D&D 5E (Poll) How much combat per adventuring day

[FormerlyHemlock]

This is a more granular version of the "long rest" poll.

In a day with combat, how much of the daily encounter design XP budget do your players tend to overcome before stopping? Please mark both number of combats and total XP budget so we get a sense of both exhausted PCs "should" be, and how difficult the individual combats are.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Which would you be more interested in. One-shots run at a convention (AL or not)? Or ongoing, open-entry/exit Encounters (AL) games spanning many sessions? Or unofficial 'home' campaigns?

 

[S'mon]

I might have guessed 50-75%, but then I actually checked the table - 7th level PCs budgeted for 5,000 XP each per day... heh. Even on a big day my group would face less than half of that - and would tpk long before reaching 'budget'. So 0-50%.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Which would you be more interested in. One-shots run at a convention (AL or not)? Or ongoing, open-entry/exit Encounters (AL) games spanning many sessions? Or unofficial 'home' campaigns?

For purposes of the poll, let's make home campaigns the intended question.

So far it looks as if the adventuring day guidelines are adhered to more closely than the "6-8 fights per day" guesstimate, even by those who have fewer fights. That's useful information.

I might have guessed 50-75%, but then I actually checked the table - 7th level PCs budgeted for 5,000 XP each per day... heh. Even on a big day my group would face less than half of that - and would tpk long before reaching 'budget'. So 0-50%.

Make sure you're using adjusted XP for the daily budget calculation (i.e. includes quantity multiplier), and not the raw XP. It's a common misunderstanding.

 

[steeldragons]

I have no idea how to answer this...nor did I answer the other similar poll. There is no way to come to a set number of fights per day. That is totally up to the actions [or inactions] and decisions of the players. They can run afoul of 10 "fights" completely by accident...or chase after/push through for some goal and take on a dozen or more..."Slow days" or downtimes might not have any or include a single combat "distaction"...or a single full on unfortunate random encounter with something that can TPK the party four times over with a sneeze...There might be four specific encounters/ambush sites within a dungeon and the party manages to avoid then all...or runs away from the biggest threat...so, those combats are nixed.

There's just...no answer. The PCs do not find "Y XP worth of monster per short rest" or XP "budget" per day, they encounter what they encounter, as they decide to take on, where they go or don't. That's not for me, as DM, to decide or "force-feed XP per combat (or any other way, for that matter) to level you just right."

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I have no idea how to answer this...nor did I answer the other similar poll. There is no way to come to a set number of fights per day. That is totally up to the actions [or inactions] and decisions of the players. They can run afoul of 10 "fights" completely by accident...or chase after/push through for some goal and take on a dozen or more..."Slow days" or downtimes might not have any or include a single combat "distaction"...or a single full on unfortunate random encounter with something that can TPK the party four times over with a sneeze...There might be four specific encounters/ambush sites within a dungeon and the party manages to avoid then all...or runs away from the biggest threat...so, those combats are nixed.

There's just...no answer. The PCs do not find "Y XP worth of monster per short rest" or XP "budget" per day, they encounter what they encounter, as they decide to take on, where they go or don't. That's not for me, as DM, to decide or "force-feed XP per combat (or any other way, for that matter) to level you just right."

It's fine if you don't want to answer. If you do want to answer anyway, you could take the poll as asking for your mean, not your mode. Everybody has a mean.

Edit: actually, your median would probably be more meaningful than your mean.

 

[Rhenny]

I have no idea how to answer this...nor did I answer the other similar poll. There is no way to come to a set number of fights per day. That is totally up to the actions [or inactions] and decisions of the players. They can run afoul of 10 "fights" completely by accident...or chase after/push through for some goal and take on a dozen or more..."Slow days" or downtimes might not have any or include a single combat "distaction"...or a single full on unfortunate random encounter with something that can TPK the party four times over with a sneeze...There might be four specific encounters/ambush sites within a dungeon and the party manages to avoid then all...or runs away from the biggest threat...so, those combats are nixed.

There's just...no answer. The PCs do not find "Y XP worth of monster per short rest" or XP "budget" per day, they encounter what they encounter, as they decide to take on, where they go or don't. That's not for me, as DM, to decide or "force-feed XP per combat (or any other way, for that matter) to level you just right."

In the other poll, I tried to estimate a mean, but the more I think about it, the more variable it becomes and I don't think understanding a mean helps much. I've had days with no combat. Some days with 1 or 2. Some days with 4-5, and other days (usually when the party is deep into a delve) where they have 8-12. To be perfectly honest, I don't even use the xp budgets when I make up my own encounters/sessions. I just decide what works for the story. If I want to challenge the party, I may consider the xp guidelines just to see where it falls. Most recently, I've been running Princes of Elemental Evil, and it seems as if it pretty much fits with the guidelines 6-8 easy or medium encounters per day, or 2 or 3 difficult, with chances for interaction and exploration that can take up 1/2 or an entire session depending on what the party likes to do.

