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

The creator of OSRIC once told me (a bit snootily) that it's 1 per 3 turns in 1e, when I said I check every turn. I've never seen a reason to check less often. In fact that's what defines an exploration turn for me: what you can do between encounter checks.
Sounds fair. Do you find it to be "brutal" (to borrow [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]'s description)?

Your other post, about gamism and encounter frequency/difficulty, is interesting. Can you elaborate on "statistical power"? Do you mean that, in the 2 encounters - short rest - 2 enconters - short rest - etc model, there is not enough scope for skilled vs poor play to reveal itself?

I tend to think that the whole idea of gamist play within a GM-set quest structure (like "save the world" or "rescue the princess") is a bit fraught, because the "weight" of the story and the constraints it establishes limit player choices too much. And as I type that, I'm thinking maybe that's what you meant, and why you suggested optional encounters that let a party test its mettle. Whereas the constrained model is what makes the gamism turn into bickering/rules-lawyering while trying to succeed at the tests that (given the story) there is no choice but to tackle.

My gut feeling is that, for fairly traditional D&D-style play (where eg combat tends to be the ultimate form of conflict, and is typically to the death), there has to be a readiness to risk TPK if the gamism is going to be real. But risking TPK becomes hard with some of those story stakes.

And another rough intuition: if the gamist part of play becomes too much like a crossword or suduko (ie seeing how the available resources can be properly distributed across a roughly pre-given set of encounters) then some of what is distinctive about RPGing has been lost.

I think this is part of why 4e shifted so much of the gamist/resource-management element of play to taking place within the encounter, which itself is strongly encouraged and supported (via movement, terrain, transform-on-bloodied, etc rules and techniques) to generate a somewhat unpredictable but engaging space for resource expenditure choices. It's a bit like condensing a classic dungeon exploration (open-ended, though within some broadly foreseeable constraints) into a single combat.

The challenge for 5e seems to be that (like the more classic game) it is intended to operate across rather than within encounters; but its more 4e-like focus on balance (across asymmetric resource suites) makes the classic open-endedness a problem for play; and its default mode of play seems to be the 3E-ish "adventure path", which makes it tricky to allow the players to truly express choices about engaging encounters.
 

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Very much a tangent - but where in the AD&D books is the frequency of wandering monster rolls stated? The only thing I can think of is the city encounter section in Appendix C of the DMG, which refers to a check "every three turns as normally".
I thought it was something that varied with location. Modules would have a random encounter table and the frequency with which you check it. (Further tangent: I quite liked the 1e MM2 encounter tables at the time, 2-20, d8+d12 or 2d10, with the resulting modest bell curve corresponding to how common the monster was supposed to be. So, 2 or 20 got you a 'very rare' monster. Seemed cool at the time, I created random encounter tables for many regions of my campaign world - I rarely ever used them but they gave me a tool to define the inhabitants and feel of the area.)
 
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Sounds fair. Do you find it to be "brutal" (to borrow @S'mon's description)?
Not really; a typical dungeon level might have what...12-18 turns, for 2-3 expected random encounters? Feels right to me. I think even if I wanted a very empty megadungeon feel I would stick with 1 per turn and just reduce the proportion of rooms with monsters in them.

Your other post, about gamism and encounter frequency/difficulty, is interesting. Can you elaborate on "statistical power"? Do you mean that, in the 2 encounters - short rest - 2 enconters - short rest - etc model, there is not enough scope for skilled vs poor play to reveal itself?

I tend to think that the whole idea of gamist play within a GM-set quest structure (like "save the world" or "rescue the princess") is a bit fraught, because the "weight" of the story and the constraints it establishes limit player choices too much. And as I type that, I'm thinking maybe that's what you meant, and why you suggested optional encounters that let a party test its mettle. Whereas the constrained model is what makes the gamism turn into bickering/rules-lawyering while trying to succeed at the tests that (given the story) there is no choice but to tackle.
Yep, that's pretty much it. It's both the story weight and the linear structure; they tend to go together. I'm trying to explain why the linear AP style adventure is not ideal from a gamist perspective without using the word railroad, because a railroad can be undesirable for other reasons.

