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

[Micah Sweet]

I'll say this doesn't obviate any responsibility on the part of the DM for what happens encounter wise. Long ago, I played with a player who had a reaction table he used to determine what his character did when he met an NPC. Did he want to be friends? Was it time to roll for initiative? Only the dice know! If you've seen the Simpsons episode with Gary in it, they make a joke of it where he makes a D20 roll to determine his own reaction. That kind of thing. It was definitely fun, for him.

But using a table to determine what happens in your game is still a choice you're making. It effectively says "Every time you want to take a rest, we'll roll a die to see if you can do it." Is that somehow more fair to the players? Honestly, don't know. What I've typically seen when a DM does this is that they say, "There is no story to my game. At the end of the night, whatever happened was the story." And again, that's a choice. Do random tables and die rolls make for a better game? Again, don't know.

If everyone is having fun, more power to you. But the DM chose to make that how the world works, and it's the dice deciding when or if you can take a rest, not any kind of story. As you can imagine, that's ... not my style. I've played with enough DMs who use it to know I won't enjoy it as a player, so I bow out of those games. If the players tell you "Here's what we want to do," and you just make a die roll to see if they can do it without other considerations, that's still on you as a DM.

If the tables used make logical sense for the situation at hand, it's definitely more fun for me. I'm not interested in bending the setting to conform to someone's idea of "a good story", even my own.

 

[Blue]

I think we may be approaching the concept of balance from different directions, and talking past each other as a result. Based on your proposed analogy and your description of what I would need to show to continue the conversation, it looks like you're focusing on (and perhaps defining?) in-combat balance as PCs having similar "output" over time.

Close, but still approaching it from the other side.

I am not trying to show combat balance. I am trying to show combat imbalance.

In other words, this can't show balance. Having four good tires doesn't mean your car is good to drive. It can show imbalance. Having a flat tire can show that a car is not good to drive.

I actually completely agree that lower or higher numbers of encounters are going to differently affect the "output" of different PCs. As I previously discussed, I think the relationship between number of encounters and PC average effectiveness is more complicated than you presented (because you're not accounting for how often a PC can actually make good use of their highest level spell slots, a factor which I think campaign style influences), but I agree on the basic premise.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to handwave this away. This is a general evaluation where I don't care about any particular situation. Over the course of play enough times will come up to use high level spells, or the spells would be replaced in what the character is prep/known if it doesn't fit the style. I played a bard who picked up Heat Metal at 3rd, one of the best low-level damage spells on the bard list, and trained it away at 6th, never having come across a combat where my concentration was best used against a single opponent, and that opponent was wearing metal. It self corrected to match the style. When

My original point, however, was instead looking at how unusually low or unusually high numbers of encounters affect whether or not any particular table experiences balance issues. In other words, I'm talking about whether the players at any particular table view any imbalance they percieve during their campaign as actually rising to the level of an issue that detracts from their play experience.

Eh, you can go this route, but if I can compare something at least someone rigoriously (though I admit it makes huge assumptions about effectiveness when it's not just damage that's easier to add up and compare), vs. a fully subjective rating, I'll go for the former.

For ladder is just anecdotal. I was in a Theros campaign where we all ended up getting weapons of the gods. I was playing a rogue, and by sneak attack damage, which was situational and often wouldn't occur in the first round of combat, was completely overcast by characters with extra attack who were getting a bonus 3d8 damage every hit. My subjective view was that in combat I contributed the least - I did less damage in a round, I couldn't tank, I didn't have spells. Talking to some of the other players at one point, I had early on (before the Legendary weapons) been "the damage dealer" and when they saw high single hits later on that's what stuck in their minds. So they all thought I was the big damage dealer of the party, while the battlemaster fighter regularly out damaged my character as well as providing other aspects like tanking. Subjective evaluation is just that, subjective evaluation.

That's a much broader (and inherently less quantifiable) view of balance than I think you're focused on.

Again, this is the crux of talking past each other. I am not talking about game balance. I am talking about game imbalance. You can have clear signs that things are not balanced, but the lack of those particular signs is not an indication that they are balanced.

You are trying to talk about a car ready for a journey. I am trying to talk about a car not ready for a journey. Missing a tire and the check engine light off is not ready. All tires and the check engine light blinking is not ready. A flat tire can be a sign that the car isn't ready, but the lack of the flat tire does not say anything about the check engine light.

