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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Uller" data-source="post: 7466649" data-attributes="member: 413">Can you give us an idea of the levels of the PCs and the adjusted encounter difficulty?I don't necessarily plan out adventures to be 6-8 encounters within the daily XP budget.  But what I do is use it as a guide for what I can expect the PCs to cover in the upcoming adventure, especially if it is going to be a combat heavy session.  That way, I'm not caught off guard if things are too easy or too difficult.  This is what works for me:I try to keep max adjusted XP for a single encounter to be 2X Deadly and I try to keep the entirety of XP between long rests to be about the daily XP budget for the party.  I have found that a fully rested party can generally defeat a 2X deadly encounter with no deaths but will use 75% or more of their resources (spells, HD, etc) to avoid PCs going down.For instance:  My current game is 2nd level.  They are in a wilderness and found they were being tracked by a orc eye of gruumsh (who I made a druid rather than cleric...heat metal, absorb elements and healing word make for one badass orc for a low level party...or so I hoped) and his sabertooth tiger (it came about from just a couple rolls on the random tables in Xanthars).  The orc was harassing them and luring other monsters to attack them for a session.  The party got away from him enough to take a long rest and decided they would double back on him to try to kill him.  This would be a tough fight for 2nd level PCs but not unwinnable.Here is what I'm looking at for a 2nd level party of 4:Easy: 200Medium: 400Hard: 600Deadly: 800+Max: 1600Daily: 2400Orc Eye of Gruumsh (450) plus Sabertooth Tiger (450): 1350 Adjusted XP/DeadlySo I decided that we'd run this as a sort of skill challenge.  Each failed check would result in a random encounter from Xanthar's.  4 successes would result in the party getting to the shaman.  The 4th failure would mean the shaman attacking on his terms.So I rolled 5 more random encounters using the Tier I hills and forest tables and got:3 harpies: 1200/Deadly3 scouts: Trivial (friendly)4 orcs: 800/Deadly2 hippogriffs: 600/Hard5 bandits: 250/EasyGreat...that's potentially 4200 XP worth of encounters.  So that would be nearly impossible for a 2nd level party to overcome in a single day.  So my plan became that the chase could take 2 days...if they failed three times they would lose track of him for the night and would have to rest to pick up the trail again in the morning.  If they failed one more then he attacks them after one more encounter.  I don't give HP back for long rests...just half HD rounded up plus class features recharge.  So if they are low on HP/HD going into a long rest, they might not be much better off by the next morning.  I don't let short rest recharge powers recharge more than twice per day...so after the third use of something like Second Wind, you need a long rest.The encounters would just go in order from easiest to hardest (I also considered just randomizing them).  The scouts I decided would just be mixed with the harpy encounter.   That would give the PCs some help...they would come upon the scouts fighting off the harpies.  This would fit with the current situation anyway since they were actually searching for a team of surveyors that were supposed to be mapping a route through the hills/forest to a river ford.  They surveyor party (unbeknownst to the party at this point) had been attacked in killed by orcs, the survivors given to a local green hag...so I decided these three scouts had "escaped" (really abandoned their friends to their deaths) and were trying to get back to the main encampment so the party would come across them as they were attacked by the harpies.  That way if the party were tired after two days that would give them at least a little boost...Anyway...none if it mattered.  They succeeded 4 DC 15 skill checks in a row and thus ambushed Torug (they orc eye of Gruumsh) and his cat.  The battle was difficult but the PCs pretty much went nova on them and won without anyone getting seriously injured.  The cleric succeed on his save vs heat metal TWICE (dang it!), they focus fired on the cat and brought it down, the only hit it scored was on their onyx dog from a figurine of wondrous power they found last adventure (just a random tier I treasure hoard...).  They did manage to interrogate the orc and got out of him the presence of the harpies so they decided to press on and attack the harpies too...by this time, I decided the harpies had already captured the scouts and had tied them to some dead trees on a hilltop to let them "ripen" a little.  This actually turned out to be the tougher fight.  The ranger went down, the fighter was down to 2 hp at one point.  The elf wizard had to resort to using his shortsword to drive one of the creatures off...So it ended up just two encounters as 2550 adjusted XP.  The the party was completely out of spells, had most of their HP, less than half their HD and had used up one of their two healing potions, 6 out of 10 goodberries.  If they had to, they could have handled another medium or hard encounter.  A third deadly+ one might have overwhelmed them.Anyway...the short of it is the 6-8 encounter/XP budget, IMO is a great tool for DMs to just guide them in setting up scenarios that are challenging but not too challenging.  They let us determine if the party has a good chance to face the challenges ahead or do we need to introduce a chance to rest, signal to the party they might be getting in over their head or are things going to be too easy and we need to look to increase the challenge.  To me, things break down if you are just doing 1 encounter per day...then you really favor the classes that have mostly long rest recharge abilities and leave your players feeling like they have to nova in every fight which, imo, takes away some of the interesting choices players face.</blockquote>

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