D&D 5E Where did the 6-8 encounter standard come from?

[Coroc]

Lol, ya all my groups have ben 3-4 players, 3 with any consistency and engaging in 1 maybe to 2 encounters per COMBAT DAY per session. I specify combat days because many session "days" are down time, travel, preparation, and just opening up story elements. That said, session days can fast forward a bit. We may only have 1 or 2 COMBAT days in a 4 hour session, but generally at least 1, thought we have had a few sessions without them.

Unless your actually in a dungeon, combat is a big moment that takes up a large part of a session between story, so my GM limits them. It also makes the Warlocks spell recovery pretty useless since the group would rarely ever have a more than one battle a day. In a dungeon however, I could see a Warlock suddenly becoming the anchor of the team and really powerful.

Even with a small group I could never do 12-16 encounters within 4 hours Real-time.

Does your group do hack and slay style only? Do you use the average for mob damage?

Do your encounters look like: You see a group of goblins they do not see you yet, party mage: I cast fireball DM: they all die?

I am clueless.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

For the group that I play with, it is absolutely a sign of things going well that we have renewable resources unspent when we rest.

This question really illuminated for me why there is so much disagreement over 5e encounter days. It's a fundamental question of preference in how people play.

Early D&D was a resource-management game. You would do everything you possibly could to avoid taking damage, and to avoid spending spell slots, because it might very well be the difference between life and death later on.

Modern D&D looks like a resource-management game, but the rate of recovery is so generous that you rarely have to worry about running out of anything. I still cringe when I'm playing and I see another PC casting a spell gratuitously, because I'm trained to think of spell slots as a valuable resource to be conserved, even if they player isn't actually in danger of dooming the party with their recklessness.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Do your encounters look like: You see a group of goblins they do not see you yet, party mage: I cast fireball DM: they all die?

I ran a couple of encounters like that. It was fun, until the mage rolled low on damage once, and some of the orcs survived and scattered. None of the subsequent encounters went that easily.

I also wholly recommend using average damage, not just for monsters, but for any PC who feels like it.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

So you've never read (off the top of my head) The Dresden Files? Watched a Die Hard movie?

My recollection of the Dresden Files was that there might be 3 combats per BOOK. And those take place at least across several days. Lord of the Rings... classic fantasy. Not exactly filled with 6-8 combat days. It's complete genre fail for anything other than opening up a series of soundproof rooms, because requiring each adventure to be paced so that there is a ton of urgency to prevent long rests, but allowing multiple hour-long naps in enemy territory doesn't happen organically.

Expecting 6-8 fights in a day is absurd, since it's just a pointless MMO grind (and to think 4E was supposed to be the video game edition). Ain't nobody got time for that. We've got spouses, kids, and jobs. 3-4 would be much more reasonable, since anything beyond that is likely just attrition soaking filler.

 

[Oofta]

My recollection of the Dresden Files was that there might be 3 combats per BOOK. And those take place at least across several days. Lord of the Rings... classic fantasy. Not exactly filled with 6-8 combat days. It's complete genre fail for anything other than opening up a series of soundproof rooms, because requiring each adventure to be paced so that there is a ton of urgency to prevent long rests, but allowing multiple hour-long naps in enemy territory doesn't happen organically.

Expecting 6-8 fights in a day is absurd, since it's just a pointless MMO grind (and to think 4E was supposed to be the video game edition). Ain't nobody got time for that. We've got spouses, kids, and jobs. 3-4 would be much more reasonable, since anything beyond that is likely just attrition soaking filler.

Which is why, as I've stated repeatedly, I use the optional rules where overnight is short rest and a long rest takes days (usually a week).

I could see using the standard rule if you did a lot of old school dungeon crawls.

What's the real issue? If you follow the guidelines of 6-8 encounters with 1-2 short rests you can throw a variety of encounters yet don't have to worry about those high level casters going nova every single round.

As far as references to fiction, I don't give a fig about actual number of encounters. The point is that the character(s) are pushed to their limits, and then some. You can easily replicate that in D&D by following the guidelines. Don't want to do that? Then don't complain about class balance and certain builds going nova.

As far as it being a "grind" my sessions average 4-6 hours. I just tell people we're going to pick up the next game day where we left off. It's not hard.

 

[OB1]

Expecting 6-8 fights in a day is absurd, since it's just a pointless MMO grind (and to think 4E was supposed to be the video game edition). Ain't nobody got time for that. We've got spouses, kids, and jobs. 3-4 would be much more reasonable, since anything beyond that is likely just attrition soaking filler.

