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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6839092" data-attributes="member: 996">It boils down to closer to a short rest every other encounter on a 6-8 day, or after each encounter on a 3-4, but, yes, with symmetrically longer & more challenging encounters that would seem to make sense.  One factor that could mess with the idea, though, is whole-encounter effects.  That makes very little sense, even as rationalizations go.  OTOH, if there is an expectation of 6+ encounter days among the players, they'll conserve daily resources, and, rather than the occasional 3-4 or 1-2 encounter day being distorted by novas, it'll just end with a bunch of daily resources un-used.  So it would only be telegraphing or consistently running shorter days that'd be an issue, in terms of numeric balance of resources across classes, that is.Then there's the party composition.  A party consisting of Cleric, Sorcerer, Barbarian, & Paladin (and/or Wizard and/or Bard, not so much Ranger, maybe) isn't going to have the balance among it's members much distorted by a somewhat shorter day at most levels.  It's harder to envision as practical a short-rest oriented party, but some Warlocks, BMs, Monks, and Assassins might get up to something.It's a natural-language interpretation, and 5e favors natural language over obscure jargon - and, I should hope, over intentionally deceiving both players & DMs.  But it is clearly presented as a guideline, not a rule (and even if it were a rule, the DM'd be free to change it).  It's not that the DMG is saying that you should run 6-8 encounter days and have short rests about every other encounter, every time, it's just saying the short-rest types'll need one after 2 or so encounters, and the long-rest types will need to bed down after 6-8...  Fewer encounters means less pressure on resources, so the party can handle tougher fights.  But, reading between the lines, as you point out above, if you do keep the 2-3 short rest to 6-8 encounter ratio, you might not exacerbate class balance issues.But, it's none of it set in stone.  If you have a party where one PC seems to be underperforming, and his resource schedule is the odd man out, that could be a place to look for solutions, for instance.  OTOH, if you have one mostly-daily character dominating and another languishing, changing encounters/day around is unlikely to help.  There's a lot of ways the DM can tweak his game to keep it fun for everyone.  Encounters/day is one of them, and it's one that tweaks several things at once - including intraparty class balance based on resources, and encounter difficulty - and not always conveniently in all the directions you need.</blockquote>

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