D&D 5E How many encounters per day is YOUR average?

Willie the Duck · Sep 20, 2021

Average won't be a meaningful piece of information. The distribution is bi- or tri-modal -- 0-2 on days where people are wandering, travelling, going to talk to the duke, etc.; 3-6 when infiltrating a temple, burglarizing the Duke's chambers, or clearing out a kobold warren; 6-12 or even more if dungeon-crawling.

Helldritch said:
Strange, I have no trouble to put that many encounters between rests. Already posted many of my tricks but here are some.

1) Do not play monsters as static opponents that wait for the player to "activate" their "pods" as in some video games. The players made a foray into a lair and went back to rest before tackling the BBEG and the rest? Have the BBEG search for them. Have him and his retinue ambush the party. Have some reinforcement arrive.

2) Use random encounters and use the following.
Random encounters gives no exp and yield no treasures, ever. So no farming exp or treasure from random encounters. My players know this and act accordingly. Random encounters occurs until the allotment of encounters for the day are met.

3) For overland travel, estimate the possible number of days and roll all encounters and then narrate the inconsequential ones (like a deer or any animals) and only use the meaningful ones and weave them into 1 to 3 consecutive days. Example, for a 21 day travel, you can have up to 63 possible encounters. If you roll 12, use them in the last 3 days or in the middle. Fill the rest of the journey with descriptions and whatever you feel adds to the narrative. This allows for short rest character to shine and prevents a bit the "nova type " characters to blast everything as they do not know how long will the streak of encounters will last. You can even distribute some encounters in days far apart so that the players will always be on their toes. Here pacing and logic is the key.

For Tiny hut and the likes....
The more intelligent monsters/foes will know of these. Especially if caster are amongst their rank. Dispel magic can be used with great effectiveness. Tracking is possible. Magical detection can be used to.

Tend to agree. WotC did actually include a lot of good advice on this in the perpetually-never-read DMG, but I do think that more could have been done. It's a shame that there wasn't an active and read Dragon magazine where they could have perpetual articles going over alternate rest and encounter design option #238...

dave2008 said:
No, not in theory. I have actual empirical data from our table. No theory at all.

To be clear, I am not saying it works for everyone, or that it is "good" design. I actually really liked the 4e AEDU structure if you balance.

4e, as always, is 'that game with really good design (excepting exceptions 1,2, and 3...) that it's a darn shame didn't gel with the community, but it didn't.' There is a lot of good things to mine from it and I think with enough distance it will have, the eventual 6e probably will grab more pieces of it.

dave2008 said:
It seems like WotC is moving to "number of uses equal to proficiency modifier" paradigm too.

This can be true for X/SR or X/LR abilities. I think the reason for this is that bards and war domain cleric and the like get double-penalized for taking feats instead of boosting their casting stats asap and that maybe was an unintended effect.

Xeviat · Sep 20, 2021

ad_hoc said:
In case you are interested my houserule is "long rest only at a friendly settlement."

It is simple and does everything I need including making narrative sense.

The only place it wouldn't work is in an urban campaign but in those cases I would expect time to be a limiting factor in most adventures anyway.

Would you allow for sufficient survival proficiency to allow for long rests in the wild?

HaroldTheHobbit · Sep 20, 2021

My group really like the roleplaying aspect, so we have lots of zero combat sessions. And when there is combat encounter time, we rather go with bigger set pieces than longer chains of slogging. So 1-3 encounters during "fight" days. I also run with 10 minute short rest, max 2/day.

It's not by the book and we tone down the hp and spell slot resource management aspect, but we have fun that way

Helldritch · Sep 20, 2021

Willie the Duck said:
Average won't be a meaningful piece of information. The distribution is bi- or tri-modal -- 0-2 on days where people are wandering, travelling, going to talk to the duke, etc.; 3-6 when infiltrating a temple, burglarizing the Duke's chambers, or clearing out a kobold warren; 6-12 or even more if dungeon-crawling.

Tend to agree. WotC did actually include a lot of good advice on this in the perpetually-never-read DMG, but I do think that more could have been done. It's a shame that there wasn't an active and read Dragon magazine where they could have perpetual articles going over alternate rest and encounter design option #238...

