D&D 5E 6-8 Encounter Adventuring Day as the Key to Combat as Sport/War in 5e

[Psikerlord#]

Yes, this is precisely the point. Players who attack and adventure day with the Combat as War mentality will be in fewer combats and won't be as challenged in them. The consequence of that is that they won't level up as quickly as if they played combat as sport. So Sport players may level to 20 in the course of say 30-40 sessions (if they aren't TPK'd first) where War players may take 70-100.

My players like a little bit of war and a little bit of sport, so setting up adventuring days like this allows them to decide on a session by session basis how they want to play it. That it turn also depends on how big the threat feels and how high the stakes are.

Don't get me wrong, I like your approach, and I think "encounters per day" guidelines should be thrown out the window.

 

[werecorpse]

I'd like advice on dealing with players who don't believe in "6-8 encounters per day" please.



After the players defeat the patrol, they go many hours back to their camp (taking care to cover their tracks) and have a night's rest. The next day, they travel back to the lair. Repeat for every encounter.


I do know some tactics for dealing with this. For example, in the example above, the guards could track the party back to their camp. Or perhaps the next day, there's a new patrol, twice as strong as the previous one. Or perhaps the bad guys abandon the lair overnight? What other ideas are there?

As a player, would you consider it cheesy or unfair if the guards tracked characters back to camp? Would you consider it unfair if the bad guys abandoned the lair overnight, so characters got no xp or loot?

The solution here is to make retreating and resting undesirable. here are my suggestions:
1. Mission is time sensitive (bad guy does something that wipes out a town a day or Bad guy will bolt if he has time and knows he is discovered)
2. Reactive bad guy - after first attack bad guy tracks them or sets up an ambush (or leaves)
3. Other good guys turn up and finish dungeon, taking all the treasure, glory exp and loot. (Other parties are a great trick for a DM to use in many ways)

An example of number 3 I experienced was while a player in G2. We had fought our way through about 3/4 of the dungeon, resting periodically so none of the encounters were too threatening. It was clearly frustrating the DM. So when we went back after a days rest to head into the last bit of the adventure we met another group of adventurers (lead by a paladin from our clerics church that we had never heard of before - otherwise we might have attacked them) leaving the dungeon with the giant kings head strapped to a mule and bags and bags of treasure. We rushed into the complex to scour it for any loose change and when we got back to town they were holding a fair in honour of the other group, and the other group were all about to undergo further training (yes the DM said they all levelled up - he knew how to inflict pain) I'm pretty sure the DM overstated the loot the paladin got but we were green with envy.

For the next few adventures we always made sure that vulture was nowhere near our potential loot - and we got all looting and glory hogging done as soon as possible. Good result all round.

You should only need to do this once. My suggestion is that you set it up so the NPC gets big loot and treasure.

Btw later when we were getting our butts handed to us by a bunch of drow and demons in some underground tunnels that paladin and his mates showed up and prevented a tpk - swings and roundabout. But for some reason they could never come adventuring with us - something about us being the heroes of our own story blah blah blah.

 

[OB1]

Don't get me wrong, I like your approach, and I think "encounters per day" guidelines should be thrown out the window.

I'd say to take them for what they are, guidelines, and then throw them out the window only when necessary. No reason not to have a day with 1 encounter or 3 deadlies with a short rest between each or to plan for 10 but have the party get around 8 of them. But I think it's worthwhile to keep in mind that 6-8 is the baseline and to design to and around that with purpose. As my English professor used to say you must learn the rules before you can break them effectively.

I started off DMing 5e only thinking about individual encounter difficulty and ignoring the daily guides. Since I've started using them, I've found that we end up with much more dynamic sessions with more decision points of consequence facing the PCs.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

After the players defeat the patrol, they go many hours back to their camp (taking care to cover their tracks) and have a night's rest. The next day, they travel back to the lair. Repeat for every encounter.

I do know some tactics for dealing with this. For example, in the example above, the guards could track the party back to their camp. Or perhaps the next day, there's a new patrol, twice as strong as the previous one. Or perhaps the bad guys abandon the lair overnight? What other ideas are there?

As a player, would you consider it cheesy or unfair if the guards tracked characters back to camp? Would you consider it unfair if the bad guys abandoned the lair overnight, so characters got no xp or loot?

