D&D 5E DM in trouble needs advice/help to balance encounters in his campaign.

[Flamestrike]

But one that can easily cause issues is that 5e is calibrated around a long slog of an adventuring day. Your party should get a short rest maybe every-other encounter, and a long rest only after 6-8 encounters.

This.

OP; instead of dialing up the difficulty of encounters (which turns the game into rocket tag, and mandates the 5 minute adventuring day) you need to increase the amount of encounters per short/ long rest.

Either use Doom Clocks or other methods to push more encounters (as a median) on the party per long rest, or change the rest frequencies (short rest = 1 day, long rest = 1 week).

 

[aco175]

Could you bring milestones back and reward the players with a re-roll every 2 encounters they manage each day? I do not see pacing being a big problem, but this may help the 5mwd crowd. Although a re-roll is not the same as having all your powers back.

 

[jasper]

Ok, you and your players are NEW to 5E. So have allies in nearby towns not charge for healing or raise dead. Know both you and your players are learning a new game so if there is a total party kill, don't worry about it. Either rewind the action, or have npc allies recover the bodies.
I been playing since 1980 and started 5E in Sept 2016. It took me about two years to get use power levels and new classes.

 

[clearstream]

Thanks a lot for the quick replies.

I think you guys nailed it: We're very far from 6-8 encounters in between rests. It's usually more like 1-2 :/

I lack the experience to wear the characters down and force them to develop strategies to save their strengths.

On the other hand, when I think about it, they also lack that experience: I almost lost the whole group in the cult's secret temple, when they just explored it in one go without ever resting. The last encounter would have been deadly hadn't I decided the creatures were young and therefore naive in their strategy...

Now to address an advice you gave me: I have a tool on a French D&D website to simulate encounters so I use that to evaluate them. I suppose there's just not enough fights all in all, except for that secret temple scenario but in any case we're really not used to play dungeon crawling style.

In our last game I just got caught off guard when the players ran into 3 NPCs and half a dozen soldiers: the damned sorcerer (or whatever it's called in English... not the one with a pact or a book, the one with innate magic) vaporized 85% of my strengths in the blink of an eye, with a fireball :'(
I realized I found it hard to evaluate the strengths of the NPCs because they don't fit in my webtool to simulate encounters...

Ah well, I suppose I have a long way to go to learn how to be a good DM.
Thanks again for the help and tips.
Cheers !

t.


edit: since we're not used to play multiple battles in a row, it may actually help and fit our gaming style if we change the resting rules as you suggested. I need to ponder the options and maybe discuss them with my players. We'll see. Kudos

As well as rests being off, the scaling for number of creatures is tuned to very easy. I have been using

Monsters	Multiplier
1	0.5​
2	0.75​
3 to 6	1​
7 to 10	1.25​
11 to 14	1.5​
15+	2​

 

[Sadras]

@tom1017 I think your biggest issue is that the encounter guidelines provided within the DMG do not match the published material which is something @CapnZapp has crusaded at length on these boards.

My bite-sized advice on this lengthy issue is if you're going to have 1-2 encounters per day, have them be deadly and come in waves OR change the recovery rate of abilities/powers to either those in the book or something you're comfortable with OR introduce Lingering Injuries per the DMG or any combination of these options.

 

[CapnZapp]

Mhhm..?

 

[tom1017]

Wow I missed all the hindsight of the past days.
Thanks all for the help and advice.

It's true our main issues are that everyone in our group is new to DD5e and we're not used to encounters-heavy sessions.
So I think I'll just give a go at changing the resting/recovery pace and see how it goes from there.

In any case, your guys help was really appreciated. Kudos.

Cheers!

t.

 

[ad_hoc]

It's true our main issues are that everyone in our group is new to DD5e and we're not used to encounters-heavy sessions.

I see this come up a lot where people conflate sessions with long rests.

Our table averages 1 long rest every 2 sessions.

Every table will be different. Different session lengths, playstyles, play speed, time spent talking out of game, etc.

These differences all work if you don't try to have exactly 1 long rest per session.

 

[tom1017]

The simple fact is I never considered there was a needed ratio between encounters and short/long rests.
I just followed the narrative so if a session's length implied 5-6 nights comfortable enough to recover, bang, here we were with 5-6 long rests while our gaming style implies that in the same time max 2-3 medium/hard encounters occur.
If there was a little more encounters due to a more dangerous stage of the scenario, I set them "easy" but still, we were lightyears from 6-8 encounters between long rests.

This is why I believe our group needs to consider trying something like 1 average night = 1 short rest recovery value while something like a good night's sleep per week in a very cosy place offers the recovery benefits of a long rest.

 

[ad_hoc]

The simple fact is I never considered there was a needed ratio between encounters and short/long rests.
I just followed the narrative so if a session's length implied 5-6 nights comfortable enough to recover, bang, here we were with 5-6 long rests while our gaming style implies that in the same time max 2-3 medium/hard encounters occur.
If there was a little more encounters due to a more dangerous stage of the scenario, I set them "easy" but still, we were lightyears from 6-8 encounters between long rests.

This is why I believe our group needs to consider trying something like 1 average night = 1 short rest recovery value while something like a good night's sleep per week in a very cosy place offers the recovery benefits of a long rest.

Yeah. The game is designed for adventuring in dungeons (or the equivalent).

The farther you deviate from that the more house/alternate rules you're going to want to use to correct for it.