D&D General 6-8 encounters (combat?)

[Maxperson]

You do you, I would not be keen on two long rest per level. It is levelling too fast for my taste but what ever. I do not really have an issue with rests I am just trying to understand the position of others here.

I think you(or maybe I) misunderstood him. My take on what he is saying is that it can take 3 months to level up. During that time a full week of rest = a long rest. The rest of the time you only get short rests. Except for 2 floating short rests that the party can invoke during that level. It's not saying that you get a level every 2 long rests(days).

 

[UngainlyTitan]

The issue I have with that is that not every encounter is going to be hard or deadly. There are going to be a fair mix of medium and easy as well. All encounters being hard or super hard fights is as narratively unsatisfying as cramming 6-8 encounters into 24 hours or having a long rest be once a week. How the designers chose to balance 5e is super frustrating to me.

In my experience, running 6 or so encounters in a dungeon is not too difficult and make one or two of them a multi-stage encounter and you have your 8. Outside of dungeons, you can more deadly encounters.

Now the party will often break off, not having done all they can that day but as long as nobody is complaining I don't care.

For the record, in my opinion the whole thing breaks down at about level 16 or so. At that level easy and medium encounters are speedbumps and you might as well go big or go home.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes, I am aware of this. It did not bother me then either.

I didn't bother me, either. I could fully challenge a group in 1e-3e with a single encounter, because those editions were not balanced around resource management.

 

[Maxperson]

Although there were disincentives at higher levels, since re-memorizing high level spells took at long time. You could realistically end up wasting an entire day on it.

Not that that stopped us. Though for us it was always because we'd taken too much damage and the cleric was out of healing magic. So we'd wait a day or two for the cleric to heal the party up, since natural healing was at a glacial pace.

That was what teleport was for.

Fight, teleport home, rest, teleport back, continue until you decided to teleport out for the next rest.

I can't actually recall a 5MWD prior to 3e that was due to the wizard. Nor even really the cleric, except when they ran out of healing spells. I'm not saying it didn't happen at other tables, just not at mine (as far as I can recollect).

The groups I played with(multiple different DMs) tended to rest after using up about half of their spells, since they didn't know if a super hard fight was coming and they would need more than half. It was really rare for a group to push forward until they ran out of or very low on spells. Too many of us experienced TPKs doing that.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I didn't bother me, either. I could fully challenge a group in 1e-3e with a single encounter, because those editions were not balanced around resource management.

Yes they were it was just all the casters were on the same resource clock.

 

[iserith]

If time pressure seems "contrived" (leaving aside all the other contrived things in a game based on make-believe that some don't seem to care about), consider this easy house rule:

No Pain, No Gain
You gain +X% bonus experience points for all encounters after your 5th encounter of the adventuring day.

Then make X a number sufficient to entice your particular group. The more you do, the more you learn and grow. It's up to the players at that point.

 

[Maxperson]

'Punish the players'

Found the problem.

Yeah. I'm not their parent, so punishments are not my thing. Consequences stemming from decisions on the other hand. If the rogue wants to steal from the local lord, I'm not going to be upset by it or try to punish him. If he gets caught, however, it's going to badly because he stole from the local lord.

 

[Flamestrike]

No, I've not said that at all. You seem to be assuming that one can't engage in a discussion about a deliberate area of poor design choices in the 5e ruleset

And I've maintained that that's a separate discussion to 'how do I make the rule work'.

And its a different argument from 'Doom clocks suck' or 'Rest variants dont work' because I use both, and they work fine.

Personally I would like an #encounters neutral game, where balance is maintained if its one encounter or 12. But all too often then you run into the 4e problem of every class feeling same-y.

The advantage of the system of 6 encounters and having some classes be better with fewer, and some being better with more is that it allows the DM to do the following:

1) Tweak class balance by simply increasing the short rests or tweaking the resting rules.
2) Avoids same-yness and allows the spotlight to move between different players at the table. On longer days the Fighters kick butt. On shorter days the Casters do. Everyone gets a chance to shine.

They're positives of the system we have. Whether they're worth the extra work for the DM policing the adventuring day is a different question.

 

[Flamestrike]

If time pressure seems "contrived" (leaving aside all the other contrived things in a game based on make-believe that some don't seem to care about), consider this easy house rule:

No Pain, No Gain
You gain +X% bonus experience points for all encounters after your 5th encounter of the adventuring day.

Then make X a number sufficient to entice your particular group. The more you do, the more you learn and grow. It's up to the players at that point.

Yep that also works.

I prefer mostly narrative solutions over mechanical ones personally (though I do allow 5 minute short rests, at max 2 per long rest as a mechanical change, that's mostly to stop jarring 1 hour sit downs in the middle of a dungeon)

 

[Maxperson]

Yes they were it was just all the casters were on the same resource clock.

No they weren't. It was balanced around death. Lower hit point, save or die, save or suck, etc. You weren't expected to resource manage as the metric for being challenged. A single fight that left with plenty of resources afterwards could be a challenge that killed half the group or nearly killed all of them.

5e altered the balance by inflating hit points on both sides, then minimizing the amount of damage inflicted, minimizing the impact magic can have, give more classes a lot more short/long rest abilities, etc. It became entirely about resource management, rather than quick and bloody fights.