D&D 5E How to Think About 6-8 Encounters Per Day

[Tony Vargas]

Yep, variant rules (restricting rests due to hard environments, or making a long rest a week) make HP as a wilderness resource more viable, and 5e could DEFINITELY use some better exploration rules (falling back on previous e's hasn't done 5e many favors in this regard).

It's not even really a variant, the DM can just rule that resting 8 hrs in a fetid swamp means you wake up feeling worse than when you lay down, instead of giving you the benefits of a long rest - or he can rule that some checks will let you find a place in the swamp where you can rest. It's just runnin' 5e, is all. You have the power to make the game do what you need to keep your campaign fun (or whatever "creative agenda" is most important to your group).

I think both DMs and players need to celebrate the choice that adventuring day planning affords over encounter planning. One of the reasons why WoTC designed the 6-8 encounter day and moved away from encounter by encounter design was to put the decision to take short and long rests firmly in the hands of the players. Now, it really is a choice.

Can't agree that that was the reason, no. 5e is more on the side of DM Empowerment than Player Entitlement. Classes that balance without regard to the pace of the campaign free up both player and DM to choose that pacing without any further wrinkles. Encounters balanced in a vacuum - like in the last edition of Gamma World, where PC's abilities hard-reset after every encounter, with sleeping something you did just because sleep was still theoretically necessary - make the choice less meaningful on the player side, though, even as they make encounter balance & encounter design very easy.

That's never been the case in D&D, itself, though: shorter days have always meant the party could handle tougher encounters.

Do you stop for an hour to recover slightly, or do you keep pursuing foes? Do you as a party feel as if you've found a safe enough place to rest either for 1 hour or for a full 8 when you feel exhausted an nearly drained?

Not that 1 hr vs 8 hrs is exactly ideal, either, but they're so easy to vary, it hardly matters. Make it a night's rest and a week's leave, make it 5 min and 6 hrs. You can map it to the campaign's expected pacing, so long as you more or less stick with that pacing. Personally, I think just 'ruling' when which rest is possible and how long it take is fine, too - even preferable, because it give the DM more freedom.

I'm finding that when we give ourselves over to this mentality, we are more immersed in our character experience and the mechanics of resting rarely break my immersion.

OK, now I'm flashing back the edition war...

When we played with milestones (4e) the game always intruded and it felt more mechanical and less organic. So, to get the most out of 6-8, everyone has to buy into it.

And there you have it. 4e had a mix of encounter, daily, and at-will resources, and encounter-design guidelines with an expectation of 4-6 encounters/day - fewer encounters means dailies were more powerful and encounters could be harder, but class balance wasn't impacted, because everyone has comparable daily resources - it gave DMs the freedom to use the pacing they liked, and players an incentive to rest if they thought they needed it to be able to face coming challenges (and a contrary incentive to push on to a milestone and get an action point & unlock an item-daily use or magic ring property or whatever). 5e has a mix of short- & long- rest resources and at-wills, and encounter-design guidelines with an expectation that the party will outnumber the opposition (or the difficulty is adjusted up with a multiplier) and that there will be 6-8 encounters/day with 2-3 short rests, and both encounter difficulty and class balance are affected by that, because classes mechanically differentiated by having different mixes of resources - it Empowers DMs to showcase the strengths of different characters by varying pacing, to rule whether rests are possible or how long they take to vary pacing, and to provide a range of adventuring challenges. That's not so different that one is an abomination or the other even strictly superior.

I've also found that when players expect more in a day, I feel much more free to throw anything at them that fits with the story/situation, rather than try to balance encounters.

The two are hardly exclusive, indeed, they're complementary. 5e gives you encounter-design guidelines so you can balance encounters to be medium-hard, (or easy or deadly+ if you want to consider that 'imbalanced'). It's a feature 5e has retained from 3e & 4e, but an ability that experienced DMs had long since developed on their own before that.

