D&D General Taking the "Dungeons" out of D&D

[robus]

While we’re talking about adventuring days, we should also remember that not every day in the game world is an adventuring day. Each day of travel is not an adventuring day for example. You can make some travel days adventuring days by putting a difficult obstacle in front of the PCs or you can move to alternative rest rules in order to limit the nova effect making a single encounter uninteresting.

And a day of courtly intrigue also doesn’t count as an adventuring day (unless it’s a rerun of the red wedding!) Talking to people will not tax resources to any similar amount.

So, when thinking of adventuring days, these are the days when the PCs take on the dungeon, the wizards tower, the enchanted caverns or whatever. It’s when the s**** hits the fan.

 

[Ancalagon]

I am of two minds on out of combat mechanics. I agree with you in many respects, but I also feel like when you have fewer mechanics for, say, "social combat" you end up punishing players who aren't necessarily good at that thing even when they want to play a character that is. No one has to prove they can really fight to play the heavy, why should a player have to be charming to play the face? That sort of thing.

This is true, and I understand your point. But I will point that to fight well in a game, you don't need to be a good fighter in real life. I'm a passable swordsman (basically I'm proficient in the arming sword and shield, but not good enough to have a fighting style of feat ha!). This knowledge doesn't help - in fact it helps me see the unrealistic part of the game better and is more a source of frustration than help

So yes, a player with poor social skills IRL will suffer playing a bard unless he can use social skills in the game (like a persuasion check). Same how an out of shape person who's never been in a fight can play a brilliant warrior...

... but... there are skills involved in being a great warrior in a D&D game. You need system mastery (much more so in PF1 or 3.X than 5e, but still), and you need tactical sense. I have seen players who are bad at both. Should they be penalized for that? They... sort of are, unless the game is very easy. This is "player skills". Good roleplaying is also a "player skill".

 

[Ovinomancer]

Because I'm happy to let politics and interpersonal relationships be resolved through roleplay? I understand why my preferences aren't universal, and that's just fine, but I strongly suspect some of this apparent puzzlement is performative.

I think it's worthwhile to point out that "resolved through roleplay" is just a "GM decides" adjudication system. The mechanics here are convincing your GM that you've done enough rather than using some other resolution mechanic. When I play Blades in the Dark, for example, social encounter use the same resolution mechanics as exploration or combat encounters, and there's a huge amount of roleplaying. Similarly, when I use a skill challenge as a social encounter in 5e, the dice have a say, but lots of roleplaying still happens. So, when you say you roleplay out social encounters, you're just saying that you prefer to use a GM decides (or player decides, for matters relating only to their PC) mechanic. It's not actually more or less roleplaying than can occur in other resolution schema.

 

[Greg Benage]

There used to be very precise knowledge of how dungeon "procedure" was made, but as several bloggers have pointed out, this knowledge was slowly lost and not included in the books anymore.

And this is something designers should be clear-eyed about when including "rules structures": A lot of players simply won't use those structures if there's a more naturalistic (or maybe just lazier) way to handle them. In general, I think the OSR has taken elements such as "time in a dungeon," encumbrance, and the like way more seriously than most tables did when we were playing those games at the time. I played AD&D in tournament events at GenCon in the 80s where all those rules really should have been used, and they still weren't. I suspect they didn't fall out of the books by accident.

Fast forward to 5e, where it's revealed in every other complaint about "nova damage" or unbalanced spellcasting that DMs don't use the game's existing rules structures for the adventuring day. That shouldn't come as any surprise, because (many/most?) players always ignore rules structures it feels more "natural" to ignore.

I don't necessarily think there's any way around this, but recognizing that actual play is likely to be more "unstructured" than you assume is probably a decent baseline from which to start. Some designs may make it very difficult to play in a unstructured way (not naming any names), but those designs run the risk that players simply reject them in favor of those that accommodate their preferred playstyle more easily.

 

[Greg Benage]

I think it's worthwhile to point out that "resolved through roleplay" is just a "GM decides" adjudication system.

Yeah, I'm a big fan. My preferred version of D&D would be something like B/X with no thief class and more freeform player-driven/GM adjudicated rules for everything from "skills" to spellcasting. Instead, the direction since 1974 has been to move more in the direction of the spell system by adding as much rules definition as possible to everything and trying to get as much of what a character "can do" as possible onto the character sheet. I think this is a mistake, but I've long accepted that my preferences are not shared by everyone (or even by many people at all).

That doesn't stop me from standing astride the forces of history and shouting "No more!" at every opportunity.

 

[Charlaquin]

What I don't get is why everyone insists that it's 6-8 encounters. According to the DMG (pp. 84-85), it's specifically 6-8 medium or hard encounter per adventuring day. If there are easier encounters, there should be more encounters. Inversely, if there are deadly encounters, there should be less encounters. The adjusted adventuring day XP shapes how many encounters the characters should face in an adventuring depending on the creatures in the encounter (which means tougher encounters will result in less encounters). It's also worth nothing that character can only gain the benefit of a long rest once every 24 hours. The adventuring day also assumes that there will be, on average, two short rests per day. This is achievable if there is at least 3 encounters in the day.

It's also worth noting that the encounters don't have to be strictly combat encounters, either.

I think “6-8 encounters” is generally shorthand (and often I even just see “6 encounters.”) The point is less the specific number and more the idea that 5e is built around the idea of balance spread out across many encounters throughout the day. Even if you do mostly hard and deadly encounters, you’re still going to need 3 or 4 to meet the daily XP budget.

 

[Stalker0]

Inversely, if there are deadly encounters, there should be less encounters.

I mean sure, if you want to lower your 6-8 encounters to 2-3 you could make every single encounter the party faces deadly....but by the rules that assumes a high likelihood of killing off party members, which not every DM wants to do on some general wilderness exploration.

 

[ART!]

Is there anything official that addresses how many of the encounters per day "should" be combat encounters?

 

[Charlaquin]

While we’re talking about adventuring days, we should also remember that not every day in the game world is an adventuring day. Each day of travel is not an adventuring day for example. You can make some travel days adventuring days by putting a difficult obstacle in front of the PCs or you can move to alternative rest rules in order to limit the nova effect making a single encounter uninteresting.

And a day of courtly intrigue also doesn’t count as an adventuring day (unless it’s a rerun of the red wedding!) Talking to people will not tax resources to any similar amount.

So, when thinking of adventuring days, these are the days when the PCs take on the dungeon, the wizards tower, the enchanted caverns or whatever. It’s when the s**** hits the fan.

Yes and no. Obviously not every day that passes during the course of an adventure will be an Adventuring Day. But generally days that aren’t adventuring days are days that just get narrated over. If nothing eventful happens during travel, you just brush over it in the narration. But if there’s enough going on in a day, that it’s worth playing out, it’s probably an adventuring day. Not every encounter needs to be combat; if you’re challenging the PCs and they’re expending resources to overcome that challenge, that’s an encounter, be it an exploration, social, or combat encounter.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Is there anything official that addresses how many of the encounters per day "should" be combat encounters?

Logic dictates that non-combat encounters do not contribute toward expectations, unless they drain a significant amount of resources. The party has enough HP and spell slots to get through six moderate combat encounters per day, so going through five such encounters and one non-combat encounter would be trivial.