So I'm thinking of a game like an "experiment" to test for skilled play. The difficulty is like the significance level of the experiment. Hardcore gamist play requires a stringent significance level (they know they're good; they want to know how good) and is therefore prone to a type II error: failing to distinguish good play from poor. Reducing the chance of the false negative requires increasing the statistical power.

To do that we can either increase the sample size of decision points (classic sandbox) or if insist on a smaller sample size (linear AP style adventure), decrease the variance of the data--by bickering with the DM to make sure every encounter is run 100% BtB, and with the other players to make sure everyone optimizes their characters. Or straight up tampering with the data (DM fudging).

Many of the decision points in classic sandbox D&D are low-tension, and I can see why there is a temptation to skip to the fun, but over time they add up to significant differences in player accomplishment. One of my regular players is risk-averse (often plays a Cleric) and one is notoriously risk-seeking (like to play scouty Thieves/Rogues and instigative Fighters). It's interesting to see which strategy tends to be more successful over time. Typically the latter player has more characters die early but by mid-levels has the character with better stats (more chances at chargen) and magic items (point man gets first choice). I do try to remind myself as DM to reward (or at least not punish) instigative play.

I think the powergamers here would enjoy a big community MMO-style sandbox with multiple DMs, a campaign wiki and where much of the content is procedurally generated, more than the adventure they're playing ("testing") now.

(I know it's not a real game, it's a test of the encounter building rules, but functionally it's hardcore gamism and I think that's exactly why they're getting into it).

With a sandbox game they wouldn't have had to kick out the guy who didn't optimize well enough. He could still play, his character just wouldn't get invited to the toughest raids and would advance more slowly than the others.

My gut feeling is that, for fairly traditional D&D-style play (where eg combat tends to be the ultimate form of conflict, and is typically to the death), there has to be a readiness to risk TPK if the gamism is going to be real. But risking TPK becomes hard with some of those story stakes.
Yep, I think that's right.

And another rough intuition: if the gamist part of play becomes too much like a crossword or suduko (ie seeing how the available resources can be properly distributed across a roughly pre-given set of encounters) then some of what is distinctive about RPGing has been lost.

I think this is part of why 4e shifted so much of the gamist/resource-management element of play to taking place within the encounter, which itself is strongly encouraged and supported (via movement, terrain, transform-on-bloodied, etc rules and techniques) to generate a somewhat unpredictable but engaging space for resource expenditure choices. It's a bit like condensing a classic dungeon exploration (open-ended, though within some broadly foreseeable constraints) into a single combat.
Could you say more about what you mean here? I just read the example of play in the AD&D DMG again and I was struck by how richly the PCs interact with the fictional space; I found it inspiring. Although I thought it was unfair to give the spider a free attack just because the player touched it to throw it to the ground.

The challenge for 5e seems to be that (like the more classic game) it is intended to operate across rather than within encounters; but its more 4e-like focus on balance (across asymmetric resource suites) makes the classic open-endedness a problem for play; and its default mode of play seems to be the 3E-ish "adventure path", which makes it tricky to allow the players to truly express choices about engaging encounters.
I'm not convinced 5e is poorly suited for the classic style of play, but I'll have a stronger opinion on that in a few months.
 

Libramarian, that's a very rich post - thanks - and a very interesting perspective on the "encounter building design" thread. It all seems pretty plausible to me, though I don't have the experience with the sort of "community sandbox" you describe (either in D&D or in MMOs, which I've never played), and so am judging plausibility mostly by intuition.

I just read the example of play in the AD&D DMG again and I was struck by how richly the PCs interact with the fictional space; I found it inspiring. Although I thought it was unfair to give the spider a free attack just because the player touched it to throw it to the ground.
On the free attack - this does seem roughly consistent with the rules for initiative and free attacks for unarmed attacks (DMG p 73), though that's not to say that it's also a harsh ruling, especially when a hit = save or die.

As an example, I personally don't find it inspiring, but that's really just reiterating that I'm not into that sort of play. But that's not what my crossword/sudoku comment was about.

pemerton said:
And another rough intuition: if the gamist part of play becomes too much like a crossword or suduko (ie seeing how the available resources can be properly distributed across a roughly pre-given set of encounters) then some of what is distinctive about RPGing has been lost.

