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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Transformer" data-source="post: 6837494" data-attributes="member: 70008">Balancing classes around 6-8 encounters/day was a terrible design decision, a mistake I'm surprised they made after such a long playtest. And yes, we're talking about combat encounters specifically, because the other two pillars drain very few in-game resources. It is extremely difficult to average 6-8 encounters/day over the course of a long campaign. I've found that I need at least three things to hit 6-8 encounters in a day, and that I can only manage it occasionally:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">An dungeon-style adventure, with enclosed spaces and tightly-packed groups of enemies along a somewhat linear progression.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A clear, plausible source of time pressure baked into the plot.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Cooperative players, who are willing to press onward even when a lot of their resources are used up. My current group freaks out whenever someone is knocked unconscious in a combat and insists on a long rest roughly every two combats, forcing me to make the difficult decision whether or not to bring the whole dungeon down on their heads as they sleep in hostile territory. A smooth progression of 7 encounters punctuated by two short rests is something I cannot make them do.</li> </ul>In a wilderness or city adventure, it's extremely difficult to plausibly hit 7 combat encounters/day. Without clear time pressure organically arising from the plot, it's pretty much impossible. Without cooperative players, it's very difficult.And those are just the logistical problems with getting to 7 encounters/day. There's also the fact that even if you can reliably average 7 encounters/day somehow, it makes the game boring. It's not necessarily the quality of the encounters themselves. You could populate every one of those encounters with cool mechanics and interesting monsters, and having 7 encounters/day on average would still make the game boring.The reason is out-of-game time vs. in-game time. My group averages at least 30-60 minutes per combat encounter (maybe your group is fast as lightning and knocks out combats in 10 minutes, but most groups can't). That means that if you average 7 combat encounters/day, then a single in-game day takes at least 5 hours of out-of-game play time, and probably more like 7-8 hours once you account for exploration and roleplaying. That's way too much out-of-game time for a single in-game day. That makes the progress of the plot glacial. If I reliably had 7 encounters/day, it would take at least 2 sessions (but probably 3) to get through a single day of in-game plot. That would be miserable.So it's pretty much a disaster all around. The vast majority of groups average way fewer than 7 encounters/day, for reasons that are blindingly obvious. I really have no idea why the game is balanced around 7 encounters/day with 2 short rests, rather than (perhaps) 3-4 encounters/day with 1 short rest. That would be far more in line with how the game is played in the wild, and how players tend to progress organically.</blockquote>

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