As a player, I'd be fine with the enemy backtracking us to camp. In fact I'd probably expect it, and there's a good chance I'd try to ambush and mousetrap them*. 5E gives major tactical advantages to the defender and I'd like to exploit them. Ideally I'd attack with a weak force and withdraw, hoping to provoke an enemy attack in "overwhelming force" (because that's what rational enemies do, attack with superior or overwhelming force to minimize their losses), and then I'd counterattack with my real force which is strong enough to beat the supposedly-overwhelming force, especially given my defensive advantages like fields of fire, partial/total cover, and caltrops. (Yay for Mould Earth! Roman legions have nothing on a 5E wizard with Mould Earth.) Then a quick break (short rest) to patch everybody up, and now we're on to the main event: attack the now-weakened main enemy base, which has just lost a bunch of troops, some leaders, and maybe some morale.

However, if the bad guys abandon their lair and I don't get any credit for defeating them because I didn't physically hunt them down and murder them, that would leave a bad taste in my mouth. Not so much because I feel cheated, although that's a factor, as because the DM is apparently saying that I have to become a murderer to play in his game, and that nonviolent and indirect solutions are unacceptable. The credit doesn't have to come in the form of XP (maybe the DM has a theory that XP come only from sucking life force out of dying creatures) but at minimum that should go down in the books as a nice bloodless victory, and my military superiors should congratulate me on accomplishing my objective, and then "reward" me by giving me a harder objective with even less chance of success.


* If I didn't try to mousetrap them, I might do the opposite: try to get them to attack in force a fake camp when I'm actually somewhere else. Then hit their main base while the big army is away; occupy it and fortify it so that when the main army gets back, I'm sitting behind all of their defenses with all of their treasure. And yes, I did in fact steal that tactic from the Book of Mormon (war chapters in Alma).

 

[OB1]

Just curious [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION], how you would proceed if you didn't have the larger/more powerful force? Perhaps try to break a large encounter that you couldn't win into several distinct pieces/ and or sneak your way past the main force and take out the enemy leader directly? Perhaps several tactically necessary small violent skirmishes along the way that are easy enough for your group to overcome with a riskier attack at the end where the reward is worth the risk of potential death?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I like the idea & I definitely like combat as sport. I agree it is used by people who seem to be saying "my make believe toon risks his imaginary life every time I play while your just want to have fun".

Referring to your earlier post a lot of the problems come from noone really knowing what anyone else means when they use the terms.

Well, while it may have been a tad "weasel word"-y on my part, I did say "almost always" and not "always." So your personal example, while valid, doesn't truly contradict what I said. Quite right, however, on the fluidity of the definitions. People use the terms very blithely, assuming everyone uses the words exactly the way they do.

For me sport is leaping into every fight because well it's fun. PC are tough & I spent most of my time figuring out my abilities etc with combat in mind so do it.

Combat as war however has combat being dangerous & more importantly not especially fun. Getting it over faster or avoiding it altogether or at least mitigating some of the danger is more entertaining than fighting.

4e epitomises the sport style & 5e is well suited to the war style. Oddly AL play (or LFR as was) seems to suit the sport style better as you have very little lattitude regarding combats in that format. One counter issue being the length of 4e combats.

Other people indubitably understand the terms differently

I guess my problem, then, is that I don't think it is correct to assume that people who like 4e's mechanics consequently "leap into every fight because it's fun." For you, that may be entirely the case--and there is nothing wrong with approaching 4e in that way. What is wrong is the assumption that *because* 4e's designers really tried to make the..."process of combat" (for lack of a better term) enjoyable in itself, people *therefore* must inherently want to engage in combat in a specific way if they like 4e(-style games).

That's one of the biggest problems with it, even. It assumes that people who play particular editions always approach a particular slice of the rules with a specific mindset--which strikes me as just a slightly more nuanced kind of "one true way"ism. (Nuanced in that it assumes there is one true way for each ruleset.) As you demonstrated, you enjoy engaging with 4e by leaping headlong into the fray, and you enjoy engaging with 5e by scrounging for every advantage, fair or unfair, that you can find. But asserting that the dichotomy "exists" is equivalent to asserting that there's a right way and a wrong way to play 4e or 5e or any other game, and that's going to run into some pretty heavy opposition. (Consider, for example, the entire "Fourthcore" subculture, which revelled in the precision math of 4e...while specifically gunning for all the qualities people seem to assign to the "combat as war" style.)

Like OB1. I don't really see the choice as being all on the side of the players. And real risk does not need to be there. It can be more about doing cool things (spinning back fist KOs) rather than facing difficult challenges.

