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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7426114" data-attributes="member: 37579">The encounter guidelines work better than the ones for 1e and 2e which didn't exist. Or for ones in 90% of other RPGs on the market where they also don't exist. They work better than the ones for 3e, which were funky. And about as well as the ones for 4e.The thing is, those rules exist only because they were expected and for writing the published adventures, so they can be done "by the book". The designers knew that once people got a feel for designing encounters, those rules would go out the window. I don't think anyone thinks it's perfect. I just think they don't see the point about complaining. Or feel the need to defend it against attack (especially from non-positive criticism where no solutions are presented).5e is like capitalism or democracy, where they're pretty flawed—often at an inherent level—but they're the best we have at the moment. Attacking them for the sake of complaining doesn't serve much purpose.True. But lots of people didn't like the 4-5 encounters per day of 3e and 4e either. For many games, balancing around a single encounter per day might be preferable. Getting the exact right encounters-per-day ONLY matters when you're trying to establish baseline balance/ effectiveness between short rest recharge classes and long rest recharge classes. Which, even then, is only theoretical as the dice will make effectiveness vary, as will player skill, character optimisation, and a myriad of other factors. And it's pretty much impossible with the average party since you're trying to gauge the comparative effectiveness of four very different characters fulfilling four very different roles. There's no single metric that works: how do you compare how effective the tank was compared to the blaster compared to the healer?5e has abundant out-of-combat healing. In combat healing is often weak, as it's hard to heal more damage than is being inflicted. A single encounter can be challenging, regardless if you're on encounter 1 or encounter 8. The advantage of a 6-8 encounter day is that it's long. You can have a single big encounter that feels like 2 or 3 encounters and still have enough fuel in the tank for 3-4 more regular encounters or 2 scary encounters. Unlike the 4-5 encounter workday, where after an encounter like that you feel tapped and incentivized to rest. It encourages a five minute workday. Trying to have those long multi-encounter dungeons (like in 1e and 2e) felt tricky with 3e, as people exhausted their resources too quickly. So you can have something like the opening of Lost Mine of Phandelver where you have 6 goblin encounters at level 1 without taking 2-3 days.</blockquote>

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