D&D 5E How many encounters per day is YOUR average?

[tetrasodium]

Since I don't expect he will answer - I'm figuring something like Animate Objects + Disintegrate + Disintegrate = 227 Damage over 3 rounds.

Featless and Magic Weaponless Paladins and Fighters should be able to get pretty close to that (at least 180 but probably 200+)
Barbarians fall behind here.
Monks can't keep up in direct damage but they can stun alot at that level. This is probably more impressive than damage.
A Druid using conjure animals can keep up depending on the animal he can summon. Wolves would do about 270.
A typical cleric does much less. Maybe 150ish (some of that is AOE though)

apparently @Cap'n Kobold decided to go with 3x fireballs but did it in a way that quote won't work. Those aren't bad spells either & I'm not bothering to check your math beyond eyeballing the numbers in the post for "I think that's probably plausible." Keep in mind though that the fighter is doing 39/round with 20 strength no fighting style no feats no crits & no archetype abilities for a total of 39-78/round depending on if he uses short rest recovering action surge or not

• Fireball is 8d6 with +1d6 per slot above 3rd save for half
• 7th level fireball: 12d6 average 42 damage, save for half +1
  • Spoiler: With legendary resistance

    zero damage but only 2 more legendary resists
  • Greatsword with 20 strength making three attacks with no feats no fighting styles no archetype features & no crits average 39 damage.
• 6th level fireball: 11d6 average 38.5 damage
  • Spoiler: With legendary resistance

    zero damage but only 1 more legendary resist
  • Greatsword with 20 strength making three attacks with no feats no fighting styles no archetype features & no crits average 39 damage.
• 5th level fireball: 10d6 35 average damage
  • Spoiler: With legendary resistance

    zero damage but no more legendary resists
  • Greatsword with 20 strength making three attacks with no feats no fighting styles no archetype features & no crits average 39 damage.

Here's where it starts to change. First you have those 3 level 4 slots he picked up at levels 7 8 & 9. Those fireballs are doing 9d6 for an average of 31.5 to the fighter's continued 39 average damage. Next you have the three third level slots he has had since level six that each deal8d6 for a total of 28 average damage. As before these spells do zero damage when meeting with legendary resist.

But fireball is aoe! It certainly is but we never discussed the specific encounters & this thread is literally about the number of encounters per adventuring day which is currently 10.7% 21 encounters 18.7% 2 encounters & 25.3% for 3 encounters. Factor in two short rests & the fighter has gone from one action surge(av39) to two action surges(avg another 39) while the wizard has gained an extra level 5 slot(avg 35 or zero with legendary resist).

I haven't forgotten about the AOE & that whole action surge point was relevant here. If we look at dmg249 in "adjudicating areas of effect" fireball should typically hit 20ft radius/5=4 targets. That however assumes that A: there will be 4 targets not 1-2 badass hard/deadly encounter monsters & B: that those 4 monsters will be politely clustered together in a 20ft radius sphere with their necks out... That's a lot of assumptions especially when you figure how many hard/deadly encounter monsters for a level 13 wizard will be sporting fire resist magic resist or legendary resist. If you look at the final boss for wotc's HC adventures that end around level 10-12 for guidance on an average encounter it's probably going to be 1-2 maybe 3 creatures with a very high chance of legendary resist magic resist and/or fire resist on one or all of the creatures who could trivially just decide not to stand in a 20ft radius sphere.

With all of that factored in, the theoretical lead the wizard had from condensing the adventuring day down with fewer more dangerous encounters just shrunk to something unrealistically difficult to measure if it hasn't dissolved entirely. Not only that a wizard tends to be at their best when they are doing things that don't involve damage like buff/debuff/control spells that are almost universally concentration in 5e meaning that a wizard focused on their most optimum role will see absolutely no shift in power until factoring in the higher likelihood of magic resistance & legendary resistance on those fewer more dangerous fights to actually make them less effective.

 

[S'mon]

I've been playing or running 5e pretty consistently since launch across multiple groups, stores, and states. One thing that seems pretty regular across all of those tables though, and that's the number of average combats per day. If I had to give an integer, I'd say that the average I've seen is only around 2 per day and the most I've probably ever seen is 4 fights in a day. In some campaigns, we regularly have one combat per day and that's it. The recommended number of encounters per day in the DMG seems completely bonkers, to me.

I voted 4, on the assumption that you meant per-long-rest not per-24-hours. I always use longer long rests.

 

[S'mon]

And how many people think an “encounter” means a “fight”.

Well for DMG purposes it means 'resource drain equivalent to a fight'. So not social interaction that does not use resources, but an environmental hazard might count.

