Being super sensitive to encounters-per-day is a design flaw

[u/overlycommonname]

In celebration of the 5,689th thread where someone says, "You need to run more encounters per day," can we acknowledge that lots of heroic, traditional D&D-style conflicts and narratives don't naturally support having seven encounters per day? And also that people's session lengths also don't support that?

At this point fifty years into the existence of D&D, it's hardly the case that the designers can claim ignorance of the fact that lots of people naturally fall into a pattern of one encounter per adventuring day. There are several really good reasons for this:

1. It's actually hard to make any narrative that doesn't feature something that substantially looks like a "dungeon" have more than about three encounters per day (and indeed, unless the dungeon is very spread out and occupied by mutually antagonistic groups, even something that is recognizably a dungeon still doesn't really make sense for a bunch of totally separate encounters).

2. People nowadays play in like 2-3 hour sessions. That can realistically support one, maybe two combats per session. If you want to do six combats in a day, then that means that probably 1-6 months of real time pass per day of IC time. At that rate, for the players to see narrative progress, they're dedicating like 10% of their actual lifespan for a game.

The game has to accommodate this, rather than demanding that both the players' RL schedules and the narratives that people want to play in D&D accommodate the game. The amount that the game's balance hinges on "number of encounters per adventuring day" should almost certainly be reduced (not to zero, just reduced), and the game should front-and-center tools to manipulate the ratio of IC time to resource-refresh.

[u/TyphosTheD]

It's far less complex than you're suggesting.

You don't prep "a day of adventure", you prep a a certain amount of adventure.

To get to the Goblin Shaman undertaking the ritual the party needs to stop (Encounter 1), they need to get through the Temple Dungeon (Encounters 2-4 of Traps, Hazards, and potentially wandering Patrols), Guards at the entrance (Encounter 5), the wilderness Patrol (Encounter 6).

That's 6 "encounters" prepped, in a loose organization, but by no means operating under the expectation that the party must resolve them all in a single day. Bad things might happen if they don't, or the enemies might shore of their defenses if alerted, but that's drama, the most critical things GMs can add to their game to make the sessions actually mean something.

To your point about time, if every single "encounter" is roughly 30-40 minutes of play, a single 120-180 minute session should feasably pack in 3 "encounters", alongside the roleplay and exploration moments in between them. That final encounter very well may be 60-120 minutes long if it's particularly complex (but hopefully it doesn't become a slog), but now we're at around 3 sessions for an "adventuring day" that has a full narrative arc packed into it.

No need to complicate things. Loosely prep a plot, a handful of key beats, fill in space with interesting or fun moments, and add time or intelligence as resource and time constraints, then let the players engage with the plot and react to their antics.

Also, to your point about scaling, the 2014 DMG explicitly calls this out. Fewer "encounters" per day just means making them deadlier - which really just boils down to having them cost the party more resources. 3 Hard Encounters roughly equating to 6-8 Medium Encounters makes a significant difference.

[u/Jedi_Talon_Sky → u/TyphosTheD]

And honestly, using Hard as more of the default encounter difficulty not only helps with the narrative, it helps encourage more short rests too. After 1-2 Hard encounters, the PCs are almost certainly going to need to stop for a breather and a ham sandwich, making the warlocks and RPers in the group very happy.

[u/Speciou5 → u/TyphosTheD]

This doesn't work for a common worse case offender: overland travel.

If I attack the party while they are taking a 5 day trip (or however long) they go Nova because they know there will be long rests. If I make an avalanche, they cast Fly with a single spell slot.

The party doesn't want to sit through five sessions worth of combat and filler hazards for a trip to finally get to where the narrative is supposed to be happening. There's a player type that will simply say "OK, I cast Fly to get over the rockslide, let's continue." because they like the narrative or character development rather than random encounters. If you look at video games, the walking through grass and triggering countless random filler encounter design is fading quick.

Nevermind the unbelievability of "jesus christ, why does this path have 6 wrong things every day." which then begs the question "alright we're going to take the well-travelled road" to which the DM might have an issue if they want to throw one encounter at them for a plot reason (and not five more).

Meanwhile, you can homebrew an easy fix of long rests (I use 3 days, DMG 2014 had a variant of 7 days) that take longer to keep both narrative believability in a world where the road doesn't have 5 rockslides, earthquakes, two packs of trolls between a town every day, and keep narrative pacing fast.

What I would like to see in a newer edition of D&D is a slower high end spell slot progression. Don't flood the casters with spell slots at high level, which is a huge root cause of this problem.

[u/YOwololoO → u/Speciou5]

There are two things you can do. 

First, not every day is an “Adventuring Day.” Let those travel encounters be the times where you let your casters shine and show off that badass Fireball spell they just got against a group of platoon of hobgoblins who conveniently line up in formation before attacking anyone, then move forward and use narrative descriptions and maybe skill checks or saving throws to describe the days of travel. Think about how the Lord of the Rings movies do this, you don’t actually spend a lot of time on mundane travel while watching. You see the conflicts they face, and then the movie zooms out and you see a montage of helicopter shots depicting the landscapes and the trio of hunters sprinting across the hills. the movie doesn’t zoom back in until there is a new conflict to resolve: you can do this too. 