This, at least, I can agree with on both counts. If the dichotomy has any validity at all--and I'm skeptical about how much it has--it's because it shows how the experience of the game is shaped by numerous factors, including but not limited to:
- the actual text of the game in question
- the general culture and norms (realistic or unrealistic) surrounding that game
- the preferences and choices of the DM
- the preferences and choices of the players
- the format/tools used by the group

"Real" risk is one possible example of DM and/or player preferences. "Pulling clever/powerful stunts" (I hesitate to say "doing cool things" since what is "cool" varies so greatly from person to person) is another, equally valid example--and that's just within that axis of variation.

Combat in RPGs covers far more than just challenging players & fun comes from far more things than just surviving risky situations. For me measuring out resources is not especially fun so minor attritional encounters bore me. Showing off my cool power is fun especially if it can be done creatively.

Similarly, some people may get a huge kick out of poring over their collection of miniatures, either to find inspiration (for a combat, an adventure, or potentially even an entire campaign) or to get *just* the right mini for a particular enemy to make it "come to life." Others may find it inconvenient or impossible to game in person, and thus only look for online games. Etc. All of these things can influence the experience of play, and make for a system much too rich and diverse to be summarized by even a highly robust dichotomy, let alone one as ill-defined as the alleged "war vs. sport" one.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Just curious @Hemlock, how you would proceed if you didn't have the larger/more powerful force? Perhaps try to break a large encounter that you couldn't win into several distinct pieces/ and or sneak your way past the main force and take out the enemy leader directly? Perhaps several tactically necessary small violent skirmishes along the way that are easy enough for your group to overcome with a riskier attack at the end where the reward is worth the risk of potential death?

Sure. That, or else lateral thinking/full-on Combat As War where instead of fighting the enemy you instead knock on the doors and offer to join them for a fee, and after three weeks of politicking/assassination/betrayals you are somehow now in command of the enemy army and can just march it straight into a meat grinder while your troops cheer your bravery. Personally I'm not so good at the latter kind of genius (I'm more tactical than truly strategic or insightful) and that kind of thing is hard to talk about on the Internet anyway because it's so situational and NPC-/DM-dependent.

Anyway, even if you try to address it through purely military means: I wouldn't call that multiple encounters--I'd call that one giant encounter which the players spend all session on--but regardless of what you call it, hit-and-run is a valid approach to whittling away a superior force in D&D. You need good mobility and ranged support to make it work, but it's quite viable. Adventurers are usually better than monsters at mobility and ranged combat anyway, and they're more resilient than NPC mooks, so one way or another there's usually a way to attain local superiority against anything smaller than company-sized elements. In my experience and opinion.

If the enemy force is just plain superior to you in all respects, either cut your losses and run, or if it's really important, stand and fight or die trying. "On death ground, fight!"

 

[harshman]

I recently ran a mini-campaign in which the PCs rarely had more than one fight in a day. The system does not seem to be built for this at all. I used Deadly XP budgets for nearly every fight because they had such an easy time with moderate XP combats.

 

[Magil]

I recently ran a mini-campaign in which the PCs rarely had more than one fight in a day. The system does not seem to be built for this at all. I used Deadly XP budgets for nearly every fight because they had such an easy time with moderate XP combats.

This is a fairly standard observation. System balance breaks down fairly quickly when you do not adhere to the 6-8 encounter (with 2 short rests) adventuring day. Some consider this acceptable, but many classes/archetypes are going to be significantly weaker than intended when the standard adventuring day is thrown out the window.

And for the record, this also applies to avoiding encounters, if no significant resources are drained in doing so.

 

[OB1]

[MENTION=6672353]Magil[/MENTION] - That is exactly my point with this thread. That you can make an adventuring day easier by avoiding encounters without spending significant resources. It also allows the DM to build a mission that, if confronted directly, would be far beyond what the party could handle, while still having the possibility of overcoming using the social or exploration pillars of the game. This gives a feel of Combat as War to a primarily Combat as Sport centered game (while not fully falling into the definition of either).
[MENTION=6813097]harshman[/MENTION] - This is absolutely the game running as intended. Barring below average rolls by the players, a deadly fight is only truly a challenge when it is part of a larger adventuring day. And 6-8 encounters aren't strictly necessary, you can run 2 deadlies and a hard with short rests between each and get roughly the same feel as long as you hit the daily XP budget with them.