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

[S'mon]

[MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]: Druid wildshape is 1/2 druid level in duration, so its definately supposed to be able to last over a short rest.

I suspect a significant part of it is going to be a reduction in the use of wandering monsters due to people playing different campaign types. Wandering monsters tend to imply a specific campaign type: Dungeon crawling. My current 5E games are an urban setting and the other one features us trying to escape from a world we got planar shifted onto.

I suspect if you played a dungeon crawler, scrapped all the rope trick style spells and went back to per hour in the dungeon, a 1 on a 1d6 means a wandering monster shows up to claw your face, you'd see a lot less resting. That said, I feel like playing an OSR edition is a better fit for that sort of gameplay.

Druid Wildshape duration - Thanks - I've been misremembering the 5e rules a lot recently
(feels like I've slipped into a slightly different parrallel universe - again...)
Still my Druid player is happy to have Wildshape end at the end of a short rest, so I'll
stick with that.

Wandering monsters & dungeon crawls - I like to roll a d6, 6 = wandering monster. I'll be keeping that up. I prefer rolling every ca 20 minutes as per 1e and having 15 minute short rests,
makes it more practical for PCs to get a rest in before monsters turn up. I had been switching to a single check per hour of short rest but it felt a bit artificial.

 

[S'mon]

You're directly responsible for 50 percent of that as the DM of 2 of those 4 campaigns, so thats fairly spurious reasoning.

1. Observation is not reasoning.
2. So I don't Railroad my players. So sue me.

BTW in my experience Wizard types often do tend to conserve their high level spell slots, and I've not really seeen any 3e style 'God Mode Wizard' or 'CoDZilla' in 5e. What I guess I do see is Barbarian being a
stronger class than Fighter. Barbarian players soon realise it is best to Rage at the start of any non-trivial encounter; if they don't then they are ineffective and take a lot of damage which will suck up party healing resources.
The feeling is that 5+ non-trivial encounters in the day will likely wipe the party anyway (just like in 3e), so players don't operate around the assumption of 6-8 fights. Typical assumption is more like 3 fights and
the possibility of a 4th as party are leaving/retreating, so spend most resources on the 3 but leave some gas in the tank just in case.

 

[pemerton]

I like to roll a d6, 6 = wandering monster. I'll be keeping that up. I prefer rolling every ca 20 minutes as per 1e

Very much a tangent - but where in the AD&D books is the frequency of wandering monster rolls stated? The only thing I can think of is the city encounter section in Appendix C of the DMG, which refers to a check "every three turns as normally".

 

[S'mon]

Very much a tangent - but where in the AD&D books is the frequency of wandering monster rolls stated? The only thing I can think of is the city encounter section in Appendix C of the DMG, which refers to a check "every three turns as normally".

There are scattered references to 1 per 2 Turns & 1 per 3 Turns in 1e DMG, Moldvay Basic et al. OD&D seems to have used a rather brutal 1 per Turn.

 

[pemerton]

There are scattered references to 1 per 2 Turns & 1 per 3 Turns in 1e DMG, Moldvay Basic et al. OD&D seems to have used a rather brutal 1 per Turn.

I'll have a look at OD&D to see what it says! My memory is that Moldvay uses 1 per 2 turns, but I'll have to check that too. I've just checked the example of play in the AD&D DMG - it says "Here, as about 3 turns hove elapsed, the DM rolls a d6 to see if a ’wandering monster’ appears; the resulting 5 indicates none". That is consistent with the 3 turns in City Encounters.

 

[Flamestrike]

What I guess I do see is Barbarian being a stronger class than Fighter. Barbarian players soon realise it is best to Rage at the start of any non-trivial encounter; if they don't then they are ineffective and take a lot of damage which will suck up party healing resources.

Thats because in the games you run, and the ones you play in you only ever grant 1-3 encounters per long rest, and rarely short rest.

In other words your barbarians are perma raging, and your poor fighters (champions and BMs) arent getting the amount of encounters to let thier abilities shine.

Run your party through a 7 encounter, 3 short rest adventuring day. You'll see Fighters being a notably stronger class than barbarians on such days.

If your barbarian players are raging on round 1 of every battle, youre not forcing the player to conserve resources or making the decision to enter a rage, a meaningful choice. It should be.

 

[JonnyP71]

Tonight my party try to gain entry to a castle... there are 30+ rooms, many of which begin occupied. They will have no opportunity to rest as it is a very busy place. And if they are not careful, their 'easy' exit route may get blocked.

Depending on how they approach it, this could be 15+ encounters (mostly fights!) without even a short rest. All hell could break loose, then it will be wave after wave of enemies. Or they could complete the mission using brains (and a few successful rolls) and get the info they need after 2-3 minor scuffles.

6-8 encounters - pah!

 

[Salamandyr]

Run your party through a 7 encounter, 3 short rest adventuring day. You'll see Fighters being a notably stronger class than barbarians on such days..

Actually the fighter and the barbarian are going to look about the same...each using their abilities in approximately half the combats, and having nothing to contribute other than basic attacks in the other half.

This is especially the case if you run 7 encounters and 2 short rests, which is probably more common.

 

[Libramarian]

I've been thinking about what rubs me the wrong way about the gauntlet style of adventure discussed here. The 'statistical power' for detecting good play is too low. If you complete it, you haven't done anything special: you've done what the designers expect a typical party to do. If you fail, you're not even good enough to be a typical party. Not to mention you've probably TPKed and the world might be ending.

I think this is why gamism with this model tends to result in arguing and rules lawyering (as evidenced by the design debate thread...).

This style of play needs finer degrees of success than pass/fail. At the least you could have, say, 4 medium encounters and 2 optional hard encounters. If you beat the medium encounters, you save the kingdom but the NPC who gave you the quest gets much of the credit. If you beat the hard encounters, you save the kingdom and you get all the credit (or something like that). I bet the players would spend less time arguing about whether the easyish encounters are "fair" and more time figuring out how to beat the hard ones.

 

[Libramarian]

Very much a tangent - but where in the AD&D books is the frequency of wandering monster rolls stated? The only thing I can think of is the city encounter section in Appendix C of the DMG, which refers to a check "every three turns as normally".

The creator of OSRIC once told me (a bit snootily) that it's 1 per 3 turns in 1e, when I said I check every turn. I've never seen a reason to check less often. In fact that's what defines an exploration turn for me: what you can do between encounter checks.