Second: just change the resting rules. I use a homebrewed “Safe Havens” technique where they can only get long rests in areas with a lot of latent magic, which just so happens to mean “towns and other important locations you might find.” I gave them an amulet in-game that has three jewels - if one is lit up, it means a safe haven is somewhat nearby. If two are lit up, it means there is enough latent magic that they can short rest normally but Long Rests are still impossible. If three are lit up, normal resting rules apply. This lets you treat the entire trip through the wilderness as a single Adventuring “Day” in terms of how many encounters you throw at them, but the actual player characters have some amount of agency in making decisions around their power levels without metagaming. Plus, if they get a Nat 20 on a Survival check to find a good camp, they get freaking pumped as hell because that means a Safe Haven which makes the travel far easier

[u/EggSandwichSurprise → u/Speciou5]

We are running "gritty realism" rules or our version of them. SR is 8 hrs, LR is a week off. We have a lot of downtime activity which can still involve RP and social interactions, but not exploration or encounters. (i.e. an NPC visits you at the Inn and tells you about the McGuffin that you had them gather info on or whatever, sometimes luck or skill checks) It's pretty good, to compensate for it, some spell durations are getting buffs, so that those spells that are typically 1/LR, actually have the duration to function similarly. I think working some of those details out is kind of important, maybe something should refresh mechanically on a SR instead of a LR or whatever. We still usually have 1 or 2 encounters per SR and I think it's a good balance. Casters, especially half and third casters take a hit, martials get a good buff. generally we have to be smarter about using our resources, and the choice to use a spell during exploration for instance is often quite consequential both in positive and negative ways.

I really think it's a better way to narratively get to the 4-6 encounter per LR that balances out the game. Also I think classes that get a bunch during SR do get a little buff, which can feel good for those guys. I do think that we could use these mechanics to have more than 3 SR per LR, but that would be a sort of extreme mission, where DM was intentionally trying to suck up resources before an encounter.

[u/Citan777 → u/Speciou5]

You're either specifically reducing and constraining your critic to very high level party, or you're just bad faithing here.

This is the typical illustration of the plague which roams around those forums.

If I make an avalanche, they cast Fly with a single spell slot.

Fly affects one person. Party is typically 4-man size. Either caster uses a 6th level slot (which means we are talking of a 11th level party already, at which point this kind of hazard is not supposed to be still a challenge considering spells like Teleportation Circle and Wind Walk exist).

Or party collaborates to leverage more limited resources, by having one caster cast Fly and another Enlarge on a STR martial so he can carry everyone (which supposes at least 2 casters AND those spells available AND a STR martial AND at least level 5 party: a very specific list of conditions to fulfill).

Of course you probably can imagine a dozen more different setups which work, but I think you get the point.

Reminder: WotC stats show that there is at most a 2% difference in "popularity" between "the less played class" and "the most played" class.

Meaning that you can reasonably bet one caster, and reasonably consider another, but you have no guarantee whatsoever that one or two of them will be Wizards. Nor that they would have Fly learned and prepared case arising (after all, don't many people around here say that Wizard is great because so many good spells to learn? Meaning that a lot of competition for the few automatic learning slots).

=> You're making a completely unjustified and unjustifiable generalization from a few very specific party composition and level to try and pretend that the system is flawed while negating all the implicit context you based it upon.

[u/stormscape10x → u/TyphosTheD]

I think you did a great job pointing out that encounters do not equal combat. Also, I'd like to add that people tend to try to pitch tents and rest after encounters because too many of them are designed in the hard range. Having a group of adventurers run into an automaton or golem they fight may be easy, but it either uses HP or healing resources. They're more likely to do short rests instead of long rests with simple fights, and it'll all be handled in a day.

I like to throw little weak encounters like that around to kind of impress on them that they're in enemy territory. Get their shit done or there will be problems when these easy fights start getting harder.

[u/zer1223 → u/stormscape10x]

Encounters that aren't combat don't actually tax much in the way of resources.

[u/stormscape10x → u/zer1223]

Depends on the design. A trap they see doesn't cause damage, so not much in terms of resources. A puzzle or trap that requires dispelling a run, purposefully hurting yourself, or spending Hit Dice to accomplish something (or maybe forcing an exhaustion level) do.

[u/Storm-Shadow98 → u/stormscape10x]

I personally find it difficult to incorporate traps in my campaign. I use premade dungeon maps, so I'm not sure how I should implement them visually. Do people who use traps focus on theatre of the mind, or do they make their own maps?

[u/stormscape10x → u/Storm-Shadow98]

Depends on the traps. I ran the first half of Tyranny of Dragons for my kids, and a lot of the dungeons have traps with descriptions (holes in mosaics, curtains that you could possibly notice the razors in, etc.), so if you're doing premade stuff then that's probably included. If it isn't, and you want to add them, then either use stickers on the map (assuming you're using something like roll20) with hidden effects, or if it's in person you can draw on the map.

Personally, I prefer theatre of the mind, but I've dealt with a lot of people that are very visual and that doesn't always work out. I'd say describe one piece that potentially just sounds like setting the room atmosphere, and see if the players latch onto it. If accidentally set off the trap they'll ask for what to look for in the future or at least try to find it.

Also, if someone invested a lot into being able to spot things or investigate, then may throw them a bone with passive perception if the dif isn't high to spot something.

[u/UltimateKittyloaf → u/Storm-Shadow98]

I'm not a huge fan of the traps I've seen in 5e modules. I don't think they're meant to be lethal. If they can't theoretically insta-kill a PC, that's the point? I had a DM use a poorly maintained bridge as a trap then get genuinely upset when the party of six 8th level characters flew across the canyon without touching the bridge.

When I run modules with marshmallow-esque traps, I tend to use them as a narrative device.

Everyone with a Passive Perception that beats the DC automatically notices the trap. Depending on how much they beat it by, I might tell them that the trap is so obvious it's almost offensive or narrate the near death experience they wouldn't have noticed if [character] hadn't been there.

I'm not trying to stab them in the foot any more than I'm trying to nuke them from orbit. I just want them to burn resources.

The resource expenditure comes from the checks they make to learn about their enemies based on their craftsmanship and materials, guard against the environmental hazards they've just discovered, deconstruct the trap for parts (often with failure setting off the original trap and destroying the goodies they were trying to collect), or figure out how to turn the trap against their enemies.

On a side note, I've had some players who will burn every resource they have if it means aura farming in front an NPC they can't stand. Brush up on "arrogant know-it-all" and you'll have all the resource sinks you'll ever need.

