D&D 5E (2024) Mike Mearls explains why your boss monsters die too easily

[Parmandur]

The rule is unusable as written then, because it includes no more than 2 hours of light activity as a qualifier as well. Well, what happens if you only have 300 rounds of combat(30 minute), but you also have 1.5 hours of light activity? How much light activity does 30 minutes of strenuous activity take up? Or is it really 3 hours of interrupted sleep. What about 20 minutes of light and 20 minutes of strenuous?

Or maybe it's in addition to the light. You can do 120 minutes of light, and 59 minutes 54 seconds of heavy without ruining your rest. However, if you do 120 minutes and 6 seconds of light, it's also ruined.

The rule as written is nonsensical. It cannot be followed since you can have combinations of light and strenuous, but cannot know how much of each you can have when you combine them, and they will virtually always be combined if ANY strenuous activity happens. It's exceedingly rare for no watches(light activity) to happen.

I banned hut, rope trick and more.

Just these tweaks alone make Dungeons with a full Adventure Day a lot more achievable, if the players don't already approach the game seeming to assume a social contract to not cheese rests (never even see anyone try that 5MWF stuff).

 

[Maxperson]

I would go so far as to suggest that stuff like Leomund's Tiny Hut are a direct cause of high Level play breaking down and not being common.

It starts at 3rd level, not high level. Rope Trick gives you a virtually unstoppable hour for short rests. The higher level options just extend the problem outward.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

There are many reasons why the “adventuring day” remains one of the most problematic concepts in D&D, and most of them trace back to D&D itself—across all editions. The game has always tried to define a formula that balances player strength against monster power, distributed over a certain number of encounters per day. The intent is clear: players should manage their limited resources so their strength ebbs and flows across multiple challenges. In theory, this creates tension and meaningful decision-making.

In practice, that tension rarely exists.

The entire model collapses under the weight of how easily rest and recovery occur. The rules assume that players will space their encounters across a long stretch of adventuring, but at any point they can simply stop, take a rest, and return to full power. Attrition—the supposed balancing factor—is mostly a smokescreen. It only works if the game enforces scarcity, but the game doesn’t. The moment rest becomes a trivial choice, the whole attrition economy breaks down.

A “balanced” encounter, as defined by the rulebooks, compares the party’s strength and number to the monsters’ challenge rating, assuming the party is operating at or near full capability. But what happens if they’re not? What if they’ve gone through several encounters without resting, or if the DM enforces constraints that limit recovery? The system offers no clear guidance for that situation. Balance is built on the assumption of full readiness, yet the rules also suggest that attrition matters. Those two ideas can’t coexist cleanly.

The larger issue isn’t about encounter math—it’s about the lack of a consistent definition for the “adventuring day” itself. What is a “day” supposed to represent in play terms? A real-time session? A sequence of encounters? A narrative block? The rules are deliberately noncommittal, leaving DMs to improvise one of the most critical pacing structures in the game.

This problem only deepens when you look at what rest actually costs. The benefits are obvious: recovery of hit points, spells, and abilities. But the price? Virtually nothing. Monsters wait patiently in their rooms. Treasure doesn’t vanish. Events rarely move forward unless the DM explicitly scripts a countdown. The rest of the world freezes until the players decide to resume. When time itself carries no weight, rest becomes a free reset button—and with that, any notion of balance tied to endurance loses meaning.

So, how do you balance a system that allows infinite resets? More importantly, why does the game continue to offer design guidance based on resource attrition when the mechanics actively undermine it? The result isn’t balance at all, but an illusion of one—a fragile construct that depends on restraint and self-discipline rather than coherent system design.

 

[payn]

There are many reasons why the “adventuring day” remains one of the most problematic concepts in D&D, and most of them trace back to D&D itself—across all editions. The game has always tried to define a formula that balances player strength against monster power, distributed over a certain number of encounters per day. The intent is clear: players should manage their limited resources so their strength ebbs and flows across multiple challenges. In theory, this creates tension and meaningful decision-making.

In practice, that tension rarely exists.

