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

[Fanaelialae]

The thing people forget about wizards is it's very easy for them to mess up. Cast the wrong spells and they can be completely ineffectual. If all you can do is hit things with a sword you are not going to get the blame when your bad choice leads to a TPK.

a) I'm having difficulty recalling a time at my table that a caster cast the wrong spell and caused a TPK. YMMV

b) A fighter can absolutely cause a TPK by engaging the wrong creature, thereby allowing the wrong enemies to engage the party backline and permitting the squishies to get squashed (or even just having to waste resources protecting themselves, rather than bringing a quick conclusion to the fight).

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I would love to see some actual data on the 5mwd, I strongly suspect that it bothers DMs far more than players. Recently watched all CR - Vox Machina and I noticed that Matt Mercer very frequently has only 1 encounter per long rest.
Though he also uses some super deadly encounters.

 

[Iosue]

That will teach me not to post at midnight. Well, not really, but I apparently shouldn't try to do math when tired.

I don't agree with the bolded portion. If you are expected to get 20,000xp, then not reaching that mark makes the encounters easier than the game is balanced for. The lower the amount of XP, the easier the day gets.

There are two things to consider:

Granted, the way it is worded in the DMG ("...how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day") is misleading. But because the table is explicitly an adjusted XP table, it can't be about how much XP is actually earned. Adjusted XP is only ever used as an encounter measurement.

Second, the Adventuring Day section is about giving the DM "a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters that the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest." Going over the threshold means going beyond what the characters can be expected to handle before needing a long rest. The game is not particularly prescriptive here, neither explicitly saying the threshold should be met, nor cautioning against going over it (though that would certainly be rough on the party).

At the same time, the math can be wonky. In our 6-level example, the Encounter XP thresholds/Adventuring Day XP fractions are rough! Easy Encounters are 13.33, Medium are 6.66, Hard are 4.44, and Deadly are 2.85. I don't think the game expects DMs to work out the exact configurations of encounters to hit the numbers exactly. But since going over the threshold would make it harder on the party, and the whole point of the table on p. 84 is so the DM can gauge the expected limits of what a party can handle, I can only assume, then, that getting near the number without going over is acceptable, and expected. After all, they know that most people are not going to be using this tool, but are going to be setting encounters to fit their story.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And in a highly social situation, quiet shy players can lose out. It's up to the DM to arrange encounters so everyone gets something to do. And that's going to depend on the players as much as the characters

And a player doesn't have to be rolling dice in order to be contributing. A fighter who says "why doesn't Wizard-Bob cast Detect Magic?" is contributing more than Wizard-Bob.

And yet, WotC and others continually release adventures that are usually very specific about what you do and how many encounters you...encounter. Maybe more attention in the books should be given to reading your players and crafting adventures for them rather than sell modules that won't be ideal for anyone and don't even enforce their own design parameters.

 

[Guest 7034872]

So I keep hearing how the best way to balance the game is a 6-8 encounter adventuring day for every adventuring day... putting aside that I feel that is way too gamest and unrealistic... does this mean combat? or does it mean all 3 pillars?

I suspect (only suspect--won't claim to know) they meant 6-8 potential combat encounters per day. While I heartily agree that that number feels off to the point of absurdity, I have to remind myself I'm thinking in terms of open-air adventures right now. For a dungeon crawl, 6-8/day actually doesn't seem excessive to me. Does it to you? But for open air stuff, yeah, that's way, way off.

I think about it and the fighter does his best work in fights. so if it really was meant to balance the casters it would almost HAVE to have more combat then anything else.

That's how I figure it, yeah.

 

[Micah Sweet]

A character only has 2 long rests PER LEVEL. Everything else works out.

(Maybe 3 long rests per level depending on taste.)

So, everything is a short rest. Except, twice per level, a player who needs it can convert one of the short rests into a long rest.

So the answer is to make it  more gamist?

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

As I've written elsewhere, in 5e I usually run big set piece fights, with as few meaningless small resource depletion fights as possible, preferably none at all, since they ain't fun for anyone.

That's why my new go to system for fantasy is Savage Pathfinder - there's no need for the boring stuff.

 

[Dausuul]

Skill checks and role-playing don't use up resources.

But utility spells do, which is the point--to push the casters into using magic for noncombat problems, thus draining some of their resources.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I see this as mainly a design error that accidentally removed noncombat options from the Fighter class.



The Fighter is great at combat. At the same time, every class is great combat, swapping damage for other combat effects.

(By the way, "combat" includes Stealth/Detection and Mobility/Barrier. So dual-use spells like Fly and True Sight still count as combat.)

The spellcasters are great at noncombat. At the same time, the Fighter sucks at noncombat.



This has nothing to do with an imbalance in combat.

It has everything to do with the designers forgetting to give the Fighter extra design space for the noncombat stuff.

Did they accidentally remove noncombat options from fighter every edition (except 4e, but that's another story)?

 

[Fanaelialae]

There's another factor, which is that the 6-8 encounter day is a kludgy solution. Not just from a DMing standpoint of having to include that many encounters. That can be addressed in a number of ways, from varying the length of your encounter days, to using waves of enemies in order to combine multiple encounters into one.

The issue, which I've witnessed on multiple occasions in my own games, is that the fighter's longevity (their alleged advantage over the wizard's "limited" spell slots) is contingent on luck.

I've seen front-line fighters eat a string of bad crits in the first encounter or three, and be forced into a second-rate backline role for the rest of the adventure day because they were out of hit dice and the party didn't have sufficient healing left to give them back a meaningful quantity of HP. I wouldn't say it's common, but I've seen it happen quite a few times and it really isn't a pretty sight.

It goes back to one of my fundamental criticisms of the 5e fighter, which is that even within their expected role, they aren't provided with great tools to accomplish their job. It's often just glossed over by a life cleric or the DM opting not to provoke opportunity attacks. (After the early levels, the damage from one attack isn't much of a deterrent from having monsters peel off to punish the back line, but most DMs, including your's truly, generally ignore that reality and choose to have the monster try to pound on the fighter. Mostly because otherwise the fighter will feel pretty useless, IME.)