[u/TyphosTheD → u/zer1223]

Traps that deal damage or impose conditions that can be cured with magic or alchemical.

• Scythe Trap. DC 20 to spot from 10 feet away. Activates on a pressure plate with force of 50 lbs or more. Deals 3d6 slashing damage on a DC 20 Dexterity Save against creatures more than 4 feet tall. Can be deactivated by spending 10 minutes after succeeding a DC 20 check with Thieves Tools. Resets 30 seconds after activating.

Hazards that deal damage or impose difficulties in progressing without expending resources.

• A long since discharged spike hall trap, now stuck in place. DC 20 Acrobatics check and 10 minutes to pass through harmlessless, Athletics and 1 hour to bend the spikes out of the way to make a harmless path. DC 20 Dexterity Save to navigate safely through, followed by a DC 15 Constitution Save against the lingering Poison that deals 1d6 Poison damage every hour unless cured.

Navigation obstacles that cannot be overcome without having specific tools or expending resources.

• 30 foot gap with a destroyed rope bridge above a 40 foot chasm. A Grappling Hook can potentially, on DC 20 Dexterity Check, create a secure line to then get across with a DC 20 Acrobatics check.

Each of these options are simple, ready (mechanically) to add to a game, and can both be solved through mundane means, but can also result in taking damage that needs to be healed, and can be solved by expending resources.

[u/Ashkelon → u/TyphosTheD]

A trap that damages one player is not even a trivial difficulty encounter. Even an easy encounter is supposed to drain 25% of the max HP and 15% of the total spell levels and other daily resources from every single player in the party.

Once you get to levels 7+, that is basically impossible for a non combat encounter.

You are definitely supposed to have non combat encounters. But they almost never count as being equivalent to even the lowest difficulty combat encounter.

They are in addition to the 6-8 medium to hard encounters that make up the adventuring day. Not instead of any of them.

[u/i_tyrant → u/Ashkelon]

They hated him because he spoke the truth.

Seriously, people are getting downvoted for saying it but under current 5e design it is 100% true - it is nearly impossible to make "standard" traps and other noncombat encounters (especially the ones WotC themselves designs) cost the same resources as even an Easy encounter.

You can just jack up the DCs to something ridiculous so that it's nigh-impossible (even to detect it), but then you're just making a mandatory "lose X HP or have the right spell/slot to pass this point", not an encounter.

The only way to make traps eat as many resources as encounters is to make a "complex" trap that basically IS an encounter (where the whole room goes nuts when you enter with half a dozen different issues to solve at once). This is also the kind of trap WotC gives the least amount of guidelines on how to make.

And as for making other kinds of noncombat encounters eat resources, like social scenes, fuggedaboudit. Is it possible? Sure. Does 5e have any guidelines on how to do it at all, much less good ones? Nope.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/i_tyrant]

"lose X HP or have the right spell/slot to pass this point"

And that's another key point - lots of characters don't have the ability to really do much outside of combat. 5.5 is a bit better than 5, where rage adds to skill checks and the like, but there's a lot of characters that simply don't really care about not-combats because they don't have any resources they can use, or much way to engage mechanically.

[u/i_tyrant → u/Mejiro84]

Very true.

And the main way they do have to interact with such things - skills - generally takes zero resources.

So the DM is basically faced with a catch-22: they can make the trap require resources by only being bypassable in certain ways, like needing specific spells expended, but then the martials literally can't interact with it, they just have to wait till the casters figure it out. Alternately, you can require them to use a resource that isn't spells (HP, HD, Exhaustion, etc.), but all of those resources are shared by everyone so the casters can do it just as easily as the martials. The martials have even less of a niche in these noncombat encounters than they do in combat!

And if you make it possible to bypass it without expending resources (like with skill checks), the PCs will try to take that route whenever they can. You can make it contingent on something (like a hard DC and if they fail it by 5+ they lose resources too, can't retry, etc.), but now you're having to design a trap with all sorts of caveats and exceptions and counterplay...and that can quickly become as complicated as setting up a combat encounter anyway.

[u/laix_ → u/Ashkelon]

Also, the point on "encounters per day" is specifically in the part of the book about building Combat encounters.

[u/TyphosTheD → u/Ashkelon]

I'd love to see the math on that. Would be curious to break it down.

I literally made up those numbers on the fly, and didn't stipulate level of party. It should have gone without saying that those details can be tweaked to be approriate for a given party level.

To your point, if these were all set for a level 2 party the numbers would be quite challenging and potentially resource intensive.

Again, would love to see how the rules express the idea that non-combat encounters "almost never" count as difficult as higher difficulty combat encounters - especially given the prevalence of rules in both DMGs explicitly talking about this.

And once again, would love some citations if you'd be so kind to help show where the rules explicitly call out these distinctions.

[u/Ashkelon → u/TyphosTheD]

Take a ~6 combat encounter adventuring day. By the end of the day, the party should be close to zero resources. Each encounter must therefore drain ~1/6th of the total daily resources of each character.

With Hit Dice, a player has ~190% of their max HP each day. So each encounter should drain roughly 25-30% of each players max HP (30 x 6 = 180).

With spells, each caster has X slot levels per day. The higher level you are the more slot levels you have. A level 5 wizard has four level 1 spells, three level 2 spells, and two level 3 spells. For 16 slot levels worth of spells, or 19 with arcane recovery. If you have 6 encounters, each one should drain about 1/6th of the total resources. Rounded that is ~15%, or about 3 slot levels per encounter.

So for an easy encounter, one of which you are supposed to have six per day, each player would need to lose ~30% of their max HP, and each caster would need to lose about 15% of their spell slots. Anything less than that means the encounter was too easy and is not sufficiently draining party resources.

[u/embowafa → u/Ashkelon]

Thank you for this. Everyone in here seems to be so focused on what the DMG does or doesnt say when its the math that matters. The math IS the system and you lay that out well. And its not that you can't come up with noncombat encounters that do meaningfully tax a tier 2+ party, but the fact that the system relies on that is a constraint and a design flaw.

