D&D 5E 6-8 encounters/day - how common is this?

[JonnyP71]

I would never be happy running a fighter in your game

So you wouldn't be happy in a game where a rich plot danced and weaved, with many twists and turns, neatly incorporating every characters' personalities and backstories, so that every player feels engaged... just because the DM places story above mechanical minutiae.

It would be your loss.

Thankfully the 2 players in my groups who have fighters think differently. 'Optimisers' would have a fit if they saw one of them in particular - he won't even wear armour because it would mess up his clothes and hair, and fights shieldless with just a Rapier (no CON bonus either, his best 2 stats are Dexterity and Charisma).

 

[meshon]

WotC didn't need to design their game this way. They could have tried to provide a solution, preferably in the DMG but at the very least in their adventure modules. Instead of just dumping the issue in my lap and yours. That's my complaint.

I understand your complaint. What are you going to do about it?

 

[Kite474]

So you wouldn't be happy in a game where a rich plot danced and weaved, with many twists and turns, neatly incorporating every characters' personalities and backstories, so that every player feels engaged... just because the DM places story above mechanical minutiae.

It would be your loss.

Thankfully the 2 players in my groups who have fighters think differently. 'Optimisers' would have a fit if they saw one of them in particular - he won't even wear armour because it would mess up his clothes and hair, and fights shieldless with just a Rapier (no CON bonus either, his best 2 stats are Dexterity and Charisma).

Questions: Do they play Champions, Exactly what promps you all to play D&D compared to other systems, and exactly how do you go about not making a character feel mechanically useless?

 

[JonnyP71]

Questions: Do they play Champions, Exactly what promps you all to play D&D compared to other systems, and exactly how do you go about not making a character feel mechanically useless?

1 is a Champion (the one in my example - in the campaign in which I play), the other is a Battlemaster (who plays in another campaign which I DM). The Champion character is also a lower level than most of the other PCs in the group.

We play D&D because we enjoy it!!!! - we have a mixture of levels of player gaming experience in the group, and we found the game easy to learn and very flexible for both players and DMs alike, as we are all time-poor adults with jobs and families. (We also play occasional 1E games as well as Call of Cthulhu when several players cannot attend a session of the main 5E campaign).

The players drive the story - the main DM prepares elements of the next session based on player dialogue and actions of previous session, and everyone gets their own piece of that story. The only way anyone would feel useless would be if they sat back and said nothing.

None of the characters in either campaign are 'optimised'.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Questions: Do they play Champions, Exactly what promps you all to play D&D compared to other systems, and exactly how do you go about not making a character feel mechanically useless?

I'm not the guy you were asking... but the implications made by your questions got my attention, so I decided to toss in my own answers too. For a frame of reference, I am my group's primary DM, and rarely ever get to play (last I did the math it was an average of me getting to play in 1 session for every 300 that I've run).

I play a champion. Two of my players' collective characters thus far in 5th edition have also been champions. I have no complaints about playing a champion. Neither player that has played a champion has expressed complaints about playing a champion despite being asked if they had any complaints. Some other players in the group have expressed that they would like to play a champion at some point, among numerous other character types they'd also wish to play at some point.

As for what prompts us to play D&D compared to other systems: it's the best fit for high-fantasy heroics set in the various worlds of D&D. 5th edition even more that other editions, in our shared opinion. We do play other games, of course, but not when seeking the same sort of stories and same themes and feelings.

To the question how exactly I go about not making a character feel mechanically useless, here's my process in step-by-step format:

1. Let the players make characters that they think seem cool (note: in this case "cool" and "mechanically useful" are necessarily synonymous)
2. Make up obstacles between those characters and whatever goals their players set for them that make sense and present a variety of challenges, using the guidelines present in the game.
3. Repeat step 2 until the story create by playing the game feels like it has reached its natural conclusion

That's it. That's all it takes - the design of the game makes it nearly impossible to have a character that is mechanically useless, so it is very easy for players to not feel that they've ended up with one.

 

[Sunseeker]

I have two characters who play fighters, one is a battlemaster, one is a champion. The latter isn't enjoying his character as much, but I think that is less from "amed up fights less often" to "he would almost always prefer to be a wizard". However: these are the only two characters who haven't gone down throughout the entire game. They both have the highest ACs at the tables, they use their second wind every chance they get and it really keeps them going and that improved critical has really seem some shine, while the battlemaster quite enjoys fearing enemies.

