6-8 Encounters a long rest is, actually, a pretty problematic idea.

[5ekyu]

Precisely. The benchmark numbers do not dictate what has to happen in your campaign. Mandatory encounter numbers also remove player choice. If the party is on an encounter treadmill then what is the point of making strategic decisions? Some sessions may be encounter heavy and some may be spent doing activities that don't lead to many if any, resource draining encounters such as research, or information gathering. Encounters in these situations may be purely role play based or require skill use but cramming resource draining events into these activities just for the sake of doing so could ruin the natural flow of activity in the campaign.

I don't want to be on the same roads as some folks after they see thr commercials saying gas mileage is based on standard speed 55 etc. After all, that means they are forced to drive 55, right?

 

[CapnZapp]

[SARCASM]

Not sure why you're so passive-aggressive you even need to put your words in my mouth.

I love 5th edition. It is by far the best edition I've seen or played.

What it is not, however, is flawless. You just need to learn to live with that.

 

[Oofta]

Not sure why you're so passive-aggressive you even need to put your words in my mouth.

I love 5th edition. It is by far the best edition I've seen or played.

What it is not, however, is flawless. You just need to learn to live with that.

I didn't think I was being all that passive.

Listen, we all get our rant on now and then. I know I do. But I also try to even that out with solutions and examples of how I addressed issues in my games. Maybe it's just that the threads I've hit lately where you post you've been all Negative Nancy while being completely unhelpful. Maybe it's just been a long week [EDIT: just to clarify, I'm the one who has had a long week and am being overly-sarcastic] .

So how do you deal with this issue in your game? What solutions have you come up with? What worked or didn't work? No game is perfect so how do you make it better?

I may not agree, your solutions may not work for my game or my style but I'm interested in what other people have to say. It's why I'm active on this message board.

 

[Tony Vargas]

As someone who has run quite a few 3E, Pathfinder, and 4E D&D games and only a handful of 5E D&D games, I have to say that running large numbers of encounters in a 'workday' is problematic for two reasons:


1) A lot of players get very disengaged by their character going 'I Fire Bolt it.' 'I Fire Bolt it.' 'I Fire Bolt it.' repeatedly because they have to budget their abilities.

Less of a problem the more & more varied encounter/short-rest abilities each character has. A party of Warlocks, Battlemasters, and Monks would ameliorate that problem, for instance...
...though I guess the lack of healing could be an issue.

There are a lot of players who legit don't mind describing how they're swinging their sword after taking the Attack action ten rounds in a row

I've heard that, too - more often I see players who are just happy to spam a high-damage attack and get excited about high rolls & crits.

2) If things go south and the players end up blowing a lot of their abilities in the first one or two encounters, they feel like you're picking on them as you drag their characters through the rest of the gauntlet. This is also true if the players are casual or new to the group and aren't in tune with how D&D structures workdays. They aren't going to be sympathetic to your rejoinder of 'that's just bad luck/you not getting the rhythm of the game; better budget your abilities better next time'

That can be an issue, sure. But to the extent the game is /designed/ to work on a specific pacing, in order for encounters to be challenging and classes to at least spot-light balance, at least theoretically, you can't just let the party that overplays it's first encounter or two off the hook, you need to hammer them the remainder of the day to make them regret that choice so they won't do it again. If you fall into the 5MWD rut, you'll be making over-leveled encounters to 'challenge' the party, who will pull out all the stops to win, and then be forced to rest again. Aside from the class imbalances that style brings to the surface, the level of challenge presented by encounters becomes increasingly brittle, as the party 'novas' to annihilate the day's encounter makes it seem 'too easy' and by the time your crank it up enough to appear challenging, you set up the potential for a TPK of the anticipated nova doesn't quite go off (someone blows a roll or misses their cue, and suddenly PCs are dropping).

I also think that 6-8 encounters does violence to the narrative of action-adventure fiction (since it's a D&D-specific trope that doesn't have genre or metafictional justification) that can only be justified as a gameplay/story tradeoff

It's not like it's the only thing about D&D that runs starkly counter to genre.

but that's a separate discussion altogether. Just speaking from a gameplay perspective, it disengages certain kinds of players and I'm getting rather tired of boards like these treating such players as powergamers or n00bs.

That's the least of the problem, IMHO. It's the kind of issue that can end up giving a prospective new player a poor first experience with the game.

Look, I've played a lot of 5E D&D. I like the game a lot. I played since it first came out and I play a combination of home, online, and AL games an average of 8 hours every week.
I have, however, not DMed a lot of 5E D&D. That's there for full disclosure.

It is very different from the other side of the screen. DM Empowerment is a very real thing, and you can use it to run the best game you can, or for some other agenda...

I DM'd AD&D (1e & 2e both) for a long time, and running 5e comes easily because of that hard-won experience. I doubt 3e/4e DMing experience would translate quite as well. But one of the things about the classic game was an expectations of characters managing their precious daily resources, in order to clear/explore as much of the dungeon as possible, because it was prettymuch a given that when you walked away from it to rest, treasure was going to get up and walk away and new monsters move in, or some rival adventurers were going to white tornado the place while you were gone. 'Gold rush economy' was about more than just inflation.