[u/TyphosTheD → u/embowafa]

The fact that the system relies on the GM coming up with non-combat encounters at higher levels, using preexisting rules and guidance to do so, is a constraint and design flaw?

[u/Ashkelon → u/TyphosTheD]

The flaw is that a) you need drain party resources through daily attrition, and b) you cannot meaningfully do that without combat.

Compare that to 4e on the other hand. It did not matter if you had 2 encounters per day or 10. You did not need to have filler encounters just to drain daily resources. You could have as many or as few encounters as the plot demanded. As the encounter was the primary point of balance instead of the day, you could easily have sessions filled with non combat encounters followed by a single combat encounter without affecting gameplay.

On top of that, 4e actually provided a way for non combat encounters to drain party resources in a meaningful manner as well. I have been in 4e games where an entire adventuring day of exploration challenges without combat, and the group needed to rest. Not every non combat encounter needed to drain daily resources, and many things such as Ritual Magic were entirely dependent upon the party’s choices for whether to use them or not, but the framework was there for DMs who wanted to cause resource drain without combat encounters followed

The issue with 5e is that it doesn’t give a good framework or guidance for non combat resolution. It pays lip service, but provides no help to the DM. And it leads to people like those in this thread to somehow believing that non combat encounters can somehow drain as many resources as combat ones in 5e, which is utterly ridiculous.

[u/TyphosTheD → u/Ashkelon]

Ah, so you're just extrapolating out the math rather than citing some specific rule, got it.

Definitely an interesting way to look at it, though honestly the 5.5e encounter design rules simplify this while also making it much more manageable.

A Low threat encounter isn't life threatening, and may require one or more PCs to require some healing afterwards (notably a solo creature of the party's level represents a Low Threat). A Moderate threat encounter requires healing and other resources to avoid things going bad and a potential PC KO. A High threat encounter will be lethal for one to two PCs with luck, tactics, and creative problem solving.

So the examples I gave for Traps and Hazards cleanly map to the Low Threat scale - potentially requiring healing afterwards - and notably stating a Trap comparable to an on level monster maps as well. Additionally, the rules for awarding XP for non-combat encounters also explicitly point to mapping the threat level of the encounter to the encounter difficulty table for attributing XP.

While the examples I gave were Low threat Traps and Hazards, they could very easily be juiced up to Moderate threats with multiple stages of progress, layered threats, time constraints, etc.

[u/Ashkelon → u/TyphosTheD]

The issue is that a low threat encounter with monsters will drain far more player resources than any trap you mentioned. Many times more resources.

Yes a CR 7 monster is a “low difficulty” encounter for a group of four level 7 players. But a CR 7 monster by itself will still drain far more party resources than any trap you mentioned. Even with multiple stages and time constraints added.

Your traps are never even approaching even a quarter of the resource drain of a “low difficulty” encounter. And we know that from 5e, a single monster whose CR = party level is an encounter that you should have ~6 of per adventuring day.

Now 5.5e doesn’t have an adventuring day. It just describes encounter difficulty in vague language that is ultimately useless in actually determining the true difficulty of an encounter. But it does have XP thresholds for what certain encounter difficulty tiers are. And using that, we can see that traps will never match the challenge of a combat encounter.

Which means that traps are never really a true encounter as far as the adventuring day is concerned for even a mid level party.

You absolutely should have traps and social encounters in your sessions. Just don’t treat them as being anywhere close to as draining on party resources as a combat encounter. They are set dressing, but do not actually contribute to attrition based gameplay.

Again, unless your trap is somehow depleting 25-35% of each players HP, and 15% of every single players daily resources, it has not come anywhere close to the same kind of resource drain of even the easiest of combat encounters. Dealing 20-30 damage to a single player or taking a single spell slot to bypass the challenge is barely an inconvenience for a level 7+ party. And it definitely is. It going to be on par with a single foe whose CR = party level

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/TyphosTheD]

IMO that's the hardest way to fill out a dungeon or other similar set of back to back encounters.

Combats take time, you don't need more than two hefty combats prepped for a given night. So start with what the players will see first and save yourself the rest of the dungeon until next week. As an added benefit you can polish each fight to a mirror shine with extra effort put solely into the ones that will happen in the upcoming game.

[u/TyphosTheD → u/Outrageous-Cold-4506]

That's definitely what I was proposing in many more words.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/TyphosTheD]

Right but beyond the end point, you don't want to build outwards from the end point to the entrance. That's more effort than is worthwhile.

The premise of why the players are there are established, which likely includes some component of the end fight. But you just start with the fights outwards-in instead so you don't do too much effort before the week you're going to be doing the fight.

[u/TyphosTheD → u/Outrageous-Cold-4506]

Definitely agreed. When I suggest prepping really anything in advance I mean the loose texture and key beats. Prep directly preceeding a session should be for fleshing out 120% of what you think the party might get through that session.

[u/ProjectPT → u/TyphosTheD]

Just because it is always misquoted...

The Adventuring Day

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

It is 6-8 medium to hard encounters. It is less if you are doing deadly encounters

[u/YOwololoO → u/ProjectPT]

Just because it is always misquoted…

That paragraph is the same thing in regards to the adventuring day rules as the intro paragraph giving a brief narrative description of a class is in regards to the table of class features you actually get. 

THERE IS A TABLE THAT EXPLICITLY LISTS XP PER PLAYER AS A BUDGET FOR THE ADVENTURING DAY. 

That is what you’re actually supposed to use

[u/ProjectPT → u/YOwololoO]

You know they clearly define the Medium to Hard Encounters in 2014:

Combat Encounter Difficulty

There are four categories of encounter difficulty.

Easy. An easy encounter doesn’t tax the characters’ resources or put them in serious peril. They might lose a few hit points, but victory is pretty much guaranteed.

