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

[abirdcall]

I've been playing or running 5e pretty consistently since launch across multiple groups, stores, and states. One thing that seems pretty regular across all of those tables though, and that's the number of average combats per day. If I had to give an integer, I'd say that the average I've seen is only around 2 per day and the most I've probably ever seen is 4 fights in a day. In some campaigns, we regularly have one combat per day and that's it. The recommended number of encounters per day in the DMG seems completely bonkers, to me.

Have you tried running published campaigns to get an idea for how it's done?

Most of them are designed around an average day. The exception is overland travel which I've found needs houserules to accommodate.

I actually have trouble grasping how people can have so few. Where is the excitement? the tension? the drama? If I was playing an adventure where this was possible I would just narrate that the PCs win and then we'd move on to another more exciting one.

 

[NaturalZero]

My main reason for ignoring the encounter recommendations is for pacing of sessions. We play once every 2 weeks for 3-4 hours and a combat encounter usually takes at least an hour to play through. If we were to fight 6-8 encounters in a "day" it would take probably 2 months of real-world time to get through. I much prefer having 1-2 encounters so the story can move at a fairly regular pace.

After running a ton of 3e, 4e, and 5e, I'm favoring the concept of per encounter design more and more because it makes it much easier to run whatever number of combats makes sense for the plot without the system creating intentional resource differential between people in the same party. Everyone is used to people running out of things at different times and half of the party needing a rest while the other half is good to go - we're still having a good time - but after 20 years it just feels like it could be handled better.

 

[NaturalZero]

Have you tried running published campaigns to get an idea for how it's done?

Most of them are designed around an average day. The exception is overland travel which I've found needs houserules to accommodate.

I actually have trouble grasping how people can have so few. Where is the excitement? the tension? the drama? If I was playing an adventure where this was possible I would just narrate that the PCs win and then we'd move on to another more exciting one.

Published campaigns always seemed pretty bad to me for pacing because they can't accommodate for your party, unless you're changing them anyway and at that point I might as well just make my own campaign. I'm not really having troubles with pacing as a DM, I'm just pointing out that I never play in any games where other DMs have run more than 3 combats in a day. I'm playing in one now where it's usually 1 per day, tops. The thing is, this doesn't even seem to be an anomaly and I'm wondering if this is as common as it seems from my anecdotal experience.

 

[el-remmen]

In the current adventure I am running that PCs are up to nine encounters in the same day, which I am pretty sure is our high. The lowest of course is 0, but assuming that doesn't count, it'd be 1.

I am not sure the average would tell us much, though. You can look through the details of all the combat encounters in my Ghosts of Saltmarsh+ campaign in this thread.

 

[tetrasodium]

You can really tell from the posts which gms have noticed this as a problem they've tried to fix and which gms (or players) are discussing this on a theoretical level.

Scaling encounter cr up is an easy solution that on rhe surface looks like it will work & in some cases of group makeup it might even seem good, but durations &ability consumption rates winds up being all screwed up with that while short rest lclssses get to start most every fight with fill resources plus the things intended to fill the gap when they are expected to be tapped outand long rest classes are probably doing the same but dont have the extra class abilities/powers while not being able to really make use of the extra endurance thst should be a boon simply because of durations concentration & the number of rounds. Maybe you as a GM think you can find a balance for this to work out, yet players will notice & adapt or simply make characters to make the most of this and it will get even worse

"Just force more encounters".... sure sounds great, but your going to run into the extreme ease of the huge recovery rest mechanisms I. 5e and the fact that short of an extremely strict doom clock always running or gm fiat level "no you cant rest.. you just xanr... it wont even work with rope trick in a tiny hut:" heavy handedness there's basically nothing that can be done to make "let's take a rest" difficult enough that the party wont take one. Sure you might squeeze in an extra fight but not the four to seven thst you need

 

[jgsugden]

In a dungeon or adventure setting.. 5, with a SR in the middle is most common. However, I've had PCs go through 14 combats between LRs. It depends upon the urgency in the story. How well they've preserved resources, how much benefit they get from a SR, etc...

 

[el-remmen]

Just to be clear "# of encounters per adventuring day" has never been an issue in my campaigns in terms of degree of fun or degree of challenge.

 

[abirdcall]

Published campaigns always seemed pretty bad to me for pacing because they can't accommodate for your party, unless you're changing them anyway and at that point I might as well just make my own campaign. I'm not really having troubles with pacing as a DM, I'm just pointing out that I never play in any games where other DMs have run more than 3 combats in a day. I'm playing in one now where it's usually 1 per day, tops. The thing is, this doesn't even seem to be an anomaly and I'm wondering if this is as common as it seems from my anecdotal experience.

Could you explain further because I just don't understand it.

I only play published adventures and most chapters/adventures have many encounters.

The ones that don't usually involve overland travel so I have houseruled it.

And you don't have issues with pacing? Could you go into that more because having 1-3 encounters per adventuring day would be a big problem of it were to happen in my campaigns. (Noted that it could happen and be okay, the thing is that the players wouldn't know there would be few encounters that day as there are usually more)

 

[Delazar]

Have you tried running published campaigns to get an idea for how it's done?

Most of them are designed around an average day. The exception is overland travel which I've found needs houserules to accommodate.

I actually have trouble grasping how people can have so few. Where is the excitement? the tension? the drama? If I was playing an adventure where this was possible I would just narrate that the PCs win and then we'd move on to another more exciting one.

The best fight encounters I had where single encounters in that day, where we fought wave after wave of enemies in the same encounter, or one huge enemy that took most of our resources to put down. Having multiple "little" fights in one day was never that exciting. Actually, those little fights are the ones that the DM just narrates, like "after you massacred all the kobolds, you're now in the treasure chamber of the dragon".

For me, it also better evokes the drama of movies, novels, and comic books. The Avengers spend two cut scenes killing mooks, and 15 minutes fighting Thanos (not sure if this is the actual timeframe...). That's how I like it.

 

[Oofta]

I rarely use dungeons so I use the alternate rest rules. A short rest is overnight, a long rest is several days, usually a week. For me it helps with pacing because I run a very investigation/exploration heavy game with a lot of urban settings. With that we get between 4 and 10 encounters, probably a bit on the lower side depending on current situation.

I find that it helps balance out classes, although I do have a house rule that any spell that lasts more than half an hour gets it's length multiplied by 5 because I want things like mage armor to be as effective as during a "typical" dungeon delving day using standard rules.