D&D 5E The Adventuring Day has nothing to do with encounter balance.

[UngainlyTitan]

I remember a while back i made a post about how the adventuring day is based on hit dice, as resources and nothing else, and after thinking about it more and looking into a few matters on this.

Jeremy Crawford asserts that the adventuring day is a maximum but not a minimum here.

So why is the problem people have with the adventuring day? Some fights feel a bit easy than they should, most people think its because the game is balanced around the party being withered down due to the 6-8 adventuring day.

Well that has nothing to do with that, the actual issue is the encounter building rules for fifth edition are broken.

I've come to realize the adventuring day has nothing to do with our issues with encounter balance but encounter building rules themselves.

You see the adventuring day basically is just a gauge of how many fights they can take before they run out of hit dice, thats it, ive talked about this in length in my post here. Where I go into some things about how it is just a measure of how many fights you can take before your you run out of hit dice. And how class balance and resources have less to do with it.

In fact, i will argue monsters are designed with the idea that the players have all of their strongest resources, this is backed up the lead designer of 5e saying this himself

But after experiencing with a different set of encounter building rules, and some points, i've come to realize something.

The actual issue we are having is coming from the fact the encounter building rules in the DMG are nonsense, and simply do not account for the fact that when the party outnumbers a solo monster, the action economy different breaks it.

I when into this more here in this post. but ill give it a bit of an excerpt.


And after adjusting the encounter difficulty appropriately, most of the issues i had, kinda went away.

The core issue is, the encounter building rules of 5e are actually busted, they do not account for the action economy different of normal monsters vs the party well at all.

They do for monsters but not quite for players.

This causes whole encounters to basically be a tier of difficulty easier if the party outnumbers a monster by like 3, two tiers of difficulty if outnumbered by 5. Because the action economy kinda makes those fights hyper easier.

Luckily a quick fix for this above sorts out the issue for the monster part, just dont use it for legendary monsters as their action economy can keep up for the most part.(The fix is consider the difficulty of the encounter one tier less if the party outnumbers the monster by 3, if they outnumber it by 5 reduce the difficulty tier by two.)

This adjusts most of the issues but there is still one more critical issue, which is how some fights can just get kinda blown up on bad saves.

Which the issue comes down to, a flaw in monster design...where most monsters do not have saving throws proficiencies.

See according to the rules of the monster design, monsters can have 2 saving throw proficiencies and the CR is unaffected, despite this...no monster has saving throw proficiencies, this is a minor but big important effect on the game, which is big spells like hypnotic pattern that can shut down encounters are way more powerful because most monsters are likely to fail the saving throws since they have no proficiencies, this makes encounters extremely easy to circumvent unless its a legendary monster or one that have resistances, or actually has saves.

This is luckily an easy error to fix as you can just give them proficiency is their best strong save(Dex, Con, Wis) and their best weak save(Str, Int, Cha). you can do this on the fly easily since PB's are on statblocks now, making the game much easier.

The point of what im saying is,

TLDR: The Adventuring day is just a gauge of how many encounters can they take before they run out of hit dice, it has nothing to do with encounter balance or game balance, the actual issues we have with 5e are being caused by bad encounter building rules, and an odd monster design choice making monsters much easier to circumvent if they arent legendary or dont have resistances.

This is also backed up by JC himself saying that the adventuring day doesnt have much to do with balance, and i think it explains the disconnect between us and him. He knows the adventuring day has nothing to do with encounter balance, its just a gauge of how long you can go before you run out of Hit Dice, like it was in 4e.

We think it is the reason our encounters are much easier, and the issue with the game, this is not the case.
This is why they mentioned nothing about adjusting the adventuring day for One DnD, because it has nothing to do with the encounter building issues, but you know what they did announce?
Fixing their monster design, and updating their encounter-building rules. The actual problem.

What are your thoughts on this?