 

[S'mon]

and I don’t believe that. I believe you’ve never really deeply analyzed what happens in your game when short adventuring days are the norm. I believe that in light of the evidence I am providing that you are relying on a flawed perception of your experiences to protect your previous assertions.

In fact, you’ve provided no evidence of how your short adventuring day games actually run and so all we have is your potentially flawed perception about them. You’ve not told me about what actions the fighters are taking, the Paladins, the wizards, etc. if you did we could actually come away with some idea of their contributions relative to each other.

And really without that, why should I believe your potentially flawed perception?

How can you possibly think a Champion Fighter and a Barbarian are equally effective in a game where there's only ever 1 fight between long rests? That's ridiculous.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I chose fireball because it was the defacto #1 damage spell at level 6 which was the comparison level I used.

Yep. Its a good pick. As you say, control abilities are better, but its hard to calculate a comparison there (given that several of the classes in your party don't have any), so we have to stick with damage. Given that your wizard can drop it on the party without hurting them, they're going to be hitting most if not all their opponents with it.

Since I don't expect he will answer - I'm figuring something like Animate Objects + Disintegrate + Disintegrate = 227 Damage over 3 rounds.

Hmm. If we're resorting to single-target damage (rather than control or AoE), which is an area the wizard is somewhat lacking in, those seem reasonable.
A level 7 Animate objects will do 90 damage/round, and disintegrate deals 75 damage a pop. Assuming a 30% hit/save rate, that is 280 damage over 3 rounds.

Featless and Magic Weaponless Paladins and Fighters should be able to get pretty close to that (at least 180 but probably 200+)

Your fighter was dealing 12 per attack at level 6. Damage per attack is unlikely to have changed much if no feats or magic weapons. 3 rounds will be 12 attacks, so around 150 damage over 3 rounds..

apparently @Cap'n Kobold decided to go with 3x fireballs but did it in a way that quote won't work.

Ah. I'm sorry. Broken link?
It was quoting Frogreaver's post that we are discussing.

Given that you have a certain antipathy to theoretical discussions and they reacted somewhat ballistically to the suggestion that someone else's experiences did not match their own, I am going to let them state what their wizard did in that situation rather than take a guess.

Those aren't bad spells either & I'm not bothering to check your math beyond eyeballing the numbers in the post for "I think that's probably plausible." Keep in mind though that the fighter is doing 39/round with 20 strength no fighting style no feats no crits & no archetype abilities for a total of 39-78/round depending on if he uses short rest recovering action surge or not

• Fireball is 8d6 with +1d6 per slot above 3rd save for half
• 7th level fireball: 12d6 average 42 damage, save for half +1
  • Spoiler: With legendary resistance

    zero damage but only 2 more legendary resists
  • Greatsword with 20 strength making three attacks with no feats no fighting styles no archetype features & no crits average 39 damage.
• 6th level fireball: 11d6 average 38.5 damage
  • Spoiler: With legendary resistance

    zero damage but only 1 more legendary resist
  • Greatsword with 20 strength making three attacks with no feats no fighting styles no archetype features & no crits average 39 damage.
• 5th level fireball: 10d6 35 average damage
  • Spoiler: With legendary resistance

    zero damage but no more legendary resists
  • Greatsword with 20 strength making three attacks with no feats no fighting styles no archetype features & no crits average 39 damage.

Here's where it starts to change. First you have those 3 level 4 slots he picked up at levels 7 8 & 9. Those fireballs are doing 9d6 for an average of 31.5 to the fighter's continued 39 average damage. Next you have the three third level slots he has had since level six that each deal8d6 for a total of 28 average damage. As before these spells do zero damage when meeting with legendary resist.

Why zero damage on a legendary resist?

But fireball is aoe! It certainly is but we never discussed the specific encounters & this thread is literally about the number of encounters per adventuring day which is currently 10.7% 21 encounters 18.7% 2 encounters & 25.3% for 3 encounters. Factor in two short rests & the fighter has gone from one action surge(av39) to two action surges(avg another 39) while the wizard has gained an extra level 5 slot(avg 35 or zero with legendary resist).

This particular discussion with Frogreaver is about having just a single combat encounter.

That the fighter will do better if the adventuring day gives them more encounters with short rests between them was precisely the point I was making.

I haven't forgotten about the AOE & that whole action surge point was relevant here. If we look at dmg249 in "adjudicating areas of effect" fireball should typically hit 20ft radius/5=4 targets. That however assumes that A: there will be 4 targets not 1-2 badass hard/deadly encounter monsters & B: that those 4 monsters will be politely clustered together in a 20ft radius sphere with their necks out... That's a lot of assumptions especially when you figure how many hard/deadly encounter monsters for a level 13 wizard will be sporting fire resist magic resist or legendary resist. If you look at the final boss for wotc's HC adventures that end around level 10-12 for guidance on an average encounter it's probably going to be 1-2 maybe 3 creatures with a very high chance of legendary resist magic resist and/or fire resist on one or all of the creatures who could trivially just decide not to stand in a 20ft radius sphere.