The entire model collapses under the weight of how easily rest and recovery occur. The rules assume that players will space their encounters across a long stretch of adventuring, but at any point they can simply stop, take a rest, and return to full power. Attrition—the supposed balancing factor—is mostly a smokescreen. It only works if the game enforces scarcity, but the game doesn’t. The moment rest becomes a trivial choice, the whole attrition economy breaks down.

A “balanced” encounter, as defined by the rulebooks, compares the party’s strength and number to the monsters’ challenge rating, assuming the party is operating at or near full capability. But what happens if they’re not? What if they’ve gone through several encounters without resting, or if the DM enforces constraints that limit recovery? The system offers no clear guidance for that situation. Balance is built on the assumption of full readiness, yet the rules also suggest that attrition matters. Those two ideas can’t coexist cleanly.

The larger issue isn’t about encounter math—it’s about the lack of a consistent definition for the “adventuring day” itself. What is a “day” supposed to represent in play terms? A real-time session? A sequence of encounters? A narrative block? The rules are deliberately noncommittal, leaving DMs to improvise one of the most critical pacing structures in the game.

This problem only deepens when you look at what rest actually costs. The benefits are obvious: recovery of hit points, spells, and abilities. But the price? Virtually nothing. Monsters wait patiently in their rooms. Treasure doesn’t vanish. Events rarely move forward unless the DM explicitly scripts a countdown. The rest of the world freezes until the players decide to resume. When time itself carries no weight, rest becomes a free reset button—and with that, any notion of balance tied to endurance loses meaning.

So, how do you balance a system that allows infinite resets? More importantly, why does the game continue to offer design guidance based on resource attrition when the mechanics actively undermine it? The result isn’t balance at all, but an illusion of one—a fragile construct that depends on restraint and self-discipline rather than coherent system design.

Really its because D&D has to accommodate so many playstyles it cant pick a lane. When it does, things tend to get incendiary one way or the other. I think the modular concepts of the design were supposed to allow folks to lean in, meaning the foundation had to be flexible. Turned out the modular set pieces never needed to materialize becasue folks are making the game work on their own (and buying the crap out of it anyways).

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Why are random encounters a crutch? They’re a tool the DM is fully intended to have at their disposal. There is absolutely nothing wrong with using that tool.

The biggest problem to me is that they are a tool of limited usefulness. I don't send my players to monster-infested dungeons and wilderness all the time. If they are, say, in a city and investating some murder mystery or something, they aren't running into bandits or roving ogres every hour!
So I prefer a game system that can handle it if I throw just one combat encounter a day at me, without making some characters overshadow others because they picked a class that performs better if it has just one fight a day.
And sometimes, when the players do enter a dungeon, I don't really expect a long rest to happen at all, because the players know they can't really afford the let the enemy shore up their defenses or move away while they rest, so the game should also handle a series of encounters or a single encounter with waves, without favoring particular classes because they have more or less daily resources.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

4E would be having same problem. It has dailies.

Yes, if a 4E party has only one or two combats per day, it can handle much more powerful enemies or larger groups of enemies. The advantage 4E has is that everyone has dailies. So no class has an advantage or drawback when there are only one or two encounters, nor when there are 10. (And because it also has encounter powers, it also has the advantage that everyone can make tactical decisions in each combat when to use their best tools, even if they need to hold back their dailies for a potential future fight. Of course, it also has the drawback that everyone must make such tactical decisions, there is a lot less variation in complexity of play by class.)

 

[payn]

The biggest problem to me is that they are a tool of limited usefulness. I don't send my players to monster-infested dungeons and wilderness all the time. If they are, say, in a city and investating some murder mystery or something, they aren't running into bandits or roving ogres every hour!
So I prefer a game system that can handle it if I throw just one combat encounter a day at me, without making some characters overshadow others because they picked a class that performs better if it has just one fight a day.
And sometimes, when the players do enter a dungeon, I don't really expect a long rest to happen at all, because the players know they can't really afford the let the enemy shore up their defenses or move away while they rest, so the game should also handle a series of encounters or a single encounter with waves, without favoring particular classes because they have more or less daily resources.