I mostly agree. I believe that action economy has to be taken into account as well as the resilience of the monster(s). I think that 3 to4 round is the minimum for an interesting encounter.
But is not just action economy. For a party of 4 the current system is ok'ish up to about level 7, it is a level adrift (deadly > Hard>medium etc.) up to around level 10 or 12, There is another jump around level 16 and again around level 18.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Also, their CR system is busted but at least they've acknowledged this and are addressing it.

This, I think, is a little overstated. There was a really good response on reddit about it. (I know! I was shocked, too!)

Really, though, what throws people off is that a party of five level 12 PCs can tackle a CR 20, but if you plug that into the actual encounter rules, it's only slightly above the Deadly rating. That jives with my play experience; it's really tough, but you can win pretty consistently without a PC dying. The issue is that low level PCs can only handle CR within 2 or 3 steps of their level, while higher level PCs can handle +8 or more, sometimes without much difficulty. That's expected by the design, but it's not intuitive or obvious when designing an encounter. It kind of makes sense, though. a level 13 Fighter isn't that much more challenging than a level 12 Fighter, but the difference between a level 1, level 2, and level 3 Fighter is quite significant. Levels have diminishing returns, not linear progressions. That's less true if you're a spellcaster, but it still holds roughly through level 10 or 12 (I'm not a fan of level 7+ spells).

Maybe CR should be just replaced with or include the tier system. Medusa (CR 6) is meant to be a Tier 2 monster, so it'll be really challenging for Tier 1 PCs and pretty throwaway at Tier 3, and so on. Maybe even include Tier 0 for the really easy monsters. That's kind of how I've looked at CR for awhile. "Oh, this is CR 12? That will imagine the possibility of tier 3 abilities."

The system does severely lowball encounter difficulty, however, if you calculate it the way they tell you to. The whole XP multiplier for monster group size can be ignored in my experience until you really outnumber the PCs. So it's not that CR is busted; it's that the encounter-building rules are. It's challenging to run a solo monster encounter at high PC levels, regardless of the NPC's CR.

But yeah, the main problem is that doing a bunch of combat encounters takes too long and isn't fun.

Well, doing a bunch of easy encounters, certainly. It takes more DM time to set up, takes longer to play through, and isn't very satisfying to play in.

 

[Blue]

"I reject your reality and substitute my own."

The adventuring day is all about the balance between the classes. Which breaks down to resource attrition.

Let's go absurd and look at an adventuring day of 1 round, vs. an adventuring day of 20 encounters each 20 rounds long. Some tier 2 or 3 party. Let's compare long-rest-recovery classes vs. at-will classes.

It's pretty clear that long-rest-recovery classes, such as pure casters, will shine the most frequently where there's only a single action and they can cast one of their highest level slots. Not say there are no corner cases, but the vast majority of the time a high level spell will do more than an at-will.

Let's look at the other. At-will focused classes (including the EB-focused Warlock, who has spent class features on improving it) will do more than a cantrip. When you have enough actions to run though spell slots and force heavy cantrip usage for most of the day, you end up with the average effect per action to be lower than those at-wills. So the at-will classes are the most effective.

Adventuring day length is about balance between those two. (And unfortunately, where 5e is calibrated is more encounters per day then most DMs run, even published adventures.)

Short rests per day is a different axis, but the same thought experiment should show how it affects them as well. A warlock with 0 short rests vs. a warlock with 3 short rests has a significant difference in total slots.

 

[FallenRX]

"I reject your reality and substitute my own."

The adventuring day is all about the balance between the classes. Which breaks down to resource attrition.

Let's go absurd and look at an adventuring day of 1 round, vs. an adventuring day of 20 encounters each 20 rounds long. Some tier 2 or 3 party. Let's compare long-rest-recovery classes vs. at-will classes.

It's pretty clear that long-rest-recovery classes, such as pure casters, will shine the most frequently where there's only a single action and they can cast one of their highest level slots. Not say there are no corner cases, but the vast majority of the time a high level spell will do more than an at-will.

