Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Retreater" data-source="post: 8823922" data-attributes="member: 42040">Maybe part of the problem I'm running into with my 5e group is that we have short sessions. I regularly run for 2-3 hours on a VTT, just to fit everyone's schedules on a weeknight (since weekends aren't possible). That means that if I follow the guidelines for how many encounters in a day I'm supposed to have (according to the RAW), it can take us 4+ sessions to get through a single adventuring day. That severely bogs down play. It spaces out story beats in the campaign. It creates a long time IRL to recharge your character's cool abilities. So I prefer more intense, concentrated battles than the fights that don't really matter to the campaign overall. A pack of giant rats that can nibble off 10% of the party's HP and other resources is not satisfying because it ends up expending around 50% of the players' time for the weekly session (after you account for placing tokens, putting things on a battlegrid, rolling and ordering Initiative, and managing "cleanup" among the characters after the fight.) If I were playing weekly for 4-5 hours a session like I did when I was a college student - then yeah, I could run that kind of game. Now, it's more of a chore of meaningless tasks. I'd rather get into the story, exploration, and encounters that challenge the players and their characters while doing the double duty of advancing the plot or enriching their discovery of the campaign world. So I need something more like an average of 3 fights per day. Games that focus on resource attrition aren't fun when our real life most precious resource (time) erodes more quickly than the characters' spells, torches, and hit points.</blockquote>

Verification