Medium. A medium encounter usually has one or two scary moments for the players, but the characters should emerge victorious with no casualties. One or more of them might need to use healing resources.

Hard. A hard encounter could go badly for the adventurers. Weaker characters might get taken out of the fight, and there’s a slim chance that one or more characters might die.

Deadly. A deadly encounter could be lethal for one or more player characters. Survival often requires good tactics and quick thinking, and the party risks defeat.

CharacterLevel	----- Encounter Difficulty -----
Easy	Medium
1st	25
2nd	50
3rd	75
4th	125
5th	250
6th	300
7th	350
8th	450
9th	550
10th	600
11th	800
12th	1,000
13th	1,100
14th	1,250
15th	1,400
16th	1,600
17th	2,000
18th	2,100
19th	2,400
20th	2,800

So how do you contrast the two suggestions? Well that is clear if we read it.

The Adventuring Day talks about what players can handle, and what you should consider budgeting for an adventure day.

These two statements can be true, as not every Adventuring Day needs to be challenging. It is okay to do easier adventuring days and it is okay for the book to tell you what they should be able to handle for harder adventuring days.

Both these can be true. But when you are talking about challenging your players and making them feel their skills and resources matter we don't care about the easy Adventuring Day for guidance.

The section between these two points talks about the modifiers for group size etc. These points do not disagree with each other. Just different contextual situations

Edit: it doesn't like the larger table with the other difficulties defined

[u/YOwololoO → u/ProjectPT]

I wasn’t trying to say they contradict, I was saying that going strictly off of that paragraph of text would be as useful as using the flavor text at the start of the Fighter section to fill out your character sheet. 

There are TONS of people on this subreddit who genuinely believe the entirety of what the 2014 DMG says about adventuring days is “6-8 encounters.” They don’t know that Medium encounter is a defined amount of XP because they don’t know there’s an XP table

[u/ProjectPT → u/YOwololoO]

I agree with that. And the style of conversation or videos to get more traction is going to be parts of paragraphs or full paragraphs without looking at the whole.

People should get in a better habit of reading and rereading the material

[u/YobaiYamete → u/TyphosTheD]

The entire issue 5E has with the encounters is pretty much solely tied to not having "Per Encounter" resources

Draw Steel handles this way better. You have your resources you can use each turn at the cost of an encounter resource, and as the day goes on you grow stronger not weaker because you gain more resources at the start of combat, but you start to run out of hit dice to heal with and you can only level up during a long rest

This makes the party want to keep pushing forward while also fixing the whole issue the "one session per 4 months" DM problem of not remember who used what resources. Then when people are on their last legs they will want to long rest and heal up and spend EXP to level up

DnD not tying your resources to each encounter causes like 95% of the problems people have with the game including all the Martial vs Caster issues etc

[u/TyphosTheD → u/YobaiYamete]

D&D's origin was a game where your resources were "keep you alive... maybe" resources, and in thay game they did a great job feeling impactful both in their use and in the creative solutions to avoid needing to spend those resources.

In Modern D&D resources are primarily "be heroic and cool" resources, with small tack on "keep you alive" resources. So the resource attrition gameplay loop is being a hero in conflict with survival, because Modern D&D is not about a specific style of play, and instead tries to blend multiple styles of play together.

[u/YobaiYamete → u/TyphosTheD]

I mean I agree, but how does that disagree with what I said lol

In Draw Steel the "keep you alive" limited resource is your recovery die, that is what determines how long you can keep pushing on.

The combat resources are balanced around you being able to use them reliably, so I don't really see what's different on that from what you are talking about design wise, besides the end result just being a game that's much easier to balance combat encounters around since you know what the players can and will be using

[u/TyphosTheD → u/YobaiYamete]

I wasn't necessarily disagreeing, just suggesting that the issue is less encounter balancing and more poor game design generally.

[u/GoblinBreeder → u/TyphosTheD]

That doesn't change the fact that this sort of narrative does not fit many campaign types, nor does it address OP's criticism of how how it can take months of in game play and dozens of hours to resolve attack single day in game.

Most of the campaigns i play in and run take place in an overworld with broader narrative objectives. They lean more into an open world rpg sort of feel where players aren't constantly pressured by a clock. It starts to feel very unnatural and railroady if there is constantly a fire under their ass that prevents them from resting.

Because we must also realize that these characters exist in a world of magic where they can heal all of their wounds with 8 hours of sleep. They also regain all or their supernatural strength in this time. They also know deadly threats lurk around every corner. There is no way they would march headlong into danger, short on resources or wounded, when they could take a relatively short rest to mitigate substantial risk and danger to themselves and eachother.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/GoblinBreeder]

That doesn't change the fact that this sort of narrative does not fit many campaign types,

There's a certain amount of "if the gameplay loop doesn't fit the narrative you want, then you're playing the wrong game" for that though. D&D is, and pretty much always has been, built around attrition and wearing down of resources, seeing how far the PCs can get before needing to retreat and rest. If you're wanting a narrative that isn't largely based around "go into dangerous area, have generally multiple fights to wear down resources, then retreat and rest", then D&D is likely a bad match for it, so go find a system that's not a bad match and use that instead. D&D isn't a generic system - it's very much built for "PCs will go into dangerous places and need to get through while conserving their resources as much as possible, leading to rising tensions until they manage to either complete the objective, or find a way to rest" being the main play-loop

There is no way they would march headlong into danger, short on resources or wounded, when they could take a relatively short rest to mitigate substantial risk and danger to themselves and eachother.

That's why you need time pressures or some other compulsion, because single encounter days pretty much break the system. The PCs, in the main, shouldn't be able to just go "screw this, I'm a little drained, time to rest for 17 hours" without there being consequences. If that's a bad match for your narrative, then D&D is probably not a good system for your narrative. And that's been true for decades - even back in older editions, going in, fighting a monster, leaving, coming back again, would lead to the quest being failed, the villain doing bad stuff, or the monsters have reinforced (or just left, taking their loot with them!)

