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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rogermexico" data-source="post: 7467903" data-attributes="member: 6872275">I'm 2/3s of the way through running the first full "adventuring day" for my party. I've been doing my best to do it by the book, and we're all new at this. So I figure it will be interesting for you old-timers to see how some newbies are experiencing 6-8 encounters.For background:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">We play at work—every other Friday over lunch for an hour and a half. So pretty casual and we keep an eye on the clock.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">We’re a mix of newbies and casual players. I hadn’t played since 1993 prior to DMing this group (I can do a whole other post on the things I’m learning as a ‘new with an asterix’ DM) and everyone else either had a similar gap or is pretty new to the game.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The party is a Halfling Monk, Half-Elf Ranger and Human Wizard. (There was a half-orc rogue but he left the company and thus the party)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Everyone just turned second level two sessions ago.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">We have played (counts on hands) 8 sessions total. The first few were basically one encounter per session with some travel and social mixed in to set the table. They headed into the dungeon (and thus their first “adventure day”) on session 5.</li> </ul>So yeah: I did my best to plan a proper dungeon delve. I planned for them to have roughly 5-9 encounters, depending on how efficiently they navigated the dungeon, with 12 encounters total across all the possible routes. Mostly we’re talking cultists, guards and Bullywugs, with a gray ooze and some evil Myconids thrown in. At the bottom of everything there’s a Sea Hag.I built everything as per the encounter budgeting guidelines in the DMG. Kobold Fight Club was tremendously helpful as I’m not great at math. They were meant to go at their own pace to start, and then I added a chase element to add pressure–halfway through they encounter some of the cultists with a prisoner. Either they free the prisoner and learn about the impeding ritual, or need to chase after to rescue, the idea being that once they were a way into the dungeon, they’d have a pressure to prevent too much resting. Given that this is my first time building this kind of thing, and the party doesn’t have any healing resources, I loaded them up with minor healing potions (two each) prior to them entering the dungeon.Here are the points relevant to this discussion:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">They’ve taken damage and have already used up 5 of those 6 potions. Everyone is at full health though currently with two big encounters to go, including that Sea Hag.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The wizard has used 2 of his spell slots already.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Once the “chase” bit kicked off, they were pretty into hurrying. With that said, after a tough encounter with some bullywugs and a giant frog that left the wizard pretty hurt, they did debate pausing for at least a long rest. “We’re probably too late to save that prisoner anyway,” was the discussion. They ended up pausing for a half an hour for the Monk to recover a Ki point. I decided that wasn’t such a long pause that it wouldn’t mean bad news for the prisoner.</li> </ul>So, I guess it’s mostly gone to plan. One of the things I liked, as a newbie DM, is that planning around “the adventuring day” meant I had to be thoughtful about what would make for exciting, plausible situations that they’d want to keep powering through without resting despite resource completion.Also, I know I’ve seen it mentioned plenty on the boards, but holy cow low level characters are fragile. Especially without in-party healing or any particularly brawny classes on board.Hopefully that's interesting for folks.</blockquote>

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