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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 6970956" data-attributes="member: 19857">Ah you've got the opposite problem of the "5-minute workday" - you've got a week's worth of narrative that's going on in a single session.  Those kinds of games worked much better under 4th edition assumptions than under either 3e or 5e for me, but you can make them work.  Personally I think my advice above still mostly stands - balance your encounters with the assumption that the PCs will be able to "go nova" in every encounter and you'll mostly be okay.  You need to be careful about throwing higher level monsters at them - even with 5e's bounded accuracy you want to make sure that the AC of the monsters is within range for your PCs to hit reliably because otherwise the battles turn into annoying slugfests with bags of hit points that won't go down after they've outlived their dramatic purpose and nobody likes chasing after bags of hit points in a mop up operation once it's obvious how the battle is going to turn out. In sessions where I'm likely to have only one single setpiece battle where the PCs will be at full power, I like to actually make it 2-3 smaller battles strung together where there isn't enough time for them to catch their breath - just as the last opponent looks like he's going down, the dragon shows up.  That kind of thing.  You can't get away with that every session, but you might be surprised how often your players will let you get away with it if they're enjoying it and feeling the challenge. (And taking a page from 13th age I might even let them have the mechanical benefit of a "short rest" in between if it looks like they need it.  Sometimes my PCs get a surge of inspiration from the new threat that has shown up and it rallies them as if they'd had a short rest.  Or something like that - some justification for throwing the short rest mechanics into the mix without actually interrupting the battle and making it narratively two different battles instead of one big one.)One of your comments said that your players were finding combat to be boring.  I believe that if you're doing compressed narratives where a week's worth of narrative fits into a single session and you're building encounters by the book. Even double-strength encounters might be too weak. Go with what works for your group, fold and mutilate the rules to make them work for you.  I think it's doable in 5e to run this kind of game - not as easily as it was in 4e, but still doable.</blockquote>

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