4e, as always, is 'that game with really good design (excepting exceptions 1,2, and 3...) that it's a darn shame didn't gel with the community, but it didn't.' There is a lot of good things to mine from it and I think with enough distance it will have, the eventual 6e probably will grab more pieces of it.

This can be true for X/SR or X/LR abilities. I think the reason for this is that bards and war domain cleric and the like get double-penalized for taking feats instead of boosting their casting stats asap and that maybe was an unintended effect.

Hard to do quotes on a phone. So I will go this way.
1) this is what average are for bi or tri or even quadri modal just make a stranger average with a bigger standard deviation. Just one average is more usually more than enough, but I see your point. It would be more interesting to see in which environment the average applies.

2) If people would read the DMG it would be a great benefit for us all. A lot of advice in there are quite useful, but they went quite light in the explanation département as to why a set number of encounters is required for balance. Short rests classes need short rest but nova classes need long rest. The last are very prone to nova and a higher number of encounters puts them on par with the short rests ones.

3) 4ed had a lot of good things going for it. I was a fan, but it was not the case of everybody... It did have its downsides though...

4) Feats are optional but I have yet to see a table where they are not used at all. And yet, I still see quite a few Bards taking feats (well, one and that is usually inspiring leader). As for the cleric s, a lot takes feats but I have seen very few war clerics....

tetrasodium · Sep 20, 2021

dave2008 said:
This generally holds true in white-room theory crafting, I agree with that. But that is not my experience in actual games. I realize every table is different. But my players can almost never be sure how many encounters they are going to have any given day. So they always have to account for the next possible encounter. The wizard always sprinkles in some cantrips because he never knows when he might need a higher level spell. Similarly, the fighters are careful when the bust out their action surges or maneuvers. They just don't know, normally, if there is going to be another wave of monsters or this is the only combat for the day.

So, I agree with your math. I just disagree that it matters to the extent some claim.

Thats all well & good in theory, but things break down if the players aren't willing to risk the uncertainty. Take this example.

End of the last long rest & players start things. No matter what there is always going to be a starting point & it doesn't matter if that was last night on the rail, back in town at the inn, or whatever. We shouldn't need to debate that at some point the players started with a clean slate because that's what a long rest does.
Players go through a couple fights, lets say two fights.
Alice the druid: I used a few of my big heals & only have one wildshape left, lets take a rest
- Bob the sorlock: Yea I could use a rest
- Chuck the fighter: Yea I used my action surge & took some damage even though Dawn the cleric healed most of it, I could use a rest
- Dawn the cleric: I don't really get anything from short rest but channel divinity & that's no big deal.
- Edward the wizard: um sure if we are taking a rest ok.
- Greg the GM: you don't feel safe taking a rest here. Remember this originak impasse...
  - Edward: I'm going to cast tiny hut so we can make it a long rest
    - Greg: You knew it was unsafe & a couple minutes into the ritual a wild encounter appears!
    - Players stomp the encounter. You now have three fights.
    - Edward: I'm going to cast tiny hut
      - Greg the GM: a wild encounter appear... It's not very effective because it's only four fights in
        
        Edward: I'm going to cast tiny hut
        
        Greg the GM thinks to himself "ok I can interrupt it mid rest" midway into the rest the party is attacked by a random/wandering encounter & still at four of 6-8 encounters.
        
        Lets say the party feels like they should deal with this instead of shrugging it off. Alice has recovered a wildshape, bob has recovered sorlock stuff, chuck has recovered action surge & second wind along with the possible archetype specific stuff like superiority dice. Dawn the knowledge cleric still doesn't really care but edward used arcane recovery. This has 2 ways f going... everyone pus out a ranged weapon & shoots from the tiny hut hunting blind or everyone but edward goes out to nova down the encounter & edward says the words "I stay in the hut to maintain the tiny hut & that's my turn".
        
        Either way the fight ends & everyone runs back to edward in the hut to finish the long rest & recover everything
        
        Greg the GM has the choice of trying again with a burrowing/incorporeal monster that can come up from under the dome or one that can dispel the dome, but both of those just go back to the earlier original impasse or a slightly modified version of it where people keep recovering short rest abilities until they either finish the long rest or Greg the GM is forced to throw up his hands in defeat. This is the second impasse.

