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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Blue" data-source="post: 8188331" data-attributes="member: 20564">Encounter guidelines address two different needs.  As you mention, total challenge can be balanced with fewer, more deadly encounters.  However, it also deals with the balance between at-will recovery classes like the rogue or EB-only Warlock, and the long-rest-recovery classes like casters, and hybrids like paladin and barbarian.Simply, high level spells do more per action than at-will focused characters.  I don't think anyone disagrees with that.  If we have a single combat a day, harking back to the 5 (or 15) minute adventuring day, casters with their ability to nova will be a lot stronger.Now, the fun part is that at-will focused characters do do more than cantrips.  So we have higher level spells > weapons > cantrips.  So to balane between the classes, we need to reach a point where their efficiency per action balances out.  The at-will classes are fairly even on this, so the way to do it is to have enough encounters that the long-rest-recovery classes add in enough actions doing cantrips to bring the average down from what their high level spells do.Again, it's not enough to run them out of spells - if casters aren't spending a large number of actions with cantrips to bring their average per action down, their output well surpasses the at-will-primary characters.There's a second aspect - some long-rest-recovery abilities are even more efficient in longer battles.  A single 1 min buff lasting for 8 rounds in a bigger battle will do more than in a 3 round battle.  The easiest way to show this is to think about the barbarian - a 5th level barbarian has 3 rages.  Are they making better use of rage (and all the goodies it brings) if they are raging in every battle during the day (fewer tougher battles), or in half the battles per day (6-8 recommended).Now, I'm not saying we're all DMing wrong.  I am saying that the design team picked the wrong number of encounters per day to balance the classes on because no one regularly runs that many, and runs more than that as often as they run less.So it can feel satisfying to have a few big deadly battles a day.  I do it.  But it favors one category of classes over another.  And the short-rest recovery classes can also be advantaged or disadvantaged by the opportunities (or lack) the DM gives for those as well.</blockquote>

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