With adventuring day, I feel perfectly fine just having the party encounter 2 guards. Most of the times, this is a triffle, but it fits the story, and with some random rolls it is quite possible that even against 2 guards, the party may need to blow some resources, or an alarm can be raised or one of the guards can escape, etc. I can also introduce them to an encounter where they are severely outmatched and depending on their condition or time of day, they have a different set of decisions that they must decide between. 6-8 encounters basically opens up the design space for a DM and allows the DM to use variety and diversity to make the adventure more interesting. To capitalize on this, all DMs need to pay more attention to variety and building encounters that have meaning and fit within the story of the campaign rather than worry so much about developing each and every encounter as a test that pushes the party to its limits.

Running a varied and interesting game, a 'living world' as we sometimes call it, is certainly something that helps when running 5e. I don't know if it's fair to say that the 6-8 encounter assumption, specifically, has anything to do with enabling that or making it necessary, though. And it certainly doesn't open up design space, though design space is a developer issue, so maybe you meant something else...

Also, it is so easy now to have an easy encounter escalate into a more difficult battle as reinforcements join the fray.

Was it every hard before? Bounded Accuracy does lend itself to simply adding more monsters to get a more challenging encounter, even when the monsters' CR is far below the party's level. It's a little tricky, because the vital multiplier is less valid in a 'wave' encounter.

Overall, the key to enjoying 6-8 encounter/day design is to be conscious of the variety and diversity it affords.

Again, I question the causation you posit. DM Empowerment allows a DM to introduce a great deal of variety into his campaign, between the DM's traditional authority and the way 5e leans towards rulings over rules, he essentially has carte blanche. A 6-8 encounter guideline is no different/better than a 1-3, 3-4 or 4-6 guideline, in that regard, though - and only a little more convenient than no guideline at all (and less convenient than needing no such guideline - the very wholly-Encounter-based straw man you stacked it up against).

 

[Rhenny]

[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION]. I did not intend edition war. Encounter design is just as valid and fun to play, but as DM, to me, it usually tends to lead me to make all encounters more challenging.

I guess many of my comments about rests being player choices are based on wotc's decision to make a short rest=1 hour rather than 5 or 10 minutes. This difference was hard for me to get used to in the beginning, but I warmed up to it because it made the short rest less automatic. I do know for a fact that WoTC kept this rule because they wanted the decision to rest to be a substantial decision for players. Sure, when the players decide to rest, the DM ultimately decides if the rest is successful with or without complication/encounter, but the initial decision rests with the players.

Also, all of my opinions are strictly based on my own gaming experiences, so any causal relationships I state or imply are only true for me. I would never presume that they are universal and definitive.

 

[Grydan]

As someone playing both 4E and 5E currently, I'll say I definitely don't feel like I have more of a choice in 5E, or that the choice comes up more frequently or gets weighed for longer when it does come up.

Nearly any time a group would say no to a 4E short rest, they'd also say no to a 5E one. If you can't spare 5 minutes or secure a location for that long, then you can't spare an hour or secure a location for that long. (There are corner cases where you have consumable resources that would give you safety for an hour or longer – but not for long enough to get in a long/extended rest – and it might be a bit wasteful to use them for a 5 minute breather, but generally such resources are tailored to the system enough that something that's only good for an hour in 5E is either good for significantly less time or significantly more time in 4E.)

Pretty much any time a group would say yes to a 5E short rest, they'd also say yes to a 4E one. If this place is secure enough to hold for an hour, and we have that much time to spare, then automatically it's sufficient for a five minute rest.

Then there's the situations where a definite yes with 4E is a definite no in 5E. Cases where you're definitely safe for 5 minutes and have the time to spare, but an hour would be out of the question.

In all of these cases, the decision is still pretty much automatic.

Where it's not automatic does differ, though. Some of the cases where it's a definite yes in 4E it'll be a judgement call in 5E: We definitely can spare 5 minutes and rest safely here for that long, but due to some degree of uncertainty about time or location beyond that we don't know if an hour rest gives us enough to offset the potential downsides.

