D&D General 6-8 encounters (combat?)

[Micah Sweet]

MOST DEFINITELY!

As I said upthread, last night I ran an exploration encounter, a combat encounter, and then three social encounters.

Encounters aren't just combat--and I feel badly for any group whose DM thinks combat is the only type of encounter (hopefully no one actually does think that...).

Again, it's about resource depletion, which is SO much easier in combat without having your players riot that most folk only count that as an "encounter" for purposes of the adventuring day.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Is this more of a general guidance, like a "rule of thumb"? or is this an actual rule in the text somewhere? (Serious question, I promise I'm not trolling.) I only ask because until I saw these threads start cropping up on ENWorld, I had never even heard of the DM needing to adhere to a certain number of encounters per long rest. Now I see folks are starting to describe it as a rule.

I admit that it's been a minute or two since I've read the DMG from cover to cover, so it's possible I missed it.

It's the encounter building advice in the DMG.

Given that a lot of the adventures (some written by the designers themselves) don't follow those guidelines, I think it's pretty safe to say that it's not a hard and fast rule.

The idea that someone's campaign is suddenly house ruled if they throw in a one encounter adventure day seems preposterous to me.

That said, it is the default that the 5e adventure day is balanced around, so if you don't have much experience with the system, it's a good idea to follow it until you're more familiar.

Once you do so, however, you can start to do things like varying encounter frequency. That works pretty well IME. There's not a huge difference between a caster that's out of spells at the end of the day, versus a caster that still has spells left because they weren't sure whether they'd need them later.

And then there's always condensing multiple encounters into a single narrative encounter by having the enemies come in waves. This is often easily justified by having different groups of enemies nearby, who then rush to the scene when they hear the sounds of battle. As an added bonus, you can reward clever players, if they can somehow manage to take out each individual group without alerting the others.

Finally, if you have a really good feel for the system you can throw out the guidelines entirely and just build encounters to challenge your particular party. Since each party is unique (different compositions coupled with differing levels of player skill and optimization) this is well outside the bounds of what any kind of encounter building guidelines could realistically provide in the first place.

 

[Xamnam]

Is this more of a general guidance, like a "rule of thumb"? or is this an actual rule in the text somewhere? (Serious question, I promise I'm not trolling.) I only ask because until I saw these threads start cropping up on ENWorld, I had never even heard of the DM needing to adhere to a certain number of encounters per long rest. Now I see folks are starting to describe it as a rule.

I admit that it's been a minute or two since I've read the DMG from cover to cover, so it's possible I missed it.

P. 84

The Adventuring Day

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

I do think it's important to remember in discussions like this, that they foreground average luck and conditions, and this is the recommendation for if you want to come close to exhausting your party's resources. If that's not your goal, if you don't care about resource management or challenging the party on that specific front at the moment, there no reason to try and force that amount of combat into a single day just to hit that number arbitrarily.

 

[Fanaelialae]

It’s not an edition war, but more a play style preference.
The search for more symmetry, and more ressource management for fighters send the game into more strategic, management, balance concerns. It may be narrow thinking, but if the game insist more on those aspects, those who find satisfaction on other aspects will find less space.
Having a social encounter, and push all classes and players into the same ressource management paradigm make the game less fun in my sense.

Except that there's no need to push them into the same resource management paradigm. You seem to be dead set on leaping to false assumptions.

Let's just pretend for a second that the Ranger never existed. And let's pretend that the Fighter got something like the Ranger's Natural Explorer feature. In what way does that push the Fighter into the same resource management paradigm as the Wizard?

Simply put, it doesn't. Not even a little.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Again, it's about resource depletion, which is SO much easier in combat without having your players riot that most folk only count that as an "encounter" for purposes of the adventuring day.

Why do people keep thinking the game is about resource depletion? Sure, it is part of the game naturally, but that isn't what encounters are about.

Resources are there to be used or not as needed by the encounter, keeping in mind those resources might be needed later. That is the choice players have to make: now or later? (Of course, later might not come if they aren't used now, lol! )

Why would players riot? Riot against what??

Anyway, the "adventuring day" is unnecessary and pointless. At best it is a guideline for inexperienced DMs to help them gauge encounter difficulty and understand what is likely a party can reasonably handle. However, there are so many variables, it is a very loose gauge at that.