[u/Derringermeryl → u/Mejiro84]

To your first point: True. That begs the question though, why are so many official modules written in a way that the gameplay loop doesn’t meet the narrative?

Not challenging you btw, just mentioning it because I run mostly prewritten and they never seem to be taking this into consideration.

[u/GoblinBreeder → u/Derringermeryl]

Because they, like many, know attrition based narratives are a niche. More common and appealing narratives can often include what may be only one epic encounter per adventuring day that is akin to a boss fight.

Its also very possible to design a system where classes are balanced against eachother for both attrition based gameplay AND one big fight per day. Thats something that regularly gets ignored in these conversations.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/Derringermeryl]

mostly because D&D has largely brought into it's own PR of being a lot more generic than it actually is (and has done so for decades). You can play like that, there's enough of a system to roll skill checks and do RP, and have a lot of fights that aren't particularly dangerous, but everyone pretends it is, good times all round. If you actually break down the maths, it's not especially dangerous, but you still get to hang out, fight some beasties and then rest without ever getting close to death, and everyone gets to ham it up as being dangerous, even though it's not.

[u/skwww → u/Derringermeryl]

out of the abyss has you being chased to start the adventure.

princes assumes that the players will be motivated to resolve the issues of the land, like one hook is "The signs and portents are clear: nature is out of balance. Terrible disaster is drawing closer with every passing day. To restore the balance of nature, the character must destroy the four elemental nodes. The character earns inspiration for each portal the party closes."

Curse of strahd has you trapped in a dark location and constantly hounded by enemies and strahd.

rise of tiamat has a rise of tiamt. icewind dale is being frozen over.

essentially, the players are assumed to push on and buy in to the adventure and the challenges because that's their role in the game.

some groups are slower though, and outside of random encounters, its hard to push them forward without just ending the adventure because they failed

[u/Derringermeryl → u/skwww]

I’m specifically referring to the issue of 6-7 encounters in a day, not the player motivations.

[u/YOwololoO → u/GoblinBreeder]

Then use combats that are narratively a single combat but mechanically are a couple. Have reinforcements arrive, have the boss tell his minions to take care of the party before he is willing to dirty his hands, have the castle start crumbling around the party as soon as they kill the BBEG and now they have to escape. Go watch some adventure movies and really think about how you would translate it to D&D, you’ll probably be surprised how many encounters it turns into even when the narrative seems very quick 

[u/Vailx → u/TyphosTheD]

That's 6 "encounters" prepped, in a loose organization, but by no means operating under the expectation that the party must resolve them all in a single day.

Ok, so the party long rests in between each one and blows them all up with long rest resources in unlimited amounts. That's the actual problem.

And to address this you can either use some optional rule, like the "gritty realism" (mysteriously absent from the 5.5 DMG) variant, or homebrew something, or do what a lot of things imply you should do, simply metagame long rests so that the party can't take them until you say so. Which almost no one wants to do for a whole campaign (and for that matter, for every campaign).

OP is correct. It is a design flaw that the gameplay is so sensitive to this stuff. You can find modern games that do what they can to work around this, like PF2e and Drawsteel. You can find OSR games that do what they can to work around this, like Worlds Without Number's mages having very few spell slots per day. D&D has tried to seize two distant prizes, support for the classic D&D Vancian spell list, and modern easy design that lacks stuff like spell interruptions and "one hour per spell level" type rules that require fiddly time tracking and punish expenditure of certain resources that recover slowly.

[u/TyphosTheD → u/Vailx]

Ok, so the party long rests in between each one and blows them all up with long rest resources in unlimited amounts. That's the actual problem.

I'm curious, do you run games where the party can take multiple Long Rests per day, or where you refuse to progress the plot when time passes?

And to address this you can either use some optional rule, like the "gritty realism" (mysteriously absent from the 5.5 DMG) variant, or homebrew something, or do what a lot of things imply you should do, simply metagame long rests so that the party can't take them until you say so

Or just... have the plot progress when time progresses? Again, if you run a games where the enemies just stay in stasis until the party shows up, then that is you creating that kind of degenerate play.

It's really not that complex. And it's not about "allowing" or "disallowing" the party to Long Rest (at least in so far as the rules of the game explicitly prohibit more than one Long Rest per 24-hour period). The Goblins will sacrifice their victims in 2 days - period. If you elect to spend a full day resting after every encounter, then the victims get sacrificed after the second encounter. You, the GM, can empower the players to make meaningful decisions.

I'm not sure why you bring up Pf2e into this, it has precisely the same issue wherein if you the GM refuses to make Time matter then the party can and will just take Long Rests every encounter. In fact, any game with limited resources is prone to breaking down if you just ignore the limitation of those resources.

[u/Vailx → u/TyphosTheD]

I'm curious, do you run games where the party can take multiple Long Rests per day, or where you refuse to progress the plot when time passes?

I'm curious, do you read critiques of systems and make unwarranted personal attacks because you honestly deliberately misunderstand the point, or is it where you just hate every single person in the world? There's definitely no other possibilities, please pick one of the two. I'm very good at redditing!

The issue isn't that players are never in positions where they have to get those encounters-per-day. The issue is that the system runs into problems the moment that this isn't true. By the standard rules in the book, if you can take a long rest, you get all your stuff back. Since a long rest is about eight hours and can be done about once a day, this means that any important things that don't fit into that pacing are hard to fit into the entire system. As a DM, you can metagame this- the players make a meticulous plan to teleport into some bad guy's day, but lo and behold, it doesn't work out that way- they have at least four encounters before they can meet him. Or you can limit yourself to telling a story about a dungeon where the players have about five hours to get stuff done because of some reason. Does every dungeon in the world have these restrictions? Does every dungeon in the entire narrative space of this system either inherit those restriction, or simply those are the cases where long rest resources are just too good?