But the thing is, there's also cases where it's 5E that is automatic, but 4E that's uncertain. Personally, I find these ones more interesting and more filled with tension, because once they come up they can come up multiple times in a row, with escalating time pressure. We've got an hour or less to get through an unknown number of obstacles to stop the nefarious necromancer from completing his midnight ritual. Clearly we can't just sit around idling for an hour. If we rest after every little fight, every trap, every hazard, we may arrive too late. But if we don't rest at every opportunity, we may find ourselves less able to cope with each successive situation, as we expend encounter resources we don't get back in time for the next challenge. We may find that this was our last opportunity to pause. What was an easy yes when we had an hour's buffer is less easy when we're still not at our goal and there's only a half hour to go. We think he's in the next room, and there's less than 10 minutes to go ... do we huddle up for five minutes or kick down the door now?

Now, that's certainly not an every-session scenario, to be sure. But in my experience, neither is 5E's non-automatic decision scenario.

The vast majority of my adventuring days in 5E have either had no demand for a short rest at all (we haven't lost enough HP or expended enough resources to make us deem the rest necessary, we've got places to be and things to do and people will worry if we take an extra hour ...), or every opportunity that arises is automatically taken ... and often turns out to be a good time and place for a long rest anyway, turning the short rest into 'Let's top up the HP of the first watch'. I think last session was the first I've seen in quite some time where we actually got in two short rests, and the second was the short/long combo. And really, the first was more of a "we're stuck at this place for an hour or more anyway, so anyone who needs it better take the short rest". Any agonizing over the decision to stay at that place would've been there every bit as much if the resting aspect only took five minutes of the time, it was other factors that made us decide to stay that long.

I wouldn't mind a ten minute short rest. It makes the decision a little less frequently an automatic yes than 4E, but far less often an automatic no than 5E.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I guess many of my comments about rests being player choices are based on wotc's decision to make a short rest=1 hour rather than 5 or 10 minutes. This difference was hard for me to get used to in the beginning, but I warmed up to it because it made the short rest less automatic.

That's the kind of reaction that's going to vary. The group I played 3e with didn't much like using WoCLW, because they felt standing about for multiple /rounds/ was dawdling, and not the kind of thing you should be doing in hostile territory. 5 minutes'd've been right out. A party I DM'd 5e for at DunDraCon this year all felt comfortable taking 1-hr rests after every encounter in a dungeoncrawl, even though I was rolling random encounter checks every 20 min. Personally, I feel like if taking an hour is practical then taking 8 probably is, too (and I don't feel like an hour is practical in a dungeon or other hostile area).

That's why I can't agree that 1 hr was calculated to have the effect it has for you, but for everyone. ;P

I do know for a fact that WoTC kept this rule because they wanted the decision to rest to be a substantial decision for players.

Fact? I could see that, in a relative sense, though. A longer short rest discourages them relative to a shorter one.

I think it was a mistake to put too much stock in a specific length - it could have been left to the DM. As it stands, the DM is always free to rule that a shorter rest is adequate or a longer one needed in a given scenario, so it's a minor issue, not a game-breaking or game-defining one.

 

[Rhenny]

I think it was a mistake to put too much stock in a specific length - it could have been left to the DM. As it stands, the DM is always free to rule that a shorter rest is adequate or a longer one needed in a given scenario, so it's a minor issue, not a game-breaking or game-defining one.

You are right about that, but if they didn't tell me to try 1 hour rests, I would have been using 5 min/10min ones which basically became automatic after each encounter. I guess with the variant rest options, they are basically saying do what you want to do.

Also, I don't think it is out of order for the DM to plain out say that the area is not suitable for resting...or forget about rolling random encounters...just lay one on them and make them run. lol.