I mean, really, how "necessary" is it to follow such guidelines when nearly 60% of the poll doesn't even bother with it? I mean, I know this is a small sample, and more experienced DMs are less likely to bother with it, and IME newer DMs often have never read about it.

 

[tetrasodium]

So why is it bothering the DM if the players do not care or notice. What does it matter to the DM if the party chooses a 5MWD?

Personally I generally do not care about general encounters. I will try and make Boss Fight hard or deadly but I generally do not put a clock or force the pace.
I have noticed though that players tend to overestimate the difficulty of encounters and I try to push the party a little further if I am a player.

It creates situation where the gm is forced into choosing between a MAD style arms race of escalating encounters, a boring snooze of "trash" encounters in loop, or an escalating workload pushed onto the GM to thwart those with things like tuckers kobolds or bulletproof doom clocks that require an ever growing amount of prep & overhead to prepare & run.

 

[CleverNickName]

@UngainlyTitan @Fanaelialae @Xamnam Thanks for the clarification, I had indeed missed it.

It's a strange bit of advice, isn't it? I started playing D&D with the red-box Basic rules back in 1986, and there wasn't any such guidance offered. I guess I got accustomed to having the game having a certain pace to it, and that pace hasn't really changed. The rules for THAC0 and save throws and such have changed, but I still run the game more or less the same way that I've run it for decades.

I'm starting a new campaign in a few weeks. After spending the last couple of years as a player, I'm taking my seat again in the DM's Chair (where I'm most comfortable, tbh). My previous DM had been using milestone leveling, which we later came to understand as "we will level-up whenever the DM gives us permission to" and we kinda hate it. Well, I prefer to track individual XP (see the paragraph above), and I award XP for more than just killing things. But now I'm going to be wondering if I have the right amount of combat in my game, for the first time in 30+ years.

Eh. This rule isn't going to work for me. It's trying to fix a problem that I've never had, in a way that I would never try.

 

[Xamnam]

As long as you and your players are happy, that's the far more important thing than "filling" out adventuring days! Good luck to your campaign!

 

[Maxperson]

I believe they are few and far between... but I have met some.

I haven't, thankfully.

 

[Fanaelialae]

@UngainlyTitan @Fanaelialae @Xamnam Thanks for the clarification, I had indeed missed it.

It's a strange bit of advice, isn't it? I started playing D&D with the red-box Basic rules back in 1986, and there wasn't any such guidance offered. I guess I got accustomed to having the game having a certain pace to it, and that pace hasn't really changed. The rules for THAC0 and save throws and such have changed, but I still run the game more or less the same way that I've run it for decades.

I'm starting a new campaign in a few weeks. After spending the last couple of years as a player, I'm taking my seat again in the DM's Chair (where I'm most comfortable, tbh). My previous DM had been using milestone leveling, which we later came to understand as "we will level-up whenever the DM gives us permission to" and we kinda hate it. Well, I prefer to track individual XP (see the paragraph above), and I award XP for more than just killing things. But now I'm going to be wondering if I have the right amount of combat in my game, for the first time in 30+ years.

Eh. This rule isn't going to work for me. It's trying to fix a problem that I've never had, in a way that I would never try.

I can't recall any encounter building guidelines in Basic.

I think that 1e and 2e had some basic guidelines, though they were buried so deep in the DMG that I wasn't even aware of them until a few years ago.

3e is the first edition that had encounter and daily guidelines that were clearly presented and explained. It also pioneered Challenge Rating for monsters.

5e is similar to 3e, except that where 3e had an expectation of 4 encounters per day, 5e goes for 6-8 as the default.

Even though 6-8 is a bit much, I think a set of guidelines is nice to have. I started with the black box and, while I have a deep and abiding love for that set, I remember not having a clue as to how to design a proper encounter (one that would neither be a cakewalk nor a slaughter). I did manage to muddle through, but I tended to have weaker encounters as a result (because I was always afraid I'd steamroll the PCs).

While I do think that DMs, particularly experienced ones, can get by without such guidelines, I think they're nice to have nonetheless, particularly as a "sanity check". For inexperienced DMs, they're especially nice, since they take a lot of the guesswork out of encounter design and therefore allow them to focus more on creating a fun game, IMO.