So really what matters is having fun. If your only way to have fun is to feel "mechanically useful" yeah I understand that, but as long as you know what kind of game you're getting into, you'll know what you need to do to have fun.

 

[Salamandyr]

I've only rarely had 6-8 encounter days. I think a good component is that I've found that 3-4 hard encounters, one of which is heavily roleplaying, makes for a better 3 to 4 hour adventure, than a 6 to 8 medium intensity fights that gradually ramp up in difficulty because the party has fewer and fewer resources to bring to bear.

That's another problem. D&D combat, absent options to choose from, is really boring. Casting cantrip after cantrip, making your standard attack round after round, because you don't have any more leveled spells, or your action surge has already been used in the previous encounter and you don't have anything to do in this one, isn't a tense, nailbiting experience, it's just a boring one.

That's why I finally just made short rests last 15 minutes and went back to the 4e assumption that they occur after every encounter. If people were playing short rest heavy classes I'd have to look a adjusting their numbers, but as the party currently consists of mostly daily dependent classes, it means they almost always have something fun to do.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

I think we've already hit the point where the amount of "work" that you have done expressing your position on the matter exceeds the amount of "work" that is actually required to follow the 6-8 encounters per long rest guideline or find an alternative that is suitable to you.

Because it really doesn't take that much work.

I know it is only an anecdote, but: In the span of time spent watching a single episode of a TV show on Hulu, I did all of the prep-work necessary for me to run a long-term and likely quite enjoyable campaign for characters beginning at 13th level (it's a continuation of an old campaign that concluded at that level) and carrying on to 20th level (and possibly even after that). It's all of a 5 point outline or overview that will be filled in further only by where the players take things and what they have their characters do once play has begun. It'll likely have, when all is said and done, an average of 6-8 encounters in a day too... not because of me making any special effort to cause that to be the case, but because that is what has simply felt natural for my group and I while playing 5th edition thus far. The impetus being nothing more than the players' collective desires to "do stuff", not any special effort on my part or any time constraint (weird or otherwise) attached to the goals of the characters.

That's not the part that takes me significant time. The time consuming part (for me) is encounter design. The 5E framework (as is the 4E and 3.5E!) for this is complex. We're expected to do the following:

A) Cross reference the pair of tables that tells you the XP budget and XP multiplier. The bit I find tricky here is that getting the value of encounters right is tricky because adding a new monster changes two things and you need to do a lot of fiddling.
B) The internal balance of monsters in 5E is worth discussing. I think there is a lot of variance around damage which means encounter design needs a careful eye to make sure you don't overuse monsters with high alpha or create padded sumo. For example, the centaur who can quite plausibly 1 shot a PC at level 3, has excellent standoff capability with 2 longbow attacks for reasonable damage, high movement speed, and the encounter design guidelines call for using 3 centaurs vs a party of 5 level 3 PCs. At the other end of the table you have a bunch of sacks of low damage attacks with HP and resistances which don't make for fun. 5 suits of animated Armour have more than twice the effective HP and less than half the DPR which leads to a very slow fight as the players whittle away the sack of HP (Animated armour have another problem in that they don't actually do anything interesting other than 'I attack' for what rates to be a protracted fight)
C) The framework for designing and rescaling monsters is not fast. There are a number of blog posts about the multi step process that walk through the complexity of the steps.

This is why I personally have a huge preference for running canned modules in D&D - the last 3 editions place huge reliance on the combat subgame, but it is a lot of work to design robust balance encounters. You can just 'wing it' or fudge a lot when you realise you've screwed up, but I buy into the school that this sucks the drama out.

 

[Tony Vargas]

That's not the part that takes me significant time. The time consuming part (for me) is encounter design.

