D&D (2024) How many combats do you have on average adventuring day.

[Deset Gled]

hmm, average is less than 3 combats per Long rest here.

so much for 6-8 combats per day idea...

Encounters. 6-8 encounters.

 

[jmartkdr2]

The 6-8 combats a day always sounded more like a warning than something to aspire to. From memory, the advice in the DMG stated that PCs could probably handle around 6-8 combats per long rest before running on empty and needing a long rest to recover.

It was also specifically talking about medium encounters, just using hard encounters can cut that in half.

 

[ezo]

hmm, average is less than 3 combats per Long rest here.

so much for 6-8 combats per day idea...

Well, it goes back to the problem with your OP... what did you expect???

As many people stilpulated (including myself) the average is skewed artificially low because the idea is 6-8 encounters per "adventuring day". Not traveling day, not days talking to NPCs in a town or village, etc., but actual adventure days. Since a long rest (more or less) happens every day (or in a 24-hour period), you are counting many days which are not "adventuring days".

For example, I might have combats according to the following day-to-day:

On days the PCs are "In town", combats are few. While traveling, random encounters are a bit more common, but neither of these are the "adventuring days" discussed in the DMG. In the above example I only have two "adventuring days", with an average of 10.5 combats per adventuring day... much higher than the overall "combats per long rest" that you asked for.

Do you honestly expect the average for ALL types of days (when a long rest is taken) to include the guidelines of 6-8 encounters suggested for actual adventuring days??

It was also specifically talking about medium encounters, just using hard encounters can cut that in half.

Actually, it was medium or hard...

 

[tetrasodium]

The 6-8 combats a day always sounded more like a warning than something to aspire to. From memory, the advice in the DMG stated that PCs could probably handle around 6-8 combats per long rest before running on empty and needing a long rest to recover.

There is also a quote from Mearls out there about that being what they assumed and mapped to

 

[Xetheral]

This... okay, let me restate this with cars.

Me: "If you have a flat tire, it's a sign that your car isn't fit to drive."
You: "I don't think having a flat tire is the one and only barometer a car being fit to drive."

I trust you can see how those differ.

I'd be glad to discuss how wildly varying effectiveness per action is or is not a sign of in-combat imbalance. Basically, you will need to show that regardless of the number of encounters, both at-will and casters have around the same output over time - so no "this particular situation favors one or the other".

I think we may be approaching the concept of balance from different directions, and talking past each other as a result. Based on your proposed analogy and your description of what I would need to show to continue the conversation, it looks like you're focusing on (and perhaps defining?) in-combat balance as PCs having similar "output" over time. I actually completely agree that lower or higher numbers of encounters are going to differently affect the "output" of different PCs. As I previously discussed, I think the relationship between number of encounters and PC average effectiveness is more complicated than you presented (because you're not accounting for how often a PC can actually make good use of their highest level spell slots, a factor which I think campaign style influences), but I agree on the basic premise.

My original point, however, was instead looking at how unusually low or unusually high numbers of encounters affect whether or not any particular table experiences balance issues. In other words, I'm talking about whether the players at any particular table view any imbalance they percieve during their campaign as actually rising to the level of an issue that detracts from their play experience. That's a much broader (and inherently less quantifiable) view of balance than I think you're focused on. Speaking from experience as both a player and as a DM, it's entirely possible for the presence of some types of intraparty balance (e.g. every PC's contributions being equally crucial, a good balance of spotlight time, a shared stake in the party's success, or a good balance of player contributions) to offset a lack of other types of intraparty balance to the extent that the players agree that the game feels balanced.

Would you agree that campaign style can impact whether any percieved imbalance in "output" at any particular table rises to the level that's it's perceived as a problem by the players? From there, because I agree with you that number of encounters can impact relative PC "output", I think it follows that campaign style can influence whether that impact rises to the level that it's perceived as a problem.

If you can agree with that, then I think we're in broad agreement regarding "balance" as we're each using the term. If you can't agree with that, where do you see our evident disconnect as arising?

 

[Xetheral]

I wanted to comment on the notion that "the story determines when you get rests." In D&D, I find that notion the DM equivalent of "it's what my character would do."

As a DM in traditional play, you create the environment. You make the rooms, deploy the monsters, and set any time limits on what's happening. The "story" only exists because of what you've created. So if an adventuring day becomes 12 encounters, that's largely because of what you did. And like everything I write, if you and your players are having fun, who am I to gripe about it? The only thing I can say is: it's you who's making that decision (especially with time concerns) and largely not your players. Of course there are always those players who are ready to roll for one more room, even when they are spent, and god love 'em.

There are other ways to play than traditional D&D play. There's "emergent play," and "play to find out, err ... play," and those are traditionally found in the PbtA world.