I think this is part of why 4e shifted so much of the gamist/resource-management element of play to taking place within the encounter, which itself is strongly encouraged and supported (via movement, terrain, transform-on-bloodied, etc rules and techniques) to generate a somewhat unpredictable but engaging space for resource expenditure choices. It's a bit like condensing a classic dungeon exploration (open-ended, though within some broadly foreseeable constraints) into a single combat.
Could you say more about what you mean here?
Maybe. I've reread it and I'm not 100% sure what I was trying to get at, though I can sort-of work myself out.

It's related to the point in the previous post where I worked out what you were getting at with the "optional" encounters: gamism benefits from a degree of open-endedness, which allows the players to choose how hard they push (and the better or luckier players can demonstrate this by pushing harder and getting through more content, thereby - everything else being equal - accruing more rewards).

In 4e, a lot of this happens within the encounter: the players choose how hard to push the encounter, how safely to play it, etc - and the game gives them lots of tools to show off these choices, and gives the GM lots of tools to create encounters where that showing off can take place (mobility, terrain, transformation-on-bloodied, different sorts of healing with different action economy and resource consumption implications, etc).

The resulting gamism is in some ways relatively light rather than hardcore - the game doesn't inherently reward a group for finishing an encounter with N surges left rather than half N, and because I think the game plays at its best when the GM modulates the future encounters in part in response to this resource consumption, it's not as if pushing encounters hard and cleverly necessarily makes you more likely to avoid a TPK. But nevertheless there is the satisfaction of knowing that the group played well, and you can certainly read onine accounts of play and TPKs and the like and think "Well, we did better than that!", and between themselves the players can see who is holding up his/her end and who is not such a contributor.

And (at least in my experience) the game lends itself well to repeating this, with the resource constraints getting more narrow each time (because surges and dailies deplete) but there still being meaningful scope for clever play and encounter victories. This is due to the game's interesting (and relatively symmetric, across PCs) balance between encounter and daily resources.

And the group can then remember the time that (say) they pushed through 8 (or howevermany) on-or-greater than level encounters without an extended rest, and think "We played well through that series of encounters!"

And (at least as I've found it) this doesn't tend to produce the pressure on the GM and the GM's rulings that you've pointed to - maybe because, in the way you talk about, there are a lot of decision points in the play that are (in themselves) relatively low-tension but that combine, over the course of a 6 to 8 to 10 round encounter (4e likes and supports many-round encounters) add up to different outcomes that reveal something, to the players even if not in a statistically meaningful sense, about the cleverness and pros/cons of their play choices.

Now to contrast: what I mean by "sudoku" or "crossword puzzle" play is where the choices are all (largely) known in advance, and so is the framework within which they have to be made, but there is a question about how it all actually fits together. Eg "We're going to have to blow our fireball in one of these encounters that's coming up, but which one?" If you do it early, your anxious that you've hosed yourself for a later encounter; but if you hang onto it, there's that chance that when you get to the end-point fireball doesn't suit (eg the enemies in that last encounter are all dispersed) and you've needlessly underpowered yourself for the whole thing.

I'm sure that plenty of 4e players have experienced this playing through adventure-path/linear scenarios; but I don't think it's an inherent or necessary risk in 4e, because if the fireball is an encounter power than nothing is lost by using it early, while if the group has dailies left at all, the GM can just keep piling on the encounters without too much risk of breaking the game, or the balance between the PCs, or TPKing. (This feature of 4e - the inter-encounter rather than intra-encounter dymamics - is clearly a different sort of open-endedness from the classic dungeon-crawl, because 4e tends to rely on the GM, rather than the players, to choose the pacing/sequencing of "scenes".)

But in 5e, if you pile on more encounters in response to the pattern of player resource use or conservation, you do risk breaking the balance between classes (short rest vs long rest), or TPKing (because there is not that ready reservoir of encounter powers to provide some sort of guaranteed minimum that a clever party will use to pull their PCs out of the fire), etc. Which in turn can undermine player/GM dynamics by looking adversarial or unfair. (Which I think is much less of a factor in 4e, because of the way that game's resource suites work - [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] has had some similar experiences with 4e compared to other resource schemes, I think.)