But how many ROUNDS are those 3-4 combats? I've found that 3-4 Difficult fights tend to take about the same number of rounds as 6-8 easier ones.

That said, if you're not playing TOM, there is some additional time for setup for those extra 3-4 combats, but that should only account for an additional 15-20 minutes. Not exactly earth shattering.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The point is that the character(s) are pushed to their limits, and then some. You can easily replicate that in D&D by following the guidelines. Don't want to do that? Then don't complain about class balance and certain builds going nova.

I think that about sums it up, really.

Expecting 6-8 fights in a day is absurd, since it's just a pointless MMO grind...Ain't nobody got time for that.

5e combats are meant to be mercifully brief.

 

[Bacon Bits]

[MENTION=6777737]Bacon Bits[/MENTION]

You wrote about feeling dismissed and patronized because some people state they don't share the problem. It certainly wasn't my intent to disparage anyone, sorry if I came off that way.

Actually, I wasn't intending to point any fingers at you at all. Your post was just a good jumping off point. I apologize for the misunderstanding.

My intent was to simply head off the most common counter arguments to the points I was making whenever this topic has come up in previous threads. I think it was [MENTION=25643]ca[/MENTION]pnZap (although I could be remembering) who had a post about being unsatisfied by encounter difficulty and resting in 5e, and he immediately got overwhelmed and sidetracked into the two dismissive arguments I mentioned. The next 50 odd pages of posts were just him defending his position instead of, you know, actually addressing the issue he wanted to talk about and look into solutions for.

I agree with the bulk of your post, particularly arguing about rests. It's come up only once in the game where I'm a player, and yeah it was a little frustrating, but our DM generally paces things out pretty nicely.

Anyway, like yourself, I want 2-4 encounters per adventuring day, but I think we perceive the problem from different angles. You want to modify the rest mechanics to make the game right for you. If I were inclined to modify a system, it would be the class features themselves. That's why I called them out on page 4.

Which is easier? Well, if you adjust the rest mechanics you're affecting all the classes in one way or another. Maybe it makes the short resters stronger and the long resters compartively less so. If you adjust the classes, you only have to adjust the classes in your current group, and then only for the people who are feeling short changed. Is the fighter the only one complaining about the lack of short rests? #$% it, give him 3 more BM dice. Warlock feeling useless? BAM extra spell slot.

Fortunately I haven't even considered house ruling class features to accommodate this complaint, because no one in my group is complaining. Again, not saying this to be dismissive, only to share my experience. I don't do house rules willy nilly, and when I do, it's almost always because the players want it, not me. Even then, though I abide by a philosophy of service to my players, it's a hard sell to get me to implement them.

The change I've considered is just eliminating short rest abilities by doubling the number of uses and making them long rest abilities. That's more elegant than changing them to X-per-time-unit abilities (1/hour, 1/10 minutes, etc.). I like double over triple because, well, we're also reducing the number of encounters each day! However, we're currently playing Adventures in Middle Earth and Savage Worlds, so it just hasn't come up again. AiME is 5e, but it's... a different flavor of game.

I guess alternately you can make a short rest 5 minutes again, but that's also a bit amazing for Warlocks and Fighters. I don't want players of those classes to be bored from lack of options, but I also don't want them to be better than they already are.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The change I've considered is just eliminating short rest abilities by doubling the number of uses and making them long rest abilities. I like double over triple because, well, we're also reducing the number of encounters each day!

Sounds like reducing daily resources proportionately might also be a good idea.

I guess alternately you can make a short rest 5 minutes again, but that's also a bit amazing for Warlocks and Fighters.

Combined with fewer/tougher encounters/day and the same number of dailies for everyone else, it'd balance at some point - maybe around 3 encounters/day, with a short rest after each encounter more or less assumed...

 

[Hussar]

Where does 6-8 come from? That's easy. Several years of people bitching about 15 Minute Adventuring Days in 3e. The idea that you'd have 2-3 encounters per day when some of us wanted to run actual dungeons with dozens of encounters the way we made dungeons and adventures in AD&D.

And, since 5e is very much going back to the AD&D mode of play, 6-8/day makes a LOT of sense in order to try to capture the feel. Look at how many encounters you'd have in those old AD&D modules. As a random example, N1 Cult of the Reptile God has a dungeon. There are 10 combat encounters on Level 1 and 9 on Level 2, plus random encounters to be checked 1 in 6 every 3 turns.

If we balance around the 2-4 encounters of 3e, that module will take a VERY long time to actually play out. Whereas in 5e, that should take about 2 adventuring days, which is a pretty solid pace.

The problem is, people want to ignore the advice in the DMG and force square pegs into round holes.