Let's look at the other. At-will focused classes (including the EB-focused Warlock, who has spent class features on improving it) will do more than a cantrip. When you have enough actions to run though spell slots and force heavy cantrip usage for most of the day, you end up with the average effect per action to be lower than those at-wills. So the at-will classes are the most effective.

Adventuring day length is about balance between those two. (And unfortunately, where 5e is calibrated is more encounters per day then most DMs run, even published adventures.)

Short rests per day is a different axis, but the same thought experiment should show how it affects them as well. A warlock with 0 short rests vs. a warlock with 3 short rests has a significant difference in total slots.

My point is that it really doesnt have anything to do with encounter balance if the design of encounter assume every character has all of their resources.

The actual issue here is that the encounter building rules have been broken for awhile.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The adventuring day is all about the balance between the classes. Which breaks down to resource attrition.

Yep. That's the problem. Some classes can do their thing all the time and have very little impact aside from damage.

Then the ones that do have impact need napsies almost immediately and guess whose schedule we're actually on.

 

[MGibster]

This is what I am counseling against here. Saying that a battle that doesn't threaten the life of PCs won't really matter is undervaluing the importance of story and the other ways you can challenge a PC. Some of the most iconic battles in my campaigns over the decades involved the PCs trying to stop someone from doing something - and the only attacks that were lanuched at the PCs were things intended to slow them down or cut them off from their goal - not kill them.

They become tedious slogs because the battles don't really matter. Why are we fighting? Because we're supposed to have X fights per adventuring day. When the system is designed to have X number of fights, at some point you're going to run out of reasons and fights will seem contrived. In a lighter system, this isn't a problem because combat is a breeze. In a heavier system like D&D it can become a chore.

 

[Bacon Bits]

My point is that it really doesnt have anything to do with encounter balance if the design of encounter assume every character has all of their resources.

The actual issue here is that the encounter building rules have been broken for awhile.

Crawford's tweet thread said full health, not full resources. They assume the party recovers their HP between encounters. I think that's the only remotely reasonable way to do it. It covers the lion's share of situations, and that's all anyone should reasonably expect. I don't think it's weird to assume that the PCs stop to heal, especially when short rests are available, the design of the game essentially requires it for several classes to function, and numerous spells and abilities exist that make it extremely easy to short rest nearly anywhere.

 

[Willie the Duck]

The current implementation leaves something to be desired, but there are also major fundamental issues within D&D as a whole to contend with.
Probably most notable is just the incredible breadth of what the gamer base considers the normal mode of play. Some people are in dungeons 24/7, others mostly wandering the countryside, others mix&match. Some DMs let you retreat and rest (or the contextual equivalent) whenever you opt to do so, while others press with time constraints or wandering encounters or just the hornets from the hornet nest you just shook up coming out and taking the battle to you. Some groups come with a menagerie of pets, herd of mounts, and retinue of NPCs; while others stick with 4 PCs (and the action economy associated with that).
Second to that (IMO) is the wide distribution in how different PCs perform under different play experiences. Not just 'always on' abilities vs. X/day or Y/sub-part-of-day, but also who does well against traps vs monsters, bosses vs swarms, pure combat vs. everything else, stuff you expected vs. unforeseen circumstances, who is a glass cannons vs <whatever the antonym of that is>, etc. The same goes on the other side of the balance arm, in that some monsters will crash and burn against some parties, while others will be devastating.
There are more issues, but these seem like a huge part of the variability that makes assigning a simple challenge number to an enemy/enemy encounter so fraught.

The new one's going to be just as bad because we're still shackled to catering to the Old Tradition of daily attrition.
Until we overthrow that despot, the problem will persist.

It's certainly an option, but what does one replace it with? Certainly BitD you had total-HP-available-over-day and spells/magic item uses/day as you do now; but also a much greater risk of just running out of HP right now (since your totals were lower and you were dead at 0 or -10) and save-or-dies (meaning 'still with most resources, but dead so it doesn't matter' was a more common situation). Other RPGs (where combat is a significant component) might play around with one or another aspect -- maybe everything will fully charge within minutes of a battle; or combats are so risky (or healing so burdensome) that pressing on for another fight is nonsense; but in general most have some resource (HP, or the equivalent, if nothing else) that gets expended in fights. Do you have a few examples you were thinking of as models?