I've never used the encounter building guidelines in the DMG until just recently. One of the things that surprised me was that I overran my daily XP budget front loading the adventuring day with one hard and one deadly encounter. Basically, the math provides you with 6 MEDIUM encounters... +1 easy encounter, if you really want to hit your max budget

Keep in mind that the budget is for exp the party gains, but that the difficult modifier for being outnumbered doesn't add to exp earned, just to difficulty. So there's a fairly large amount of wiggle-room, there.

We've heard all of this before. All those reports of 5E being the most popular version ever? Fake news.

To be fair, 5e took 3+ years to move the kind of units that TSR was doing at the height of the 80s fad, each year.

 

[flametitan]

I don't understand.

Why would you nerf spells if you remove a power? The logical thing would be to compensate them for your loss?

The flow of progression I believe Blue's referring to is as follows: Without cantrips you'd need more spell slots (lest we run into the issue of, "I cast my one spell for the day, I'll wait for you back at the tavern"), and that more spell slots would necessarily require weaker spells so as to not overshadow the fighter constantly. As of now, what we have is that throwing a levelled spell is a cool moment while the fighter keeps doing their thing and shining in between the cool spell moments.

 

[cooperjer]

I understand the OP to be seeking a game where the players can use cool abilities a majority of the time. The question might be asked, "Why does a wizard need to use Firebolt repetitively, in an action game based in fantasy?" I would say this is a good question, and my initial thought is that D&D 5e is not built for that style of play. I don't feel it's a set of rules that support a high action style of game. I get the impression from watching Crawford and Mearls interviews that the game is built with a set of rules that allow for many different types of games to be played, while pulling from historical D&D iconic flavor. The net result is a game that doesn't really lend itself to a lot of continuous action, or a lot of continuous intrigue, or a lot of continuous horror, etc.

In my experience as a DM, I can say the AL game I run is usually 6 - 8 encounters between long rests. In the game I let the players know approximately what time of day it is, i.e. about lunch time, or early evening. This helps them pace their resources. In my home game, I design encounters using the recommended daily XP budget and use my experience on how the PCs have performed with similar encounters. The will usually utilize 60% of their daily XP budget before they feel like a rest is needed. In some cases they use 75% of the daily XP. I don't track encounters per rest day, but most encounters are 12% to 20% of their daily XP.

Is there a game rule set that lends itself to high action and adventure gaming?

 

[Tony Vargas]

Is there a game rule set that lends itself to high action and adventure gaming?

There's plenty that try: 4e, 13A, BW, DW, PbtA, BESM, GURPS Cinematic, 7th Sea...

The flow of progression I believe Blue's referring to is as follows: Without cantrips you'd need more spell slots (lest we run into the issue of, "I cast my one spell for the day, I'll wait for you back at the tavern"), and that more spell slots would necessarily require weaker spells so as to not overshadow the fighter constantly. As of now, what we have is that throwing a levelled spell is a cool moment while the fighter keeps doing their thing and shining in between the cool spell moments.

The rudimentary balance-math might be a little different, though. Your unlimited-use abilities establish a base line. A weapon-user with OK weapons & not much else (like the Cleric) and a cantrip-user (wizard &c) are both kind a 'meh' in that area, their unlimited-use baseline is lower than that of a fighter with the best weapons, feats & combat style belting out the DPR. The daily or short-rest spell resources make up that gap, and, over an assumed 6-8 encounters/day, that's a lot to make up. If the baseline is stabbing ineffectually with a dagger or tossing darts or whatever, then the gap over 6-8 encounters is wider, and the caster can get more and/or more powerful spells to make it up.

 

[Satyrn]

I understand the OP to be seeking a game where the players can use cool abilities a majority of the time.

Yeah that's what I see, too

. . . but I'm also mildly amused that conjuring bolt of flame isn't cool.

 

[Oofta]

Yeah that's what I see, too

. . . but I'm also mildly amused that conjuring bolt of flame isn't cool.

Yeah, if you had a build that could spam Disintegrate every round how boring would that be! Set phasers on vaporize!

 

[Sacrosanct]

I apologize if this has been covered and I missed it, but I see a couple things of note here

* there seems to be an association between "adventuring day" with "gaming session." I.e., you don't need to cram in 6-8 encounters per gaming session where PCs just spam firebolt and then get bored. And adventuring day can be over in a second (nothing happens), or an entire adventure can take place over the course of a single adventure day that may take several sessions.

* resource management is important. If players expend all of their resources in the first encounter or two, then it's sort of on them to live with the consequences of doing so. If they get bored spamming fire bolt, why did they blow all their spells in the first encounter? this is doubly odd to me when I hear people complain about things like : 1st couple encounters: blows all their resources (game is too easy!), next couple of encounters say it's boring and so they do short and long rests between only every few encounters (the encounter system is broken!). If players don't dictate when a rest is available, but what is going on in the game world does, and they manage their resources by not blowing them all at once, I'm sure the game will feel much more balanced. if you allows rests whenever the players want, and players blow all of their resources at once, no wonder why people have the impression the game is too easy