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

How many combats per Long rest?


Depends on the tier.

Tier 1? Generally one; maybe two.

Tier 2? Either a single challenging encounter, or two medium ones.

Tier 3? Two encounters minimum. I aim for three.

Tier 4? Two deadly encounters minimum. I aim for four, but usually land on three (by that Tier, players have way more power to choose when to Long Rest than the DM does).
 

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We tend to make encounters Deadly or Deadly+, so I'd say we average 2-4.

It's difficult to say, however, because we don't use conventional XP. We use what most people call milestone XP. As a result, I don't really know how far we get through the daily XP budget, which is really the information we want to know.

I do say that short-rest reliant classes have felt short-changed the entire edition. By that I mean Fighter, Warlock, and Monk. As a result, I've avoided those classes since 2016 or so. We seldom have enough short rests to make it feel like those classes have an adequate amount of resources to keep up. 2024 looks better, but still not good.
 

Players get to decide if they are going to take part in most of the fights, most of the time. When and where the party manages to rest is a combination of their desire to rest and the consequences of how they chose to execute the preceeding fights.

I tried to plan out encounters/day and create rest points but soon stopped as a waste of effort. The other two GMs in our group hold a similar view.

Why? Sometimes players blow through fights or snuck past enemies so they felt emboldened to continue. Often they ignored hints or used impossible to ignore spells, like a fireball at night or an incredibly loud spell (shout, knock, thunderwave), where I couldn't justify reinforcements not arriving.

"Sorry, no nap for you, the evil baron has mobilized his cavalry to see what exploded at his slave labor camp."

Although sometimes foes didn't reinforce. Some fled, some fortified, others went from multiple set-piece encounters to one massive force, some did multiples of the above resulting in most of the fight, almost none of the material reward.

"Good news: you are well rested. Bad news: the entire villainous organization is manning the ramparts and four figures are flying away on some kind of bat-winged horses."

Then there were the few players who ignored clearly telegraphed "this is too high of a level for you" scenarios. Such as the 18th level 3e monk who waltzed into the center of a 10,000 strong goblin army knowing the goblins had bardic wardrummers, priests and druids.

"Your character lost that encounter but you as a player have gained some experience."
 


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