 

[Quickleaf]

For overland journeys, there's basically a few options:

• The party reaches their destination without incident. Maybe I roll a random encounter for flavor, but it's not meant to be a real challenge. It's cool if they wipe the floor with it, or if it's noncombat.
• Getting to the destination is itself a challenge. This calls for tracking rations, getting lost, exhaustion tracking and draining non-hit-point resources. 5e doesn't support this TOTALLY well out of the box, but it does have rules for things like rationing, starvation, and the weight of food and water. I think 5e could use a better rules option or two here, but it's not really much of the focus of most D&D games. Encounters and HP attrition don't work here.
• The party has some big challenge on the way to the destination. This calls for a lair/side-story, with the full encounter suite and a dungeon.

I think some people's problems come in trying to use HP attrition for that second bullet point, but 5e doesn't support that very well. You're better off tracking food and water, rolling to get lost, having environmental hazards (weather, cliffs, difficult terrain) that cause exhaustion, etc.

Great thread Jacob

I like the design principles you're working with, but I'm wondering how this looks in practice?

For example, does your approach suggest a different way of creating encounter table entries for a "main plot" kind of campaign? Does it suggest you shouldn't have random encounter tables if that's the kind of campaign you're running?

Is there anything proscriptive you're suggesting about how published adventures should be designed in relation to "6-8 encounters per day"?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Great thread Jacob

I like the design principles you're working with, but I'm wondering how this looks in practice?

For example, does your approach suggest a different way of creating encounter table entries for a "main plot" kind of campaign? Does it suggest you shouldn't have random encounter tables if that's the kind of campaign you're running?

Is there anything proscriptive you're suggesting about how published adventures should be designed in relation to "6-8 encounters per day"?

On random encounter tables: it really depends on the goal you have for them. If the random encounter table is just "here's what lives in these lands," it's more the first bullet point. In that case, it's fine to have a mix of monsters and NPCs and hostilities and CR's - any monster groups that are too tough to fight will be "run away," any monster groups you can fight won't be a big challenge, and any NPC groups you're more interested in talking to will be "Face Time." None of these are meant to be a big risk for the party, just local color and pacing, and that's important.

If the random encounter table is meant to give the PC's a significant challenge (the third bullet point), I'd treat the monster rolled as if the table said "A lair of X." If I rolled a random encounter for greenhags, it might be a greenhag and her ogre servitors in their tangled swampy wilderness, or a coven of greenhags and their animated trees, or somesuch (The old 2e "Habitiat/Society" information for the monster, or the 1e "lair information" are useful here). The random encounter just becomes a seed for a "random side-quest."

If the random encounters are meant to be a method of resource attrition to reflect an arduous journey that not everyone survives, I'd make sure to include encounters that drain resources that a rest won't get back, or to set up some quick rulings about how you can't rest on the road in the wilderness without a skill check, or something. My own DMing mostly makes this a bit of the "trolls with goals" phenomenon: every time you rest, the enemies move forward. You only have a certain number of rests between you and the enemies succeeding. But that's mostly because I can't be bothered to do detailed ration accounting. If I wanted to make the journey itself more arduous, I'd start looking into "house rules."

For published adventures, I think the first option and the third option have the most potential. Either the random encounter is just a bit of fluff that shows off what the environment is like (and so you can include a huge range of diversity in there, with the understanding that it doesn't matter if the party can fight it or not), or there's some system the adventure has that makes journeys more arduous or risky. Days you spend on the trail are days the villains move forward, or you gain exhaustion for dealing with certain random encounters (storms, cliffs, fording rivers) that you can't shake off until you're back in civilization. The second option is probably best suited to a more focused "lairs book" project.

 

[Syntallah]

The Adventuring Day and it's supposed 6 -8 encounters per is something I've been thinking about a bit too. One big question I ask myself is, what actually is an Adventuring DAY? Is that an actual In Game 24 hours (or whatever time period your game world uses)? Not all adventures and quests are measured on the same scale. Assuming the 24 hour Adventuring Day, this really makes overland adventures very awkward. And on the reverse side for shorter forays into small 3 to 6 room dungeons, keeps, necromancer's towers, abandoned moat houses, and the like that may have all 8 encounters but packed together to be completed in less time than taking a short rest! There have been plenty of times I can recall having the characters trek to an adventuring site and describing the heroes arriving by late morning or mid-day. After 5 Real Life hours of gaming, one of the players asks, "How much time has passed in the game?" and you look down and realize that the combined rounds of combat over the encounters equals.... minutes!! Add in the 400 feet of tunnels and caves the party has explored and the time taken looking in nooks and crannies - and really you're stretching it if that's more than an In Game hour total!

