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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7186180" data-attributes="member: 71699">This question has come up several times and I believe could come from a lack of clarity in the terminology.An adventuring day in this context (DMG84) is any number of encounters that sum to a given amount of experience points. It doesn't matter how many calendar days those encounters span over. And it doesn't matter whether those are deadly or easy encounters because the adventuring day XP is divided over encounters pro-rata their XP value. Deadly encounters are worth more XP so fewer fit into one adventuring day. Easy encounters are worth less XP so more fit into one adventuring day. An adventuring day is called that because it is assumed that it ends with one long rest, and contains two to three short rests. From the point of view of refreshing abilities, it doesn't matter how many calendar days those rests span over. The intended balance as expressed in the DMG and stitched through the MM and PHB, is that over all the encounters that fit into one adventuring day you will get one use of each of your abilities that refresh when you finish a long rest.It doesn't matter if this is seen as a guideline or a rule, it's simply a fact about the way 5th edition is balanced. Coming back to your question, it doesn't matter mechanically if the party knows ahead of time how long the adventure is and it doesn't matter mechanically if you are in a sandbox with a swingier type of play (in fact, I designed this system because I am running a sandbox and calendar rests do not work well when the time from one encounter to the next might be measured in days or weeks). Resource attrition is overwhelmingly due to encounters, and the game baseline is one refresh of each long rest ability and two to three refreshes of each short rest ability per however many encounters yield the XP of one adventuring day.A quick example. If I am 3rd level going to 4th I need 2700-900=1800XP. Looking at the table on DMG84, my XP per "adventuring day" at 3rd level is 1200. So I need 1.5 of those to earn 1800XP because 1800/1200=1.5. It doesn't matter how many calendar days that takes. And it doesn't matter whether those were all easy encounters (attrition) or all deadly encounters (lethality). It just needs to be whatever number of encounters yields 1800XP. (This is the simple picture. I will discuss the relevant complexities in a separate post.)</blockquote>

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