D&D 5E The actual adventuring day is 3-4 encounters per day, Wizards just last minute decided to make Easy Encounters from the playtest, the average.

[Parmandur]

Again just to be clear: this means that, if you're getting the expected 2-3 short rests per long rest, that your characters experience an absolute minimum of 60-80 combat rounds a day (or whatever period your long rests recharge at.)

Is this correct? Keep in mind when I say "per rest" I mean "per rest of any kind, long or short."

Ah, yeah, that ain't right. I think I misread which rest you meant. A 5-8 Encounter day should work out to 10-24 rounds of combat, with two short rests.

My experience is that the Champion is crazy effective, an unstoppable killing machine that never slows down. Playing a full Adventure Day brings that out.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ah, yeah, that ain't right. I think I misread which rest you meant. A 5-8 Encounter day should work out to 10-24 rounds of combat, with two short rests.

My experience is that the Champion is crazy effective, an unstoppable killing machine that never slows down. Playing a full Adventure Day brings that out.

Curious. You only get one extra crit out of every 20 swings (or two, at high levels). On average, that just...doesn't add much, as noted. That's really the full extent of your damage bonuses, since there are no interactions between fighting styles.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

So based on this and anyone’s experience:

What rubric would you use for better than average out of the box experience?

My DM has generally simply made adjustments up and we rise to the challenge. I have often gone with harder than average.

Does anyone have a nice rule they find useful as a benchmark? It could be what was originally intended here or otherwise—-just want to get closer with out of the gate baseline

 

[Parmandur]

Curious. You only get one extra crit out of every 20 swings (or two, at high levels). On average, that just...doesn't add much, as noted. That's really the full extent of your damage bonuses, since there are no interactions between fighting styles.

You may be overestimating the utility of what other Subclasses get. Mearls went into the math of this when he covrered the Fighter in the Happy Fun Hour: going from 5% Crit to 10% crit is the baseline power that the math for other Subclasses are based around.

 

[jmartkdr2]

So based on this and anyone’s experience:

What rubric would you use for better than average out of the box experience?

My DM has generally simply made adjustments up and we rise to the challenge. I have often gone with harder than average.

Does anyone have a nice rule they find useful as a benchmark? It could be what was originally intended here or otherwise—-just want to get closer with out of the gate baseline

First thing to do is ask the group how much they want to be challenged. Not everyone will articulate it well, but many, many players really don't want to be challenged by combats. They want to look cool, advance the plot, solve puzzles (ie how can we get through this creature's unique defenses?) or otherwise use combat as a way to do one of the many other things DD can do. DnD can provide many kinds of fun, game-challenge is one and not the most popular.*

If they want challenge from the tactical and strategic aspects of combat - structure the game so that there are almost always multiple fights per day. For best results, 3-4 hard fights per day seems to work well. And be super stingy with magic items.

*Okay, the popularity thing is mostly based on anecdotes not statistics. But if you recall the article that was going around last year abut the "cultures of gaming" only one (classic) would rely on by-the-book combat challenges, and then only sort of. The other five used combat as a way to add spice to the real core fun being sought.

 

[tetrasodium]

So based on this and anyone’s experience:

What rubric would you use for better than average out of the box experience?

My DM has generally simply made adjustments up and we rise to the challenge. I have often gone with harder than average.

Does anyone have a nice rule they find useful as a benchmark? It could be what was originally intended here or otherwise—-just want to get closer with out of the gate baseline

For a small group you can bump the monster CRs & it works well enough. For a larger group 5e itself resists efforts to retune things because of death saves weak healing & safe trivialized recovery from rests that are almost certain to catapult the party back with a full assortment of blue turtle shells to each pc.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

TL;DR. The game was originally designed around "Hard" Encounters being the average, but last-minute wizards added a new, easier difficulty, and downshifted the game's average encounters to the "Easy" Encounters without changing the math. So now the game feels too easy.

Wow that explains an awful lot.

Also I note we'd unconsciously been adjusting for it by indeed designing around Hard/Deadly encounter as the base in both my and my bro's campaigns.

As for "why", I think it was because a lower "Easy" allowed them to have a difficulty for the high numbers of "pointless" encounters a lot of old-skool 1E/2E adventures have, which would fit the "Apology Edition" paradigm. Otherwise those would be outside normal encounter design.

 

[Stoutstien]

There's no such thing as a standardized, suggested, or normalized adventuring day in 5e just like there wasn't any in the Next play testing. The encounter count in both were just a guideline for those looking to use exp budgets as a framework. The whole idea of the game being balanced around encounter count and difficulty is a holdover effect from other editions.

 

[NotAYakk]

(* Seriously, the characters have managed to beat encounters that they should have no business even being near at if we believe the CR. But CR is a complete lie. A party of four level five PCs managed to take down an encounter that was around CR 15 or so!)

So, 4 level 5 PCs have a total level of 20.

A CR 15 monster should be beatable by a party with a total level of 20, especially if the PCs are heavy on daily abilities, optimized and are doing a single-encounter day. Especially if the PCs get the drop on the monster. (If the monster gets the drop on the PCs and is played intelligently, I'd expect deaths staring on round 2).

Is this what people mean when they say "CR doesn't work"? CR in 5e is (roughly) linear (note: post-20 CR is scaled differently, a CR 30 actually about CR 40-50). A CR 15 monster is only (roughly) 1.5x as deadly as a CR 10 monster. By the time that PCs hit T2, they can (with luck, optimization and tactics) face CR up to 20.

Doubling number of foes is about as nasty as doubling CR.

 

[Blue]

Because what actually matters is number of combat rounds between rests, not total number of combats per day, and hard encounters are not in general twice as long as easy encounters.

I'm very much in agreement with what you wrote, but with a caveat.

Because duration (rage, spell, feature) often would last longer than one encounter, you get extra duty from them when you have fewer, longer encounters. So it's generally total number of rounds, but if you don't have break points in there that split up durations, then classes with durations still get more use out of them (for the same resource cost in both uses and triggering action) so you need to adjust for those as well.

Easy example: 15 rounds of combat split in 3 encounters or 5 encounters, with a barbarian with 3 rages a day. In one 100% of the rounds are with rage, in the second only 60% of the encounters.

But yeah, in general it's total rounds.