Check with Frogreaver as to what their encounters are generally like. I can't answer for them there. I can point out that that given their wizard is able to drop those fireballs on the party without risking collateral damage, catching a large proportion of opponents in the area of a fireball (or other AoE if opponents are fire resistant) is quite likely.
The fewer opponents the party face, the more effective damage the wizard can do by simply removing one from the fight with Forcecage or a similar spell.

 

[FrogReaver]

How can you possibly think a Champion Fighter and a Barbarian are equally effective in a game where there's only ever 1 fight between long rests? That's ridiculous.

Since I used level 6 before, let's use it again.

Featless Champion with action surge over 3 rounds does 75.98 @65% to hit (20str)
Featless Barbarian with rage over 3 rounds does 69.615 @60% to hit (18str)

 

[S'mon]

The best thing I've done as a DM was to ditch most short rest mechanics, triple their usage, and run everything off of a long rest. Then I modified long rests and healing rules and 4-8 encounters per day saw lots and lots of resource usage and I think the players felt like they were all contributing and using every trick in their arsenal to overcome challenges.

I tried that, but it gives Monks an insane amount of Ki to nova with against the BBEG. I finally fixed things like this for eg my oldschool sandbox Faerun Adventures:

Long Rest: a full Long Rest normally takes 1 week, and restores all Hit Dice. Typical adventurer upkeep/subsistence cost is 1gp/day, 7gp/week. Resting overnight for at least 8 hours may restore some hit points, typically 1 hp per level. Salubrious resting in quarters such as a comfortable private room for at least 12 hours may add +1 to this recovery rate, to 2 hp/level.
Typically, adventurers go on a 'delve' of up to 6-8 encounters in one day, then return to their base to rest and recuperate for about a week, before setting out again.

Short Rests take 1 hour, but any one short rest ability recovery (eg Second Wind or Ki points) is capped at 3 times per day.

For my new mythic-fantasy Odyssey of the Dragonlords game:

Rests
Short Rest takes 10 minutes. A Short Rest resource (Battlemaster Superiority Dice, Monk Ki, Warlock spell slots, etc) may be restored at most 3 times per day.
Long Rest takes 5 Days in the wilderness or on a ship deck, 4 Days in poor habitation such as an inn common room, 3 Days at a shared inn room, ship cabin or similar, 2 Days at a luxury inn room, palace chamber, or temple refuge. A Long Rest restores all hit dice.
A comfortable overnight rest restores 1 level of Exhaustion and 2 hp per level (classed character), or 1 hp per hit die (unclassed).

Basically, I keep Short Rests largely unchanged so they can work as intended during a dungeon delve - the recovery cap is mostly just to prevent exploits like Battlemaster taking multiple SRs at the start of every day to max out temp hp allocations, or all Fighters free Second Winding back to full hp. Whereas restricting Long Rests has many beneficial (for me) effects, like enabling 6-8 fights (sometimes!) between long rests, and preventing Tiny Huts or Rope Tricks being used for at-will Long Resting. I like the desperation of worrying about resource depletion, and I like Barbarians not always Raging every fight, which IME is vital to balance them vs Fighters.

 

[S'mon]

Since I used level 6 before, let's use it again.

Featless Champion with action surge over 3 rounds does 75.98 @65% to hit (20str)
Featless Barbarian with rage over 3 rounds does 69.615 @60% to hit (18str)

But Champion is a (quite squishy) Striker and Barbarian is a Defender. DPR is comparable (depending on stuff like Barbarian Reckless Attack & which Primal Path). The Raging Barbarian can take well over twice the damage! They also effectively benefit twice as much from healing.

 

[FrogReaver]

Yep. Its a good pick. As you say, control abilities are better, but its hard to calculate a comparison there (given that several of the classes in your party don't have any), so we have to stick with damage. Given that your wizard can drop it on the party without hurting them, they're going to be hitting most if not all their opponents with it.

Agreed. But then we get into the issue that doing a bunch of damage to a single target until it dies and doing some AOE damage to a bunch of targets without killing them doesn't have the same effect in combat. That is total damage caused by an AOE is not directly comparable single target damage numbers.

