D&D 5E D&D Without Adding House-Rules/Home-brew

[Krachek]

If balanced is borked if you don't follow the guideline, it pretty much as the force of a rule.

The first advice the DM guide give for building encounters is that encounters should be fun for players, the second one is that encounters should not be a burden to run by the DM.
So you can claim this second important advice to not running 6-8 encounters a day, if you consider this as a burden. And you also claim that having 6-8 encounters may be unrelated to players fun.

 

[Maxperson]

The first advice the DM guide give for building encounters is that encounters should be fun for players, the second one is that encounters should not be a burden to run by the DM.
So you can claim this second important advice to not running 6-8 encounters a day, if you consider this as a burden. And you also claim that having 6-8 encounters may be unrelated to players fun.

I suppose the players might have fun not being challenged at all by encounters.

 

[deganawida]

I went with "no", and it doesn't matter which edition. To me, no houserules or curation is like having a hamburger with no toppings, so sauces, just meat on bread, with the meat not even being seasoned prior to cooking.

 

[Pedantic]

Really depends if I'm running the game or a player. I'll play anything at least once.

If I'm DMing, then everyone gets to put up with my preferences and I've got at least 3 or 4 subsystems to shore up incomplete parts of the rules ready to go.

 

[OB1]

It’s definitely not a rule, but the underlying math checks out with the assumption that the full XP budget is used each adventuring day. If you use less, you might run into some inter-class balance issues. Not that that’s necessarily a problem, but it is what it is.

The balance issue, IMO, is best solved by having variety in the adventuring day, such that the PCs can't make an assumption of how any particular day will play out. For example, one day might have the PCs face a single Deadly+ encounter, the next a Deadly+ followed by a Hard without time for a short rest, and still another with three Deadlies with time for a short rest between each.

If anything, I'd argue that the RAI of Encounter Days is that they should be varied, to prevent players from trying to 'game' the system

But at any rate, this is moving away from the purpose of the thread. Apologies to OP for the threadjack.

 

[Krachek]

I suppose the players might have fun not being challenged at all by encounters.

Indeed, the goal is the fun of the players, not the challenge and not the balance.
But usually players have more fun when they face challenge.

 

[Blue]

You can get pretty far just with that, almost to the point of not being recognizable as D&D. I made a homebrew setting where every PHB class, subclass, race, and background were refluffed but all mechanics other than name and description of abilities kept intact verbatim.

For a one shot I was considering asking the DM if I could do some radical reskinning, and have him trust me that I was doing the mechanics right, and see who could guess what class I was playing. I was planning on a halfling "dueling master", who dropped into "parry stance" who could parry blows without spending their reaction for half damage. It would just be a halfling DEX barbarian.

 

[Mort]

The game does not need to be balanced to be playable. Power-sensitive players will make stronger choices and power-insensitive players simply won’t care.

That’s how we all got through 3.5, after all.

The more the power imbalance between PCs the harder the DMs job becomes.

I DMd 3e/3.5 through 20+ level. Now? I will happily play 3e/3.5, I won't go back to DMing it.

 

[TwoSix]

The more the power imbalance between PCs the harder the DMs job becomes.

I DMd 3e/3.5 through 20+ level. Now? I will happily play 3e/3.5, I won't go back to DMing it.

True to an extent, as long as the DM is concerned with maintaining some kind of spotlight balance. (If underpowered PCs don't care they're being overshadowed, you don't need to do much work here.)

But I think my point still stands that balance is ultimately a concern about how the game plays, not a strict rules requirement.

 

[Umbran]

I suppose the players might have fun not being challenged at all by encounters.

So, now "It unbalances the game in favor of the PCs." becomes "not being challenged at all"?

I know, on the internet, there's a tendency to restate one's position in more and more severe terms if people don't accept your posit, but could we avoid that, please? The resulting hyperbole isn't constructive.

The 6-8 encounters per day guideline is not isolated from other guidelines. Like, six encounters of one normal goblin each isn't going to cut it, right? There is an assumed difficulty of those encounters. So, if you aren't running the same number of encounters, the difficulty of what you do use should change.