Number of encounters before an extended rest

[Grazzt]

Two options exist:

1) View the campaign as the players playing out the "highlight reel" of their PCs' lives. The characters aren't actually sitting on their butts between adventures, it's just that nothing significant happens.

2) Just let the PCs take some time off.

There's no reason adventures have to present themselves every day.

Or do like Pendragon, which is 1 adventure per year IIRC. Then take the winter off.

 

[Mengu]

Having played numerous play tests and recently starting our own campaign I can say that 6-8 is fairly accurate for the number of encounters before an extended rest. I would probably start at 7 and adjust it according to how the group is doing.

Going back on topic here, 6-8 encounters sounds a bit high considering the handful of games I've played. For instance, the fighter can easily go through 3 Surges in an average encounter (one second wind, one from the cleric's Healing Word, and one during short rest). Considering he usually has around 12 Surges, I would say at low levels, around 4 encounters before an extended rest feels right. That number could be as low as 2 or 3 if the encounters are a couple levels higher than the characters, forcing them to use daily abilities.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I just realized that you can go from Farmboy to God in about a month.

It could be worse! Imagine they were no Daily Powers or Healing Surges!

It's an artifact of games that hand out XP for stuff like combat, and support a long range of power levels.

You wouldn't have this problem in Shadowrun, for example, because character advancement is incredibly slow. (And thus, often unsatisfying, I might have to add. At least you usually start already at a "high level".)

In 3E, you just needed a Stack of Cure Light Wound Wands to have the non-spellcasters go forever. Spellcasters were basically responsible to "slow" advancement down. But with the expected 4 encounters per day and 13.33 encounters per level, you'd need (13.33 * 20) / 4 = 66.65 days to advance to level 20.

 

[invokethehojo]

After I got the books a couple weeks ago I ran a few demos at my local store with one of my goals being to discover how hard to make encounters (I don't like multiple easy encounters between extended rests much, so I don't do this very often).

Here's what I learned.
Daily and Encounter powers are awesome... but they frequently miss. Players get pissed if they feel like they only get to use a cool power once in awhile and it usually misses. Of course, there are a few powers that have effects on misses or arent spent on a miss

An encounter of equivalent level to the party is a little boring IMO, I'm sure you could run several in a row just fine
An encounter of 1.5 times the party's level is challenging, 1 or 2 in a row would be exciting.
An encoutner of twice the party's level is hard as hell and will kill some if not all the characters. A little less difficult and it would be fine as a once per extended rest encounter

 

[silentounce]

An encounter of equivalent level to the party is a little boring IMO, I'm sure you could run several in a row just fine
An encounter of 1.5 times the party's level is challenging, 1 or 2 in a row would be exciting.
An encoutner of twice the party's level is hard as hell and will kill some if not all the characters. A little less difficult and it would be fine as a once per extended rest encounter

You were running 1st level PCs, right? Because when you start multiplying encounter levels I'd imagine things would get all kinds of messed up. The system isn't built that way. Obviously a 20th level encounter will kill a 10th level party. A 6th level encounter versus a 3rd level party, not so much. Or are you going by XP total? Anyway, it's hard to an alyze the results without you letting us know more about the encounters.