D&D 5E How many encounters per day is YOUR average?

On average, how many combat encounters do you experience per day in a 5e game?


Bird Of Play

Explorer
Doesn't it depend on what the players want?
In my campaign, encounters are so scarce we might go 3 hours without a single battle.
However, I'm playing as a player a Descent Into Avernus campaign and I feel last time we went on 3 hours ONLY battling.
 

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People often focus on the difficulty of getting encounter challenge/balance right when talking about encounters per day, and that's legitimate. But for me, a high number of encounters per day messes with the pacing in a way that makes the game drag.

- game sessions per adventuring day: if you have 1-2 resource-draining (i.e. combat) encounters per session, you might spend three sessions in the same adventuring day. This can make the campaign drag and makes it so that the various plots and narratives don't have time to breathe and develop (because a 10 session campaign might just be 1 week's worth of in-game time, or similar).

- ending combat early: for the sake of pacing, often times as dm I want to end combat before all the enemies are killed, either because it's realistic that they would run away or because I can see that the players defeated the enemies but the latter still has a bunch of HP left. But ending combat 'early' in this way defeats the point of combat for draining resources (potentially lost HP won't need to be recovered --> fewer short rest HD or healing spells spent, etc). So if you are focusing on resource draining, the combat drags on for more rounds than necessary (and you lose out on the idea that the enemies would retreat to fight another day).

- how fun is combat, really?: is 5e combat fun enough to warrant having medium encounter after medium encounter? particularly when the challenge in them is in parceling out your character's LR/SR/"at-will" abilities and managing HP and HD loss? Fun encounters might involve waves of enemies, interesting environmental features or constraints, and maybe even adding interesting monster abilities to the rather staid 5e statblocks. That's to say nothing of adding narrative stakes to the encounter so the players feel invested, rather than generic "ghouls attack" type of encounters. But creating those encounters takes time, out of the game for the dm, and in game for everyone to develop the narrative tension together.

In b/x, encounters take relatively little time to resolve, meaning that you can have a well-paced game even as the players are facing encounter after encounter (because either side may run away, a surprised side is at a large disadvantage, characters have relatively few powers, etc). Resource-draining takes the form of torches, rations and such, which is resolved with a single die roll.
 

dave2008

Legend
Thats all well & good in theory, but things break down if the players aren't willing to risk the uncertainty. Take this example.
  • End of the last long rest & players start things. No matter what there is always going to be a starting point & it doesn't matter if that was last night on the rail, back in town at the inn, or whatever. We shouldn't need to debate that at some point the players started with a clean slate because that's what a long rest does.
  • Players go through a couple fights, lets say two fights.
  • Alice the druid: I used a few of my big heals & only have one wildshape left, lets take a rest
    • Bob the sorlock: Yea I could use a rest
    • Chuck the fighter: Yea I used my action surge & took some damage even though Dawn the cleric healed most of it, I could use a rest
    • Dawn the cleric: I don't really get anything from short rest but channel divinity & that's no big deal.
    • Edward the wizard: um sure if we are taking a rest ok.
    • Greg the GM: you don't feel safe taking a rest here. Remember this originak impasse...
      • Edward: I'm going to cast tiny hut so we can make it a long rest
        • Greg: You knew it was unsafe & a couple minutes into the ritual a wild encounter appears!
        • Players stomp the encounter. You now have three fights.
        • Edward: I'm going to cast tiny hut
          • Greg the GM: a wild encounter appear... It's not very effective because it's only four fightsin
            • Edward: I'm going to cast tiny hut
              • Greg the GM thinks to himself "ok I can interrupt it mid rest" midway into the rest the party is attacked by a random/wandering encounter & still at four of 6-8 encounters.
                • Lets say the party feels like they should deal with this instead of shrugging it off. Alice has recovered a wildshape, bob has recovered sorlock stuff, chuck has recovered action surge & second wind along with the possible archetype specific stuff like superiority dice. Dawn the knowledge cleric still doesn't really care but edward used arcane recovery. This has 2 ways f going... everyone pus out a ranged weapon & shoots from the tiny hut hunting blind or everyone but edward goes out to nova down the encounter & edward says the words "I stay in the hut to maintain the tiny hut & that's my turn".
                  • Either way the fight ends & everyone runs back to edward in the hut to finish the long rest & recover everything
                    • Greg the GM has the choice of trying again with a burrowing/incorporeal monster that can come up from under the dome or one that can dispel the dome, but both of those just go back to the earlier original impasse or a slightly modified version of it where people keep recovering short rest abilities until they either finish the long rest or Greg the GM is forced to throw up his hands in defeat. This is the second impasse.
You might say "well Greg the GM could setup traps or do x & y up ahead while the players are resting". Yes he could & people say that so often that I suspect at least one person will respond to this with examples of things for x&y. The problem there is the original impasse. If X & Y are anything shy of abject & total TPK you just return to that point the moment there is a tiny dent in the party's combat resources/endurance. Even worse is that if Greg the GM does that the players are going to react by being even more cautious & taking even more rests. Greg the GM has basically no way to overcome the original impasse without resorting to fiat and simply declaring they can't because they can't or using a strict doom clock. Invoking oberoni or declaring that Greg should read the DMG because shy of rebuilding huge chunks of 5e itself it does not include things that will correct "no we are going to take a rest Greg. No. Means no.". Removing tiny hut doesn't solve it either because it just shifts things from the original impasse to the second impasse.
I apologize but your response was too long for me to read in the middle of my work day. You are free to disagree, I was just relating how it works IRL at our table. Not hypotheticals or theories. How it actually plays for us. That doesn't mean it plays that way for you. I am not trying to make grand statements about game design.
 

