Reducing the number of encounters in a day

[Tony Vargas]

The attrition model is newfangled, very nontraditional.

I have to disagree. Using planned attrition as way of balancing the game at a point probably goes back to 3.0, at the very latest. And single encounters or traps or what-have you weren't the real challenge in old-school, either, it was surviving a series of them by managing resources. Wandering monsters, for instance, rarely wiped parties, but if they even did a few hps, they'd hurt them.

Attrition has always been one component of (A)D&D, as far back as I've played (Mentzer Red Box, but mostly AD&D2) but usually only a minor aspect of the game. 5E has almost completely removed save-or-die from the system and leans primarily on attrition if you're not careful, and that's new, and has implications which can make the game boring if not managed correctly.

Classic D&D wasn't somehow 'not attrition' because it had SoDs, all an SoD did was kill someone - a little more often than not, a thief - that someone was a resource, and losing him was part of the attrition that would eventually drive you out of the dungeon.

I wouldn't know. The only 3.5 I ever played was the ToEE videogame, which was quite boring.

If you like the meta-game implicit in character optimization, no other version of D&D holds a candle to 3.x/PF, at least in that department. Sometimes actually playing it can seem like an unnecessary formality, but chargen/level-up is really something.

That's an interesting definition of "balanced."

I thought so when I ran across it. I find it's a good one, because it gets to the point of balance, which is not making the game perfect or automatically fun, but just preventing the game from sucking.

There's also another factor, which how 'robust' that balance might be. A game can be balanced when played with a specific party composition against a certain number of challenges per day, but broken with a different pacing or party, for instance.

And, even if a game presents imbalanced options, the players can always exercise restraint and simply not choose them, re-defining what's 'viable' in the context of the campaign they're in.

Finally, a DM can adjust or enforce balance on the fly. That's where 5e can prettymuch get away with not worrying about balance, at all, in the design phase, because it gives the DM so much latitude. He can impose the sort and level of balance he wants, and any designed-in balance is almost moot. Almost. Obviously, as we can see in this threads, some DMs want to be able to count on some degree of balance from the system to start.

In the more theoretical case where you can't know what the DM or other players will do, only the top builds that can compete with eachother are 'viable,' because someone else might bring in such a build (you can't count on player restraint or DM force). That's the degree to which the game, itself, is balanced. The less robust that balance, the more it can vary from campaign to campaign.

By that standard, 5E is extremely well-balanced

It does provide a modest number of choices relative to other modern editions, and an impressive number compared to older ones. The tricky bit is how viable they are, and the somewhat subjective bit how meaningful. And, of course, how much you can deviate from the point at which it balances before that balance is lost (which is part of the point of this thread: can you reduce encounters/day while preserving any balance that may already exist).

but the encounter guidelines are far too weak because there are a number of builds that shred them utterly.

That can be an indicator of poor balance, because those builds might be rendering other less encounter-shreddy builds non-viable. As the DM ratchets up encounters to challenge such builds, other builds become non-viable.

so that a casual player who makes a basic Champion fighter can kill monsters and get treasure. It's easy by design,...
I claim that the 5E guidelines were designed with such players in mind; but the fun part of 5E is that it's a floor on effectiveness and not a ceiling.

'Easy' is relative. If the game were 'well-' (robustly) balanced, you could have players of different levels of system mastery and 'seriousness' in the same party with minimal issues.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I have to disagree. Using planned attrition as way of balancing the game at a point probably goes back to 3.0, at the very latest. And single encounters or traps or what-have you weren't the real challenge in old-school, either, it was surviving a series of them by managing resources. Wandering monsters, for instance, rarely wiped parties, but if they even did a few hps, they'd hurt them.

We must have played AD&D differently then. I played two styles: one was Gold Box computer games in 1E and the Dark Sun games in 2E, and those were very much 5 minute work-day style games where resting back to full after almost every encounter was the norm (and if wandering monsters came along, you just dealt with them); the other was small AD&D 2nd edition games where the emphasis was on sneaking and contingency planning before an engagement and good use of spells (Fire Trap multiple places in the orc base) and having the right spells in the first place. Attrition is a component of that model, but not in the 5E sense of "nothing is really a threat until repeated encounters grind you down first."

