D&D 5E Balancing Around Fewer Combats Per Day

[Retreater]

We know that few groups follow the 8 encounter template and that makes Challenge Rating seem a little on the easy side.
My group is wanting to embark on a series of one-shots, likely facing 2-3 combat encounters per adventure. How would you adjust for that? Would you make most encounters hard or deadly?

 

[BookTenTiger]

We know that few groups follow the 8 encounter template and that makes Challenge Rating seem a little on the easy side.
My group is wanting to embark on a series of one-shots, likely facing 2-3 combat encounters per adventure. How would you adjust for that? Would you make most encounters hard or deadly?

I think that's a fair way to adjust!

 

[aco175]

Add more monsters. This makes the action economy harder since there are more targets than PCs. It also takes into account that casters will be using more spells/encounter to deal with it.

Use less rests. Some PCs are long rest and some are short rest. Having less encounters means that this 8-encounter assumption will be upset to favor one side or the other. If you have 3 harder encounters, maybe allow one rest somewhere instead of after each encounter. Have some days when there is none.

 

[Lyxen]

It really depends on the level of optimizing that you allow your players, and in particular options like feats and multiclassing. If you allow them, and want only 3 encounters to challenge them, they have to be at the border between deadly and impossible, with enough adversaries in there to take care of action economy (so at least a few monsters or a boss with legendary/mythic/lair actions).

 

[BookTenTiger]

Giving more monster lair actions and legendary actions helps too.

For legendary actions, I usually give them a single attack, a spell, and a recharge action (like a chance to knock prone, blind, etc).

For lair actions I just use spells, but flavored for the terrain. In a fight in an ancient library, a giant otyugh could summon a tornado of old pages, for which I used the spell Fog Cloud.

 

[aco175]

There is some great stuff on the 5-room dungeon that talks about making a dungeon with 5 rooms or encounters. Generally there are 3 fights with a trap or puzzle and a roleplay in there. I would have to look it up more myself, but it fleshes out good for a 1-shot.

Also if you make a 1-shot vary where the hardest encounter is. If there is always a system where the players can guess or metagame where the 'boss' fight is, they save their big guns to deal with that. If it is sometimes in the middle instead of at the end, it would make the encounters more fun and challenging.

Same thing with the occasional easy encounter where they wipe the floor with the monsters.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I recommend using reinforcements. You could have a med-hard encounter, with another med-hard encounter reinforcing them 1-3 rounds after the encounter starts. You could even have an additional group of reinforcements arrive 1-3 rounds after the first group.

 

[Retreater]

There is some great stuff on the 5-room dungeon that talks about making a dungeon with 5 rooms or encounters. Generally there are 3 fights with a trap or puzzle and a roleplay in there. I would have to look it up more myself, but it fleshes out good for a 1-shot.

Yes, I'm planning on taking a lot of design ideas from the concept of the 5-room dungeon.

 

[Ovinomancer]

We know that few groups follow the 8 encounter template and that makes Challenge Rating seem a little on the easy side.
My group is wanting to embark on a series of one-shots, likely facing 2-3 combat encounters per adventure. How would you adjust for that? Would you make most encounters hard or deadly?

There is no 8 encounter template. There's the daily XP budget, one example of which is 6-8 medium encounters. This example gets taken as the rule, when it's an example.

If you look at your daily XP budget, that's about what a "normal" party should be capable of dealing with in a day. Want it to be harder? Go higher. Easier? Go lower. It's a guideline, and it actually works pretty well.

If you want 3 combats a day, then they should probably be all deadly -- that math is pretty close. And this works fine, especially if you allow a short rest between fights. Personally, I like chaining encounters, like having a hard fight get reinforced a few rounds later, with no real break between. I find this does a better job of pressuring PCs than just a straight up deadly, even if the XP totals are similar.

 

[overgeeked]

We know that few groups follow the 8 encounter template and that makes Challenge Rating seem a little on the easy side.
My group is wanting to embark on a series of one-shots, likely facing 2-3 combat encounters per adventure. How would you adjust for that? Would you make most encounters hard or deadly?

Two things, really.

First, don’t bother with balanced encounters. Let the world breathe. If the PCs go into an orc lair, there’s a full tribe of orcs inside. It’s on the PCs to try to fight them smart, if they decide to fight at all.

Second, let the PCs take a short rest as an action during combat but limit short rests to 2 per day. This mostly balances the short rest recharge classes with the long rest recharge classes.