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

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

It is not D&D without house rules. So, that is a definite no for me.

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

I voted NO and wished that I could have voted NO! Having to encounter 6-8 combat encounters in a 24 hour period would destroy the game for me.

That is not a rule requirement. You can play the game RAW without 6-8 encounters. In fact, I think it is more fun when you don’t!

 

[Greg K]

No, I will not play any edition of D&D without specific house rules and 3pp.

 

[Mecheon]

I mean, I’d do a one-off. But D&D has always been a bit of a toolkit. No fun boss enemies based on player decisions just sounds meh

 

[Maxperson]

For each character in the party, use the Adventuring Day XP table to estimate how much XP that character is expected to earn in a day. Add together the values of all party members to get a total for the party's adventuring day. This provides a rough estimate of the adjusted XP value for encounters the party can handle before the characters will need to take a long rest."

The problem is the expected XP for an adventuring day requires multiple encounters. A party of 4 5th level PCs is expected to get 14,000 in the adventuring day. A CR 15 adult green dragon is worth 13000, so 1 of those and some other things to hit that number in 1 fight. That's a TPK and a half.

Deadly is 4400xp for that level, so you'd need 3 deadly encounters and an easy encounter to hit 14000 xp. That's 4 encounters, which is 2 short of 6, and 3 of them are deadly. Drop a few down to hard and you have 2800 more xp to play with. That's two more encounters that are almost at hard difficulty. Now we're at 1 deadly, 4 hard, and 1 easy. 6 encounters that day.

That is not unreasonable for mega-dungeon raiding where there are lots of potential individual opposition encounters and retreat between encounters is an option, but really not the expected normal tempo of a lot of D&D such as plot based heroic quests, traveling, urban scenarios, investigations, etc.

Yes. This. Which is why the adventuring day is horrible game design. The least disruptive way to play it is to go the weekly long rest option. That way you can have those encounters at the normal tempo.

 

[Maxperson]

Interesting space to wiggle there - "too far below". Nothing hard that you can be held to in that.

See my last post. Drop down to 1 encounter for a 5th level group and you TPK the party without even trying. A CR 15 creature isn't enough and a CR 16 is a bit too much. Even cutting it down to two 7k xp encounters is probably a TPK.

Well, the party is supposed to be challenged, right? There's folks around here that seem to think having a threat of TPK every session is just about right.

Then they probably want to play higher than the 14k xp in an adventuring day for 5th level PCs.

As has already been noted - WotC violates this guideline in its own adventures quite frequently. I'm running Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and the section we are going through has an explicit 8 hour span in which there's no real combat encounter to speak of! Zero is about as far below six as we can go, isn't it? Shouldn't my game be doomed?

0 doesn't start an adventuring day. An adventuring day isn't like a normal day where you have no encounters. Once you have a combat, you're into that 14k xp for a group of 4 5th level PCs. A single 14,000 xp encounter is going to TPK the group.

 

[Nefermandias]

That's how I run all of my campaigns. Lots of optional rules (variant encumbrance, gritty realism, slow natural healing and mandatory healer's kit), but absolutely no homebrew or 3pp stuff.
Never.
Ever.

 

[Azuresun]

That is not a rule requirement. You can play the game RAW without 6-8 encounters. In fact, I think it is more fun when you don’t!

It drives me batty when people assert "You must run 6-8 encounters or you're doing it wrong!", when the DMG very clearly just gives that as ONE EXAMPLE of how an adventuring day might go IF the encounters are X difficulty.

Further evidence that almost nobody ever reads that section for themselves, and trusts mangled hearsay. No matter what else they change for 5.5, they need to have 6-8 ENCOUNTERS ARE NOT MANDATORY in big glowing neon letters on the new DMG, or it might be too subtle to destroy this meme.

Yes, this seriously irritates me. You noticed?

See my last post. Drop down to 1 encounter for a 5th level group and you TPK the party without even trying. A CR 15 creature isn't enough and a CR 16 is a bit too much. Even cutting it down to two 7k xp encounters is probably a TPK.

I've heard a rumour you can use multiple weaker creatures in an encounter.

 

[Maxperson]

I've heard a rumour you can use multiple weaker creatures in an encounter.

Sure! So let's use ogres(CR2). 450xp each. That's 31 ogres. Think a party of 4 5th level PCs will survive that one encounter for their 14,000 daily budget? Or orcs(CR 1/2). That's..........140 orcs. That's going to TPK the party as well.

 

[Voadam]

The problem is the expected XP for an adventuring day requires multiple encounters.

I would say the problem is just the phrasing "XP that character is expected to earn in a day". I think pointing out the guideline of "here is how much to expect characters can take in a day" is a great guideline for designing encounters. This makes it easier to consciously design encounters across an adventuring day to be deadly, likely to kill some but not all characters, pushing their limits but doable, engaged but not really risky, or easy combat. D&D should be designed for a lot of different pacing and challenges here, not just expect to push them to the average design limits every day.

Take out that phrasing in that one sentence and I believe it is a measuring stick for challenge per long rest, not an expectation.