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

[CapnZapp]

Wait, do you mean run a small number of encounters, most of which are high difficulty, or do you mean continue to run 6-8 encounters but run fewer high difficulty ones?

I tried the former with my overpowered group and it only exacerbated the problem. More difficult encounters meant the players tried to find more rest opportunities and the 15 minute workday became a 5 minute workday. When I switched to the latter I found the group did more role-play because not every encounter was a death-match and they tried to find opportunities to conserve their best powers.

Both are valid approaches. If you want a more combat oriented game, go with 2-4 higher difficulty encounters. If you want a more role-play focused game, go with 6-8 easier encounters. I find mixing it up within the same group can be fun too.

The solution, of course, is to take the rest decision out of the players hands.

If the game is set up so, idunno, for example: "you cannot long rest until you've had six encounters" (any type: hard, easy, non-combat...) then you get the focus on resource allocation the game purports to be about.

It also means all the time wasted on getting out of the game challenge is saved.

It also means all the time the DM wastes on trying to force consequences on a resting party is saved.

For instance, everything about that example with the hobgoblins trying to bury a Tiny Hut and set it on fire is to me to lose what the game is about.

The game isn't about setting up rules, guidelines and expectations... And then spending your time exploring what happens when you try to wiggle out of that.

Why would I want to waste my time on NOT having the adventure? A DM that comes up with these hobgoblin arsonists isn't thinking of the adventure, he's rewarding the players that try to cheat the system with a new adventure.

If players short-circuit challenges, the best response is to simply say: "congratulations, you have successfully completed the adventure and saved all the princesses, with no risk to yourselves. Game over."

Do that enough times, and your players should realize that the whole frikkin point of D&D is to expose yourself to danger.

Not spend your time avoiding it!

 

[CapnZapp]

Tldr'ing my previous post:

Players that try to get out of the adventure should be "rewarded", not with new challenges, but with exactly that: no adventure.

 

[CapnZapp]

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.

Possible solutions that really does away with the problem all rely on removing generous ways of avoiding the consequence for using up all your resources in the first few encounters of the day.

In no particular order:
1) remove or heavily nerf all the spells/abilities that facilitate this consequence-avoiding: at low levels Rope Trick and Tiny Hut. At higher levels it does become nearly impossible, since you need to remove Tree Stride, Teleport, Planar Shift, Etherealness. On the bright side, at higher levels it gets easier to get narrative permission to fix this: "you're sucked into a vortex, and now you're on King Evil's home plane, from which you can only escape by killing him" is much more considered fair at high level.
2) significantly buff monster skills, so that the party's bonuses aren't so overwhelmingly superior. D&D used to be a game where monsters could lurk in the dark.
3) outright remove the whole encounter-avoiding subgame. Perhaps by
a) changing the rest rules, such as I have done for my Tomb of Annihilation game. In order to keep jungle encounters relevant for my party that arrive to Chult at level 5, I've said the undead curse makes long rests in jungle hexes impossible.
b) perhaps as simply as having an out-of-game discussion with your players "as you know, the core of why D&D is fun and exciting is the challenge of combat. Rope Trick cheats you out of that challenge. So how about agreeing to let the game work as intended, and I'll do my best to keep to the recommended daily XP budgets as the DM. On the other hand, doing all that encounter building seems pointless if all you do is rest to trivialize it all."

Maybe these suggestions are in a particular order after all, since I would say they're listed in order from least to most useful. Trying to remove spells and abilities is a fool's errand. Just magically getting players to agree to not using these spells and abilities to remove the challenge from the game is of course the quickest and least laborious.

 

[5ekyu]

Sometimes, i use overt story pressure... There are known by the characters important timing issues. (The gnolls will be eating the captives.)

Sometimes i use covert timing pressure... There are unknown to the characters critical timing issues. (There will be a shipment sent out at dawn, taking half the captives and most of the best loot... and if the characters arrive after that they get the same fight for a fraction of the gains.)

Sometimes the circumstances and situations make it obvious. (If we rope trick here, half way thru they will react to our unfinished raid.)

Sometimes i have none of the above and really dont care (a lot of "travel" fits this bill.)

Sometimes the boss is an early encounter.

Having seen all the above, and more varied, options more than once my,players dont take rests for granted or as givens.

 

[Rhenny]

No, they don't.

If the game didn't offer a dozen ways to escape having to have that final encounter of the day (by resting before you have it), then yes.

But it does, so no.

The key is to make sure the PCs don't actually know when and how difficult the last encounter will be.

And, as long as the party can sneak in that hour rest, they should. I don't see anything wrong with
Resting when needed. I do it all the time in real life. Lol.

Funny thing happened when we played Lost Mines of Phandelver and entered the Wave Echo Cave. We explored deep into cave had only 3 encounters before by sheer luck we found the boss room. It surprised the heck out of us. We rested one time before that and when we had to run because we could not handle the boss fight (and a few other toughies who heard the commotion) we had to rest again. My character had to use Rope Trick both times to allow us to hide and rest. We were challenged, we had fun, we survived (barely), and my pc had to keep 2 second level spells in reserve to allow us the escape and rest.

 

[Rhenny]

The counter to this argument is that, if the party might have a hard encounter coming up and there's no way for them to predict it, then they will force a rest whenever they get to a point where they are operating at less-than-optimal capacity. It's the same reason why you can't run a party out of resources by using only super-deadly encounters. If the next fight might kill them, then they must be prepared to face it.

