D&D 5E How to Break 5E

[Sacrosanct]

I consider the 6-8 encounter expectation fundamentally flawed. Who in their right mind want to fight three goblins, and then another three goblins, and so on, just to see if you can do it without spending any significant resources?

I don't know about you, but playing according to the 6-8 expectation would bore us to death...

Um....because most times the players don't have a choice between 6-8 encounters? 90% of the time the activities in the game world dictate how many encounters the players run into. Sometimes it is only one or two, other times up to a dozen. The game world doesn't go on pause every time the players want to rest up. If you're in a dungeon or castle or whatever, you're probably going to run into several encounters and can't do much about it. Players also have the risk evaluation to make. Do you keep going on to get to the goal before time runs out, do you leave and rest up, knowing that the defenders will regroup as well? Etc.

It certainly isn't boring. In fact, the most exciting encounters are those where you're out of resources and have to think creatively to overcome them.

 

[Talmek]

Um....because most times the players don't have a choice between 6-8 encounters? 90% of the time the activities in the game world dictate how many encounters the players run into. Sometimes it is only one or two, other times up to a dozen. The game world doesn't go on pause every time the players want to rest up. If you're in a dungeon or castle or whatever, you're probably going to run into several encounters and can't do much about it. Players also have the risk evaluation to make. Do you keep going on to get to the goal before time runs out, do you leave and rest up, knowing that the defenders will regroup as well? Etc.

It certainly isn't boring. In fact, the most exciting encounters are those where you're out of resources and have to think creatively to overcome them.

My group is in this camp as well. When my group of players starts looking for a way to take a short/long rest we play the justification game...

PCs: "Can we take a short/long rest right now? That last encounter had me use up X resources and I'm not sure we can get through another one..."
GM: "Let's take a look at the environment you're in right now. Think of yourself as just finishing up a life and death struggle...how much noise did you just make? Have you checked the other rooms/areas around you to ensure no one is just waiting to launch an ambush?"
PCs: "Aww, man...this is too hard!"

However, last night we were playing HotDQ Episode 6 (Castle Naerytar for those who don't have it or haven't run it yet) and we actually made it through nine encounters with only one short rest. The group really impressed me because they were actually checking themselves with those questions before they asked me (as GM) for a short rest. Prior to this point I believed that this (8-9 encounters) could not be done, but I'm starting to realize that it's just really difficult for the group to complete that many encounters at lower levels without more rests.

 

[Pickles III]

i don't get what the point of this topic is. It's long winded and a bit of slog to read through as well.

"Thorough"

 

[MonsterEnvy]

"Thorough"

What? I don't get this reply.

 

[Pickles III]

I'm the DM and it's very rare my group have had more than 1-3 encounters per day. They almost never take short rests.

This is because we like our fights exciting. To be any challenge, a fight must be difficult. After one or three such fights, a PC is depleted, more or less.

I consider the 6-8 encounter expectation fundamentally flawed. Who in their right mind want to fight three goblins, and then another three goblins, and so on, just to see if you can do it without spending any significant resources?

I don't know about you, but playing according to the 6-8 expectation would bore us to death...

Same here. It was like that in 3e too. I moaned so much about the crappy encounters in some dungeon (A demon jail by Monte Cook) that the DM just rounded up all the monsters & put them in the same place.

4e sorted this out at the cost of everything being a big set piece and being really terrible at pointless attritional fights - of the type we hate so who cares?

 

[Pickles III]

(1) You have to have a sucky DM. Plain and simple. One that can't/doesn't/refuses to think for himself in regards to what is the best ruling for his game...in other words, a DM that basically goes by RAW only and that's pretty much it. DM's don't (ok, shouldn't) let the rules get in the way of the game. If rules suddenly "mess up" his world/campaign flavour, then change the rules.

(2) You are assuming Feats are in Use, as well as Multiclassing. Both OPTIONAL.

(3) ...uh, I guess that's it.

3 You are playing in the Adventurers' league.

Probably because the game is designed without Feats or MC'ing being considered as well as the expectation of DM adjudication for, well, pretty much EVERYTHING in the game.

IMO your O is wrong. I believe they moved feats & MCing to optional as a sop to the 1e simplifiers but they are intended & designed to be used as evidenced by the fact they are not optional in AL play.

AL DMs are given latitude to change the adventures but not explicitly to change the rules of the game.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The party's a bit higher level now (~5th), and these small fights can still be problematic. After all, crits happen. And just because it's a few small monsters, the whole "bounded accuracy" thing means low-level monsters can still hurt you... and contribute to an expenditure of resources. I mean, at 10th level, a few hobgoblins that get the drop on you can still cause a world of pain

I think there's a bit of Older-Edition-Itis going on with some of the encounter pacing at certain tables. In 3e, at a lot of tables, you pretty much had to max out your party's output in each encounter (attrition wasn't so much a thing after your first wand of cure light wounds), encouraging a "One Deadly Encounter Then Rest Then Again" kind of pacing. 4e embraced the encounter-based design almost explicitly and there wasn't much attrition that happened between encounters, so again, one big encounter would be enough.

5e harkens back to earlier editions in this regard: you don't need to fight an enemy at the top of your danger curve to have an adequate threat. Resting should be a hard decision the party makes, and the 6-8 encounter model allows that to happen. It's much more possible to have a slow burn, a building threat, an adventuring day where you build up to a climax, and you feel it in your dwindling resources.

5e doesn't stop you from doing the one-big-boom-and-done thing (which I think is a testament to its flexibility!), and as long as you're using up your daily XP budget, you should be fine, challenge-wise (and even if you're not, that doesn't mean it wasn't challenging!). However, it encourages the game to be about more than a string of very difficult encounters, allowing for a diversity and pacing and dynamic flow that I really appreciate as a DM and a player.

 

[Pickles III]

5e harkens back to earlier editions in this regard: you don't need to fight an enemy at the top of your danger curve to have an adequate threat.

All I really remember about 1e which I stopped with in 1984 was that I did not like it much.

I do not agree with this assessment. It relies "on adequate" threat meaning something like will drain a few resources rather than "provide an exciting/entertaining encounter".

On top of this 6-8 encounters in a day is a hell of a lot, not really plausible outside of a large dungeon and these do not figure greatly in the fictions I like to recreate.

 

[Mephista]

Um....because most times the players don't have a choice between 6-8 encounters? 90% of the time the activities in the game world dictate how many encounters the players run into. Sometimes it is only one or two, other times up to a dozen. The game world doesn't go on pause every time the players want to rest up.

My group is in this camp as well. When my group of players starts looking for a way to take a short/long rest we play the justification game...

Well, I think that CapnZapp might have been refering to the fact that some gamers just find the idea of 6-8 encounters every adventuring day to be a stretch. You go out, hunt down bandits, then the rest of the time, you are involved with the logistics of breaking up the camp, returning what was stolen, taking survivors to civilization where they will be put on trial. Stuff like that. Its more of a question of 6-8 encounters feels like we're just trying to fill in a fight-quota instead of something organic.

Some of us enjoy game sessions that go by without having a single encounter in them!

 

[Wik]

Wait, you can't do 6-8 encounters outside of a dungeon? I've never had a problem with this. And it never feels like a "quota". I throw encounters at the players as they play. Not all are combat encounters. Nothing like that.

In cross-country wilderness travel, I'll throw smaller numbers of larger encounters at PCs, true, but if the adventure is set outside, a large number of encounters are easy to throw at PCs. Warbands, bandits, that sort of thing.

Kamikaze said it perfectly - it's a slow burn style of play. And sometimes, the party isn't threatened at all. That is, personally, fine by me.