D&D 5E Adjusting to 1 encounter per Day: Putting the XP Budget into a single fight

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm no historian, but I believe several tribes in Germany, France, Spain, and the UK fought the Romans in exactly this way... or tried to. It is noteworthy that they generally did not fare well. The hyper organized and disciplined warfare that we associate with the Greeks and Romans seems to be the outlier.

Not really, Zulu appear to have fought in a very similar fashion. These kinds of tactics were quite common. Sure, irregular warfare was no doubt also a common thing, as it is today. Still, if you were to believe what you see in movies EVERY battle was like that, lots of guys running in all directions, but 90% of them were not like that at all. Certainly not most of the ones depicted that way in film.

And yes, the reason the Celts, Germans, etc. etc. etc. mostly got their butts kicked whenever they faced a legion was exactly because mass formed bodies of infantry are not going to be defeated by disorganized pell-mell attacks, which are easily repulsed by a wall of shields and spear points (or in the case of the Romans pila, which was the main infantry weapon in actuality).

 

[Marc_C]

32 horses in perfect circle. Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

32 horses in perfect circle. Royal Canadian Mounted Police.View attachment 143242

Notice how the can’t actually attack someone standing in the middle (at least not all at once). And they are a highly trained unit!

 

[clearstream]

I should note that the purpose of this thread is not to fix any imbalances with 1 encounter per day. Its the simple acknowledgement that a good number of groups play that way (with a least a good portion of their encounters), and so its about what guidelines would give such a group the best guidance on what encounters to have that should meet a good and reasonable amount of challenge. The various caster vs martial imbalances are a different problem for that DM to solve

From keeping a very close eye on propensity to alpha my observation is that party capabilities are very volatile. A creature that is a nightmare for one party, can be trivialised by the group who have the caster with the right spell. That same foe might be lethal, or a walkover, depending on the encounter set up.

That said, some features of such fights

• They generally play out better in the middle ground of 2 to perhaps a dozen creatures. A lone creature can suffer tempo problems. More than a dozen can take a long time to play out (assuming they all have actual teeth in the combat).
• Generally a creature needs a way to attack more than one PC - to deplete multiple health bars at the same time.
• Generally it also needs a way to dump on one PC, either with an SoS or a lot of damage
• Varied creatures yield a fight far, far more interesting than all the same type of creature
• With cheaper creatures, you have to think about how they are equipped. Take a look at Orogs versus your basic Orc. Orogs have far better armor, which really counts. Those 200 guardsmen? If they all have longbows and split into small groups, the party are going to struggle far more than if they rush in with simple weapons. They need to be varied - some plate and shield, some heavy crossbows or longbows, remove a few dozen and add a caster or two.
• Decide how you want to play morale. The DMG has some guidance on that. It really matters in making bigger, longer fights more manageable. Think about why the foes are in this fight at all, and what they want from it.
• Effects that change the tempo equation are very swingy, like a succubus charm. If it comes off, then the party are one down and their foes are one up.
• Usually, the foe getting a surprise turn will inconvenience one or two characters, and make the fight hard. If the PCs get a surprise turn, if they can freely alpha that is the end of the fight.

The basic trouble with alpha though is your fights become all-alpha, all-the-time. The same most effective spells are cast again and again. The same abilities are always dumped into the fight.

Against that, trivial fights are also dull. The space for interesting is created by fights that are probably a bit fewer in number than DMG guidance, a bit harder on average than DMG guidance, occasionally deadly or deadly+, and your party can sometimes afford to alpha but you run rests in a way that forestalls that being every fight.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

From keeping a very close eye on propensity to alpah my observation is that party capabilities are very volatile. A creature that is a nightmare for one party, can be trivialised by the group who have the caster with the right spell. That same foe might be lethal, or a walkover, depending on the encounter set up.

That said, some features of such fights

• They generally play out better in the middle ground of 2 to perhaps a dozen creatures. A lone creature can suffer tempo problems. More than a dozen can take a long time to play out (assuming they all have actual teeth in the combat).
• Generally a creature needs a way to attack more than one PC - to deplete multiple health bars at the same time.
• Generally it also needs a way to dump on one PC, either with an SoS or a lot of damage
• Varied creatures yield a fight far, far more interesting than all the same type of creature
• With cheaper creatures, you have to think about how they are equipped. Take a look at Orogs versus your basic Orc. Orogs have far better armor, which really counts. Those 200 guardsmen? If they all have longbows and split into small groups, the party are going to struggle far more than if they rush in with simple weapons. They need to be varied - some plate and shield, some heavy crossbows or longbows, remove a few dozen and add a caster or two.
• Decide how you want to play morale. The DMG has some guidance on that. It really matters in making bigger, longer fights more manageable. Think about why the foes are in this fight at all, and what they want from it.
• Effects that change the tempo equation are very swingy, like a succubus charm. If it comes off, then the party are one down and their foes are one up.
• Usually, the foe getting a surprise turn will inconvenience one or two characters, and make the fight hard. If the PCs get a surprise turn, if they can freely alpha that is the end of the fight.

The basic trouble with alpha though is your fights become all-alpha, all-the-time. The same most effective spells are cast again and again. The same abilities are always dumped into the fight.

Against that, trivial fights are also dull. The space for interesting is created by fights that are probably a bit fewer in number than DMG guidance, a bit harder on average than DMG guidance, occasionally deadly or deadly+, and your party can sometimes afford to alpha but you run rests in a way that forestalls that being every fight.

All of which begs the question of whether or not this is a well-designed game, as it seems much easier to get it to output sub-par results...

 

[dave2008]

All of which begs the question of whether or not this is a well-designed game, as it seems much easier to get it to output sub-par results...

Yes, those are the best designed games (please note there a lots of flaws with 5e, I am not trying to suggest it is the best designed game). To much predictability lessons the fun IMO.

 

[Redwizard007]

All of which begs the question of whether or not this is a well-designed game, as it seems much easier to get it to output sub-par results...

That is certainly one opinion. Another might be, 5e allows for versatility in play styles, levels of optimization and lethality. The ability of any given DM will have a direct impact on how combats play out, as will the abilities of the other players. Other games with similar issues are poker, Monopoly, chess, solitaire, basketball, and fishing.

 

[clearstream]

All of which begs the question of whether or not this is a well-designed game, as it seems much easier to get it to output sub-par results...

Huh? We're addressing a case that the OP intends to fall outside what the game is designed for.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, those are the best designed games (please note there a lots of flaws with 5e, I am not trying to suggest it is the best designed game). To much predictability lessons the fun IMO.

Yeah, we will have to agree to disagree. 'Predictability' is not the opposite of what 5e does. There are other ways to look at it. Anyway, this is not the place for that discussion. Suffice it to say that pacing is a deep issue in 5e, who's designers eschewed many well-established ways of avoiding those issues.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Huh? We're addressing a case that the OP intends to fall outside what the game is designed for.

Oh, yes, that is true, but when you start to look at "what do I do which is better than this one giant encounter", which your post was aimed at, then you start to see the problem in perspective. At best the DM has to solve a multi-dimensional problem to get a good result, and at worst even the best attempt may be undone by access to some specific ability (spell, item, whatever) or simple luck.