Encounters per day

[Rod Staffwand]

'Encounters' should be thought of as any situation that drains resources (spells, ability usages, hp, HD) from the PCs. They need not be combat encounters, but can be traps, hazards or environmental effects. These don't necessarily generate xp for completion but can limit the party's adventuring day. Consider the poisonous gas from Tamoachan that does damage every hour, doors that require knock spell slots, chasms that require levitating, collapsing tunnels that cause damage, and so on. These all can take a toll but not be classic combat encounters.

Even monsters can be used this way. Have your goblins fire at the party and then run and hide. If they're lucky that's a bit of attrition right there. Have the evil cultist pull a trap lever causing a portcullis to fall, separating the party. Force the party to react to obstacles and new challenges by throwing off their game plans. Make them more faster than they want, split them up, hide vital information, and so on. Make them make skill checks or spend resources or be rather clever to overcome obstacles in their path. They will succeed on some and fail at others, taking drain the entire way.

This becomes more important at higher levels with more resources available to the PCs.

 

[Blue]

Thing is, do not play all encounters as pack animals.

And you can exceed XP limit of deadly by little if you think your party is over optimized.

Also attack from ambush, 2 or 3 vectors of attack so you can avoid majority of AoE damage/debuffs. Ranged attacks behind cover. Also never do solo monsters unless lore is 100% that the creature is solitary to a fault.

You can also retreat your villians and have them regroup with reinforcements few minutes later.

Absolutely, and good advice.

My critiques of how 5e resource recovery balance changes with less but tougher encounters still hold on the aggregate. The DM will not every encounter be able to put in place multiple methods to mitigate. Sometimes 2-3 vectors of attack don't make sense, sometimes they won't be able to retreat and attack again because they are defending something or for some other reason.

There's nothing wrong with doing 2-3 deadly encounters. I strongly prefer fewer, harder encounters myself. I'm just passing on observation that they favor classes that are primarily long-rest recovery based.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

Adventure-crafting is a skill that takes more than some empty formula to determine what is challenging to a party. Things like encounters-per-day and CR are hazy variables that only tell a small part of the story. As a DM you will get a feel for what your party enjoys and can handle. Don't be afraid to push them when you think it would be fun.

 

[Syntallah]

snip

There's nothing wrong with doing 2-3 deadly encounters. I strongly prefer fewer, harder encounters myself. I'm just passing on observation that they favor classes that are primarily long-rest recovery based.

I want the option of doing whatever I need to do to further the story. If I need 6-8 light encounters, great. If I need 2 holy smokes encounters, so be it. In light of this, I adopted a Milestone Dependent Rest system some time ago, and I love it.

In my system, PCs need to rest (lower case) each day as people normally have to do (i.e. take breaks when marching, sleep for the night, etc). If they don't, they face escalating levels of Exhaustion.

As the PCs progress through encounters, they might qualify for a Short, or Long Rest whenever they take a break (i.e. lower case rest). At 33% of the Daily Encounter Budget they can take a Short Rest. At 66% of the Budge they can take another Short Rest. At 100% of the Budget they can take a Long Rest. I have an Excel spreadsheet I use for building encounters, with notes on it as to the appropriate tiers. When the PCs rest (lower case), I look at my sheet, and if they have progressed through the Budget far enough, I tell them "hey, you can use this as a Short Rest". If they haven't progressed far enough, I tell them "rested, but no Short or Long Rest".

This system absolutely evens out the disparity between Short Rest classes, Long Rest classes, and no Rest classes. It also allows for a multi-day journey without the PCs going nova on every encounter because they know they can sleep it off tonight...

The only cost is a very minimal verisimilitude issue (i.e. I just slept all night but I'm not Rested (upper case)?). This lack of verisimilitude is certainly no more glaring than a ton of other issues in a table top Game that is not meant to be an accurate simulation of real/fantasy life (e.g. spell slots, rages per day, superiority dice, etc, etc, etc)

 

[Blue]

I want the option of doing whatever I need to do to further the story. If I need 6-8 light encounters, great. If I need 2 holy smokes encounters, so be it. In light of this, I adopted a Milestone Dependent Rest system some time ago, and I love it.

In my system, PCs need to rest (lower case) each day as people normally have to do (i.e. take breaks when marching, sleep for the night, etc). If they don't, they face escalating levels of Exhaustion.

As the PCs progress through encounters, they might qualify for a Short, or Long Rest whenever they take a break (i.e. lower case rest). At 33% of the Daily Encounter Budget they can take a Short Rest. At 66% of the Budge they can take another Short Rest. At 100% of the Budget they can take a Long Rest. I have an Excel spreadsheet I use for building encounters, with notes on it as to the appropriate tiers. When the PCs rest (lower case), I look at my sheet, and if they have progressed through the Budget far enough, I tell them "hey, you can use this as a Short Rest". If they haven't progressed far enough, I tell them "rested, but no Short or Long Rest".

This system absolutely evens out the disparity between Short Rest classes, Long Rest classes, and no Rest classes. It also allows for a multi-day journey without the PCs going nova on every encounter because they know they can sleep it off tonight...

The only cost is a very minimal verisimilitude issue (i.e. I just slept all night but I'm not Rested (upper case)?). This lack of verisimilitude is certainly no more glaring than a ton of other issues in a table top Game that is not meant to be an accurate simulation of real/fantasy life (e.g. spell slots, rages per day, superiority dice, etc, etc, etc)

This is basically the 13th Age (a d20 game) solution, and I've endorsed it regularly on ENWorld. It's my preferred method, adn why I'm currently running 13th Age and not 5e.

The critique that others level why they would not use it is the divorce of the in-game resting from resource recovery. It's definitely a sacred cow, and many don't like the break in verisimilitude it could create if the DM isn't aware of it and planning around it.

 

[Kinematics]

Could we stop doing this "any DM that complains must be a bad DM" schtick, please? There can be other explanations. Like, say, that the game designers have actually made objectively weaksauce monsters?

Easily four out of five encounters in published books have no interesting terrain or other features. I have my hands full as it is with DMing, I don't need to spend hours upon hours to make each and every encounter into a special snowflake encounter just to keep the challenge from disappearing.

Thank you.

Sorry, I didn't mean to insult or imply "bad GM". I'm just working through my own experiences and trying to see how they correlate with these effects. Most GMs I've played under have been very good overall, but for some of them, combat can be a bit lackluster.

And since you mention encounters in published books... That also seems to correlate with "vanilla" combat. The simplest, most straightforward combats have come from published scenarios, and combat only got 'interesting' when the GM went off script, or was running a homemade adventure. It's not a perfect correlation, of course, but definitely a strong trend.

Lack of interesting terrain and features would definitely be a major hindrance to making an interesting fight, and not an easy thing to fix, when it's potentially an issue with a large percentage of the adventure. And you have less control over the encounter rate in a published adventure, which means that if the adventure doesn't provide good combat design, the easiest fix is to ramp up the number or difficulty of the monsters.


As for the monsters themselves having a weak design? That's a bit harder to judge, because there are so many different monsters, that can all work quite differently. And even beyond that, the right player or combination of players can no-sell certain monster tactics. It's hard to evaluate without specific examples.