There are some quick & easy shortcuts. For instance, in 3e or 5e, a monster's CR is the level at which it's a default little speedbump encounter (that, in 3.5, might've killed someone) for a typical size party (in 4e, the monster would have to have the 'Solo' secondary role for that to hold true). No multiplier, no fussing. In 3e, if you wanted a larger combat, you 'broke up' the standard-issue lone monster into two CR = level -2 monsters. Neither doubling nor subtracting 2 were all that tough, though it could get troublesome if you wanted a bunch of different monsters of different CR. 4e to you total exp values of monsters, so long as they were within a few levels of the party, or you could use same-level monsters and just count up to the number of PCs. 5 PCs? 5 Standards or one Solo (worth 5) or an elite (worth 2) and three standards, etc, easy until you start varying monster levels. 5e, I find the general rule of thumb "don't outnumber the party" helps, just don't do it. Ever. For 5e? Same number of monsters, just double the exp and check the difficulty. Doubling's easy to remember & easy to do. Doubling also takes you from easy to medium or medium to deadly. Deadly is actually surprisingly reasonable if you're not doing many (or only 1) encounter that day, and the PCs aren't shy about cutting loose.

But, ultimately, tailoring encounters to a level and challenge is only one style of play - the other 'status quo' is to just place 'encounters' where they make sense for the setting and story, and let the players work out which ones are 'balanced' enough for them to take on (and always be ready to make adjustments).

This is why I personally have a huge preference for running canned modules in D&D - the last 3 editions place huge reliance on the combat subgame, but it is a lot of work to design robust balance encounters.

Between AL and two AP's a year, and 3pps, we have plenty of published adventures. As to the last 3 editions placing a lot of emphasis on combat, well, sure, they're like all the preceding editions, that way, and most older RPGs, for that matter - it was a criticism of RPGs in general, in the 80s & 90s, that no matter what they're supposed theme or emphasis, they devoted a lot of rules, page count, &c to combat. Because, really, you have to: combat is where PCs (and plot-important NPCs) get inconveniently killed, and also what any non-combat conflict always runs a risk of degenerating into - you need to get it working.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

There are some quick & easy shortcuts.

Yeah, I know. Two people have done recuts of the 5E encounter design rules that I think are a lot better:

http://slyflourish.com/5e_encounter_building.html <-- fast and generic solution to A.

https://songoftheblade.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/improved-monster-stats-table-for-dd-5th-edition/ <-- solves both problems but requires restats of monsters.

But, ultimately, tailoring encounters to a level and challenge is only one style of play - the other 'status quo' is to just place 'encounters' where they make sense for the setting and story, and let the players work out which ones are 'balanced' enough for them to take on (and always be ready to make adjustments).

Sandbox games work obviously, I've run a game like this in 3.5. It's really tricky to do without fudging imho because the communication of the difficulty of an encounter prior to arriving at the encounter can be imperfect, and a modest difference in party level can result in it flipping from cakewalk to TPK. Fudging is an unsatisfactory solution for drama reasons, and if you dynamically readjust the encounters based on when the PCs arrive... well you need to do all that stuff ANYWAY except now you need to do it in 3 minutes while setting up.

This is compounded though in 5E because it's much harder to bake the 6-8 encounter adventuring workday into the structure of the game.

Between AL and two AP's a year, and 3pps, we have plenty of published adventures. As to the last 3 editions placing a lot of emphasis on combat, well, sure, they're like all the preceding editions, that way, and most older RPGs, for that matter - it was a criticism of RPGs in general, in the 80s & 90s, that no matter what they're supposed theme or emphasis, they devoted a lot of rules, page count, &c to combat. Because, really, you have to: combat is where PCs (and plot-important NPCs) get inconveniently killed, and also what any non-combat conflict always runs a risk of degenerating into - you need to get it working.

Don't get me wrong. I like combat. If I didn't want combat, I'd play another game. The only issue though is if you're publishing a combat heavy game the biggest single draw on my time in preparation is designing combats (natch). If you want me to do this, your tooling to support the DM (me!) in designing and running combat heavy adventures better work. I think 5E has some significant gaps in this tooling. The discussion thread I was responding to can be loosely summarised as follows:

A) It's not constructive telling me to use 6-8 encounters a day when the published adventures don't do this.
B) Why not design your own adventures, that's easy
C) I added the point that designing your own adventures is not super easy if you plan your encounters in a structured manner and don't fudge.

Yes, there are published adventures. That does (hopefully, though, see our discussion about HoTDQ) solve the encounter balance problem, but brings the 'class balance is broken because the resource schedule is not adhered to in published adventures and lots of people's actual games' back to the fore.