My answer was to split the difference. Basically everything became a 5 room dungeon. In a city? Encounter a thieves guild HQ. Hexploring? 5 or so Random encounters (not all monsters to fight either) per day/hex of exploring. Every adventure had several components that made it not 1 simple encounter, but not a chain of days worth of encounters either.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't send my players to monster-infested dungeons and wilderness all the time.

Wmphaaaia added, because that's the key point here: the Adventure Day is not every day, it's a maximum threshold to guide designing a monster-infesred dungeon that works, while allowing room for a non-Dungeon story by providing the number of beats needed to match a Dungeon in challenging players: which is approximately 2 and a half minutes of combat in a 24 hour period.

The game works fine if the maximum is not pursued, the fights juat get easier that way.

 

[Maxperson]

There are many reasons why the “adventuring day” remains one of the most problematic concepts in D&D, and most of them trace back to D&D itself—across all editions. The game has always tried to define a formula that balances player strength against monster power, distributed over a certain number of encounters per day. The intent is clear: players should manage their limited resources so their strength ebbs and flows across multiple challenges. In theory, this creates tension and meaningful decision-making.

People keep saying that, but it simply wasn't true. I've been playing since 1983 and my first experience with PC power having to be distributed over multiple encounters per day started with 5e.

1e-3e had death effects, magic resistance to completely shut down some to most magic, damage immunities and resistances, weapon immunities that needed shut down or minimized weapon damage, save or suck spells and abilities, and more.

In those editions I could challenge a fresh party with a single encounter. There was none of this need for multiple encounters in order to challenge the party.

I suppose it might have started with 4e and not 5e, but as I didn't play that edition, I don't really know.

A “balanced” encounter, as defined by the rulebooks, compares the party’s strength and number to the monsters’ challenge rating, assuming the party is operating at or near full capability. But what happens if they’re not? What if they’ve gone through several encounters without resting, or if the DM enforces constraints that limit recovery? The system offers no clear guidance for that situation. Balance is built on the assumption of full readiness, yet the rules also suggest that attrition matters. Those two ideas can’t coexist cleanly.

This is not true. The encounters start easy peasy, then after a few of them it's just easy, then after a few more it's starting to get rough, then by the 6th-8th encounter it's a challenge to just beat the encounter.

That's the balance. 5e is not designed to challenge a group with a single encounter. It's designed so that like level encounters get progressively harder until the last one of the day is the real challenge.

Where that idea really falls apart is 1) people don't want to have 6-8 encounters in a short period of time, and 2) players have different play styles and skill ability, so a group might use too many resources early and TPK themselves in a series of "balanced" encounters.

This problem only deepens when you look at what rest actually costs. The benefits are obvious: recovery of hit points, spells, and abilities. But the price? Virtually nothing. Monsters wait patiently in their rooms. Treasure doesn’t vanish. Events rarely move forward unless the DM explicitly scripts a countdown. The rest of the world freezes until the players decide to resume. When time itself carries no weight, rest becomes a free reset button—and with that, any notion of balance tied to endurance loses meaning.

I don't know where you get this from. The books don't tell the DMs to have monsters wait patiently. This particular issue is a DM issue, not a game issue.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Really its because D&D has to accommodate so many playstyles it cant pick a lane. When it does, things tend to get incendiary one way or the other. I think the modular concepts of the design were supposed to allow folks to lean in, meaning the foundation had to be flexible. Turned out the modular set pieces never needed to materialize becasue folks are making the game work on their own (and buying the crap out of it anyways).

Yeah, sometimes I think all the uneven and possibly contradictory elements in D&D are the feature why it's succesful. Yes, we can have 20+ page debates on such aspects, but for all the parts we enjoyed and that clicked with us, we already joined the ride. We were "tricked" into having fun with D&D because of the stuff that clicked with us and worked for us, and if they had "picked a lane" for some of the questions we hotly debate, part of us might never have stuck with the game as long because that part was missing - so what if it doesn't quite match another aspect? Got you to level 10 and, and you remember when Bob the fighter kissed that girl who turned out be a half-elf princess in disguise and ended up marrying her because of some prophecy?