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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6943860" data-attributes="member: 6775031">The problem is that the default assumption for 5E is that a standard adventuring day will have between two and ten encounters. If you only have one encounter in a day, then the party gets to go all-out and they can punch way higher than their level for that fight (which can result in a ton of experience gained). If you had an adventure to go somewhere and do a thing, with maybe one encounter on the way there and three while you're there and one on the way back, then two of those encounters would be trivial and you're left with trying to challenge the vast resources of the party on only three encounters, which would have to be devastatingly powerful if they were to be any threat at all.You can kind of address that by saying that you only get a long rest between adventures, so all five of those encounters are part of the same "adventuring day" even though that day is spread out over a week or two, but that raises other complications. And in the end, for the purposes of analysis, they still had five encounters in one "day" increment.I didn't really stick to the encounter budgets, or the XP-per-day budgets. Trying to stick to those limits - in addition to requiring more heavy-handed meta-game intervention than I'm comfortable with - would have meant that the party was never challenged in combat, so that they would end up seeking out far greater numbers of encounters in a day. If they cleared out a camp full of orcs, but they still had three quarters of a tank left and haven't even broken a sweat, then they'll just head over to the next camp of orcs. And if they've already cleared the surrounding countryside of anything remotely dangerous, then they'll go to bed disappointed and be back up to full for the next day.Hence why I instituted some of the optional rules about training time before you can gain a level. It may have only taken them about a month worth of adventuring days to go from 1-20, but those days were spread out over the course of fifteen months in-game, so that the big climactic battle with the Tarrasque (after six lesser encounters, to soften them up) took place almost exactly one in-game year after the campaign started. From what I understand, it's not too far off from how things were supposed to work in the 3E days, with their recommended four encounters per day and twelve encounters per level. Going from 1-20 would take less than two months, or much less if you had other sources of XP (like quest rewards), and you were expected to make that sound more reasonable by filling huge blocks of in-game time with travel or castle management or whatever.</blockquote>

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