doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
I’ve found that 2-3 deadly encounters works wonders, but yeah. The game wants some resource variance.You are not required to have 6 encounters a day. But the game easily becomes unbalanced, anticlimatic, and unfun if you have less than 4.
I’ve run a game for years that tended toward sessions with 1 or 2 smallish fights leading to a session with 1 fight worth more than a days XP budget, and it works, even when they got into the big throw down fresh. But it works better when they have to think about thier resources a bit.
Then again, when I did 4 sessions featuring 3 proper fights and a chase-fight, the half-casters did not love the feeling going into the last fight. I ended up allowing a “heroic rest” where they told me what they each did to catch thier breath and help eachother get that second wind, and I let them take a short rest+, that was basically half a long rest.
I think when I start a new full campaign (we have a stop on new ones until at least one ongoing campaign is finished) I am going to propose the “long rest requires safety” rule.