D&D 5E 6-8 encounters/day - how common is this?

[ad_hoc]

A thousand times this. 6-8 combat encounters per day means that the average PC is killing 7 people per day. 49 people per week. More than 200 people per month. Each. It means that the average PC is having their life threatened more than the defenders in the Warsaw Uprising.

It also makes 5e the biggest combat grindfest in the history of D&D; even 3.X's 4 encounters per day was ridiculous and gruelling, and 5e adds in bounded accuracy so you are much more likely to face swarms of lower levelled enemies.

6-8 encounters makes no sense of anything approaching worldbuilding, and if that's what you need to balance the game then the designers screwed up.



Almost certainly, yes. Even 4e was massively helped by similar rules - and that wsn't a balance issue.

It seems that you are caught up in hack n slash, not 5e. It is based around 3 pillars. Social and exploration encounters are assumed in the game. So is downtime.

 

[zaratan]

If you want to keep the balance of the game and will not make the 6-8 encounters day, but will to much to use long rest variant, just don't let the players get full recover with a long rest.

 

[Neonchameleon]

It seems that you are caught up in hack n slash, not 5e. It is based around 3 pillars. Social and exploration encounters are assumed in the game. So is downtime.

Or alternatively I know what I am talking about.

Social encounters use up little in the way of limited resources. Do they use hit points? No. Do they use resources like Second Wind? No. Do they use any limited resources at all for the rogue? No. And even for wizards the resource use is far lower for social encounters than it is for combat.

Those saying that for resource balancing you need 6-8 encounters in a day are referring by default to combat encounters and the other two categories seldom measure up in terms of resource use.

 

[GameOgre]

One thing I didn't see mentioned is that you can divorce resting from real time. For instance you could give have 6-8 encounters between full rests like the game was meant to do while traveling across the land and only having one encounter per day. The PC's would use up resources and suffer wounds while traveling and only recover from them once there journey was ended (and the encounters were resolved).

The PC's could still sleep and rest ect while traveling in the form of short rests.

People who want to view it as the DM being forced to run 6-8 encounters every day are wrong(but the average might very well be per day). The game is oriented around 6-8 encounters between full recoveries how much in game time is between those recoveries is very flexible.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Or alternatively I know what I am talking about.
.

Or you don't:

It also makes 5e the biggest combat grindfest in the history of D&D

Because that's not true. As I and others have mentioned, 6-8 encounters or more per day was pretty common in AD&D--about 25 years of the game's history. Some of us have said that's about our average today, using 5e. That number also didn't come out of thin air, and I recall tweets confirming that that number is what came up often in the surveys. 5e plays about as fast as AD&D, and much faster than 3e or 4e, which allows you to get more done in a gaming session. So everything points to that being a number range that you'd expect. But even with that range of encounters, it still is less than AD&D on average.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I 'turn my mind' to it a lot - I spend a lot of time thinking about it. And my conclusion is that there is no way to force the PCs consistently through 6-8 encounters/day without a level of railroading that I'm not prepared to engage in. In the majority of scenarios, either the natural encounter frequency is far lower (wilderness exploration) or the number of encounters is largely up to the PCs (dungeon
exploration)..

I guess this is what comes down to play style, because in a dungeon? The number of encounters isn't largely up to the PCs intentions. Encounters don't just sit there in their area oblivious to what's going on in the dungeon around them, waiting for the PCs to show up whenever. Inhabitants interact with each other, have routines, etc. I hardly consider it railroading if the PCs end up alerting the dungeon and 5 or 6 separate encounters all become part of the same one as they go hunt for the PCs. Or that if the PCs defeat one encounter (I'll note here that "defeat" doesn't mean "kill" as some seem to assume), and don't have an opportunity to rest before the next encounter or the next 8 encounters. The game world keeps on churning with or without the PCs, and IMO, denizens should react as realistically as possible, and not like a video game where you can literally do anything as long as you don't enter the agro area.

 

[DM_Jeff]

To the original post - it varies. Outdoors much less so but I have run 5e dungeon crawls where the group can easily do 6-8 encounters (not all leading to combat) within a day. When possible, I do combine rooms or combats so they are more worthy, and cut back on the quick obvious slugfests.

 

[Kite474]

The 6-8 encounter's has not happened in our game. Hell we haven't even had a single short rest in the game yet. Really starting to regret rolling a fighter... *sigh* I hate it when a DM does not even think about game design.

 

[S'mon]

I guess this is what comes down to play style, because in a dungeon? The number of encounters isn't largely up to the PCs intentions. Encounters don't just sit there in their area oblivious to what's going on in the dungeon around them, waiting for the PCs to show up whenever. Inhabitants interact with each other, have routines, etc. I hardly consider it railroading if the PCs end up alerting the dungeon and 5 or 6 separate encounters all become part of the same one as they go hunt for the PCs. Or that if the PCs defeat one encounter (I'll note here that "defeat" doesn't mean "kill" as some seem to assume), and don't have an opportunity to rest before the next encounter or the next 8 encounters. The game world keeps on churning with or without the PCs, and IMO, denizens should react as realistically as possible, and not like a video game where you can literally do anything as long as you don't enter the agro area.

The corollary of monsters acting realistically is that PCs get to act realistically too - and
retreat when low on resources. That might mean one or even two extra encounters on
the way out, but the PCs will account for that likelihood by retreating even earlier.

 

[ThirdWizard]

You've only had 4 long rests over 18 sessions and over 50 combat encounters?

Or are you mapping long rests to = end of play session?

Because this seems to be much more common than I thought.

I never even considered that it might be normal for some people to end a session without a long rest. About 2 weeks of game time (to a month or two) is normal to pass between sessions in my games. Some sessions also run a month or so of game time. So, in those 18 sessions, about 2 1/2 years have passed in game. For me, each session is a single 6 hour "adventure" I guess, mapping to the party's current goal. I do not focus heavily on combat in my games, and I tend to run urban adventures.

A thousand times this. 6-8 combat encounters per day means that the average PC is killing 7 people per day. 49 people per week. More than 200 people per month. Each. It means that the average PC is having their life threatened more than the defenders in the Warsaw Uprising.

Nobody said PCs are adventuring every day! If you have 6-8 combat encounters in one day 1/month, that's a totally different feel, right?

The 6-8 encounter's has not happened in our game. Hell we haven't even had a single short rest in the game yet. Really starting to regret rolling a fighter... *sigh* I hate it when a DM does not even think about game design.

Several sessions into my current game, I realized that 1 hour short rests were meaning that a short rest never occured in my games at all. I changed it to a 15 minute short rest, and now things are much better.