Those games typically aren't about tactical combat. I can't think of a single PbtA or FitD game that is (although I'd like to try it if it exists!) You can resolve entire combats, or even multiple combats, with a single die roll. In Blades in the Dark, we had a game where the GM had us make a Positioning Check (it's the first part of a Score, where you determine where you pick up with active play) and then narrated how we had half a dozen fights before we got to the locked door we were looking for. That's ... not how D&D is commonly played.

As a player in D&D, you're always concerned with resources and the adventuring day, as long as you're playing a character who has resources that reset on Rests. That's whether the DM is concerned with them or not. "What can I afford to do here? Is this encounter worth using another spell slot? Is my Action Surge worth it to use so early in the day?" ... and so on.

What is all this rambling about? Just that when you create an adventuring site, you're naturally making one or more adventuring days. And if you're creating something your players can't be expected to do, it's in the same light as the player who attacks the guards because it's what their character would do.

I suspect that many posters who say something along the lines of "the story determines when you get rests" are running sandbox games where finding (or making!) time to rest is explicitly the players' responsibility. In such games (which are very traditional indeed) the content isn't tailored to the PCs and there's no expectation whether they will or will not be able to successfully accomplish their chosen goals, so it would be somewhat contradictory if the DM were to nevertheless deliberately build in opportunities to rest. Instead, rests happen either "organically" when the PCs don't have any more-urgent priorities, or else when the players decide that taking a rest is the party's most-urgent priority and work to make it happen.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I suspect that many posters who say something along the lines of "the story determines when you get rests" are running sandbox games where finding (or making!) time to rest is explicitly the players' responsibility. In such games (which are very traditional indeed) the content isn't tailored to the PCs and there's no expectation whether they will or will not be able to successfully accomplish their chosen goals, so it would be somewhat contradictory if the DM were to nevertheless deliberately build in opportunities to rest. Instead, rests happen either "organically" when the PCs don't have any more-urgent priorities, or else when the players decide that taking a rest is the party's most-urgent priority and work to make it happen.

That is how I do it, yes.

 

[Zardnaar]

I suspect that many posters who say something along the lines of "the story determines when you get rests" are running sandbox games where finding (or making!) time to rest is explicitly the players' responsibility. In such games (which are very traditional indeed) the content isn't tailored to the PCs and there's no expectation whether they will or will not be able to successfully accomplish their chosen goals, so it would be somewhat contradictory if the DM were to nevertheless deliberately build in opportunities to rest. Instead, rests happen either "organically" when the PCs don't have any more-urgent priorities, or else when the players decide that taking a rest is the party's most-urgent priority and work to make it happen.

Busted

 

[ezo]

I suspect that many posters who say something along the lines of "the story determines when you get rests" are running sandbox games where finding (or making!) time to rest is explicitly the players' responsibility. In such games (which are very traditional indeed) the content isn't tailored to the PCs and there's no expectation whether they will or will not be able to successfully accomplish their chosen goals, so it would be somewhat contradictory if the DM were to nevertheless deliberately build in opportunities to rest. Instead, rests happen either "organically" when the PCs don't have any more-urgent priorities, or else when the players decide that taking a rest is the party's most-urgent priority and work to make it happen.

Nailed it.

 

[SteveC]

I suspect that many posters who say something along the lines of "the story determines when you get rests" are running sandbox games where finding (or making!) time to rest is explicitly the players' responsibility. In such games (which are very traditional indeed) the content isn't tailored to the PCs and there's no expectation whether they will or will not be able to successfully accomplish their chosen goals, so it would be somewhat contradictory if the DM were to nevertheless deliberately build in opportunities to rest. Instead, rests happen either "organically" when the PCs don't have any more-urgent priorities, or else when the players decide that taking a rest is the party's most-urgent priority and work to make it happen.

I'll say this doesn't obviate any responsibility on the part of the DM for what happens encounter wise. Long ago, I played with a player who had a reaction table he used to determine what his character did when he met an NPC. Did he want to be friends? Was it time to roll for initiative? Only the dice know! If you've seen the Simpsons episode with Gary in it, they make a joke of it where he makes a D20 roll to determine his own reaction. That kind of thing. It was definitely fun, for him.

But using a table to determine what happens in your game is still a choice you're making. It effectively says "Every time you want to take a rest, we'll roll a die to see if you can do it." Is that somehow more fair to the players? Honestly, don't know. What I've typically seen when a DM does this is that they say, "There is no story to my game. At the end of the night, whatever happened was the story." And again, that's a choice. Do random tables and die rolls make for a better game? Again, don't know.

If everyone is having fun, more power to you. But the DM chose to make that how the world works, and it's the dice deciding when or if you can take a rest, not any kind of story. As you can imagine, that's ... not my style. I've played with enough DMs who use it to know I won't enjoy it as a player, so I bow out of those games. If the players tell you "Here's what we want to do," and you just make a die roll to see if they can do it without other considerations, that's still on you as a DM.