'Easy' is relative. If the game were 'well-' (robustly) balanced, you could have players of different levels of system mastery and 'seriousness' in the same party with minimal issues.

I don't believe that any such roleplaying system could ever be interesting to me. In order to completely negate the differential effects of player intelligence and skill, the game would have to be simpler than Checkers, on the same level as Chutes and Ladders.

You can try to push 5E in this direction by having the optimizers build characters for the other characters, which would make them look equal on paper, but then when it comes to the part I'm actually interested in (actual game time, interacting with the world) you will find that the skillful players will rapidly outpace the unskillful ones, because the unskillful ones do ineffective things like blow their 9th level spell slots on Chromatic Orb IX (true story) and don't know when to play defense/Dodge (instead of rolling another attack for 8 HP of damage) and don't think to Hide when they're being chased and never come up with creative uses for a Bag of Devouring, etc., etc.

In short, you can't negate the effects of intelligence in a roleplaying game unless you remove the possibility for some decisions to be better than others. From my perspective, if all choices made at game-time are viable, then no choices are meaningful. (Which BTW is precisely why I find DMG-balanced Medium/Hard encounters meaningless and boring. They're balanced to be beatable even if all you do is charge into the 10' x 10' room and start making attack rolls in melee.)

TL;DR I'll believe in it when I see one.

 

[Tony Vargas]

[/COLOR]We must have played AD&D differently then. I played two styles: one was Gold Box computer games in 1E and the Dark Sun games in 2E, and those were very much 5 minute work-day style games where resting back to full after almost every encounter was the norm

That's definitely very different. I never touched a CRPG. Played AD&D 1e from 1980 until 2e hit, but 2e for only about 5 years (and that mostly running an unrecognizeable variant, which, BTW, also tended toward the 5MWD, not the classic attrition model). But classic D&D - not just what I played of it back in the day, but what old guard had already been established by then, and every word I read in The Dragon and everything Gygax wrote for AD&D, all pointed very clearly at that delve into the dungeon until you can't stretch your resources any further, then retreat, rest, and go back to re-enforced monsters and re-set traps and whatnot.

not in the 5E sense of "nothing is really a threat until repeated encounters grind you down first."

That vaguely rings a bell. I think 1e came out and said something like that, about the point of many traps, wandering monsters, and the like (encounters) being to whittle away at spells and hps.

I don't believe that any such roleplaying system could ever be interesting to me. In order to completely negate the differential effects of player intelligence and skill

"Intellegence?" Heh. We gamers are so full of ourselves, sometimes. No, it's nothing about /negating/ system mastery or emotionally manipulating the DM or anything like that (no RPG could ever completely negate such factors, RPGs are necessarily too complex for that, there's always some opportunities). A game that does negate all such factors and render all players arbitrarily equal, BTW, isn't 'balanced' either, because it's presenting /no/ choices, or at least, certainly no meaningful (subjective as 'meaningful' can be) ones. (One thing I like about the many-viable-meaningful-choices definition of balance is it recognizes that choiceless games have none of the desirable qualities of balanced ones.) 3.5 wasn't imbalanced because it rewarded system mastery (it's almost impossible to design an RPG that doesn't) but because it over-rewarded it far too lavishly, rendering only a relative handful of optimal builds and Tier 1 classes 'viable' (relative to the choices presented in 3.5, that was still rather a lot relative to the viable choices in 1e or 5e).

TL;DR I'll believe in it when I see one.

