D&D 5E I have never once worried about "encounters per day" when prepping D&D 5E (a poll)

[Hriston]

I voted for "true", but I do pay attention to adjusted XP per day.

 

[Fenris-77]

I don't pay attention to Encounters, CR, or XP per day. I might have some very hazy notions about CR I suppose, but I'm not paying attention.

 

[Shiroiken]

"Never" is a strange way to put it, as I'd guess a lot of DMs at least considered it the first time in 5E. I have, and still occasionally consider it to avoid a really short adventuring day, but overall I don't care. I design the adventure based on what I expect the exist in the world, and the characters encounter what they encounter (this is true for CR as well). Since I'm planning on using the slow healing for my next campaign, it's not going to matter in the slightest.

 

[gnarlygninja]

I don't even worry about what level my players are a lot of the time, let alone encounters per day

 

[Irlo]

I have on occasion considered the encounters per day guideline when writing an adventure, but I wouldn’t say I ever worried about it.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I don't generally worry too much about CR calculations, but I have had to look at the number of encounters the party may run into and gauge who will be running on empty at this point, and who will be able to contribute more.

 

[Burnside]

I do tend to generally plan/structure my adventures in such a way that the players are unable to have their characters take a long rest after every combat. If that counts as worrying about number of encounters per day, then yes. If you try to have your character nova in every fight in a campaign I’m running, it’s probably going to end up being a bad idea.

I don’t necessarily think the “we need to take a long rest/but you CAN’T” player/DM dynamic of 5E is a particularly fun one for either side, but if you as the DM don’t make resource management part of the game by running multiple encounters between rests, the game tends to be too easy.

 

[Oofta]

I think about it, sure. I don't force anything but I think about the upcoming session, what they will likely encounter, possible ways the game might unfold based on where the PCs are and how they've been interacting with the world at large and it's inhabitants. I'm not sure how you can prep anything if you literally didn't take into consideration what could happen unless you have very static emplacement of enemies.

Maybe it's because I don't do location based adventures or dungeons, but I don't see how it can be avoided all the time. I have a rough idea of what's likely to happen, which means planning some likely encounters ... do I prep 2 or 10? How can I not take that into consideration?

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think about the encounters or meet-ups the group might potentially have narratively in the course of a day within the game... but that has no ties or worries to the game mechanics.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This poll would be more useful if you also asked "and find monks weaker than paladins".

As ignoring encounters/day just results in short days and very strong per-day classes; so you'd expect if you ignored it to just boost CR higher (or stop caring about it; at 1/day, a group of 5-6 L5 adventurers who bias towards daily classes can take on a CR 20 monster pretty reliably.)

It might surprise you. .

I have both in multiple campaigns, and haven’t noticed any discrepancy.