Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pauper" data-source="post: 6753643" data-attributes="member: 17607">Not sure that's a real issue -- if the default is that a 4-hour adventure represents 1 adventuring day, then an 8-hour adventure should represent 2 adventuring days, and the rest is just math. If, on the other hand, the 8-hour slot is 1 day, and the 4-hour slot is therefore half a day, so that two of those mods represent a single adventuring day, then I think that presumption does violence to the Fifth Edition definition of the adventuring day and should probably be revisited.In any case, it seems that the campaign is trending away from 8-hour modules and toward more 2-hour modules -- I played two at GameholeCon -- so it seems the best advice to module writers would be to plan for two short rests in a 4-hour module (with the long rest being at the end of the adventure), and one in a 2-hour module (with the understanding that the module should probably be a bit harder than normal, since a party will be gaining long rests more frequently than the standard encounter design rules expect).It's kind of funny, because I just read an<a href="http://www.madadventurers.com/angry-rants-dd-is-too-easy/" target="_blank"> Angry GM column earlier today</a> which argues that most DMs don't really understand what 'difficult' is supposed to mean in a 5E context -- it's not that every combat threatens a TPK, but that each encounter saps resources so that each encounter becomes effectively more dangerous (at the same difficulty) as the day goes on. Effectively denying the party short rests also effectively increases the danger of an encounter while not increasing its difficulty.A 4-hour adventure written for Fifth Edition standards probably should feature 6 encounters, only one of which would be of above-average difficulty by XP budget, but which combined make for an effective challenge for a party that doesn't take a long rest. The problem is that 6 actual combats for a 7-player table would take way more than the available 4 hours in the time slot. Combining those 6 combats into three larger multipart combats (with a short rest available between each) would both simplify the combats for a larger table, allowing them to run faster, and provide the party with the short rests that the encounter system expects them to get. Leaving them separate for the smaller table provides greater flexibility (as well as the ability to 'skip' combats if the party is truly weaker than average to lessen the overall difficulty).Again, easy enough to come up with this stuff as theory, but actually putting it into practice in an adventure is the real test. That will take some time, though.--Pauper</blockquote>

Verification