1.) There are too many variables for us to ever get a system that prececisely balanceds combat.

I don't expect perfection, but the challenge rating system was the opposite of helpful. Ideally, it should give me a broad guideline for threat levels but I found that it fails to do so miserably.

I would agree, and 5e's is not the best I've seen, but I've also not seen very many good ones. Wargame unit point costs often are roughly balanced and good at showing 'which will defeat which else, and how easily,' but with a lot of variability. GURPS/Hero System are almost famous for their point values not aligning well with actual power (being more of a fairness/you-can't-get-everything measure than an actual balance tool). TSR-era's HD+asterisks and/or on-what-dungeon-level's-chart-are-they-found measures are nice in that they are so vague no one really relied on them. Again, are there examples we might want to use as comparisons?

The adventuring day isnt something of old, is a concept from 4e.
Because characters have a limited pool of healing from healing surges, and a lot more daily abilities.

The basic concept of 'the adventuring day,' or at the very least the concept of recharging resources and that the GM can either police it somehow or face the consequences of not, have been around pretty much since the beginning. At least unless you did the west marches 'if you leave the dungeon, the DM's other group could well get the loot first' playstyle that man a whole bunch of us never did. PCs have always noticed that they could go out and rest after major or minor resource depletion, and several of the best ways to prevent this (doom clocks, monsters getting wise and reinforcing/leaving with the loot) can strain verisimilitude if done every time (cue debates on how much).

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's certainly an option, but what does one replace it with? Certainly BitD you had total-HP-available-over-day and spells/magic item uses/day as you do now; but also a much greater risk of just running out of HP right now (since your totals were lower and you were dead at 0 or -10) and save-or-dies (meaning 'still with most resources, but dead so it doesn't matter' was a more common situation). Other RPGs (where combat is a significant component) might play around with one or another aspect -- maybe everything will fully charge within minutes of a battle; or combats are so risky (or healing so burdensome) that pressing on for another fight is nonsense; but in general most have some resource (HP, or the equivalent, if nothing else) that gets expended in fights. Do you have a few examples you were thinking of as models?

Encounter-based design coupled with finally giving up on XP entirely. Now combats are a fun thing you do when it serves the plot or the players want a little violence. You can even run dozens of fights a day without there being a problem if you want like a tournament arc.

We were almost there in 4e. We just needed to neatly excise dailies and we would have been free. Free, I tell you!

 

[ad_hoc]

I've found that the vast majority of people saying the game is broken have 6 or more PCs at the table.

And it is true, it doesn't work with 6 even with the sidebar suggesting a multiplication of XP.

It works well meeting the goals of the designers with 4.

There are lots of factors that influence encounter difficulty.

The #1 is DM ability which is usually much less than players as each player only needs to look after 1 PC and at most tables they can discuss strategy together.

Then on top of that most DMs soft play if the PCs are getting into trouble.

 

[ad_hoc]

The current implementation leaves something to be desired, but there are also major fundamental issues within D&D as a whole to contend with.
Probably most notable is just the incredible breadth of what the gamer base considers the normal mode of play. Some people are in dungeons 24/7, others mostly wandering the countryside, others mix&match. Some DMs let you retreat and rest (or the contextual equivalent) whenever you opt to do so, while others press with time constraints or wandering encounters or just the hornets from the hornet nest you just shook up coming out and taking the battle to you. Some groups come with a menagerie of pets, herd of mounts, and retinue of NPCs; while others stick with 4 PCs (and the action economy associated with that).
Second to that (IMO) is the wide distribution in how different PCs perform under different play experiences. Not just 'always on' abilities vs. X/day or Y/sub-part-of-day, but also who does well against traps vs monsters, bosses vs swarms, pure combat vs. everything else, stuff you expected vs. unforeseen circumstances, who is a glass cannons vs <whatever the antonym of that is>, etc. The same goes on the other side of the balance arm, in that some monsters will crash and burn against some parties, while others will be devastating.
There are more issues, but these seem like a huge part of the variability that makes assigning a simple challenge number to an enemy/enemy encounter so fraught.


