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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5992514" data-attributes="member: 27160">OK, so they'll be planned some other way - what's the big deal? You can plan them in whatever way you want regardless.So ignore the encounter guidelines, if you want everything to be totally arbitrary.It sounds like we're really talking about "what the problem before the players is", rather than "how they solve the problem", but OK. If you want the players to frame each challenge, let them frame each challenge. You can even have them try to do it according to some sort of arbitrary guessing game about what you were thinking when you set up the scenario, if you like. What about having guidelines for individual scenario elements prevents you doing that? Do you feel you need some sort of authority figure to tell you it's OK to elide encounters together if the characters' actions justify it?We were talking about planning and preparation a moment ago - are you suggesting you need to calculate encounter values on the fly during play, now? Because I don't see any need to do that, with or without encounter guidelines.Damn! I knew I was missing something important - I thought we were playing a game...Immersion and simulationism and all that stuff is fine and good in actual play; it's a perfectly valid approach. In design of mechanical systems and guidelines, however, it's dysfunctional. Why? Because what the systems must deal with in reality is a group of real players sat around a real table rolling real dice. If their heads are off in some alternate galaxy during play, that's fine, but if the designer is off in that galaxy designing the game then what you're going to get is a mess.So forget it, during play. If you want a multi-game-day adventure, you're going to hit the exact same problem with "adventure days", anyway. Just design taking the guidelines into account and then forget the divisions in play and react however you want to.The players will never really be setting up their own encounters unless you actually give them the tools and the power to manipulate the design you have made; I would be amazed if, while playing D&D, you get anywhere near that. The encounters will be set up according to the arbitrary decisions you make as GM - based on your own head-model of how the world works - in response to the uninformed multiple guesses that your players come up with.Just a suggestion: add up a reasonable "day's worth" of encounters and just put them into your scenario. Use 4 times an average encounter, maybe, as a starting point. Voila - adventuring day.Sounds like a problem with the group, to me. Any "good" DM should make clear that this doesn't happen yadda yadda - who am I kidding? We don't need "mechanical solutions" for the 5 minute adventuring day, but we need mechanics (or, rather, the absence of them) to stop some players expecting guidelines to be adhered to religiously? So intimate that they have met two encounters at once because they screwed up. Or was the screw-up actually starting the adventure in the first place?EDIT: one thing it strikes me forcibly 5e could do better at than previous editions - make crystal clear the difference between rules and guidelines. It can only do that if the rules are clear and unambiguous, of course, but I think that's the only really functional way to go, anyway. But, if the rules are clear and unambiguous, then it should be made clear that XP budgets and such are guidelines - i.e they are not mandatory.</blockquote>

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