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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6943697" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I've done the occasional adventure that was specifically contrived to be broken up into multiple encounters (e.g. you have to rescue kidnapping victims held in six different locations), but your approach is more typical for my table. I tend to have gigantic encounters like "you encounter a neogi deathspider" which, if approached in a straightforward hack-and-slash fashion, would be 10x Deadly or worse. (And yet, the players in that case did it anyway. They rammed and boarded the neogi deathspider, and lived to tell the tale!) Then I rely on the players, plus a little bit of DM assistance, to deal with those encounters in a reasonable and manageable way. ("Every turn, 1d4 umber hulks emerge from the doors over there." Because obviously not all the two dozen umber hulks on the whole ship were ready to emerge and attack in the six seconds after ramming--it takes some time for their various neogi masters to realize what's happening and send them off to fight, and rolling a d4 was a convenient way of representing that without requiring me to spend a lot of time modelling offscreen activities.)The one thing, though, is that I think it's best if there's at least two situations going on simultaneously if you can arrange it without straining plausibility. They don't have to both be combat-oriented situations--it could be "hags kidnapping children and turning them into plush toys" + "Count Rugen is suing you in court to try to take possession of your factory"--but they could be, and if so you might have twice as many conflicts that turn into life-and-death combat. But I've learned from writers like Steven Brust and Jim Butcher that stories are more interesting when protagonists have to deal with multiple problems simultaneously--and from a gamist perspective, giving the players multiple problems to engage with both increases their freedom to choose which content to engage with, and increases the challenge of any solution they come up with. ("Now we have to rescue the children without Olaf, because he's stuck testifying in court." Naturally Olaf will be attacked by lawyers who turn out to be ghouls while the other PCs are away, because we wouldn't want him to miss out on the fun.)</blockquote>

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