Hmm. If we're resorting to single-target damage (rather than control or AoE), which is an area the wizard is somewhat lacking in, those seem reasonable.
A level 7 Animate objects will do 90 damage/round, and disintegrate deals 75 damage a pop. Assuming a 30% hit/save rate, that is 280 damage over 3 rounds.

You only have 1 level 6 and 1 level 7 spell slot. You can't cast a level 7 animate objects + disintegrate + disintegrate in a single encounter. I chose a level 5 animate objects for that reason.

Also I used 65% to hit and 65% chance for a failed save. That's what yielded the 227.

Your fighter was dealing 12 per attack at level 6. Damage per attack is unlikely to have changed much if no feats or magic weapons. 3 rounds will be 12 attacks, so around 150 damage over 3 rounds..

Fighter was doing 120 over 4 rounds at level 6. Add on an extra attack and he should be able to easily reach 180 since going from 2 attacks to 3 is a 50% damage upgrade. I anticipate it can be a little higher since comboing maneuvers on your action surge round leads to somewhat increased efficiency.

Though, I think there's been a subtle change from 4 round encounter in my example to 3 round here. So in a 3 round fight I would only expect about 12/15 (80%) as much. So yea, 150 - 170ish in a 3 round encounter is about right.

Wizards have pulled ahead a little here, however - Add in a single +1 magical weapon and that goes up quite a bit - which is all but guaranteed by that level. Add in a single level multiclass dip into warlock for hex and the damage ramps up even higher. Add in feats and damage ramps up even higher. It's pretty easy to push Fighter damage at this level much higher. Wizard's 227 damage is all but capped and relies on concentration - which can easily be disrupted, especially without feats and it also relies on enemies not having magical/legendary resistance.

Ah. I'm sorry. Broken link?
It was quoting Frogreaver's post that we are discussing.

Given that you have a certain antipathy to theoretical discussions and they reacted somewhat ballistically to the suggestion that someone else's experiences did not match their own, I am going to let them state what their wizard did in that situation rather than take a guess.

So I go to some trouble to show how I expect a 4 round adventuring day to play out at level 4 and all I got back is - 'that's not my experience'. No additional explanation or clarification. You don't see how incredibly dismissive that was?

Why zero damage on a legendary resist?

This particular discussion with Frogreaver is about having just a single combat encounter.

Agreed

Check with Frogreaver as to what their encounters are generally like. I can't answer for them there. I can point out that that given their wizard is able to drop those fireballs on the party without risking collateral damage, catching a large proportion of opponents in the area of a fireball (or other AoE if opponents are fire resistant) is quite likely.

I picked evoker wizard in my example for that reason. He's generally party safe.

The fewer opponents the party face, the more effective damage the wizard can do by simply removing one from the fight with Forcecage or a similar spell.

Well, Forcecage may not help with 1 enemy. But let's say 2 - which is it's best case scenario. The wizard's damage gets cut nearly in half doing that. 1 less disintigrate and 1 less use of animate objects (i'm assuming you would open with forcecage here).

Anyways the point is that the creature not being forcecaged is likely to get an extra round. In order to maintain our 3 round victory the First creature would have died in maybe 1 round with the damage focused wizard. There's a good chance it lasts 2 now. The 2nd creature would likely have taken 2 since the 1 round KO assumes everyone burning their better abilities to accomplish that. The party has taken 4 enemy turns with forcecage. The party would have taken 4 enemy turns without it (condensed to 3 rounds instead of 4 rounds). At least this is a plausible scenario.

So I'm not sure forcecage typically that much here. If the fight was longer maybe, but to get a longer encounter the enemy squad would need to have a ton more hp/defenses to chew through.

 

[FrogReaver]

But Champion is a (quite squishy) Striker and Barbarian is a Defender. DPR is comparable (depending on stuff like Barbarian Reckless Attack & which Primal Path). The Raging Barbarian can take well over twice the damage! They also effectively benefit twice as much from healing.

Let's step through that. At level 6 (which was where the other numbers came from)

#1 to get that kind of damage the Barbarian had to reckless attack.
#2 the Fighter should have +1 AC on the Barbarian. Also he has 2nd wind.

Just for an illustration here, I'll say the Barbarian has a 50% chance to be hit and the fighter a 45% chance to be hit (enemy attacking with +6 attack bonus). Except because of reckless the Barbarian has a 75% chance to be hit. The Fighter also has 2nd wind restoring +11.5hp on average. The Barbarian does get a +6 hp advantage.

The Barbarian when all things are figured can only take 9.6% more damage than the champion Fighter - at least without drastically tanking his damage numbers. Additional factors not accounted for - Barbarian will take more crits, but will sometimes get to round damage down.

*If we are choosing primal path then let's choose the crappiest one like we did for the Fighter.