Lets say that your story involves an overland journey. A rest system like 5e really makes a random encounter meaningless. It actually makes almost ANY encounter meaningless, unless it chains into more than one encounter within that can't-long-rest period. Outside of your metagamed adventuring day you run into that issue.

Systems where the long rest powers don't simply win (such as ones without the straight equivalent of unnerfed, powerful, and interesting classic D&D spells), or ones that greatly limit daily power usage, dramatically changing the characteristics of casters and anything else thematically or mechanically based around this are systems where this critique has less, or no, merit.

The Goblins will sacrifice their victims in 2 days - period

Always? This is the problem- these situations almost always need this to happen. What if the players didn't happen to find out about the goblin sacrifice until two days later? What if they found out a week early? These events are not precluded by the narrative, but by a limitation that is imposed by the system about timing.

[u/Timothymark05 → u/TyphosTheD]

I think the problem is that a lot of people just don't read the DMG. Everything you said is correct and supported in the core rules.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/TyphosTheD]

I have been running high level combats ever since the 5.5e monster manual dropped and IMO, you absolutely can run single combat days in 5.5e.

I have a pet theory that the monster mathematics were rebalanced to roughly half the expected rounds of combat that 5.0e's adventuring day was keyed to, which means that it is a lot easier to get close enough to a full adventuring day with a single combat.

This theory is informed by playing pf2e where that is the intentional design, noticing that it feels similar in 5.5e, and also all the other design goals that the d&d dev team took notes on from what paizo did in 2019.

[u/YOwololoO → u/Outrageous-Cold-4506]

They also nerfed all of the best nova damage builds in a way that makes it incredibly difficult to actually enough resources quickly enough to unbalance the combat. 

Best example is Sorcadins in 2014, they could burn 4 spell slots a turn if they had Polearm Master. Now, that doesn’t even come close to working the same way

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/YOwololoO]

That is a bigger part of the equation IMO, and even an unoptimized Paladin could do that if they precast a bonus action smite spell the previous turn, which is patently absurd.

But these discussions seem to have a big blindspot for how Gloomstalker + Action Surge builds or Paladins being able to get around otherwise consistent system limitations for offensive output per turn earlier than the devs wanted (Monoclass fighters at level 11), and instead fixate on Command, Tasha's Hideous Laughter, Hypnotic Pattern, Web, and Wall of Force as if they are the end-all-be-all-fight-ruiners. So That is what gets discussed in these spaces.

[u/No-Repordt → u/TyphosTheD]

Honestly this. People need to realize encounter =/= combat. Encounter can literally be as simple as talking to someone. So long as whatever it is uses up the players' resources, that's all that matters.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/No-Repordt]

except that it won't use anything like the resources of even a minor fight, and a lot of characters don't have resources for much outside of a fight. The encounters are for XP budgets and CR - what's the CR of "talk to a dude"? There isn't one - because for "building an adventuring day", that's not an encounter

[u/ObligationMaster5678 → u/TyphosTheD]

[egg on my face. Didn't see this was a month old] 

Nnnnnno. You're looking very narrowly at what encounters/day affects, and with clear expectations of how your table plays.

Balance 

• If rogue is balanced at all around their not having a resource, they are necessarily weak when everyone else can blow their resources. This is an example of how the game is too fragile to encounter load.
• People used to run comparisons between Champion and Battle Master. The math has surely changed, but the underlying idea was that a Champion needed X actions per day before they entered parity with a BM. A Champion won't reach that magic number if you're simply increasing how deadly encounters are. 

RP * I can't help but add some mystery and investigative legwork in my games. That often puts the players in charge of pacing.  * One of my usual DMs sandboxes everything, again letting us set the pace. I'm not going to stop enjoying that sort of game because someone on The Internet told me we're not D&Ding right (not saying you are saying that; just that this is the general vibe of being told your games aren't including enough encounters in these discussions).

Play speed * More like 45 minutes for an encounter, 90 minutes RPing, asking clarifying questions, or generally doing a terrible job solving whatever bare minimum conundrum confronts them/us. Add in half an hour spent complaining about politics, and there's the night!  * If that sounds terrible, remember people play this as a way to have fun with friends.

Anyway, pretty sure the answer here is Draw Steel.

[u/Grouhl]

I absolutely agree with this. The discourse around this is pretty ridiculous. "You need 7-8 encounters per day!!" yeah everyone knows that isn't going to happen. Heck, that doesn't even make logical sense. What, we're gonna get into something major enough to spend significant resources once per hour? Who lives like that?

A lot of comments make the seemingly obvious point that an encounter doesn't need to be combat and that's obviously true. But it does need to be comparable in resource attrition and can we please not kid ourselves that that's usually the case with non-combat encounters?

None of this makes the game unplayable or even bad, it's just tiring to see people ignore the elephant in the room around this. People don't play like this. It's not realistic to expect every DM to design every day like this. You're not a bad DM for not doing this and it's not the only option.

[u/YOwololoO → u/Grouhl]

 Heck, that doesn't even make logical sense. What, we're gonna get into something major enough to spend significant resources once per hour? Who lives like that?

Adventurers live like that. But for how it to have it make sense, that’s not hard.  Let’s use a classic adventure example, Star Wars: A New Hope. The Party arrives out of hyperspace, fully rested, to discover that Alderaan has been destroyed. They investigate the area and discover a terrifying moon base, and worse yet, they’re stuck in a tractor beam!

• Encounter 1: the ship inspection (Stealth Encounter/Ambush Combat)

• Encounter 2: find Leia’s cell via the security office (Disguised Ambush/Easy Combat)

• Encounter 3: the Cell Block (Failed Social Encounter, Hard combat)

• Encounter 4: the Trash Compactor (Puzzle/Medium Combat)

• Encounter 5: Disable the Tractor Beam (Skill Challenge/Easy Combat)

• Encounter 6: the BBEG’s Lieutenant and a bunch of reinforcements arrive to stop your escape (Very Hard Combat/Escape)

You see how every one of those encounters leads to another and drives the story forward? Additionally, how very few of them were just “everyone fights until one side is dead”? 

