just as with a shorter day, with distortions to class balance & encounter difficulty, just in the opposite directions with encounter difficulty actually greater than indicated, and classes penalized instead of over-rewarded (the caster forced to rely on cantrips exclusively for encounter after encounter will be under-performing, where the one blazing away with spells on every round of a 5MWD would be over-performing, for instance).

DMG, Page 84; Adventuring Day XP Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parts can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.
...
For each character in the party, use the Adventuring Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party's adventuring day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest.

It's my contention that the party should feel challenged after each encounter of the day, because each encounter is a test to see if they can keep their resources at or below the expected level for the difficulty of the encounter. That challenge exists because there is uncertainty about the number of encounters they will face prior to their being able to take a rest. Now, the party might look back on a day after completing a long rest and think, well that wasn't as tough as we thought, but it doesn't mean they can go into the next fight blowing resources.

The guideline is there to inform DMs of where the line is, so that when designing a dungeon, they don't make it impossible to get to the end (unless that is the intent). It's the same type of guidance as a suggestion not to set the DC of a locked door that the players must get through to complete the quest at a number that is likely to result in failure.

Yes, the different classes have been balanced around the concept of Adventuring Day XP, but you don't have to meet that standard all or even most of the time in order to gain the balancing effect of it. You just need to create days that the PCs have a reasonable belief could have that much XP in them prior to having a chance to rest to get them to use resources appropriately, and thus make individual encounters challenging.

 

[clearstream]

It really depends on your goal. The only time a full adventuring day is necessary is when you want to push the PCs to their limit and potentially cause a retreat from their goal. If you instead are concerned about keeping the players honest in encounters so that they have the right difficulty feel, you only need to ensure that there is uncertainty in the minds of the players as to how many more encounters they will face that day so they don't overspend resources in any fight. In fact, done well, the players should underspend resources and make fights more difficult on themselves than need be.

I typically take this one step further, creating 'Adventuring Days' in which there are far more potential encounters than the party will have resources to overcome and reach their goal. If they can find a way to get through a mission having only fought half or two-thirds of their level appropriate daily encounter total, they have earned it and are ecstatic about it. To me, that's the whole point of the adventuring day discussion in the DMG, not to tell DMs how many encounters they need to have, but to provide a guideline on how many may be too many for any give party to handle without rest.

Of course, I also use milestone leveling based on accomplishing goals appropriate to their current tier, so I don't have to worry about them gaining 'easy' XP in shortened days. I'm not sure it would be a big issue either way, but its certainly another thing to consider when deciding how to deal with the elephant.

For me it's about being able to have all kinds of encounters be mechanically meaningful, and about balancing so that short-rest abilities aren't overshadowed by long-rest abilities. Gaining "easy" XP isn't the issue.