D&D 5E D&D Without Adding House-Rules/Home-brew

[Maxperson]

I would say the problem is just the phrasing "XP that character is expected to earn in a day". I think pointing out the guideline of "here is how much to expect characters can take in a day" is a great guideline for designing encounters. This makes it easier to consciously design encounters across an adventuring day to be deadly, likely to kill some but not all characters, pushing their limits but doable, engaged but not really risky, or easy combat. D&D should be designed for a lot of different pacing and challenges here, not just expect to push them to the average design limits every day.

Take out that phrasing in that one sentence and I believe it is a measuring stick for challenge per long rest, not an expectation.

I think if it was intended to be a measuring stick, they'd have listed a larger range of Adventuring Day XP numbers, rather than a single total for each level. They'd have gone with something like...

Character Level: 1st
Easy: 100
Medium: 200
Hard: 300
Deadly: 400
TPK: 500+

And so on. Instead they simply say that the expected amount of experience per PC is 300, with the guidance to spread that out over 6-8 medium to hard encounters, less or more if there are easy or deadly encounters, and then let the DM figure it out from there.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

The 6 to 8 encounter per pay is setting an expectation and is not a rule. It is madness to suggest it as mandatory.
It is also contradicted by the table below that paragraph that gives the daily XP budget for the adventuring day per character.

So from the table at level one the budget is 300 XP per day per character; that is 1,200XP per day for a party of 4

Two pages earlier is a table for the encounter difficulty thresholds per character and for level 1;
A medium encounter is 50 XP per character, so for a party of 4 that is 200XP and divide 200XP in to the daily budget for level one party of 4 you get 1200/200 = 6 which is less than 8
Now lets look at hard encounters. Here the XP per encounter per character is 75 and for a party of 4 that is 300 which translates to 4 encounters in an adventuring day.

Now look at level 5, here the daily budget per adventurer is 3,500XP and that for a party of 4 is 14,000XP
Now looking at the encounter budgets we get Medium at 500 XP per PC and Hard at 750XP per PC.
This gives an encounter budget of 2,000 XP per medium encounter and 3,000 XP per hard encounter. Going out at 7 easy encounters per day for medium only and ~4.9 for medium encounters.

Purely for the fun of it I looked at a few other combinations of pure medium or hard encounters at level 5 and 10 for parties of 4 to 6 and got numbers of around 7 for medium and 4.5 or there about for hard encounters.

Given that in my experience a deadly encounter will only drop a pc to zero and is unlikely to TPK and you could toss in a medium encounter with it and most parties will manage you can make of this what you may.

 

[Cadence]

I think if it was intended to be a measuring stick, they'd have listed a larger range of Adventuring Day XP numbers, rather than a single total for each level. They'd have gone with something like...

Character Level: 1st
Easy: 100
Medium: 200
Hard: 300
Deadly: 400
TPK: 500+

And so on. Instead they simply say that the expected amount of experience per PC is 300, with the guidance to spread that out over 6-8 medium to hard encounters, less or more if there are easy or deadly encounters, and then let the DM figure it out from there.

Is "and then let the DM figure it out from there" <- is that part of the modus operandi for 5e in general (part of "rulings not rules).

 

[Maxperson]

Is "and then let the DM figure it out from there" <- is that part of the modus operandi for 5e in general (part of "rulings not rules).

No. It's the part where the DM says to himself, "Okay. I have 14000xp for the adventuring day for this party of four 5th level PCs. Six to eight medium to hard encounters will cover that, but I want one of the fights to be deadly, so..." and then he figures out if he wants fewer encounters to compensate, or if he wants to drop one hard encounter to medium and one medium to two easy encounters. Or whatever other combination he wants that adds up to the expected number of XP.

If that number was just part of a measure of XP that includes 14000, then they would provide the numbers for the other ranges. A measuring cup doesn't just have a line for 1 cup. It also has 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4, perhaps even 8ths.

 

[Cadence]

No. It's the part where the DM says to himself, "Okay. I have 14000xp for the adventuring day for this party of four 5th level PCs. Six to eight medium to hard encounters will cover that, but I want one of the fights to be deadly, so..." and then he figures out if he wants fewer encounters to compensate, or if he wants to drop one hard encounter to medium and one medium to two easy encounters. Or whatever other combination he wants that adds up to the expected number of XP.

If that number was just part of a measure of XP that includes 14000, then they would provide the numbers for the other ranges. A measuring cup doesn't just have a line for 1 cup. It also has 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4, perhaps even 8ths.

If I were betting. I would wager a beer that the percentage of DMs that actually do that in the wild is closer to 0 than a half (even fewer if we are judging based on how accurately they are doing it). As such, I'm guessing that the vast majority of people replying on here find it the whole topic a nothing burger in the context of home rules and RAW. (I would also not be that surprised if a poll somewhere proved me wrong!!).

 

[d24454_modern]

I voted NO and wished that I could have voted NO! Having to encounter 6-8 combat encounters in a 24 hour period would destroy the game for me.

That doesn’t mean it all happens in one session.

 

[Maxperson]

That doesn’t mean it all happens in one session.

Well, no. An adventuring day is 24 hours, but depending on the game each session might be 1 hour of that day. I think I'll call it.......24! I wonder if Hollywood would be interested.

 

[Cadence]

Well, no. An adventuring day is 24 hours, but depending on the game each session might be 1 hour of that day. I think I'll call it.......24! I wonder if Hollywood would be interested.

In 13th age the adventuring day isn't even 24 hours.... :-/

 

[Micah Sweet]

Whatever the individual group wants? This isn't a community issue IMO.

It is for those official rules which are the context of the discussion.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah. The most stunning example was when someone used a 4e Monk for its unarmed combat to mechanically play a bear. It worked well.

4e is designed for easy reflavoring. 5e bakes narrative into the mechanics, so is sometimes prohibitively difficult depending on what narrative one is trying build.

As I believe it should be. I hate reflavoring and avoid it whenever I can.