D&D 5E Basic question - how many encounters per day

[RangerWickett]

It's been a while since I've run 5e. My party is third level. My understanding of the rulebook is that it's okay to have, like, one easy encounter, three medium, and two hard encounters in a day.

 

[LordEntrails]

It's ok to have 1 encounter per day or 100. The suggestion is 6-8 per day. But as DM, imo, it is very important for you to vary things up. Some days only have 1 encounter, some days many. Variety is the spice of life!

 

[RangerWickett]

Well sure, but for my upcoming session, how feasible is it for the party to handle that number of encounters?

 

[robus]

It's been a while since I've run 5e. My party is third level. My understanding of the rulebook is that it's okay to have, like, one easy encounter, three medium, and two hard encounters in a day.

The challenge is designed around 6-8 medium to hard encounters per adventuring day, but many find this hard to sustain.

A single deadly encounter is likely to be equivalent to a medium encounter if it’s the only one they have in a day. So it‘s important to differentiate the days in your game. An adventuring day is the day they take on the dungeon, the lair etc and should be designed to challenge the PCs such that they feel at the end of their resources, HP and otherwise. Other days are not expected to have that level of of challeng.

 

[NotAYakk]

I think of it as scenes.

The recomended adventuring day has 2-4 scenes per long rest. Between each scene, you can get a short rest.

An average scene at "local hero" tier (level 1-4) is a (deadly) encounter, a (hard and an easy), (2 medium), (4 easy), or (1 medium 2 easy) encounters roughly. Scenes can be made harder by exceeding this budget. As you gain tiers the scene budget edges up a bit.

(You can give a scene a 4 point budget, and easy=1, medium=2, hard=3, deadly=4. Then you can ramp up or down scene budgets based on what your players can take, and how hard the day/scene should be.)

Also, the DMG math works best for single-class, featless PCs with not that many, nearly random magic items.

If your characters optimize well, then scene budget creeps up.

---

If you want more a of a sandbox style world, you can break the world down into 4 tiers - T1, T2, T3, and T4.

A T1 scene budget is a CR sum of 1-6 (~PC level 1-4)
A T2 scene budget is a CR sum of 6-15 (~PC level 5-10)
A T3 scene budget is a CR sum of 15-22 (~PC level 11-16)
A T4 scene budget is a CR sum of 22-30 (~PC level 17-20)
A T5 scene budget is a CR sum of 30-60+

Note that for single monsters above CR 20, you have to rescale their CR to CR*2.5-30, as monster CR after 20 scales faster than it does before 20. (so a CR 30 is really 45).

Encounters where things are "broken up" are easier than if they are all together.

The PC level ranges is for a 4 person party. For other size parties, add up PC levels and divide by 4 is a half-decent way to do it.

(Note: "adding up CR" is imprecise, but it is really easy and gets you pretty close.)

So you could start the players off in a village, with a few problems.

You seed the area with mostly T1 scenes, and some non-aggressive (at least immediately) or hidden T2 scenes, with the T1 scenes leading to information on the T2 ones.

You can also level up using CR per player.
1: 2 CR/PC
2: 4 CR/PC
3: 8 CR/PC
4: 12 CR/PC
5-10: 5 + level*3 CR/PC
11-20: level*2.5 CR/PC

Time in each tier is:

T1: About 25 T1 scenes to reach T2
T2: About 66 T2 scenes to reach T3
T3: About 43 T3 scenes to reach T4
T4: About 20 T4 scenes to max level.

You can use this to help populate your world.

Now, over time, your scenes can move and merge. Two scenes can merge into a scene 1 or 2 Tiers higher.

---

In my case, I'm building a world using roughly this mathematics. I'm using gritty rests, so each Scene is an adventuring day, and 2-4 scenes get a long rest (or a week) tacked on; so 10 days per adventuring day, or an average of 3 days per scene.

Based on that I can build a rough calendar of when PCs reach each tier.

Day 1: Tier 1
Day 75: Tier 2
Day 275: Tier 3
Day 400: Tier 4
Day 470: Level 20

This assumes "efficient adventuring". If we throw in a +33% factor for downtime not attributed to adventuring:

Day 1: Tier 1
Day 100: Tier 2
Day 350: Tier 3
Day 500: Tier 4
Day 600: Level 20

So I can populate the world in such a way that the Scenes "level up" over time; basically, unsolved problems get worse.

