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

[Xetheral]

Frankly I am amazed at how low most of the votes are. When I voted 3 I was sort-of low-balling it due to the travel and town adventuring days where long rests aren't needed in the absolute sense of resource recovery.

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.

The thing I am doing right now is basing encounters on the game-world concept of creature rarity based on CR primarily.

Spoiler: My encounter system

In short, each encounter has a base of tier 1. A d6 roll of 6 ramps it up to tier 2, another 6 to tier 3, and a final 6 to tier 4. I don't care what tier the PCs are... If they encounter something below their tier it will be easier, and something above their tier they might have to avoid or flee from, etc.

I live in rural upstate NY, so I explain it like this:

If I see a squirrel, that is tier 1 (basic creature seen/encountered all the time)
If I see a deer, that is tier 2 (common enough that I seem them often, but not all the time)
If I see a black bear, that is tier 3 (something I see once in a great while, but I know they are out there... so I am always cautious while hiking, etc.)
If I see a rattlesnake, that is tier 4 (I know they are around here, but I have only ever seen one in my life)

Now, I try in use sufficient numbers, terrain, etc. to make the encounters at least minimally challenging when the PCs are higher level and things from tier 1 would not otherwise be much of a threat, but when you consider tier 4 includes CR 4 creatures, it isn't too hard to manage.

It does mean, however, that tier 4 PCs will not always be encountering tier 3 and 4 creatures (just to make it a challenge) like most games... they will often encounter tiers 1 and 2 when they get there.

Personally, I ignore CR and don't worry about PC vs monster balance--the monsters and NPCs exist in my campaign world independently of the PCs. It's mostly up to the PCs in my campaigns to decide what to try to engage (at least until they provoke an NPC into hunting the party), and that includes trying to make sure that they're properly prepared if they're going to try to punch above their weight class.

In my current campaign the PCs have mostly opted to backburner adventuring opportunities that would lead to dungeons (or dungeon analogues) with the potential for sequential combats, in favor of pursuing objectives they've deemed more urgent. Some of those objectives have been resolved without any combat--usually when the party was obviously more powerful than their opponents and could leverage that strength to achieve a non-violent resolution--and some of which have been resolved by the PCs hunting down and deliberately attacking the NPCs, either because eradication was their chosen objective or because the NPCs were too powerful to otherwise coerce. (The latter of which naturally leads to combat encounters far beyond what the DMG would classify as 'Deadly' if I was using CR.)

I agree, but you still have a number of people talking about only doing a couple encounters daily when it is a "meaningful portion of encounters". I personally don't count non-conflict encounters into the equation... no resources are used, you could have an infinite number of them in theory without issue.

My answer is 1 under either formulation of the question.

And most of the spellcasting and other limited-use resource expenditure at my table is done out of combat, either in pursuit of non-combat objectives or when trying to set up a planned combat encounter to their own advantage.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Wow, we are not playing the same game at all. I don't recognize your game.

Sure, I can increase the challenge so that fewer encounters can feel tough, but those never feel balanced. That's the part that boggles my mind you feel. An at-will character like a rogue provides a steady output regardless if it's the first or seventh encounter, while a long-rest recovery character like a full caster has so much more output in a single 10 round combat adventuring day then in seven 3-4 round combats.

I'm finding it a little hard to parse "more output in a single 10 round combat adventuring day than in seven 3-4 round combats."

D&D combat in 5e is about 3-5 rounds per fight, maybe up to about 7 if there's a significant legendary brick in your way or something.

In that time, I usually see a long-rest recovery caster like the wizard dumping their top 2-3 spell slots and a rogue sneak attacking every round. The long-rest-recovery character has to make some choices about their efficiency and project what they think the rest of the day will bring, and the more at-will character doesn't, but that's mostly an experiential difference that has little impact on the numbers being dumped out. Having a long-rest-recovery character nova doesn't significantly reduce the duration of a particular combat, and that duration is what causes the party to feel threatened by the fight (because every round spent is more damage incoming).

So, my experience with 5e is fairly consistent in that regard: different rates of recharge on different characters doesn't impact individual fight duration significantly (maybe a round or two here or there depending on how the dice fall).

It really comes down to how much can a character do per turn, and frankly when you only have a few combats per day so casters can fill every Action with one of their highest level of spells they average so much more efficiency per turns than when those turns are a mix of their highest level spells, mid level spells, and cantrips.

The impact of the nova in 5e is not super significant, IMXP. Long-rest-recharge characters don't dominate my one-fight days. They burn their highest level slots, but the fights don't end faster, and still wind up threatening character death (which is what I want out of a "challenging" fight). Parties with more at-will or short-rest characters don't take longer in those fights, either.

I find D&D 5e's pacing to be as nearly as resilient as 4e's 10-round-standard in this regard (though subject to the round or two variability I mentioned above).

Heck, even the fact that more challenging encounters are longer are in their favor, as an Action to cast a high level spell that lasts for 3 rounds has less effect then an Action to cast that same spell which has a duration of 8 rounds.

I mean, this doesn't speak to # of encounters/day. Spend my highest level spell slot on my first turn on a buff or debuff that lasts 3 or 8 rounds, I'm still out my highest level spell slot, and that's a significant drop in my power.

So no, I never feel that 5e is balanced enough to run one encounter per day or seven. It's not, and the PCs absolutely feel it.

