D&D 5E So...resting in 5e

[Don Durito]

Do you follow the default rules and how many encounters do you actually get in?

I tend to think that the way most tables actually play, they should probably be using some kind of variant rest period.

I honestly don't think I've ever run a game that had more than four combats in a single day.

There's the one night long rest and the week long rest in the DMG.

In Adventures in Middle Earth you can only rest in a sanctuary (so no easy long rests during wilderness travel)

Even in AD&D you didn't just have to sleep. You needed to be rested and then you needed to memorise your spells (15 minutes per spell per spell level - which could take up most of the next day as well)

In 13th Age you just get the equivalent of a long rest every 4 combats. (The GM is free to adjust it if needed but it has no relation to time passed.) However, I suspect most tables would find that too arbritrary.

 

[Oofta]

I use the alternate rules where a short rest is overnight and a long rest is a week or more. My games rarely involve dungeon crawls and are more social/exploration/mystery focused than combat. I use the alternate rules primarily because of pacing and preference, I tend to have adventuring days similar to The Dresden Files where everything is going along okay and then the poo hits the propellers for a couple of days.

If I define encounters as anything that uses consumable resources I usually get in 4-5 encounters between long rests, I've had as many as 10. It depends on the group and the current arc.

 

[iserith]

Do you follow the default rules and how many encounters do you actually get in?

It depends on the campaign that I'm running. I adjust the dials according to the game experience I'm trying to create with the players.

That said, we frequently hit the DMG guidelines for encounters per adventuring day. My players get after it and there's always a time crunch of one form or another.

 

[Fanaelialae]

It varies significantly. Anywhere from 0 to 7 encounters in a day. I don't recall having done 8.

You really don't need to do the 6-8 very often to challenge players. So long as you do it once in a while, players will generally conserve resources accordingly (because they never know if today will be a long day).

 

[DND_Reborn]

The number of combats per long rest is usually 1-3 for overland travel (if any, due to random encounters), but for dungeon crawls it could be well over 10 to even 20. So much depends on the scenario and what our table is doing.

 

[OB1]

The 6-8 medium encounter guideline is only a single use case of the overlying rule of Adventure Day XP. Using that rule, you can see that you could have a day with 3 Deadly, 2 Deadly with 2 Hard, or even 1 Deadly+ (full day Adventure XP in a single fight or in a multi-wave fight), in addition to the 3 hard plus 3 medium in the example guideline.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the guideline is designed for DMs to estimate how many encounters are too many encounters for a typical party to handle in the course of reaching their objective, not as a rule for how many they should have every day. Depending on the story, there I may design an Adventuring day with far under or far over the recommended Adventure Day XP.

When I go far over (I'm talking 2x to 5x), I design some or even most of the encounters to be avoidable via the exploration and/or social pillars. If the party chooses to go in guns blazing, they will run out of resources before they get to their final objective and will not achieve that objective as a result, a fate more fun than TPK.

As a side note, when determining what CR of creature a typical party can fight, in general I've found a Solo monster that is 1.5-2x party level (depending on party synergy and skill as well as magic items available) makes for a deadly fight, and can be very deadly if the party has not discovered intel on their opponent prior to reaching it.

 

[Oofta]

Another note on encounter design and encounters per long rest. What works varies a lot from group to group, level and type of encounters.

I've run two groups over the same period, same number of players, house rules, options and rewards. For one group I calculated encounter budget straight up or even a little low. The other group? Standard budget times 1.5 seemed to be about right most of the time.

 

[the Jester]

Do you follow the default rules and how many encounters do you actually get in?

More or less, though I don't do "recover everything on a long rest".

The number of encounters pcs have per day really depends on what the pcs are doing. Hard core adventuring? Probably four to eight encounters per 'working' day. Traveling? Zero to three per day from random encounters, but you never know- it could be more.

 

[Sacrosanct]

The number of combats per long rest is usually 1-3 for overland travel (if any, due to random encounters), but for dungeon crawls it could be well over 10 to even 20. So much depends on the scenario and what our table is doing.

@dnd4vr the quote function isn't working right, so I had to do this manually. I pretty much am in alignment with you. We do not follow the guidelines. We follow what is happening in the game. Been doing it that way since 1981. It feels much more natural than to have some sort of awkward rest period when the actions in game may not fit. In dungeon crawls with a high density of monsters, there are many encounters before rest. You can't just rest whenever you feel like it. Monsters are living creatures, and would react as appropriate for their intelligence. You may also want to plow through and clear the dungeon due to time constraints or not wanting them to have a chance to build up fresh defenses.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I change my stuff all the time, and campaign to campaign. I have found that trying to put together a "single way" to run any and all potential combats, encounters, and rests is a fool's errand. Sometimes that adventure might have several encounters in a row. Sometimes the story goes across several weeks and thus any fight can be nova'd and then recovered from. Sometimes a campaign's short rest will be 10 minutes, other times it'll be three days. It always changes. And as a result I just improvise around it all, throwing more or less obstacles into encounters as I feel is necessary to make things interesting to players.

Encounter building is a waste of my time and never works anyway. Especially when trying to use it to create "solvable" adventures where the characters will be challenged but maybe not really challenged. The numbers just aren't that tight. And thus I thumb my nose at all of it.

And truth be told, for me its all completely unnecessary anyway... as all I need to do is have two monsters flank a PC and all of a sudden that player throws up their hands and says "Well, I'm dead!" Why? Because my players are incredibly inept at understanding just how easy or difficult combat can be. A PC gets whalloped for like 60 points of damage and that player now assumes it's time to rip up their character sheet... completely forgetting that there are like five other PCs at the table with healing spells or healing potions at their disposal to keep their character alive. Nope-- that is completely forgotten about. All the player knows is that their character got hit for like 3/4ths of their HP in a round and thus they are now decrying the unfair and humorless universe.

Meanwhile, I'm back behind the screen knowing full well that those 60 hit points were not even 1/20th of the amount of HP and healed HP I need to whittle down to actually make this fight even start down the path towards a potential TPK. So I'm sitting back there thinking "Oh shut the F up, you big baby!" as the player bemoans their situation. LOL!

So no... I don't worry about defaults or standards when it comes to resting because all of it is pretty much bullcrap anyway.