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

[Oofta]

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...

Back to the old canard that I think D&D is perfect? Bored now.

No game with the complexity, flexibility and options that D&D has can be perfect, nor can it account for every scenario. Instead of constantly whining about it, I try to share ideas on how to deal with those issues. You should surprise everyone and try it some time.

 

[CM]

I never paid attention to those guidelines, and chances are you'd be OK ignoring them as well. If the party is just exploring a ruin with nothing pressing them for time, there's no reason they shouldn't be as safe as possible, and trying to artificially boost encounter numbers is silly.

On the other hand, if the party always has enough other goals occupying their thoughts that they will want to move quickly, they're naturally going to take more risks.

Throw in at least a rumor or two that appeals to each character. Maybe the paladin hears about some injustice that needs to be righted, or the ranger/druid hears about woodlands being clearcut by orcs, or the cleric hears rumors about a recovered relic, or the wizard hears about a spellbook auction in the next town over.

Nobody's going to ever want to rest anymore.

 

[Rhenny]

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. 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, but there are a lot of players who DO in fact mind, and I think it's both projectionist and unfair how the gaming community paints the former group as Proper Roleplayers Making The Best Use Of A Limited Toolkit and the latter group as Dirty Powergaming Munchkins Who Want To Show Off All The Time.


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', especially if it runs up against caveat one.

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 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.

I see what you are saying and for some players, you are totally correct. I was lucky to have started playing D&D in the late 70s with a wizard pc and I quickly learned that conserving spell power, etc. was beneficial and it became part of the fun of the game for me. I know that other people don't really love that type of game.

That said, by having a variety of encounters (some not even combat encounters or combat that can be avoided by clever play/use of spells, etc.) a DM can train players to enjoy all three pillars of the game (combat, exploration and interaction) so that 6-8 encounters goes by without the grind. I really like to think less about encounters and more about how the pcs spend time in the game. If they spend 10-12 hours investigating, exploring and interacting with the environment and NPCs in the world, with 3-4 combats sprinkled within (probably more like hard encounters, but I always like variety), an adventuring day passes and it seems pretty organic to me.

Also, I do think that it is the DMs job to provide ample opportunities for PCs to rest when they feel it makes the game more fun. If the PCs have a tough time in an encounter and they have to nurse themselves back to health, and I still want them to fear, I can throw a less dangerous encounter at them as they try to find a place to rest or as they retreat from a dangerous environment. Nothing, not even what's written in pre-written adventures needs to be "as written."

 

[cmad1977]

Eh. Not seeing it.

 

[flametitan]

I've not had issues with when/how often my party rests in my games, but then my group isn't the type to game the rest system, either because they don't think to, because I've shown my enemies capable of counter planning against overdoing resting strategies, or because they consider it disrespectful to me as a DM to trivialize the work I put into the game and encounters.

 

[Sacrosanct]

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.

The DMG actually explicitly tells you that as the DM, you need to breathe life into the monsters and NPCs. People who refuse to do that, and then try to call the game broken? One of the more dumb arguments I’ve ever seem.

It’s like playing RISK without using the cards and then complaining how the game isn’t working. That’s bad enough, but to then accuse anyone who doesn’t agree with such crazy logic that THEY have a problem and can’t admit fault? Wow.

 

[Oofta]

The DMG actually explicitly tells you that as the DM, you need to breathe life into the monsters and NPCs. People who refuse to do that, and then try to call the game broken? One of the more dumb arguments I’ve ever seem.

It’s like playing RISK without using the cards and then complaining how the game isn’t working. That’s bad enough, but to then accuse anyone who doesn’t agree with such crazy logic that THEY have a problem and can’t admit fault? Wow.

That whole conversation reminded me of an old computer game from the Pool of Radiance era. The game would let you attempt a long rest and heal anywhere, but there was always a chance of being interrupted by a random encounter.

So in one section, the party was in a collapsing tower, climbing a staircase, rocks falling from the ceiling. We were badly hurt, almost out of spells, about to face the big bad. Tense, time critical scene right? Well...not really. I just kept hitting the long rest button until we weren't interrupted by falling rocks. We probably spent weeks in that collapsing staircase.