This isn't a measure that can show balance, just imbalance. All of the discussion points you make about balance may be valid, but they don't invalidate this as a measure of imbalance. Especially once you are looking outside mechanical aspects like spotlight time

Would you agree that campaign style can impact whether any percieved imbalance in "output" at any particular table rises to the level that's it's perceived as a problem by the players?

Regardless of if this is true, it doesn't impact what I was talking about which was a mechanical evaluation. Subjective evaluations like this are important, because they impact the fun a player is having, but that's a separate type of evaluation.

From there, because I agree with you that number of encounters can impact relative PC "output", I think it follows that campaign style can influence whether that impact rises to the level that it's perceived as a problem.

Which is all I was saying. Though perhaps more strongly than you - this is why I'm not picking up the 2024 books. I find when the characters get to T2 and T3 that both running and playing we have so few encounters per adventuring day that it is a large enough flaw that I really don't want to play anymore. I was thinking about running with the Gritty Realism variant from the DMG, but now I've kickstarted 13th Age 2nd Edition and it have a full heal-up (the equivilent of a long rest) once per arc, and that fits my running style even better.

If you can agree with that, then I think we're in broad agreement regarding "balance" as we're each using the term. If you can't agree with that, where do you see our evident disconnect as arising?

I think the disconnect in our discussions was I was talking about something inhernet in the mechanics/math of the system to measure an imbalance or not across all tables, while you were looking at subjective measurement trying to show balance based on style, which is not inherent and the same across all tables.

BTW, don't take this as a criticism of what you are talking about. Frankly, the subjective feeling from all of the players that they are contributing is very important. Critical even. I agree with all of it. This is a game, we should all be having fun. It just is measuring different things and therefore can be used in conjuction with what I was talking about, much like a spedometer and engine RPM gauge are related conceptually but show different things. Having both of these tool makes things even better.

 

[Xamnam]

The 6-8 combats a day always sounded more like a warning than something to aspire to. From memory, the advice in the DMG stated that PCs could probably handle around 6-8 combats per long rest before running on empty and needing a long rest to recover.

Good of you to bring that up, the text is pretty clear it's not a goal or a standard to be met (unless your personal goal is to have characters ending the day/rest period with close to zero resources left). Especially with the caveats about average luck, average conditions, most parties, etc. Page 84 of the DMG:

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

I both don't care about exhausting my players resources on a constant basis, and they play as if there could be any number of encounters on any given day, so I personally have never had to worry about how many encounters there are on an average day, they just experience whatever makes sense.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'll say this doesn't obviate any responsibility on the part of the DM for what happens encounter wise. Long ago, I played with a player who had a reaction table he used to determine what his character did when he met an NPC. Did he want to be friends? Was it time to roll for initiative? Only the dice know! If you've seen the Simpsons episode with Gary in it, they make a joke of it where he makes a D20 roll to determine his own reaction. That kind of thing. It was definitely fun, for him.

But using a table to determine what happens in your game is still a choice you're making. It effectively says "Every time you want to take a rest, we'll roll a die to see if you can do it." Is that somehow more fair to the players? Honestly, don't know. What I've typically seen when a DM does this is that they say, "There is no story to my game. At the end of the night, whatever happened was the story." And again, that's a choice. Do random tables and die rolls make for a better game? Again, don't know.

If everyone is having fun, more power to you. But the DM chose to make that how the world works, and it's the dice deciding when or if you can take a rest, not any kind of story. As you can imagine, that's ... not my style. I've played with enough DMs who use it to know I won't enjoy it as a player, so I bow out of those games. If the players tell you "Here's what we want to do," and you just make a die roll to see if they can do it without other considerations, that's still on you as a DM.

"or else when the players decide that taking a rest is the party's most-urgent priority and work to make it happen" that very last bit is really the critical part of the problem. The gm is not relieved of the responsibility to provide a fully stocked adventuring day to keep 5mwd type problems from rearing their heads. What changed with 5e is that the bar players need to meet for "the story to determine that the players get a rest" to such a degree that it's almost impossible for players to fail suffer setbacks or find themselves in a meaningful quandary when they decide resting is the immediate "story" priority. From the bottom of that pit the gm is left with little more than begging and an adversarial level of hard no backed by fiat that has nothing to do with story.