If you've mostly played 2e and 5e, you probably haven't seen a robustly-balanced game, yet. And, the truth is, most games have some aspects that are reasonably balanced, and big holes that aren't. 4e, for instance, was as robustly-balanced as D&D ever got, but stats were still a little out of whack, certain skills not quite there, and feats a deep quagmire of too-good must-haves, errata-as-feat 'taxes,' and non-viable trap choices.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

If you've mostly played 2e and 5e, you probably haven't seen a robustly-balanced game, yet. And, the truth is, most games have some aspects that are reasonably balanced, and big holes that aren't. 4e, for instance, was as robustly-balanced as D&D ever got, but stats were still a little out of whack, certain skills not quite there, and feats a deep quagmire of too-good must-haves, errata-as-feat 'taxes,' and non-viable trap choices.

I've played MERP, AD&D 2nd edition, Shadowrun 4E, GURPS 4E, and D&D 5E. I lost interest in GURPS because, a few years into 4E, all the new material that was coming out was extremely balanced, with everything defined in terms of point budgets and cost-per-effect. (Not that the point building system wasn't still highly gameable, but gameable abilities were gated behind Unusual Background costs which in effect were a fudge factor for the GM to apply a nerf bat.) No interesting constraints on optimization, no real flavor to anything; fluff became secondary to mechanics. The original GURPS 4E rules were fine, but I didn't like the trend line of the new releases so I moved on. (That's pretty much why I left AD&D 2nd edition, too.)

I played a tiny bit of 4E, enough to know that I would hate it if I played any more. Too much like the things that drove me away from GURPS.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I've played MERP, AD&D 2nd edition, Shadowrun 4E, GURPS 4E, and D&D 5E. I lost interest in GURPS because, a few years into (GURPS) 4E, all the new material that was coming out was extremely balanced, with everything defined in terms of point budgets and cost-per-effect.

I was roped into earlier versions of GURPS, and didn't find them at all balanced, but we were mixing worldbooks. Same with Shadowrun, only earlier editions, and not that much of it. Lots of
Champions!/Hero-System ('balanced' in a sense, but profoundly vulnerable to system mastery) and Storyteller (hardly a hint of balance in any sense - hardly a 'system' really), though.

It's funny, but I think we actually have very little RPG system-experience in common.

I didn't like the trend line of the new releases so I moved on. (That's pretty much why I left AD&D 2nd edition, too.)

OK, we have that experience (giving up on 2e) in common.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

It's funny, but I think we actually have very little RPG system-experience in common.

At least we have a shared interest in world-building and exploring alternate fantasy physics/biology/etc. though.

 

[GMMichael]

The DMG also makes it clear that a party is supposed to be able to handle 6-8 medium-hard encounters per day.

This is actually the correct amount, because it does not specify "combat" encounters. 6-8 combat encounters would be overwhelming.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This is actually the correct amount, because it does not specify "combat" encounters. 6-8 combat encounters would be overwhelming.

In the section entitled "Building Combat Encounters?" I don't think challenging the party through attrition, forcing them to expend resources very carefully, and to take several short rests is 'overwhelming.' And, it just might help keep everyone relevant in a mixed party with neo-Vancian casters, short-rest-recharge classes, and mostly-at-will classes. Maybe.

 

[GMMichael]

Yep, you're right. I found the "6-8" line in the same section as this tidbit:

In general, over the course of a full adventuring day, the
party will likely need to take two short rests, about one-third
and two-thirds of the way through the day.

Where "adventuring" seems to have another implied "combat-", and the enemies of this combat-adventuring-day seem to disperse themselves somewhat evenly over its course.

 

[Endur]

(As an aside, if you've never played Master of Magic, you must try at least four things: evocation Channeller with Flame Strike to nuke enemy armies from afar; eleven-book Black Magic wizard to create armies of self-replicating Ghouls and Lycanthropes that are immune to normal armies; Rune Magic + Artificer to create invincible heroes who solo entire armies; and fleets of flying invisible (spell-locked) warships bombarding enemies from the air with catapult stones. All of these tactics are game-breakingly good, which leads to a metagame of breaking the game in new and different ways.)

I'm perfectly happy with Torin the Chosen and heavily armored dwarves and flying draconians and war trolls.