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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8403058" data-attributes="member: 7030755">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.</blockquote>

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