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General Tabletop Discussion
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Where did the 6-8 encounter standard come from?
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<blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 7277469" data-attributes="member: 20564"><p>No, they are not key factors. As a matter of fact, those are factors that should be discarded because they are misleading.</p><p></p><p>Remember, I'm talking about actual usage - which is based on that guideline but is NOT that guideline.</p><p></p><p>First, while the guideline say "can", actual usage say "pretty needed to maintain inter-class balance with different resource recorvery rates".</p><p></p><p>Actual play also shows that lots fewer but harder encounters do not balance well or a recurring, day to day basis, regardless how high you crank it up. Again, not in being able to defeat the characters, but in the resource usage and recovery between classes.</p><p></p><p>Plus every table has different amount of optimization, different amounts of synergy between characters, and different amounts of tactics on both the players and the DM - "medium to hard" shouldn't be used as an absolute XP value but rather a guard of actual difficulty.</p><p></p><p>In othwer words, I'm not going from the guideline at all, but ti happens that the guideline matcdhes up with actual play But because of trap words like "can" and "medium to hard" and the XP budgets, it's doesn't model reality and can be actvely misleading to anyone to tried to use the XP budgets slavishly<em>. But if you have 6-8 meaningful (for your table) encounters per day, it works out well.</em></p><p></p><p>(Again, I am not defending that it should be 6-8 encounters - that doesn't fit my DMing style at all. Just what works out across multiple tables.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Blue, post: 7277469, member: 20564"] No, they are not key factors. As a matter of fact, those are factors that should be discarded because they are misleading. Remember, I'm talking about actual usage - which is based on that guideline but is NOT that guideline. First, while the guideline say "can", actual usage say "pretty needed to maintain inter-class balance with different resource recorvery rates". Actual play also shows that lots fewer but harder encounters do not balance well or a recurring, day to day basis, regardless how high you crank it up. Again, not in being able to defeat the characters, but in the resource usage and recovery between classes. Plus every table has different amount of optimization, different amounts of synergy between characters, and different amounts of tactics on both the players and the DM - "medium to hard" shouldn't be used as an absolute XP value but rather a guard of actual difficulty. In othwer words, I'm not going from the guideline at all, but ti happens that the guideline matcdhes up with actual play But because of trap words like "can" and "medium to hard" and the XP budgets, it's doesn't model reality and can be actvely misleading to anyone to tried to use the XP budgets slavishly[I]. But if you have 6-8 meaningful (for your table) encounters per day, it works out well.[/I] (Again, I am not defending that it should be 6-8 encounters - that doesn't fit my DMing style at all. Just what works out across multiple tables.) [/QUOTE]
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Where did the 6-8 encounter standard come from?
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