overgeeked

B/X Known World
Doesn't it depend on what the players want?
In my campaign, encounters are so scarce we might go 3 hours without a single battle.
However, I'm playing as a player a Descent Into Avernus campaign and I feel last time we went on 3 hours ONLY battling.
Yeah, it really should. For us, it's however many fights the PCs decide to pick during a day.
 

Oofta

Legend
I'm intending on trying these rules out for my next, slower paced game. How have they worked out for you?
I've done it for a couple of campaigns now, it works a lot better for my style of games. I try for something like The Dresden Files where everything is going fine and then the poo hits the air circulation device for a couple of days.

For me it's just as much about pacing as balance. I can have a few really hard encounters in a day (I'll try to broadcast it's going to happen) so casters can have fun going nova along with several days of travel and exploration with easier combats and everything in between.

I also do fairly long breaks between so we have plenty of time for downtime activities and so that people don't go from novice to legends overnight.
 

1) this is what average are for bi or tri or even quadri modal just make a stranger average with a bigger standard deviation. Just one average is more usually more than enough, but I see your point. It would be more interesting to see in which environment the average applies.

Excepting if it is mostly bimodal (which I think it is--one wandering monster on the road and then a dungeon with massively multiple encounters) then the actual average could occur in the middle of the dip -- a deadman's land that resembles very little of actual gameplay. If you use that average as the metric around which you design something, your results will be very frustrating -- as I think it seems to be (minus, again, that there is plenty of guidance in the DMG on what to do if it becomes a problem).
 

When I'm planning out a serious adventuring day it likely has a more or less unavoidable fight or two, a tricky to avoid fight or two, a couple potential fights with obvious ways to avoid them, possibly a bonus fight players could find if they opened the wrong door and did the wrong thing, one or two potentially dangerous npc encounters that should have no reason to become fights but who knows what might start, and any number of other "encounters" with beings whom I guess the PCs could start a fight with if they really wanted to just see the world burn. So I guess if those all count as "encounters" we're having a 6-8 or more "encounter" adventuring day, but in terms of actual fights we'll pretty reliably have 2-5. A sufficiently murderous PC could maybe have a dozen fights.
 

el-remmen

Moderator Emeritus
I looked at my notes for my Ghosts of Saltmarsh+ campaign:

  • Campaign begins 7 days of travel through settled lands no combat
  • Day 8: 2 combat encounters
  • Day 9: 3 combat encounters
  • Day 10: 3 combat encounters
  • Day 11: 1 combat encounter
  • 9 days of travel and RP
  • Day 21: 1 combat encounter
  • Day 22: 5 combat encounters
  • Two days of travel and RP
  • Day 25: 5 combat encounters
  • Two days of travel and RP
  • Day 28: 1 combat encounter
  • Three days of travel and RP
  • Day 32: 2 combat encounters
  • Day 33: 1 combat encounter
  • Day 34: 1 combat encounter
  • 10 days of travel and RP
  • Day 45: 1 combat encounter
  • 6 days of travel and RP
  • Day 52: 5 combat encounters
  • 11 days of travel and RP
  • Day 64: 1 combat encounter
  • 2.5 days of travel and RP
  • Day 66: 1 combat encounter
  • Day 67: 2 combat encounters (though one involved only 1 PC who was separated from the rest of the party)
  • Day 68: 5 combat encounters
  • Day 69: 1 combat encounter
  • Day 70: 1 combat encounter
  • 1 day of travel
  • Day 72: 9 combat encounters (so far)

So if I average based just on days with combat encounters it comes to 2.5 encounters per day. If I average based on total days then it comes to .69 encounters per days (nice). The mode is 1 and the median is 4.5.

EDIT TO ADD: This data is from 28 4-to-5 hour sessions

Do with this info what you will.
 
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Excepting if it is mostly bimodal (which I think it is--one wandering monster on the road and then a dungeon with massively multiple encounters) then the actual average could occur in the middle of the dip -- a deadman's land that resembles very little of actual gameplay. If you use that average as the metric around which you design something, your results will be very frustrating -- as I think it seems to be (minus, again, that there is plenty of guidance in the DMG on what to do if it becomes a problem).
I don't really follow the DMG for the rules but I still keep in mind the intent. After 41 years of playing I think I get it right and my players seems to think so too. It is all a matter of pacing, prep and improvisation. The balance between too easy and too deadly can be hard to achieve for a novice that is why I am often asked by younger DM in our Friday night Dungeons about how I plan things out.

And as you said, it is surprising to see the amount of people that limit their reading (if any) of the DMG to magic items and optional rules chapters (and even that one is often skipped). One young DM even asked me where I had taken the death domain and the oath breaker paladin... I have had to show him the both of them in the DMG for him to believe me. So yeah, a bit more reading would help a lot.
 

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