I get the impression that certain people would allow similar shenanigans unless there was boxed text in a mod that specifically disallowed it. That, much like a computer game, encounters are not really triggered until some specific event (usually opening a door to the room with the next set of monsters) happens. Maybe not to the level of the collapsing tower, but obviously you could take out the first third of a goblin stronghold and expect no changes to behavior from the rest of the goblins while the party rests for 8 hours.

I can't imagine why anyone would think that was the best way to run a game, but to each their own. Modules, encounters per day guidelines, XP budgets, et al. are a starting point and will always need to be adjusted based on DM style, options used and the group.

 

[GameOgre]

For me it's all about character freedom to behave as close to believable as we can get. If the characters feel that a rest is important and want to attempt to rest then I will let them.

Now that also means they have the freedom to fail if time is important and the freedom to make a bad call if trying to rest in a area unwise to try and rest in.

My game isn't set up by encounters so it matters not at all to me if they fight once and then rest or 10 battles and then rest. However, there is ALWAYS consequences for everything they do. If nothing else the consequence is time has passed and npc's and monsters ect will have done things in that time.

One of my players asked me after a particularly difficult day of adventuring"How were we supposed to rescue those villagers in that time frame? There were so many of the enemy and we had such a short time to make the attempt before they reached there lair."

My response was this.

"You are not supposed to do anything but what you decide to do. That was not created as a rescue mission adventure but instead just something that happened that you could interact with in whatever way you guys wanted. There was no planning for you guys to succeed or fail but instead what would those monsters and villagers do in that situation. The villagers desperate and hurt wanting to be rescued and those monsters wanting to capture and loot and bring slaves back to their lair in the best way possible for them."

The Adventure is that you guys are supposed to be Heroes and that sometimes no matter what the odds you pull a win out of utter disaster and tragedy or sometimes die heroic deaths defending others or in a lot of cases through greed and avarice get yourselves in situations with no way out but somehow manage to win the day anyway."

 

[Sacrosanct]

I get the impression that certain people would allow similar shenanigans unless there was boxed text in a mod that specifically disallowed it. .

You know what? That doesn't even bother me to be honest. If someone wants to play that way, then sure. Whatever their table wants to do to have fun. I think the thing that gets me is the...well...I think hypocrisy is the right word for it. I will admit, hypocrisy is one of my low tolerance things. The game is designed in a certain way. That way explicitly tells you what to do (rules), and one of those things is that the DM has a certain job to do when running the game. It flat out tells you in black and white in the DMG that the DM needs to breath life into monsters and NPCs, and run them like living thinking beings. Things like flavor text in the MM are just as important as attack stats. And INT stat is just as important as a DEX stat as far as how you play a monster is. These are things that are part of the game.

So when someone is too lazy to use any of that or to follow the rules of how the game is designed and calls other people lazy for not designing the game exactly how they want to play, that is just pure hypocrisy to me. On top of that, it's one of the most illogical arguments one can have. We all have preferences, so expecting the designers to design the game exactly how you want it is pretty much impossible. Especially if your preferences are in the minority of gamers. In what bizaroo world would that ever make sense from either a business standpoint, or fan based standpoint? I've designed games, and the only time I've designed a game where I wanted a specific feel that most gamers wouldn't be drawn to is when it was my own project and I didn't care how many other people played it. Pretty sure that's not WotC's mission statement with D&D lol.

So yeah. If someone wants to change or ignore rules to play a certain way, then more power to them. I will never accuse them of being badwrong. But you have to realize that doing so means the onus is on you for modifying the game to fit your preferences because it's not designed to do that out of the box. I do have a real problem with people who make these arguments:

"I'm ignoring huge swaths of the rules, but I say the game is broken, and if you don't agree, then you're just an apologist who thinks the game is perfect."
"I love the game, even though I've never said a good thing about it, but instead I'm always saying how I hate how the classes, races, combat, monsters, treasure, spells, feats, etc are designed."

Being a DM requires work. If you don't like to do any work, don't be a DM.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

You are right it does require work, it was so much work rewriting the modules/AP that I found I was doing more work than if I just ran my own. So I just switched to a different game that works better, I can see how someone who is stuck with gaming at the store or in AL could be screwed though.