My experience is that each combat can threaten the PC's with death pretty reliably (if that's the fight I want to have), even if it's the only fight they have in a day. This kind of touches on the CR conversation and how different tables experience risk and combat difficulty, but in practice, a hard encounter for my groups (which I usually build using Xanathar rules) has always been one where at least one character felt the pinch of potential death, and that's usually enough for me to feel a combat was satisfyingly tough. It doesn't matter if it's a party full of wizards and clerics or a party full of fighters and rogues - the rules for making a hard encounter still pose the same general level of risk.

When I have more than one encounter in a day, I still get the expected level of risk in each fight, fairly reliably. What changes is mostly that PC's leverage less renewable resources the longer the day goes.

 

[Mistwell]

If we're counting "adventuring" (as opposed to downtime) days where resources are spent, but no combat occurs, my response would be considerably lower.

Some people did, some people didn't. If you look through the comments, it's clear some people counted days spent as court intrigue or exploration with no combat as adventuring.

 

[ezo]

Personally, I ignore CR and don't worry about PC vs monster balance--the monsters and NPCs exist in my campaign world independently of the PCs. It's mostly up to the PCs in my campaigns to decide what to try to engage (at least until they provoke an NPC into hunting the party), and that includes trying to make sure that they're properly prepared if they're going to try to punch above their weight class.

To be clear, I don't worry about CR or balance, but I use CR a baseline for determining rarity based on threat. Creatures which are more dangerous tend to be more rarer. So, the weaker less threatening creatures should be encountered more often.

For example, in the vast majority of my game world, you are more likely to encounter orcs than ogres, ogres than giants, etc.

 

[Zardnaar]

Frankly I am amazed at how low most of the votes are. When I voted 3 I was sort-of low-balling it due to the travel and town adventuring days where long rests aren't needed in the absolute sense of resource recovery.

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.

The thing I am doing right now is basing encounters on the game-world concept of creature rarity based on CR primarily.

Spoiler: My encounter system

In short, each encounter has a base of tier 1. A d6 roll of 6 ramps it up to tier 2, another 6 to tier 3, and a final 6 to tier 4. I don't care what tier the PCs are... If they encounter something below their tier it will be easier, and something above their tier they might have to avoid or flee from, etc.

I live in rural upstate NY, so I explain it like this:

If I see a squirrel, that is tier 1 (basic creature seen/encountered all the time)
If I see a deer, that is tier 2 (common enough that I seem them often, but not all the time)
If I see a black bear, that is tier 3 (something I see once in a great while, but I know they are out there... so I am always cautious while hiking, etc.)
If I see a rattlesnake, that is tier 4 (I know they are around here, but I have only ever seen one in my life)

Now, I try in use sufficient numbers, terrain, etc. to make the encounters at least minimally challenging when the PCs are higher level and things from tier 1 would not otherwise be much of a threat, but when you consider tier 4 includes CR 4 creatures, it isn't too hard to manage.

It does mean, however, that tier 4 PCs will not always be encountering tier 3 and 4 creatures (just to make it a challenge) like most games... they will often encounter tiers 1 and 2 when they get there.

Ive gone up to X5 over deadly and PCs won.

Kinda depends on what the story calls for.

 

[Larnievc]

A simple question,
in 10 years of 5E, how many combats did you have per Long rest in 5E?

At my table it depends on the tier. 2-3 at T1 and going up from there.

 

[ezo]

Ive gone up to X5 over deadly and PCs won.

I'm curious if we're calculating this the same way... Can you give an actual example?

 

[OB1]

I put 5, largely because I vary my ADs a lot, from 0 to 10+. My players can't guess at the number of encounters per day, and so tend to only go nova when they are in trouble.

 

[jmartkdr2]

In practice, it definitely rounds to one, possibly a lot less because during travel or social situations we can go days without an encounter that uses any resources.

But so long as you have more than one fight often enough that players don’t assume they can burn all their spell slots in each fight, it works out okay.

 

[Blue]

I'm finding it a little hard to parse "more output in a single 10 round combat adventuring day than in seven 3-4 round combats."

I thought I had explained it in depth in the rest of the comment.

Per Turn, a caster is much more effective in a single 10 combat than in seven 3-4 round combats.

I didn't explicitly say that I was assuming that if you were only doing a single combat encounter in the day and were finding it challenging that it was of greater difficulty, and that's where the extended time came from. But shrinking it just makes my point even more. I made it in plenty of detail in my first post, so if you aren't sure I'll refer you back to that instead of repeating.

The impact of the nova in 5e is not super significant, IMXP. Long-rest-recharge characters don't dominate my one-fight days.

This is why I, and likely many, many gamers, don't recognize your game. Novas are real, and one fight days do really have an impact. You can look at the math I provided, or run a poll here on ENworld.

This really isn't a general experience, that novas mean nothing and full casters are the same power on one-encounter days as seven encounter days. With this as your experience you are so far an outlier I am unsure the use in continuing to talk about anecdotal evidence. Please, look at the math provided.

They burn their highest level slots, but the fights don't end faster, and still wind up threatening character death (which is what I want out of a "challenging" fight). Parties with more at-will or short-rest characters don't take longer in those fights, either.

AH, now I get it. You aren't actually measuring what I was talking about.

PLEASE, reread my post. This is all covered.

And put down anything about "challenge" or "risk of character death" or any of the metrics you were trying to apply. They aren't what I was commenting on. Which I make clear, in the post you are responding to. Please reread it and respond to what I said, not what you think I said.