It's certainly an option, but what does one replace it with? Certainly BitD you had total-HP-available-over-day and spells/magic item uses/day as you do now; but also a much greater risk of just running out of HP right now (since your totals were lower and you were dead at 0 or -10) and save-or-dies (meaning 'still with most resources, but dead so it doesn't matter' was a more common situation). Other RPGs (where combat is a significant component) might play around with one or another aspect -- maybe everything will fully charge within minutes of a battle; or combats are so risky (or healing so burdensome) that pressing on for another fight is nonsense; but in general most have some resource (HP, or the equivalent, if nothing else) that gets expended in fights. Do you have a few examples you were thinking of as models?



I would agree, and 5e's is not the best I've seen, but I've also not seen very many good ones. Wargame unit point costs often are roughly balanced and good at showing 'which will defeat which else, and how easily,' but with a lot of variability. GURPS/Hero System are almost famous for their point values not aligning well with actual power (being more of a fairness/you-can't-get-everything measure than an actual balance tool). TSR-era's HD+asterisks and/or on-what-dungeon-level's-chart-are-they-found measures are nice in that they are so vague no one really relied on them. Again, are there examples we might want to use as comparisons?

The basic concept of 'the adventuring day,' or at the very least the concept of recharging resources and that the GM can either police it somehow or face the consequences of not, have been around pretty much since the beginning. At least unless you did the west marches 'if you leave the dungeon, the DM's other group could well get the loot first' playstyle that man a whole bunch of us never did. PCs have always noticed that they could go out and rest after major or minor resource depletion, and several of the best ways to prevent this (doom clocks, monsters getting wise and reinforcing/leaving with the loot) can strain verisimilitude if done every time (cue debates on how much).

Every single adventure I play has time constraints on it in some fashion.

I have difficulty imagining an interesting adventure that doesn't.

The only exception I have found is Overland travel. If I want that to be important in a game then I use a rule of no long rests until at a friendly settlement.

 

[Stalker0]

Maybe CR should be just replaced with or include the tier system.

I like the concept, but I think your still in the same fundamental bucket.

A Tier 2 monster would heavily challenge a Tier 1 party (levels 1-4 lets say). But a Tier 3 monster isn't going to be nearly as threatening to a Tier 2 party. The game just fundamentally changes around 5th level in a way that it never does again for the rest of the game.

 

[Stalker0]

Its never going to happen but the true way to go over this problem is to reduce most things to encounter based abilities, with more out of combat/plot spells being on a slower cooldown. This ensures a consistent power level fight after fight, and is what you generally see in most heroic/super heroic depictions nowadays. You can still have nasty effects like "can't heal until a long rest" or "exhaustion" as the rare effects that linger after a fight to shake things up.

Then you use consumable items as your resource management, optional so that players/dms can include that or not as they see fit.

 

[payn]

Its never going to happen but the true way to go over this problem is to reduce most things to encounter based abilities, with more out of combat/plot spells being on a slower cooldown. This ensures a consistent power level fight after fight, and is what you generally see in most heroic/super heroic depictions nowadays. You can still have nasty effects like "can't heal until a long rest" or "exhaustion" as the rare effects that linger after a fight to shake things up.

Then you use consumable items as your resource management, optional so that players/dms can include that or not as they see fit.

I'd prefer to go the other way with a number of resources to manage per day/adventure, but ill take an encounter focus over splitting the difference.