What I've come to believe is that the Adventuring Day is malleable and dynamic, like Tony Vargas mentions, depending on the situation and adventure at hand. What's the difference if the 6 - 8 encounters happen over the course of an hour or a week In Game? Ultimately it's up to the DM to decided what the correct Length of Day is for any situation. But personally what I've found works for me is that there are 3 levels for the Adventuring Day. I call them Short-Adventure, (Regular) Adventure, and Perilous Journey. The Short-Adventure Day is as I described above. Where 6 - 8 encounters come hot and heavy and it will be assumed that the characters would handle these encounters all within an In Game hour or there about. The characters should still be able to take their short rests between a few encounters. But it would be silly if the characters had to stop and hide in a broom closet for an hour! So in this case a short rest becomes 5 minutes. A long rest is 2 hours. A regular Adventure is more in line of the classic 'dungeon'. Nothing changes here, resting would still be 1 hour/8 hour for short and long. These are the dungeons that have multiple floors, long distances between internal locations that actually end up taking several forays into the depths to fully explore. Finally the Perilous Journey is for long, multi day treks. Again I think it is hard to believe that every single day while traveling the heroes should face 6 - 8 random encounters. As if they are all lined up with a number waiting to jump out behind a rock to get the characters. And on the flip side, having a single encounter for the characters to go Super Saiyan on and then be able to long rest is equally as anti-climatic and unnecessary. So in this case a short rest is 12 hours, a long rest is 24. With this, those 6 - 8 encounters are spread across days effectively making overland trekking itself the Adventuring Day.

And of course this info shouldn't be hidden to the players. Although I don't personally tell them up front, "Oh this adventure is going to be a short-adventure!" the info does come out once the adventure is under way. And once the tempo is set, both the players and DM need to trust that the tempo won't change.

I ask this in all honesty because I have been struggling with this topic lately:

How do you justify the different levels of the adventuring day from a verisimilitude point of view? What do you tell your players when they say "well, yesterday a short rest was five minutes, today it's one hour?".

I am currently running my group through Demon Queen's Enclave, and I had a 4-5 day journey through the Underdark before they even got to Phaervorul. I deemed a Long Rest was not merely a night's eight hour sleep because of the hostile environment, but the players balked at that.

To me, the scene in Lord of the Rings movie when the group was in Moria (in the room with the well that Pippin knocks the armor into), behind that closed door, is a perfect example of a short rest. However, my players seem to think that if they close a door, and spike it shut, they should be able to sleep for eight hours and get a Long Rest...

 

[S'mon]

I am currently running my group through Demon Queen's Enclave, and I had a 4-5 day journey through the Underdark before they even got to Phaervorul. I deemed a Long Rest was not merely a night's eight hour sleep because of the hostile environment, but the players balked at that.

What I did with DQE was let them long rest, but have their maximum # of healing surges go down by 1 after each long rest... Got pretty tense towards the end!

I'm thinking about making short rests into 10 minutes in my tabletop 5e game to try to encourage more of them. There's a Warlock in the group and without frequent SRs I fear she'll be underpowered the way the Warlock in my online game was. OTOH that'll make the Moon Druid even more OP...

 

[Kusodareka]

I have been struggling with this as an inexperienced DM. I think I need to work on making my dungeons more dynamic - sleeping foes get attacked. I have not seen much of a solution for outdoor random encounters. My PCs just go nova and nuke the poor NPCs. It seems like such a waste of time that I am planning to handwave them now.