Which is why, I think, that 5e does lend itself a bit more to the crossword/sudoku style - we know there will be 6 (or so) encounters, and we have to use our fireball somewhere in those, but how do we optimise that? And to me that reduces, to an extent, what RPGing is about - instead of engaging with the fiction and making choices on that basis, there is a more "meta" element to the resource management and play of the game, and the fiction has become a little bit more secondary to that, as just providing the framework or squares into which the resource choices have to be fitted.

I don't know if the longer version is any clearer. And it could be wrong-headed - I'm trying to express a rough feeling more than a developed thesis - but maybe you can see a little bit what I'm trying to gesture at.

I'm not convinced 5e is poorly suited for the classic style of play, but I'll have a stronger opinion on that in a few months.
I'm not convinced either.

But I think you have to be prepared to break the balance between classes, or allow the players to negotiate that among themselves. And I think that is where the adversarial/unfair GMing issue might arise.

This can be an issues in the classic style too, but I think the contrast between classes in that style - MUs are so physically weak, thieves are so specialised and no one else operates in those specialty areas (at least until a MU gets to the point where fly and invisibility spells become fairly easily available), clerics don't get the magic swords or multi-attacks of fighters, etc - can make the issue of balance less pointed. And the classic style emphasises exploration (in the nteract-with-the-fiction sense) so much that player resources based on class features aren't always at the forefront of play.

Whereas when I look at 5e, and in particular see the non-traditional dice spreads for spell damage and the non-traditional spell memorisation charts, the stress on class balance (especially across damage output) seems very great. Which creates pressure on the GM to manage the encounter sequencing in a way that upholds that balance. Which creates pressure to pre-prepare 6 to 8 encounters, and then more-or-less push the PCs through them. Which creates pressure to set up linear scenarios within the fiction that will make sense of that. Which pushes towards what I have called the sudoku/crossword style of resource management, as well as the bickering-with-the-GM that you've identified.

I don't think that has to be inevitable, but it seems to me to be a challenge for 5e GMing. If, after a few months, you've got practical experience that address this, make sure you start a thread on it!
 

It would be interesting if we could find out some way whether that is because of many groups cleaving to their old ways taught to them by some prior edition and not giving themselves a chance to try it the way 5th edition suggests, or because there are a significant number of groups that are trying to do things as 5th edition suggests but are failing to do so.

It could also be the fact that they're doing things the 5E way, but find that 6-8 encounters don't fit into the 5E daily encounter budget. Or maybe that's the same as your second suggestion, I'm not quite sure.

Yes, it would be interesting.
 

It could also be the fact that they're doing things the 5E way, but find that 6-8 encounters don't fit into the 5E daily encounter budget. Or maybe that's the same as your second suggestion, I'm not quite sure.

Yes, it would be interesting.
If a group is using 6-8 encounters and going over the 5e daily encounter budget, that is not doing things the 5e way because the 5e way includes not just 6-8 encounters, but 6-8 encounters that don't exceed the adventuring day XP numbers or the related multipart encounter XP numbers.

In order to be trying things the 5e way and failing, there would have to be 6-8 encounters for the party to do that fit to the encounter building guidelines, no more than the multipart encounter XP guideline before being able to take a short rest without interruption, and no more than the adventuring day XP guideline before being able to take a long rest - and then have the players genuinely attempt to complete all those encounters before taking a long rest, but fail to do so consistently (and I say consistently because failing once or twice every now and then could be bad choices or bad strings of die rolls)
 

If a group is using 6-8 encounters and going over the 5e daily encounter budget, that is not doing things the 5e way because the 5e way includes not just 6-8 encounters, but 6-8 encounters that don't exceed the adventuring day XP numbers or the related multipart encounter XP numbers.

In order to be trying things the 5e way and failing, there would have to be 6-8 encounters for the party to do that fit to the encounter building guidelines, no more than the multipart encounter XP guideline before being able to take a short rest without interruption, and no more than the adventuring day XP guideline before being able to take a long rest - and then have the players genuinely attempt to complete all those encounters before taking a long rest, but fail to do so consistently (and I say consistently because failing once or twice every now and then could be bad choices or bad strings of die rolls)

In order to fit 6-8 encounters into the daily budget, you need to take them down to Easy/Medium encounters, which most DMs don't seem willing to do. More commonly, DMs will choose one or another of the various DM guidelines to violate: either they will violate the adventuring day guidelines (possibly without realizing and/or admitting to themselves that they are doing so), or they will obey the adventuring day guidelines but use primarily Hard/Deadly encounters and only 3-4 encounters per day, or they just give up entirely on budgets and guidelines and just eyeball everything based on experience.
 