 

[Bawylie]

Attrition model is fine. Mixes of daily vs encounter vs at-will actions are fine (though arguably classes should be designed that way - wizard all dailies, fighter all at-will/encounter). But there’s really nothing wrong with anticipating the usage of resources and then saying “hey your parties have X resources so if you tax them greater than X, there may be trouble.” That’s all fine.

Where we might really improve encounter-design (for combat) is a ground up redesign of monsters on the tier-schedule rather than an individual CR, and then perhaps broadly a Role (like 4E had). Number appearing/organization would also be helpful. So you can go “alright my players are tier 2, so I can drop 4 tier 2 monsters here, 8 tier 1 monsters there” and not have to worry so much.

I suppose you’d want to determine number appearing by relative strength versus one average adventurer. So it might take 2 goblins per adventurer or one ogre per 2 adventurers. Something like that.

And then the real coup would be to have the XP value communicate all that info, somehow. So you can come at it both ways. If you can reasonably assume an adventuring day of X resources can overcome Y XP, then you can build whatever you like by either slotting in versus your party, or “buying” monsters out of the tier list as you go. Such that when you are out of your daily budget, you could check to see whether pushing further would be catastrophic or not.

If a goblin was worth 1 XP and an ogre is worth 4, for example you could reasonably conclude a tier one party of 4 could overcome 8 goblins, or two ogres, or some combo thereof. And you’d know how many times they could do this before the expected end of resources.

It doesn’t have to be perfect… it just needs to be “about right” in order to be useful to the average DM. Because, after all, actual results will come down to decisions made by the party rather than some systemic design.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I'd prefer to go the other way with a number of resources to manage per day/adventure, but ill take an encounter focus over splitting the difference.

I mean, putting aside the fact that I would leap to freedom after dropping smoke bombs if confronted with more resource management, the problem you're going to run into is people who aren't casters.

We both remember the Unlimited, Long Term, Drama Cannon XXL that was powered up and fired in response to fighters getting daily abilities.

You're going to have to either weather that storm, or just do what a lot of people have quietly been praying for and just remove Fighters and Rogues entirely.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Every single adventure I play has time constraints on it in some fashion.

I have difficulty imagining an interesting adventure that doesn't.

The only exception I have found is Overland travel. If I want that to be important in a game then I use a rule of no long rests until at a friendly settlement.

Good for you for finding what works for your group. I think any given group can find house rules to fit their style. I am taking the thread topic to cover more addressing the situation overall/across the breadth of gamers.
As an example of one where a time constraint is hard, I would suggest 'let's go explore that long-abandoned _____.'

 

[Stalker0]

I mean, putting aside the fact that I would leap to freedom after dropping smoke bombs if confronted with more resource management, the problem you're going to run into is people who aren't casters.

We both remember the Unlimited, Long Term, Drama Cannon XXL that was powered up and fired in response to fighters getting daily abilities.

You're going to have to either weather that storm, or just do what a lot of people have quietly been praying for and just remove Fighters and Rogues entirely.

Which probably addresses the real problem. I think the problem is not so much on the monster side, its on the players side.

PCs can be all shapes and sizes, levels, and numbers.

I think a better system is: just like a DM assesses CRs for a monster based on certain stats, you could do the same for players. Based on the fighters standard damage, AC, and hitpoints.....there CR is X. My fireballing wizard normally does X damage over 3 rounds, so they are CR Y.

Put all of my party together, and I get my party CR. Now I have an actual baseline to measure them against other monsters. and while that might sound like work, its really a one and done kind of effort. You do that for your party, and you really only need to update it when they level, and often only minorly.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Depends on the DM and group. Personally I like a healthy mix of the two.

Say more - not sure what you mean by "healthy mix of the two"...

 

[FallenRX]

Yep. That's the problem. Some classes can do their thing all the time and have very little impact aside from damage.

Then the ones that do have impact need napsies almost immediately and guess whose schedule we're actually on.

That is a seperate issue, but the encounter desing of the game doesnt really care for that at all.
It assumes casters have most of their spell slots, and every ones big daily resources they have at least 1 of.