To do this I need about 150 scenes for my players to encounter over 20 levels. If I want a sandbox, I need 3x that number at least -- call it 500.

Now I can clump these down a bit. I can have something 10x bigger than a scene -- an arc? -- that I can assign a tier to. 10 scenes takes 10 days of adventuring plus 3 long rests, so 31 days, or a month of in-world time.

I don't have to detail these arcs yet. I just have to know how beefy they are at Day 1.

T1: 8 arcs prepped, 2.5 arcs to beat tier.
T2: 20 arcs, 6.5 arcs to beat tier.
T3: 12 arcs, 4.5 arcs to beat tier.
T4: 6 arcs, 2 arcs to max level

Arcs can be linear or not. If they branch, the length should be about 10 scenes (give or take).

An example of an Arc could be a Kobold cult. I want it to be a T1 arc.

10 T1 scenes, total CR from 1 to 6. So each "scene" has 8 to 42 Kobolds in it (!), and the Arc has 80 to 420 Kobolds.

That is a lot of Kobolds. Will get boring.

So I'll say 4 of the scenes in this arc are Kobold based. Kobold bandits. A Kobold patrol. A group of "rebels" in a cave. The temple itself with a shaman, Guard Drake and some Kobolds (low T2 scene, climax).

A random 1d4 dire wolf encounter (CR sum to 1-4) while exploring (or similar).

Maybe the Kobolds are raiding a trade route. And the city thinks it is the hill folk they are paying tribute to, but are cheating. So a the hill folk scene (CR 4ish) (which can be talked around!) can be added to the arc.

The Kobolds are in a Temple. The approach to the temple 1d2 gargoyles guarding it (CR 2-4). Ok 7 now. Getting close.

A stream they have to ford has a Water Weird in it (CR 3).

There will be 3 different paths to follow. 2 of them are wrong, and need creatures. 1d4 Harpies (CR 1-4) along one path, and the other has a Giant Spider and some Spiderlings (CR 1+).

Ok 10 scenes in this arc. If they exhaust it, they are half way out of the tier, and it should take them a month, give or take.

If they wait too long, the Kobolds "level up" and complete their ritual. The result is a T2 threat.

 

[Fenris-77]

The 6-8 number is really dependent on those 6-8 being the 'right' 6-8. It could be 12 small encounters, or 3 big whoppers. It's really about resource use, pacing, and tension. Whatever the number, if the PCs don't feel challenged it will get boring. Different DMs run encounters and scenes so differently it can be hard to put specific numbers in things.

 

[ad_hoc]

The 6-8 don't need to occur every adventuring day either.

If the players believe there could be 2-3 more encounters then they will conserve their resources appropriately and they will just have extra at the end of the day.

At our table character death and TPKs are a very real possibility so using up resources ratchets up the tension. Don't want to run out!

 

[DEFCON 1]

Well sure, but for my upcoming session, how feasible is it for the party to handle that number of encounters?

It depends entirely on whether you are a DM that re-writes encounters on the fly and is perfectly fine with number fudging... or if you are a DM that finds that playstyle an anathema. If you're the former, you'll find plenty of wiggle room in whether your PCs can handle that number of encounters. If you are the latter, you're going to probably find your encounters either wildly underpowered or wildly overpowered. Because the balance isn't tightened to a fine line... you'll never be able to truly tell just how deadly those 6 to 8 encounters will be (especially if you can't guarantee in what order your PCs will come upon them.) And since you aren't willing to futz with them as you go... those late-day encounters could easily turn deadly.

 

[Li Shenron]

It's been a while since I've run 5e. My party is third level. My understanding of the rulebook is that it's okay to have, like, one easy encounter, three medium, and two hard encounters in a day.

According to the DMG this will be OK.

The DMG says 6-8 medium or hard encounters, and your plan is 5 (plus 1 easy) so you should be even below the lower edge.

You can also use the DMG "Adventuring Day XP" table to double-check the total of all encounters.

 

[NotAYakk]

Tl;dr:
Easy is 1 point, medium is 2, hard is 3, deadly is 4.

Daily budget starts at 12ish.

Tweak based on party optimization.