 

[Xetheral]

I'll say this doesn't obviate any responsibility on the part of the DM for what happens encounter wise. Long ago, I played with a player who had a reaction table he used to determine what his character did when he met an NPC. Did he want to be friends? Was it time to roll for initiative? Only the dice know! If you've seen the Simpsons episode with Gary in it, they make a joke of it where he makes a D20 roll to determine his own reaction. That kind of thing. It was definitely fun, for him.

But using a table to determine what happens in your game is still a choice you're making. It effectively says "Every time you want to take a rest, we'll roll a die to see if you can do it." Is that somehow more fair to the players? Honestly, don't know. What I've typically seen when a DM does this is that they say, "There is no story to my game. At the end of the night, whatever happened was the story." And again, that's a choice. Do random tables and die rolls make for a better game? Again, don't know.

If everyone is having fun, more power to you. But the DM chose to make that how the world works, and it's the dice deciding when or if you can take a rest, not any kind of story. As you can imagine, that's ... not my style. I've played with enough DMs who use it to know I won't enjoy it as a player, so I bow out of those games. If the players tell you "Here's what we want to do," and you just make a die roll to see if they can do it without other considerations, that's still on you as a DM.

At one level, I agree with you that the DM is ultimately responsible for everything they put into the game world. On another level, however, so long as the degree of danger of a particular encounter has been appropriately telegraphed, and the choice to engage with it was made freely by the PCs, I also think there is a degree of shared responsibility for "what happens encounter-wise".

At my table, the closest I get to random encounters work more like environmental hazards. If the PCs are moving through an area with a known threat (or threats), whether or not their attempts to avoid that danger are successful is resolved through the basic play loop, which will include an ability check if the outcome is in question. If their attempts are unsuccessful and their attempted approach wasn't biased towards a particular threat I might roll randomly to see which of the known threats they actually encounter. So while there's a degree of randomness to some of the encounters at my table, it's not what would be traditionally described as a "random encounter".

The only thing I typically use entirely random tables for is the daily weather. However, in my current campaign the party uses Scrying like crazy to try to keep tabs on the various factions and individuals related to their chosen goals, and while I track what those factions do over time I certainly can't track it granularly enough to know what most of them are up to at the moment the PCs choose to scry. So I've started using percentile dice to determine the relevance to the PCs of what the NPCs are up to at any given moment, taking into account the time of day--overnight scrying is quite likely to let the PCs watch the NPCs sleep.

 

[Minigiant]

I think the disconnect in our discussions was I was talking about something inhernet in the mechanics/math of the system to measure an imbalance or not across all tables, while you were looking at subjective measurement trying to show balance based on style, which is not inherent and the same across all tables.

BTW, don't take this as a criticism of what you are talking about. Frankly, the subjective feeling from all of the players that they are contributing is very important. Critical even. I agree with all of it. This is a game, we should all be having fun. It just is measuring different things and therefore can be used in conjuction with what I was talking about, much like a spedometer and engine RPM gauge are related conceptually but show different things. Having both of these tool makes things even better

Exactly "It's a sandbox" does not obliviate the DMs responsibility to know the impact of short rest and long rest in balance.

I mean... you wouldn't hear so so much about the martial to full caster to half caster divide if the effect of resting was fully recognized and adjusted.

 

[SteveC]

Exactly "It's a sandbox" does not obliviate the DMs responsibility to know the impact of short rest and long rest in balance.

This is it exactly. As the DM (in my opinion, of course), it's your job to take your group and their resources into account when determining the adventuring day. Otherwise, you may find that your players may do some extreme things to stay alive. It's been my experience that the 5-minute adventuring day often comes about in response to DM pacing (or really lack of pacing).

If the DM doesn't provide natural pacing, the players can certainly do it themselves. Usually, that's done by turning around and heading back much sooner than they want to so that they can survive extra encounters on the way back.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Exactly "It's a sandbox" does not obliviate the DMs responsibility to know the impact of short rest and long rest in balance.

I mean... you wouldn't hear so so much about the martial to full caster to half caster divide if the effect of resting was fully recognized and adjusted.

True, but that concern, while widespread online, is not of equal importance to everybody.

 

[ezo]

True, but that concern, while widespread online, is not of equal importance to everybody.

To some... it isn't a concern at all.

 

[Minigiant]

True, but that concern, while widespread online, is not of equal importance to everybody.

That concern is unusual undiagnosed as people often wonder why their game has problems.

I mean, most people don't even know there is a encounter assumption the game was designed around.

They just say "X is too Y" and don't know the underlying reason. Then the houserule from a place of ignorance to varying levels of success.