D&D (2024) How many combats do you have on average adventuring day.

[guachi]

Between Long Rests, when there actually is combat, it's usually about 6. I've had as few as 1 and as many as 12 and both extremes were probably the most fun combats.

 

[Minigiant]

I find it telling that the poll shows a lot of sub-4 encounters per long rest and responses elsewhere of caster and paladin domination and fighter/rogue/ranger/monk weakness.

 

[Micah Sweet]

A simple question,
in 10 years of 5E, how many combats did you have per Long rest in 5E?

One or two, no more than that.

Why is this thread labeled for 5.5? It clearly has a broader 5e application.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I tend to loosely make 5-room dungeons (or 10ish) and this make for 4-6 encounters per day. I tried to make 1-night of game time fit and copy the book of encounters from 4e with just 3 encounters, but that proved a bit easy and predictable.

I also now try to skip travel encounters for fighting unless I think the players just want a fight. I try to add NPCs with information or foreshadow something upcoming. The whole thing of fighting a random encounter then traveling another 2 days to reach the dungeon again at full strength is kind of meh.

That would happen less if full recovery didn't happen every time the PC lie down for a few hours. That's what I see as the problem here: recovery is too swift. I think either natural healing needs to be slower than overnight, you need a proper place to rest to get the benefit, or (preferably) both.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Frankly I am amazed at how low most of the votes are. When I voted 3 I was sort-of low-balling it due to the travel and town adventuring days where long rests aren't needed in the absolute sense of resource recovery.

I know many people who use fewer encounters ramp up the difficulty to routinely hard or even deadly, but that sort of thinking has never really set well with me.

The thing I am doing right now is basing encounters on the game-world concept of creature rarity based on CR primarily.

Spoiler: My encounter system

In short, each encounter has a base of tier 1. A d6 roll of 6 ramps it up to tier 2, another 6 to tier 3, and a final 6 to tier 4. I don't care what tier the PCs are... If they encounter something below their tier it will be easier, and something above their tier they might have to avoid or flee from, etc.

I live in rural upstate NY, so I explain it like this:

If I see a squirrel, that is tier 1 (basic creature seen/encountered all the time)
If I see a deer, that is tier 2 (common enough that I seem them often, but not all the time)
If I see a black bear, that is tier 3 (something I see once in a great while, but I know they are out there... so I am always cautious while hiking, etc.)
If I see a rattlesnake, that is tier 4 (I know they are around here, but I have only ever seen one in my life)

Now, I try in use sufficient numbers, terrain, etc. to make the encounters at least minimally challenging when the PCs are higher level and things from tier 1 would not otherwise be much of a threat, but when you consider tier 4 includes CR 4 creatures, it isn't too hard to manage.

It does mean, however, that tier 4 PCs will not always be encountering tier 3 and 4 creatures (just to make it a challenge) like most games... they will often encounter tiers 1 and 2 when they get there.

I base my poll answer (and my encounters) on in-setting logic for the situation the players are in, and it just doesn't make sense for the world outside of town to be teeming with so many monsters that you have six to eight separate fights when you step outside your door, so to speak.

 

[Micah Sweet]

My dungeons and dragons adventures tend to involve Dungeons. Most have had 4-6+ encounters per long rest, easily. I don't think I've ever once run an adventuring day with only a single combat encounter. Even when I'm running other adventure styles than dungeon crawls.

An example - I ran a ravnica adventure, with the following encounters:

• The party investigated an Izzet research facility, they were attacked by loose experiments.
• The party investigated a Golgari splinter faction. They were harried by sporelings on their way through the undercity and forced to fight a group of modified ghouls before being granted audience with the faction leader.
• The party attempted to find their target in an airship field, where they were ambushed by assassins.
• The party chased after their target on her airship while riding griffons, they boarded and had to fight their target and her guards.

That's Five combat encounters, and they were supplemented by several investigation scenes, exploration with multiple traps in in the izzet facility, a tense social scene with the golgari leader, and the chase sequence with the airship.

How long did it take to run all of that in real time?

 

[kigmatzomat]

I averaged the days we have combat to around 7. Factoring in months of downtime would trend to zero.

There are days we have one or two fights (which is not the norm) and days where we use all the resources and maybe a couple short rests to boot, without a lot in between. I admit I came in late to the campaign (7th-16th level) so I missed a lot of the shorter days for levels 2-6.

The plot lines have been pretty heavy the last three years on "clear bad guy fortresses", ranging from cultists to sahuagin, plus there was the whole "find and defeat the thing at the center of Queen Mab's labyrinth", where the length of a day was up to Mab and sleep was hard to come by.

Our group is also well suited to long days, assuming we can get short rests. The warlock gets their Pact spells back, the monk is at full Ki, the bard has more inspirations and the fighter gets an action surge.

On top of that, each PC gets like 3x-4x their level in HPs in healing/temp hp per short rest for spending 1HD on recovery, thanks to a cleric with Healer feat, a paladin with Leadership and bardic song of rest. That saves spell slots for combat.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm not at all surprised by the bill of votes falling in the pre5e∆ range of 2-4 encounters. The only style of gaming where 5e's six to eight medium to hard encounters makes any sense is video games where much playtesting and restrictions on PCs to ensure that the feel is properly targeted as desired. It just doesn't fit within time constraints of a tabletop game where humans are doing the math juggling the crunch & going off page with "can I try to..." Type stuff that would otherwise be limited to prescripted QuickTime events and such in a video game.

A ttrpg should not be designed for the needs of a crpg because they are totally different animals.

∆maybe pre4e too? dunno what 4e assumed and don't think it matters beyond a possible "wElL aCtUaLlY" technicality

 

[Minigiant]

Well I think the main issue is people aren't reliable enough to split adventure day in multiple sessions and won't play simple enough PCs to burn through 3-4 simplistic combats and 1-2 complex ones.

 

[Baron Opal II]

It varies too much IMO for an sort of "average" to be a useful information. It is really a bimodal distribution.

That's how it is for me, too.

In a city, travelling, on a ship? 0-2, depending on where they are in the arc.

In a dungeon, perilous wood, traversing the Great Glacier and exploring the Lost City? 4-9.