D&D 5E How many combats does your 5e group typically have between long rests, if you have at least one?

[FormerlyHemlock]

Let's say you are in the enemy hideout and entering the sleeping chambers. You encounter some enemies there just went to sleep (if it's day, it's the night shift). You kill them and close the door. Now I find it reasonable to say there could be up to 6 hours in which nobody enters the chamber again (after that the guards looking for their shift replacement for example or the next group wanting to sleep comes). So a short rest is quite likely to succeed, a long rest would probably never succeed, however.

In the official modules dungeons often have rooms were enemies are very unlikely to enter in general, too. Even if there are patrols, they would usually patrol the hallways rather than entering every single room (unless they notice something suspicious). Keep in mind that they have probably been patrolling every day for months with nothing happening, so they won't be super alert by default.

And if hearing someone behind a door requires a successful DC 15 perception check then hearing someone behind two doors is probably at least very hard (DC 25), so very unlikely to happen.

And talking about non-inteligent creatures. If you block their path (e.g. by closing a door), they are unlikely to enter. And many of the creatures (e.g. spiders) are more lurkers, waiting for victims to come rather than they are hunters, actively hunting for prey.

I find all of this quite reasonable and it makes the dungeon crawling a lot more enjoyable.

If you kill a sleeping creature, that falls under the "surprise round/ambush" caveat that I mentioned earlier. I find it believable that you could have 6-8 or more fights in a day if they are mostly surprise ambushes, because the enemy won't have time to shout, "To arms! to arms!"

However, I think you are vastly overestimating the difficulty of making noise, especially when there are "patrolling" guards. DC 15? More like DC 5.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

If you kill a sleeping creature, that falls under the "surprise round/ambush" caveat that I mentioned earlier. I find it believable that you could have 6-8 or more fights in a day if they are mostly surprise ambushes, because the enemy won't have time to shout, "To arms! to arms!"

However, I think you are vastly overestimating the difficulty of making noise, especially when there are "patrolling" guards. DC 15? More like DC 5.

I was talking about actually fighting the sleeping enemies in a normal battle (they might wake up when you enter - most likely being surprised).

Also, it doesn't really matter what's absolutely realistic, it matters what's most fun and balanced. Don't be so strict about it. This is a game after all. Plus the DC 15 isn't something I estimated, but rather what's written in the official modules, so that's actually rules as written/intended. But again, this must not mean it's realistic, it just means that the designer thought it's most fun like that.

And in the end, if you really do:
"Wake up -> 2-3 battles -> short rest -> 2-3 battles -> short rest -> 2 battles -> long rest"
and you end up with a scenario where the players will feel challenged and driven to the end of their resources and every PC gets to contribute about the same to the outcome, then you have a fun and balanced experience. So that's pretty much goal reached.

If your players have more fun with a single battle per day that consists of more and more enemies swarming into the room because they heard something and then the rest of the day is about looting the dungeon and avoiding traps with no encounters and the players who play classes that would benefit from short rests don't complain, then sure, stay with that kind of gaming.

I just think it is normally not as fun as if you keep it as recommended in the rules which is 6-8 battles, 2 short rests and 1 long rest per day.

So I will personally bend realism a bit and claim "Those guys totally didn't hear you" or "Nobody came into the room for 1 hour" just for the sake of having fun and balance.

 

[S'mon]

Your stated goal is to see how many people follow the "encounters per day" 5e guidelines. As I explained, the way you were defining "encounters" is not really consistent with how they function in the DMG.

I don't believe it defines separate battles in the way you do, that reinforcements arriving during
a battle makes a separate encounter (except for determining difficulty), but anyway my interest is in
actual number of separate combats per adventuring day.

Here's the text from the Basic DM's document at https://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop/dm-basic-rules

>>MULTIPART ENCOUNTERS

Sometimes an encounter features multiple enemies that the party doesn’t face all at once. For example, monsters might come at the party in waves. For such encounters, treat each discrete part or wave as a separate encounter for the purpose of determining its difficulty.

A party can’t benefit from a short rest between parts of a multipart encounter, so they won’t be able to spend Hit Dice to regain hit points or recover any abilities that require a short rest to regain. As a rule, if the adjusted XP value for the monsters in a multipart encounter is higher than one-third of the party’s expected XP total for the adventuring day (see “The Adventuring Day,” below), the encounter is going to be tougher than the sum of its parts.<<

>>THE ADVENTURING DAY

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.<<

My take on this is that 5e does not prescribe 6-8 encounters per day, it just says that a typical group can
handle up to 6-8 medium-hard encounters per day, so having 2-3 more difficult encounters is not
doing it wrong. If you have 2-3 difficult encounters with a short rest after each one then the balance between short-rest and long-rest classes is also maintained.

In my own campaign I see 1-4 combat encounters per adventuring day, usually 2-3, but the party certainly seem challenged. The longest recently was: evil wizard (he escaped) - shambling mound - hobgoblins (while camped) - troglodytes (easy) - living statues; 5 encounters between long rests, which felt exceptionally arduous.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yeah, I was thinking something like that--the DMG itself, AFAIK*, specifically talks about how lots of "waves" in a row can itself be a difficulty-increasing thing. It may not be explicitly "many closely-spaced waves aren't a single encounter," but it's damn close in my opinion. It certainly seems to explicitly say that a "multi-part encounter" is in fact a particular, distinct thing, and therefore not the same as a "regular" combat.