You might say "well Greg the GM could setup traps or do x & y up ahead while the players are resting". Yes he could & people say that so often that I suspect at least one person will respond to this with examples of things for x&y. The problem there is the original impasse. If X & Y are anything shy of abject & total TPK you just return to that point the moment there is a tiny dent in the party's combat resources/endurance. Even worse is that if Greg the GM does that the players are going to react by being even more cautious & taking even more rests. Greg the GM has basically no way to overcome the original impasse without resorting to fiat and simply declaring they can't because they can't or using a strict doom clock. Invoking oberoni or declaring that Greg should read the DMG because shy of rebuilding huge chunks of 5e itself it does not include things that will correct "no we are going to take a rest Greg. No. Means no.". Removing tiny hut doesn't solve it either because it just shifts things from the original impasse to the second impasse.

TheAlkaizer · Sep 20, 2021

My DMing style has few encounters, but my players know to take them seriously.

I voted for less than 1. Because we don't get combat encounters all sessions, and when they do happen, it'll be one big encounter, or maybe two at most.

I tend to put a ton of effort in my encounters. The enemies are varied, I've prepared an intricate environment with things to interact with, verticality, pits, traps and other things. My creatures use their deadliest abilities right away. With time, my group of players learned that I wouldn't have an uninteresting encounter just to sap a bit of their resources, so they go all in, they take it seriously and also use some of their most powerful abilities out of the blue. They also really enjoy these intricates encounters.

As an example, if I recall our last five Starfinder (not D&D, but I DM both the same way) sessions:

Session 1: no combat encounter
Session 2: one combat encounter
Session 3: no combat encounter
Session 4: one combat encounter
Session 5: no combat encounter

If I go way back to my last 5E campaign right before COVID hits, it lasted for... thirteen sessions before it was interrupted. I'm checking my notes and we had eight combat encounters. Two sessions with two encounters each, four sessions with one encounter, and seven sessions with no encounter.

THEMNGMNT · Sep 20, 2021

dave2008 said:
It seems like WotC is moving to "number of uses equal to proficiency modifier" paradigm too.

Yeah, I stole it from them. Which, I guess isn't technically stealing if you're running a 5E game.

Stormonu · Sep 20, 2021

I put that I usually see about 2 combats per Long rest, with an occasional 3, maaaaybe stretched out to 4. But it shouldn't also be forgotten that non-combat encounters can have a dramatic effect on this as well - spells and abilities are used outside of the combat ring and if they have limited uses, will have an effect on what the party can handle further on down the road.

Also, I think d&d sometimes suffers in that the party starts fully armed and prepared and gets worn down, instead of starting at a "base" level and having to build/power up to get access to better abilities, spells and the likes. For example, the system could be build so that spellcasters have ready access to cantrips, but to get access to leveled spells they might have to take "build" actions or otherwise "power up" (say casting a cantrip provides 1 Power Point, need 3 PP to then unlease a 1st level spell) to access higher level magic, rather than drop Fireball round 1. Same could be done for other classes - there are other games that call this "momentum".

overgeeked · Sep 20, 2021

Blue said:
And all of that doesn't include short-rests recovery, which is a separate axis as well but with similar effects - a monk will be a lot less effective in a single large combat than in multiple combats and the recommended (and balanced around) 2 short rests around 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through.

Just let characters take a short rest as an action, but no more than two short rests per day. It basically solves the problem.

THEMNGMNT · Sep 20, 2021

el-remmen said:
Can you talk a little more about this frustration? I have found the opposite. The short rest characters are fine and get their abilities back with little problem - but the barbarian hoards his rages to make them count since he needs a long rest to get them back - which sometimes leads to "I think you should rage!" "No! Not yet!" conversations btwn players at the table.

Sure.

I mostly experienced this with warlock players, who blow their two spells and then spam eldritch blast for the rest of the adventuring day (which can easily span multiple sessions). But I've noticed it in a couple other instances, as well.

My players tend to rest only when the majority of the party is out of spells or low on hit points.

It might be worth noting that there is frequent time pressure in my game as I favor a high intensity cinematic style.