To contrast, if encounter difficulty is easily predictable, then players won't be reluctant to keep moving forward - as long as they're confident in their ability to win the next encounter, and still get out safely.

I see what you mean, but to me, resting when possible seems like a natural choice for adventurers facing unknown danger. Resting only when the group knows a big encounter is in the next room seems contrived.

If short rest is 1hour, how many times has it really been abused in actual games. In the games I've played in and DMd, PCs rest an average of 2 times per adventuring day, sometimes 3, sometimes only once, and some days not at all. I don't exactly know why it happens this way, but it does seem to create a bell curve with 2 being the median.

 

[Oofta]

No, they don't.

If the game didn't offer a dozen ways to escape having to have that final encounter of the day (by resting before you have it), then yes.

But it does, so no.

Which might be true if D&D had the logic capacity of a video game. Fortunately there's a DM who can make decisions and have the opponents take logical actions. For example:

PCs: after invading the Goblin Grotto of Gloominess, decide to Rope Trick up to safety after the first handful of encounters.

Goblins: investigating why Glimple the Gorgeous (he really was quite charismatic for a goblin) didn't show up for his afternoon manicure, find his burnt and broken body. Calling for reinforcements, they find that all the carnage was in a linear line and stopped at room G5 (all rooms in GGG start with G). To be safe the goblins call for more reinforcements, set up traps in corridor #5 and 6 (GGGC5 and GGGC6). They also collapse tunnel GGC7 because it's in such poor repair it was probably going to collapse soon anyway. Gorble the Gimpy was "volunteered" for this task. He will be remembered.

So after a long rest, the PCs now face traps, additional patrols, everyone is now on high alert and carrying Goblin Gongs to sound a warning and the adventure is much, much more difficult if not deadly. Much of the treasure, including the famed Gigantic Golden Goblet that was what started this whole quest have been moved to a safer location and is no longer prominently displayed in the trophy case.

TLDR: Dungeons are not static. Lose the element of surprise and the dungeon becomes much more difficult as the enemy sets up traps, ambushes and calls for reinforcements.

 

[CapnZapp]

Which might be true if D&D had the logic capacity of a video game. Fortunately there's a DM who can make decisions and have the opponents take logical actions. For example:

PCs: after invading the Goblin Grotto of Gloominess, decide to Rope Trick up to safety after the first handful of encounters.

Goblins: investigating why Glimple the Gorgeous (he really was quite charismatic for a goblin) didn't show up for his afternoon manicure, find his burnt and broken body. Calling for reinforcements, they find that all the carnage was in a linear line and stopped at room G5 (all rooms in GGG start with G). To be safe the goblins call for more reinforcements, set up traps in corridor #5 and 6 (GGGC5 and GGGC6). They also collapse tunnel GGC7 because it's in such poor repair it was probably going to collapse soon anyway. Gorble the Gimpy was "volunteered" for this task. He will be remembered.

So after a long rest, the PCs now face traps, additional patrols, everyone is now on high alert and carrying Goblin Gongs to sound a warning and the adventure is much, much more difficult if not deadly. Much of the treasure, including the famed Gigantic Golden Goblet that was what started this whole quest have been moved to a safer location and is no longer prominently displayed in the trophy case.

TLDR: Dungeons are not static. Lose the element of surprise and the dungeon becomes much more difficult as the enemy sets up traps, ambushes and calls for reinforcements.

All of that is entirely reasonable.

As long as it's all detailed in the module, and I don't need to invent it on the fly.

If the module doesn't spend a single line on how to react to invasions, and is meant to be completed with no long rests, I far prefer rules that...

...doesnt actively allow/encourage the complete ruination of the challenge level of said module.

In short. Don't allow the players to turn an exciting balanced line of encounters unto two utterly trivial lines, if the game offloads the entire work of restoring any semblance of excitement to those two half-lines onto the poor DM.

 

[Oofta]

All of that is entirely reasonable.

As long as it's all detailed in the module, and I don't need to invent it on the fly.

If the module doesn't spend a single line on how to react to invasions, and is meant to be completed with no long rests, I far prefer rules that...

...doesnt actively allow/encourage the complete ruination of the challenge level of said module.

In short. Don't allow the players to turn an exciting balanced line of encounters unto two utterly trivial lines, if the game offloads the entire work of restoring any semblance of excitement to those two half-lines onto the poor DM.

All I can say is that we take a fundamentally different approach to DMing. If everything has to be spoon-fed to you and you think it would even be possible to write mods (or rules) to encompass all groups, play styles and possible actions no wonder you think 5E is FUBAR. A mod is a framework for an adventure, IMHO it takes a DM to bring the mod to life and no amount of text, flowcharts or sidebars is going to do that for you.

You're asking for the impossible. Good luck with that.

 

[CapnZapp]

You're asking for the impossible. Good luck with that.

Congratulations on a new high in mixing hyperbole and strawmanning.

I call out the screaming inconsistency between what the rules want you to think and what they actually allow. I ask for official variants on resting, that publicly acknowledge this.

You call that impossible. Yeah right.

Know what I think is impossible? You ever accepting 5E is less than perfect, and more to the point: you abstaining from immediately denying any problems any time I bring one up...