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

[UngainlyTitan]

Seriously?

Yes seriously, they designed the game. If they do not care about this thing, why should anyone else?

 

[tetrasodium]

Yes seriously, they designed the game. If they do not care about this thing, why should anyone else?

because "I don't know about Dave's game, I feel like he's always favoring bob with the game he designs. When was the last time you saw poor alice in the spotlight? What does Dave have against Alice?" Dave has a very good reason to care

 

[James Gasik]

WotC has never been concerned by the rules or balance that they set up when they make adventures. When 3e was out, you found many more magic items in their adventures than the DMG said should be in an adventure. Adventures made by them should not be looked to when discussing balance or the rules.

To be fair TSR did the same thing. I played under many AD&D DM's who claimed that treasure and magic items should be rare as hen's teeth, but one official adventure later, you've got spare +1 longswords and rings of protection to go around, lol.

 

[James Gasik]

because "I don't know about Dave's game, I feel like he's always favoring bob with the game he designs. When was the last time you saw poor alice in the spotlight? What does Dave have against Alice?" Dave has a very good reason to care

I feel sorry for Dave, being a DM can be a thankless job.

 

[iserith]

It is however something GMs get blamed for when it's off. If bob is dominating nearly every combat in Dave's campaign in a way that makes Alice feel ineffective & lacking a chance to shine she's not going to blame wotc because Dave can't make balanced encounters just as she's not going to blame wotc because Dave can't effectively spread spotlight time around instead of always favoring Bob.

Dave should definitely get some blame here, as should Bob in my view. Alice might also try being happy that Bob's character's effectiveness benefits everyone in the group, and seek to figure out how she can get a more equitable share of the spotlight.

Or they can go on the internet and complain about balance endlessly or make claims that achieving 6 to 8 encounters per adventuring day is somehow an impossible task, I suppose. I don't think that's a particularly good solution as compared to the group figuring it out together by talking about it and making change.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

It is however something GMs get blamed for when it's off. If bob is dominating nearly every combat in Dave's campaign in a way that makes Alice feel ineffective & lacking a chance to shine she's not going to blame wotc because Dave can't make balanced encounters just as she's not going to blame wotc because Dave can't effectively spread spotlight time around instead of always favoring Bob.

I am not 100% sure what you are getting at here because you seem to be using "Spotlight" in the sense that Bob is more effective than Alice. But this is much more likely to be a thing where Bob is better a building a combat character than Alice in a combat focused campaign. The main way for it to be the DM's fault is where Alice builds a melee focused character but the DM makes all the encounters ranged.
I have never really seen the encounter numbers per long rest have more than a marginal impact.

 

[Maxperson]

Yes seriously, they designed the game. If they do not care about this thing, why should anyone else?

Cigarette manufacturers don't care about the cancer causing chemicals in the products they design, why should anyone else?

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Cigarette manufacturers don't care about the cancer causing chemicals in the products they design, why should anyone else?

We have gone around this a couple of times and I have said my piece. There is little point in continuing.

 

[James Gasik]

I for one, don't have the time to pack many encounters into a session. Nor do I think making my players wait months to gain any kind of meaningful benefit from their adventuring careers, or weeks to recover their abilities, is particularly worthwhile.

My groups gain a sense of satisfaction out of watching their characters improve and gain new abilities. That's not universal, but I can't be alone in this.

Since gaining a level might not even necessarily give you more than hit points and a ribbon ability, based on the precise level and class, and gold quickly becomes useless unless I step in and give it a good use, having an adventuring "day" take 2-3 sessions, when I'm lucky to get my group together twice a month, just doesn't work.

So when I prepare encounters, I make sure the individual encounter is something they can handle, and I let them rest when it's logical for them to be able to do so. Even though some profess this makes the game "easy mode", I have seen characters die in sessions I run, and I even have a TPK (sort of) under my belt (black dragon fight in Forge of Fury, at a certain point I told the survivors that if they wanted to flee, I'd allow it, and end the adventure, rather than watch them get destroyed. It took a few minutes, but they ultimately decided to take my deal).

Now I'm not saying I'm some kind of gifted DM when it comes to making encounters- I've made mistakes, and I wish the DMG and Monster Manuals were more help to me, but they haven't been.

I need a certain amount of enemies to make an encounter challenging. I need enemies who have at least a 25% chance to hit the PC's. The published monsters don't always measure up.

This means I'm often forced to use higher level enemies, which means that bounded accuracy doesn't seem to be working either- what good is it that I can use 8 Bugbears if none of them can even hit the Fighter or the Cleric?

So the way I see it, the guidelines are useless to me. I know I'm not alone in this opinion. Further, the monster design and challenge rating rules are also mostly useless to me, since two encounters with the same experience point budget can have wildly different results, and that's before I even add things like terrain or other factors which can alter the difficulty.

Further, it seems WotC knows that these guidelines aren't worth the ink they're printed on, since they don't use them themselves!

So if they have no trust in this sort of thing, how can anyone else?

 

[tetrasodium]

I feel sorry for Dave, being a DM can be a thankless job.

Yea it shouldn't come as a surprise that it's mostly GMs who complain about issues like this thread or the ways that trying to work around the design inflicted wounds cause.

I am not 100% sure what you are getting at here because you seem to be using "Spotlight" in the sense that Bob is more effective than Alice. But this is much more likely to be a thing where Bob is better a building a combat character than Alice in a combat focused campaign. The main way for it to be the DM's fault is where Alice builds a melee focused character but the DM makes all the encounters ranged.
I have never really seen the encounter numbers per long rest have more than a marginal impact.

If Alice is playing a class that was designed with the expectation that Dave should always be running an unreasonable number of encounters then Bob is going to look the star of the show every fight & alice might not even be playing a build that can grab spotlight in the other players. Take long rest vrs short rest classes simply being foisted off on the GM to solve or any of the cracks that start forming elsewhere as a GM like Dave tries working around or blocking the problem. If Bob is better at exploiting those cracks or coincidentally better equipped in ways Dave didn't consider then it looks like Dave is not only building adventures built for Bob & his cheer squad of sidekicks. if Dave makes changes that Bob is better at exploiting cracks in than Alice it looks like he's even making changes to favor Bob causing the initial criticism to be reinforced.

Wotc seems to have accepted that short rest classes in the same party as long rest classes was a recipe for one of two disasters at basically any time but we don't yet know if the 6-8 encounter problem is accepted as a problem or if 5.5 is going to continue as is in the name of "bAcKwArDs CoMpAtAbIliTy"


edit: bob & dave got mixed up in the example