Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
last encounter was totally one-sided
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6958829" data-attributes="member: 996"><p>You can, of course, do that in 5e, there's just a few factors you have to take into account. One is whether you (or your players) care about class balance at all. If nobody does, then all you have to worry about is keeping encounters challenging and workable even at 1/day. That's still a challenge, since you'll have everyone throwing down their best tricks, quite possibly, every round of the fight, but it's possible, and you've gotten some good advice on how to swim against the 'fast combat' current built into 5e.</p><p></p><p>If you do want to impose some class balance in spite of consistently falling far short of the expected 6-8 encounter day, though, don't panic. The classes aren't balanced to begin with, you would have had to do some tweaking and spotlight-roving to achieve it, anyway in reaction to party composition and other player choices, anyway, so it's just going to be party of the usual task of DMing. Just with a different focus. </p><p></p><p>Party composition could even solve the problem for you: if you end up with a party where everyone has some potent resources to 'nova' in their daily uber-encounter, for instance (or if no one does). If you get the more typical mix of classes, though, you need to forget about resource-management pressure over a long 'day' as a check on the heavy-daily-recharge classes, and find other ways to limit them, and build up the other classes. Rather than focusing on resource pressures to do that, latch onto other aspects of the disfavored PCs to help them shine. If nothing else works, you can always give the overshadowed PC(s) a nifty magic item with an awesome daily function or few.</p><p></p><p>They're not restrictions, they're just degrees of freedom that have other implications than just the pacing of you story. You can think of them as 'imbalancing' classes or 'ruining' encounter-building guidelines, or you can think of them as tools that let you leverage and re-balance the PCs and the challenges posed by encounters to better fit your campaign.</p><p></p><p>Those are pretty narrow- style- and feel- focused games. </p><p></p><p>You've certainly come at D&D in an unusual way. Most of us stepped up to 5e with multiple editions under our belts and very clear expectations of what D&D was about. And that has always included managing resources over the course of an adventuring day in one sense or another. As was mentioned above, the closest D&D has ever come to being neutral to pacing issues (and it wasn't that close) was 4e, which put all classes on the same resource schedule and made the 'daily' portion of those resources relatively less significant, allowing the DM to have much 'shorter' days with no impact on class balance and less (though still quite significant) impact on encounter balance. 4e was not well received by the fanbase who came to D&D in the more usual way, with more traditional expectations, and is out of print and not on the OGL that allowed 3.5e to enjoy ongoing 3PP support (and, 3.5 if even further from what you seem to want than is 5e), so it's not the freshest horse to hitch your wagon to at this point. Indeed, as the old saw implies, we really should stop beating it at some point...</p><p></p><p>...and, as you say, you already sprang for the set of 5e books (the good news is that you don't have to keep buying new ones every month to stay current). So, you might as well make the best of the current, supported edition. IMHO, the best thing you can do when coming to 5e without much of a background in D&D is to get some experience playing with a long-time DM and get a feel for the system. You should have a much easier time of that, being experienced with other RPGs already, but there is an art to running D&D and it's best picked up by playing under a good DM, and, of course, by doing. Fortunately, it's very easy to find current-edition games, just look up AL events in your area.... </p><p></p><p>Good luck!</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 6958829, member: 996"] You can, of course, do that in 5e, there's just a few factors you have to take into account. One is whether you (or your players) care about class balance at all. If nobody does, then all you have to worry about is keeping encounters challenging and workable even at 1/day. That's still a challenge, since you'll have everyone throwing down their best tricks, quite possibly, every round of the fight, but it's possible, and you've gotten some good advice on how to swim against the 'fast combat' current built into 5e. If you do want to impose some class balance in spite of consistently falling far short of the expected 6-8 encounter day, though, don't panic. The classes aren't balanced to begin with, you would have had to do some tweaking and spotlight-roving to achieve it, anyway in reaction to party composition and other player choices, anyway, so it's just going to be party of the usual task of DMing. Just with a different focus. Party composition could even solve the problem for you: if you end up with a party where everyone has some potent resources to 'nova' in their daily uber-encounter, for instance (or if no one does). If you get the more typical mix of classes, though, you need to forget about resource-management pressure over a long 'day' as a check on the heavy-daily-recharge classes, and find other ways to limit them, and build up the other classes. Rather than focusing on resource pressures to do that, latch onto other aspects of the disfavored PCs to help them shine. If nothing else works, you can always give the overshadowed PC(s) a nifty magic item with an awesome daily function or few. They're not restrictions, they're just degrees of freedom that have other implications than just the pacing of you story. You can think of them as 'imbalancing' classes or 'ruining' encounter-building guidelines, or you can think of them as tools that let you leverage and re-balance the PCs and the challenges posed by encounters to better fit your campaign. Those are pretty narrow- style- and feel- focused games. You've certainly come at D&D in an unusual way. Most of us stepped up to 5e with multiple editions under our belts and very clear expectations of what D&D was about. And that has always included managing resources over the course of an adventuring day in one sense or another. As was mentioned above, the closest D&D has ever come to being neutral to pacing issues (and it wasn't that close) was 4e, which put all classes on the same resource schedule and made the 'daily' portion of those resources relatively less significant, allowing the DM to have much 'shorter' days with no impact on class balance and less (though still quite significant) impact on encounter balance. 4e was not well received by the fanbase who came to D&D in the more usual way, with more traditional expectations, and is out of print and not on the OGL that allowed 3.5e to enjoy ongoing 3PP support (and, 3.5 if even further from what you seem to want than is 5e), so it's not the freshest horse to hitch your wagon to at this point. Indeed, as the old saw implies, we really should stop beating it at some point... ...and, as you say, you already sprang for the set of 5e books (the good news is that you don't have to keep buying new ones every month to stay current). So, you might as well make the best of the current, supported edition. IMHO, the best thing you can do when coming to 5e without much of a background in D&D is to get some experience playing with a long-time DM and get a feel for the system. You should have a much easier time of that, being experienced with other RPGs already, but there is an art to running D&D and it's best picked up by playing under a good DM, and, of course, by doing. Fortunately, it's very easy to find current-edition games, just look up AL events in your area.... Good luck! [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
last encounter was totally one-sided
Top