For the purposes of the poll, I voted 4-5 as a mean. 75%-110% of budget. I think this is mostly because this is what my table likes. They want to be moderately challenged, but not over challenged, and they want to have time for interaction and exploration as well as combat and alternatives to combat when they have a good idea.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

But, days with no combat are explicitly excluded from the poll.

Neither does the poll ask whether you design encounters, or use the XP budget to create encounters, or adventures, or anything. It's just straight-up, "If I sat at your table and observed every time that someone tries to inflict lethal damage on an (N)PC or monster, called it a combat, and calculated the effective difficulty of those combats relative to DMG guidelines, where would my observations sit relative to those DMG guidelines?"

I don't use DMG guidelines myself, and I don't have all that much combat in my games, but I do occasionally compute encounter days and difficulties after the fact, and I've noticed certain patterns about where things tend to average out: a very few, infrequent but very large Deadly combats, and a smattering of small-to-medium combats that I think of as mostly exploration and social events instead of existential threats even if my players choose to socialize with Fireball instead of the Friends cantrip. So I'll call that closest to 2-3 "combats" per day, and guesstimate the mean as something close to 110% of the daily encounter budget (ranging from 10% of the daily XP budget in recent sessions, to 300% to 2300% of the daily XP budget in other previous sessions).

That's what this poll is asking about. And I agree that the mean isn't very useful summary statistic--posted descriptions are actually better. Thank you for responding.

 

[redrick]

I don't do much in the way of pre-calculating or pre-planning adventuring days, so it's entirely up to the players and their circumstances as to what they encounter and whether or not they try to rest and recuperate before continuing. (And whether or not that attempt is successful.)

I voted 4-5 and 50%-75% because I generally don't try to squeeze a full adventuring day out of them unless they want to push ahead for their own reasons.

I've noticed that, when the individual combats are deadlier, players are more likely to push for a long rest before coming close to their daily budget. Players spend a disproportionate amount of spells and resources in deadly fights, and it is harder for PCs to spread the damage out in one encounter, so one character is more likely to get mostly wiped out early. There's also the reasoning that, "another one of those will definitely kill us", as opposed to, "we can probably squeeze another little combat in before we try to call it a night."

Our last session used about 50% of the daily xp budget ... in one combat. It was a random encounter, made harder by the fact that PCs overlooked the small cache of magic items in the room before. There had also been two different trap encounters, one of which killed a PC outright.

The session before we had a day that probably went over the xp threshold — (the monsters were custom monsters that I hadn't calculated CR for) — in about 5 combat encounters.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

[MENTION=92511]steeldragons[/MENTION], You can answer, as [MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] points out.

I did, because me not aiming for any particular amount of encounters or XP in a given time period does not negate that there is absolutely a number of encounters which my players get themselves into and an amount of XP those encounters are worth that a simple bit of math done in observance after the fact, rather than as premeditation, reveals.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I've noticed that, when the individual combats are deadlier, players are more likely to push for a long rest before coming close to their daily budget. Players spend a disproportionate amount of spells and resources in deadly fights, and it is harder for PCs to spread the damage out in one encounter, so one character is more likely to get mostly wiped out early. There's also the reasoning that, "another one of those will definitely kill us", as opposed to, "we can probably squeeze another little combat in before we try to call it a night."

Frankly, that sounds like entirely rational behavior on the part of the PCs.

I've noticed in my own games that what makes players reluctant to push on is not so much resource depletion as uncertainty about threats, and about their own capabilities. Once they've "solved" an encounter (a 3d6 CR 1/2 giant worker ants plus 2d6 CR 2 soldier ants--disable with Hypnotic Pattern and Web, kill ants who saved successfully first, kite and defeat in detail) it doesn't matter so much how Deadly it was, they're eager to tackle it again even if it seriously depleted their resources. But not having a strategy in place, or not understanding the threat, stops them in their tracks.

This is also rational behavior but I have yet to get the players to the next step, which is to notice why they are stumped and to undertake reconaissance to correct their ignorance. (Hmm, Chrome doesn't know how to spell "reconaissance.") Currently they just shy off and abandon the objective. I'm letting them have lots of easy practice combats (using a magic item which is effectively a training simulator) which I hope will have the side effect of making them more confident about undertaking recon. Already they've learned the virtues of Hasting the monk.

 

[S'mon]

Make sure you're using adjusted XP for the daily budget calculation (i.e. includes quantity multiplier), and not the raw XP. It's a common misunderstanding.

Yes, AIR there's also an adjustment for only having 3 PCs. Together those probably push a
couple recent days over 100%, but my last session had a single fight with one CR 6 vrock
vs 3 7th-8th PCs, and that's probably more common.