Willie the Duck
Hero
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...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.
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.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.
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.It seems like WotC is moving to "number of uses equal to proficiency modifier" paradigm too.