*I don't have a copy. I'm barely interested in running 4e, and that's my favorite edition; 5e is about as far as you can possibly get from a game I'd want to run without being 3.5e

 

[MostlyDm]

I don't believe it defines separate battles in the way you do, that reinforcements arriving during
a battle makes a separate encounter (except for determining difficulty), but anyway my interest is in
actual number of separate combats per adventuring day.

Here's the text from the Basic DM's document at https://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop/dm-basic-rules

>>MULTIPART ENCOUNTERS

Sometimes an encounter features multiple enemies that the party doesn’t face all at once. For example, monsters might come at the party in waves. For such encounters, treat each discrete part or wave as a separate encounter for the purpose of determining its difficulty.

A party can’t benefit from a short rest between parts of a multipart encounter, so they won’t be able to spend Hit Dice to regain hit points or recover any abilities that require a short rest to regain. As a rule, if the adjusted XP value for the monsters in a multipart encounter is higher than one-third of the party’s expected XP total for the adventuring day (see “The Adventuring Day,” below), the encounter is going to be tougher than the sum of its parts.<<

>>THE ADVENTURING DAY

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.<<

My take on this is that 5e does not prescribe 6-8 encounters per day, it just says that a typical group can
handle up to 6-8 medium-hard encounters per day, so having 2-3 more difficult encounters is not
doing it wrong. If you have 2-3 difficult encounters with a short rest after each one then the balance between short-rest and long-rest classes is also maintained.

In my own campaign I see 1-4 combat encounters per adventuring day, usually 2-3, but the party certainly seem challenged. The longest recently was: evil wizard (he escaped) - shambling mound - hobgoblins (while camped) - troglodytes (easy) - living statues; 5 encounters between long rests, which felt exceptionally arduous.

I'm confused. First part of your post you indicate you don't think the same thing as me, but I don't see the disagreement. Again, I'm only discussing what counts as different encounters, not about what may or may not be different "battles" or "combats". The expected 6-8 number is for encounters. A party that has 10 fights, winning 8 of them during surprise round due to ambush, tactics, organization, and alpha strikes... Still had 10 encounters. Ditto a party that fought 10 distinct waves of enemies. Ditto a group that fought 10 totally separate random encounters where a monster dropped in on them while traveling.

I must be misunderstanding your point.

 

[S'mon]

I'm confused. First part of your post you indicate you don't think the same thing as me, but I don't see the disagreement. Again, I'm only discussing what counts as different encounters, not about what may or may not be different "battles" or "combats". The expected 6-8 number is for encounters. A party that has 10 fights, winning 8 of them during surprise round due to ambush, tactics, organization, and alpha strikes... Still had 10 encounters. Ditto a party that fought 10 distinct waves of enemies. Ditto a group that fought 10 totally separate random encounters where a monster dropped in on them while traveling.

I must be misunderstanding your point.

My poll was to find out how many battles the typical group fights per day. It seems clear that most groups are not fighting 6+ separate battles per day, although they may well face a full day's XP budget, however divided.

 

[Rhenny]

I think the results are suggesting that many groups like to have less, yet more powerful/dangerous encounters per day rather than more, less powerful ones. This makes sense especially for people who played 4e because with 4e the focus was on the encounter rather than the adventuring day. To some extent, I think even 3e/3.5 focused more on the encounter than 1e/2e did. 5e's adventuring day approach is really a throw back to older editions.

Additionally, for me, at this point in my life, I run shorter sessions (1 1/2 - 2 1/2 usually) than I used to 10 or 20 years ago (gone are the marathon sessions that I reveled in as a teen). I still try to focus on the story and the adventuring day so I do try to throw in 6-8 encounters per day, but I do feel the squeeze to shorten the day with more difficult encounters when I know I don't have a lot of game time to work with.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think the results are suggesting that many groups like to have less, yet more powerful/dangerous encounters per day rather than more, less powerful ones.

That's one explanation. Just fewer combats is also possible. We have been hearing complaints about encounters being 'too easy.' Fewer encounters/day would do that.

Additionally, for me, at this point in my life, I run shorter sessions (1 1/2 - 2 1/2 usually) than I used to 10 or 20 years ago (gone are the marathon sessions that I reveled in as a teen). I still try to focus on the story and the adventuring day so I do try to throw in 6-8 encounters per day, but I do feel the squeeze to shorten the day with more difficult encounters when I know I don't have a lot of game time to work with.

Nod. As time available for a single session got shorter, I gave up on the idea of mapping in-game 'days' to sessions, convenient as it can be.

 

[S'mon]

That's one explanation. Just fewer combats is also possible. We have been hearing complaints about encounters being 'too easy.' Fewer encounters/day would do that.

If 'Hard' is only 'Hard' in the context of 6-8 encounters/day or full-xp-budget/day then that may well have people thinking the game is easy, yup.

 

[jrowland]

I voted 6-8. I've brought my old 1e players back together in a Fantasy Grounds campaign (LMoP right now) and things like Cragmaw Hideout, Cragmaw Castle, and even Thundertee were 6-8 encounters before bugging out for Long Rest. Nobody is complaining it's "too easy", but that is probably more DMing skill (excuse my boast) than encounter design. Each piece is certainly easy, but I never let them feel each is a discrete thing. There is always the risk of more foes around the corner, and a few times they've triggered nearby encounters.

We play a 2-3 session 1/week and the more, easier, encounters gives us the feel of zooming along in those 2 hours. Even the RP goes quick as we are all aware of the ticking clock and want to maximize our time. In addition, the online format pretty much stops distracted side conversations.