I purposefully design days over the DXP guideline. If players want to accomplish the primary objective of the day, they need to find a way to complete some encounters without combat, avoid encounters completely, or risk character or party death. Could be as simple as not going after the heavily guarded (deadly fight) treasure hoard or as complicated as having spent several days prior scouting, gathering info, and putting s plan in place to avoid. It is up to the players to manage their DXP in such a way as to accomplish their objectives not for me to only put the recommended number of encounters and DXP in front of them.
 

In order to fit 6-8 encounters into the daily budget, you need to take them down to Easy/Medium encounters, which most DMs don't seem willing to do. More commonly, DMs will choose one or another of the various DM guidelines to violate: either they will violate the adventuring day guidelines (possibly without realizing and/or admitting to themselves that they are doing so), or they will obey the adventuring day guidelines but use primarily Hard/Deadly encounters and only 3-4 encounters per day, or they just give up entirely on budgets and guidelines and just eyeball everything based on experience.
I agree with basically everything you say here. It is why I think it would be interesting to find out which groups are saying "5th edition encounter guidelines don't work" when the reality is potentially that they simply aren't actually using the guidelines fully - because it seems very common to not follow them (and I, in fact, don't actually follow them at all anymore - I only did long enough to get a sense of how they worked, and have since been eyeballing based on experience rather than checking the numbers and am ending up with no trouble matching, or even exceeding, 6-8 encounters in an adventuring day and keeping my group entertained while doing so).
 

I agree with basically everything you say here. It is why I think it would be interesting to find out which groups are saying "5th edition encounter guidelines don't work" when the reality is potentially that they simply aren't actually using the guidelines fully - because it seems very common to not follow them (and I, in fact, don't actually follow them at all anymore - I only did long enough to get a sense of how they worked, and have since been eyeballing based on experience rather than checking the numbers and am ending up with no trouble matching, or even exceeding, 6-8 encounters in an adventuring day and keeping my group entertained while doing so).

I'd be interested to know what you mean by saying "no trouble matching, or even exceeding". My experience is that even non-optimizing players have no trouble exceeding the guidelines (unless the DM is deliberately gaming the system with deadly but low-CR monsters, or metagaming the monsters as tactical battlecomputers bent on killing the PCs, instead of roleplaying the monsters as beings with lives and goals), but when the players fight 200% of the daily XP budget without even a short rest, that's technically a form of "5E XP guidelines don't work."

In other words, I get the sense from your writing that you think 5E guidelines don't work in the "too hard" direction whereas I think they are waaaay too easy. Although erring on the side of easy is fine, since psychologically, a DM would rather that players feel awesome about beating a fight that is officially "too hard" instead of feeling lame about almost losing a fight that is officially "pretty easy", even if it's the exact same fight in both cases.

But speaking for myself, the problem with expecting 6-8 discrete encounters per day has nothing to do with game balance or difficulty and everything to do with plausibility and roleplaying. When you look at scenarios that involve an eight-encounter day, such as the "6-8 encounter 13th level adventuring day" thread going on right now, the biggest thing that jumps out at me is that they don't make any sense from an in-world perspective. Really, there just "happens" to be a group of frost giants there in the abandoned dracolich lair, right when we teleport in? Really, there just "happen" to be a couple of paranoid death slaads in the entryway to the demiplane with readied actions (according to Flamestrike) to instantly Fireball anyone entering the demiplane? Really, there just happens to be a berserk Iron Golem rampaging through the dungeon? And he and the death slaads just ignored each other, but chose to attack the PCs? It strains credulity to the point where, as a player, I'd be looking for a hidden manipulator behind the scenes. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. Eight times is ludicrous.

I think this problem is solvable, but not in the way that gamist DMs tend to solve it. That's why I loved libramarian's comments about sandboxes, statistical power for detecting good play, alternate endings, and "story weight". Great comments. The solution lies in that direction.
 

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