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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9842017" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I think the reason is that they explained it very poorly in the 2014 DMG, and the way they explained it upset a lot of people. So, rather than coming up with a better way to explain it in the 2024 DMG, they just decided to leave it out.The reality of the whole “adventuring day” thing is that 5e (both versions) just isn’t really built for a single encounter to pose a significant threat to the PCs. Even if the encounter is built way over-budget, that mostly just makes it swingier, rather than making it more challenging in a consistent or predictable way. To get a reliable challenge, you have to wear the party’s resources down, and to do that without introducing a high chance of randomly one-shotting a PC, you have to use multiple encounters. About 6 medium ones will be enough to put a typical party up against the ropes, maybe 7 or 8 if they’re very efficient and/or very lucky. And that’s just the reality of the way the combat system is built. Technically they don’t really need to tell you that, because it’s true whether you know it or not. But I do think knowledge is power and it’s better to understand how the system is built.Another thing that’s just true about the system is that uncertainty about how many encounters the party will need to face is part of the challenge. Players might be very conservative with their spell slots and other short or long rest recovery resources because they’re anticipating needing to save them for some future encounter, and end up losing more of their hit points resource because the fight takes longer. Conversely, they might burn through a ton of their short and long rest recovery resources and trivialize an encounter without losing much or any of their hit points resource, but end up making future encounters much harder on themselves as a result. Either of these very common mistakes can lead to the party feeling more challenged than the math expects, after fewer than 6-8 encounters. That’s why the PCs being able to rest basically whenever they want to is a feature rather than a bug. It kind of allows them to set their own difficulty. Whenever they start feeling taxed to the degree of challenge they’re comfortable with, they have the power to hit the refresh button and reset the challenge for the next adventuring day.</blockquote>

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