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

[CleverNickName]

Man, we're all over the place. The last adventure spanned 3 gaming sessions and according to Roll20, there were 14 battles between long rests...it was a dungeon crawl, so there wasn't a safe location to take a long rest, and there was plot pressure to stop a ritual before dawn.

The session before they got to the dungeon, there was only 1 encounter and 5 long rests...they were traveling to the dungeon, and they had a random encounter along the way.

And the session before that didn't have any combat at all for three days. They were in town, so it was all social challenges and roleplaying as they gathered clues about the snake-worshipping cultists and their hidden temple.

I wasn't sure how to represent that in your poll. So I just added them all up and divided by the number of long rests, and voted 2.

 

[Burnside]

6-8 encounters, some of which will likely be combats, some of which very likely aren't combats, and others that present multiple options of which combat is one. On average, probably three actual combats per long rest. But player choices and actions swing that a lot.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I know many people who use fewer encounters ramp up the difficulty to routinely hard or even deadly, but that sort of thinking has never really set well with me.

Oh, you can easily go way above deadly. The basic deadly is pretty easy. I just don't see point in medium, let alone easy encounters as recommended by the book. They're so incredibly trivially won that it seems like a waste of time to go through the motions. I don't need everything to be life or death battle, but I want the characters needing to actually to put some effort in it and burn some big spells and other resources in order to triumph.

Though even with harder encounters, you still need to have several, so that there can be short rests in between them, so that the short and long rest classes maintain some sort of parity.

 

[Lazybones]

I put 5 as an average. Like many posters here I have many sessions where it's just 1-2 (typically while traveling to or from the main location for the adventure). In dungeons the number is typically higher, within the recommended 6-8 encounters, and for boss encounters/adventure finales I'll often set it up so that the party has to defeat several waves of foes with some kind of time limit (e.g., the boss might escape or some other consequence might result from delay) in order to overcome the final threat. Only rarely does the party walk into a boss's lair at 100% strength, although I do try to allow ways to bypass some of the preliminary challenges through clever play.

It also depends on whether you define "combat" as each time you roll initiative; I often have encounters where the monsters retreat or reposition in such a way that a combat technically ends briefly only to resume later under different circumstances. Often those breaks are long enough for buff spells to expire and for the casting of spells like aura of vitality, which contributes to the consumption of limited resources like spell slots.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

The Deadly threshold is only 1/3 of the XP budget of an adventuring day. An encounter meant to be a sole encounter for a day ought to be triple the XP of the deadly threshold.

For example, a single encounter for the day for four Level 5 PCs could be 6 CR 4 monsters, 4 CR 5s, a trio of CR 6s, or a pair of CR 8s. I wouldn't do a solo monster for a single encounter day.

 

[Charlaquin]

Actually the average is unimportant here. It usually is the threat of maximum possible encounters that balances long vs short vs no rest classes.

This is why fall back options for classes like the ranger or paladin or emergency recharge options are way more powerful than some people like the OP give them credit.

One is way more confident to spend your resources if one knows that they have always some fuel in their reserve.

It is only in groups where you can reliably predict the number of encounters where such abilities are worthless.

Due to random encounter rolls, my games technically have no maximum number of encounters per day. Though practically speaking, more than 8 is very unlikely, and in my experience, players will tend to retreat before reaching that point.

 

[the Jester]

This is a question that is not nearly as simple as you think.

During travel? During dungeon exploration? During a war? Very different answers.

What counts as one encounter? If the pcs enter a room with a monster in it and as they slay it, two neighboring doors open and two more rooms' monsters enter, is that one encounter, or two, or three? What if there is a steady trickle of adversaries every few rounds, but the pcs take out each group before the next arrives?

If reinforcements arrive one round after a fight is over, is it a separate encounter? What about five rounds? Ten? What if those reinforcements were in the first encounter but went out of the encounter area and took a corridor to get into flanking?

For that matter, what counts as an adventuring day? Does it count if the pcs weren't planning on adventuring but ran into a rabid dog in town? What if it's during downtime and one pc has a meeting with a crime lord that turns violent after starting off as a diplomatic scene?

 

[ezo]

Oh, you can easily go way above deadly. The basic deadly is pretty easy.

I suppose it that is more dependent on how you run them.

I just don't see point in medium, let alone easy encounters as recommended by the book. They're so incredibly trivially won that it seems like a waste of time to go through the motions. I don't need everything to be life or death battle, but I want the characters needing to actually to put some effort in it and burn some big spells and other resources in order to triumph.

A discussion best left for another thread if you want to pursue it so as not to derail this one.

 

[Blue]

I think campaign style is a confounding variable that heavily impacts whether unusually low or unusually high numbers of encounters actually lead to balance issues at a particular table.

I don't. I think it's inescapable math.

If you took your average full caster and took away all slots, they would be less effective on average than at-will classes like the rogue. Simply, an At-will > cantrip. (This doesn't include EB boosted with invocations, that's a cantrip plus class features, just as martials have class features that boost their weapon attacks.)

On the other hand, if you gave casters unlimited of their highest level slots, they would do more than at-will characters. A fireball with multiple opponents, etc. Slots of the highest few levels > at-will.

No one debates that. And it has nothing do to with campaign style.

Putting them together, we get, in generic terms for the average character:

Slots of the highest few levels > at-will > cantrip

So in order to balance these, we need some number of spells cast using highest level slots plus some cantrips or low-impact spells (like 1st level offensive spells in T2+). Some above and some below will average out to the same as an at-will.

Let's examine that. If you run a few encounters and run the party's casters all the way out of spells - you are STILL not balancing the classes unless you also are forcing them to have a good number of rounds casting cantrips - it needs that "less than at-will effectiveness" to balance out.

An easy way to work this out is average effectiveness per action, over the course of the adventuring day.

Ah, so if you have fewer encounters, as long as the last as long as more encounters we're good, right?

Well, no. It's moving in the right direction, but durations are a thing. If an encounter is 3-4 rounds and you can a spell lasting 1 minute, you only get 3-4 rounds of effect from it at most. But if the combat lasts 9 rounds, then you are getting 2-3 times the effect from the same slot and the same action. It's more powerful. So you need to offset it with even MORE rounds of lower than at-will efficiency than if you were just doing more encounters.

A easy way to see this is the barbarian. Say you've got 3 rages per day. Assuming the encounters total to the same deadliness, is there any case where you are worse off if you can rage for every encounter instead of half of them? That's one of the things that decreasing the number of encounters does - allows duration effects to be even more powerful.

Fewer encounters per day is usually fewer total rounds then if we did all of the encounters per day, and that definitely is mathematically biased in terms of the long-rest-recovery classes like casters as well as a big boost for hybrids like the barbarian and the paladin.

 

[SteveC]

Just one more comment on this really interesting topic. It is a critical part of the game for the DM to communicate these numbers, along with the general availability of short rests to the group. That will tell you how to manage resources in the adventuring day.