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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6784542" data-attributes="member: 996">That's too bad.  Simply adjusting the rest opportunities to make a 'day' whatever in-game period has 6-8 encounters in it, whether it's 3 hours spent in a dungeon or two and a half years exploring a continent, is one way of slicing through the gordian knot of 5e class-balance/encounter-difficulty/pacing interdependence.Then you might consider adjusting your pacing to match the guidelines, if you want usable guidelines.  I know, not helpful....The next question is do you care about "class balance" at all.  If you do, you'll have to make some adjustments:  [sblock="Balance"]Problem is, all the classes, and all but maybe 3 or so of the sub-classes are absolutely affected by attrition across multiple encounters, and experience it to different degrees and in different ways - and the remaining few are balanced against those classes when experiencing the expected level of attrition.  With very few encounters/day, some classes will have such a glut of resources that they'll be able to expend all their most powerful stuff, every encounter, and still have some un-used, others classes won't be able to rise to the level of performance that would result it.  You'd have to substantially re-balance the game and modify classes.  For a 'daily' ability to feel limited, for instance, you need to have fewer uses of it than you'd expect to have encounters in a 'day.'  If you're having 1-encounter days, such abilities become exactly as available as 'encounter' or 'short rest'-recharge abilities, so any character with more of the former than the latter becomes relatively over-powered.  Similarly, if you can use a short-rest or daily ability every round of every encounter, they're just as available as at-wills, and there's no reason for them to be any more powerful than an at-will.  One thing about a big combat is that it can last a good deal longer.  Put enough rounds on the table, and you can tease out a difference in availability between rest-recharge and at-will abilities.  You still might need to reduce daily resources.  If you really have only 1 encounter per day, there should be fewer daily resources available than corresponding short-rest-recharge abilities (the opposite of how 5e is designed, since it assumes 2-3 short rests between each long rest).  If you have 2-3, put a short between all encounters to reduce the problem.  Between that, and making combats much longer, in rounds, you can force some of the resource attrition (and thus balance/challenge) of standard 'day' into even a two-encounter day.[/sblock]If you don't, next problem...Personally, I find that 5e really lends itself to that style.  It may just be a matter of getting used to running that way.  It can be a lot of fun.The obvious solution is to stick to a smaller number of creatures, and ratchet up the CR of the enemies and/or give them additional advantages (Lair actions, legendary actions, terrain features, non-PC-usable items, mission parameters that constrain the PCs strategies, etc).Between bounded accuracy and the variability across classes (and thus party compositions), there really can't be nice clean guidelines.  The existing guidelines just aren't dependable w/in the pacing of encounters they're intended for, they're not going to get any better outside that range.Larger (in numbers of creatures) and longer fights wouldn't quite be the thing, then, because that would be re-introducing attrition, just over rounds instead of over a day.  Neither would just turning encounter difficulty up to 11 by dialing up CRs exactly accomplish that.  I wish I had a greater variety of advice for you, but I honestly think you're already on the right track:   Don't worry so much about stating it out in advance, and feel your way through each battle to manufacture the experience you want for your players.  It's an art, and you'll get better at it as you go.</blockquote>

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