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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flamestrike" data-source="post: 6835612" data-attributes="member: 6788736">I do. When I design my adventures during the week for my group, I always turn my mind to a time limit to the adventure, with penalties for failure/ rewards for success attached. I enforce the 6-8 medium to hard encounter/ 2 short rest per long rest paradigm for around 50 percent of my planned encounters.For the other 50 percent of the time, it varies between shorter adventuring days (wilderness encounters mainly) and the rareer longer adventuring day.When you have around 50 percent of your adventuring days running at the 6-8/ 2 short rest mark, it becomes a self regulating system. Your Players naturally conserve resources around this default, even on the shorter days. Class balance and encounter difficulty is maintained.I often find DMs that dont turn their minds to the 6-8 expectation are also the first ones who complain about class balance being off and encounters being too easy. I hear this a lot but I dont get it. I cant think of a single dungeon where less than six encounters before pulling back and resting overnight was the norm. Think of Keep on the Borderlands, Temple of Elemental Evil or Against the Giants. If your party was only clearing two or three rooms and then pulling back to sleep overnight, then we played those adventures very differently indeed.Pick up a module with a dungeon and pre-set encounters (i.e pretty much all of them). Now trace a path through the dungeon, counting how many rooms with encounters (traps, monsters, riddles, puzzles etc) the party encounter. Stop when you reach three. Now do it again, stopping when you reach 6-8. That (the 6-8 spot) is usually enough encoutners to deal with a single level of a dungeon in one adventuring day. Only having a single fight per day, but dialing up the difficulty to compensate, doesnt actually compensate for anything. You're just encouraging nova tactics, reinforcing the 5 minute adventuring day, and punishing those classes that already suffer during shorter adventuring days (Fighters, Monks, Warlocks) more, while additionally rewarding those that benefit from the 5 mintute nova strike AD (Casters, Barbarians, Paladins).Its important to note that an adventuring day is not the same thing as a game session. This is where the real cognative dissonace kicks in for most DMs - seeing as most sessions get 1-3 encounters per session, and a natural end point is for a long rest, this is where the line is usually drawn.If you only get 1-3 encounters per game session, have your short rests happen at the end of a session, and your long rests happen at the end of every third session.Its common enough. The reasons seem to me to be (more often than not) to boil down to lazy DMing. DMs either cant be bothered placing a time limit to frame their adventures, run out of ideas how to do so unobsctructively after doing so a few times, or dont understand the metagame reasons for the 6-8 paradigm, or similar.It does make the art of designing adventures and encounters more difficult in that you have an extra element (naturally framing the encounters within the context of the 6-8/2 AD) to contend with when you sit down duing the week to stat up your next adventure for the weekend. This has to be done as unobtrusively as possible, and many DMs simply dont have the skill (or the inclination) to do this.</blockquote>

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