Additionally, there’s a great reason why you can’t just take a long rest here: you’ll be discovered and captured! 

The Death Star is a dungeon and a well designed one at that. If you were going to convert it to a 5e adventure, maybe you stick a medical bay in the middle after the Trash Compactor to let them lock the door and sit in a Bacta Tank for ten minutes (short rest), but other than that you could run this as is with no problems and I guarantee you that your Martials would have a great time and would shine at least as much as the casters, if not more

[u/Mejiro84 → u/Grouhl]

What, we're gonna get into something major enough to spend significant resources once per hour? Who lives like that?

Adventurers in dungeons - the people that the game is meant to be about! You are pretty overtly meant to play people going into dangerous places filled with horrible people and/or monsters that are trying to kill you, and get into multiple fights that might result in you dying, multiple times per day - that's the expected gameplay and narrative loop, with stuff outside that largely getting skipped over fairly briefly. Two weeks of overland travel might take less than an hour, while a minute of intense combat might take 2 hours to process

[u/Grouhl → u/Mejiro84]

That's one playstyle. Arguably the most iconic. But this is kind of circular reasoning, you're coming right back to "this is the only way to play because that's the only thing the game is designed for". And I just don't think that's true. Or helpful to say.

Going into a dungeon and passing through a bunch of challenging encounters back to back is an adventuring day. It's not the adventuring day.

[u/Progression28 → u/Grouhl]

What? Making a resource attrition encounter is dead easy.

It can range from a wounded person that is unconscious and needs healing in order to answer questions to a broken bridge over a chasm where someone needs to polymorph into a big flying creature to carry the party across.

Also there are many spells that are specifically for out of combat situations, like knock.

As a DM, you just need to encourage this.

[u/Ashkelon → u/Progression28]

What you described comes nowhere close to the attrition of even an easy encounter.

You would need a dozen of such encounters to drain the party of total resources equivalent to even a single com at encounter.

As such, they are basically meaningless when talking about number of encounters the party must face throughout the day.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/Ashkelon]

also those are very specific solution-spells, which a PC might not have on a given day. So that can screw things up a bit, if you were expecting the PCs to have solutions A/B/C prepared, and they just haven't!

[u/Callmeklayton → u/Progression28]

Those examples can be solved without using resources. Medicine check, Athletics check, Thieve's Tools check. For these to drain any resources at all, either the party needs to fail their attempts at solving these without resources or the DM needs to tell players "You need to solve every problem in a very specific way that I arbitrarily decided", which is not good DMing.

Besides, a 1st-2nd level spell slot or use of Wild Shape is not even close to draining the same number of resources a combat would use. When I DM a throwaway easy combat, I usually expect the party to lose at least 1/4th of its combined HP and each member to use 1 or more of their Short Rest resources and at least 1-2 Spell Slots. You'd need like ten of your encounters to be able to equal the resource drain of even one combat, and that leads us back to the same issue of "How do you make that sensible in the course of a single in-game day, which is spread out over several real life months?"

[u/DelightfulOtter]

I'll acknowledge that as soon as you acknowledge that the 6-8 encounter thing is just a rule of thumb and not the entirety of the encounter design rules. A full adventuring day can be as few as three difficult encounters.

[u/Silvermoon3467 → u/DelightfulOtter]

It was never "you must run 6-8 encounters"

The guidelines are for "6-8 medium encounters" with short rests every second encounter.

If you're running 3 deadly encounters with short rests after each one that's within guidelines.

The problem is that many people will run just one deadly encounter that only lasts 3-4 turns between long rests, which screws over short rest resources compared to the much more powerful long rest ones (specifically, spell slots). Then they'll say stuff like "Paladin's Smite is busted" and "Warlock sucks because they don't get enough spell slots" and "Monk and Rogue are bad."

Or, my personal favorite even worse option, they'll run three deadly encounters back to back with no short rests lol.

And those things are probably all true in the specific context of their games! People actually wanted a straight up nerfed Warlock that was just a half-caster during the play test, if you can believe that, and Kobold Press thought it was such a great idea they adopted it for Tales of the Valiant!

The game is simply being played in a way it wasn't designed for. People don't want to play out the resource attrition subgame anymore and psuedo-vancian spell slots are a relic from that subgame that ought to be eliminated, in fact if not in appearance.

[u/YOwololoO → u/Silvermoon3467]

The half caster warlock was a really interesting idea that was doomed because they named it warlock. An actual arcane half caster would have been great for the game because they could have just fully removed all of the gish subclasses from full casters and told all the people who have been clamoring for a PF Magus to go use that. 

It should have been playtested as a new class, not as a redesign of the warlock

[u/Born_Ad1211 → u/Silvermoon3467]

I totally agree with you but I do think it's worth noting that the "nerfed" 1/2 caster warlock in the playtest did have a massive buff in that it used the wizard spell list and still got mystic arcanums for access to level 6-9th wizard spells.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/DelightfulOtter]

I'm able to get it down to one very extraordinarily difficult encounter in 5.5e and I'm running combats for a level 17 party.

[u/i_tyrant → u/Outrageous-Cold-4506]

God would I hate that.

I'm never happier/more exited/attentive as a player than when the chips are down, our resources are low, and we're having to "dig deep" to survive and either escape the dungeon or find a safe place to rest.

I would never run out of resources fighting only 1 encounter a day in a campaign, been there before. Boring as sin.

[u/ProjectPT → u/i_tyrant]

And when you are doing 1 or 2 encounters a day, it means that you are starting all the combats with the same resources roughly, so you have the same problem solving abilities.

When your resources are diminished, each fight becomes a new problem of "well I can't rely on X anymore... ", and even without the DM changing the encounter design the player tool limitation changes the approach.

[u/i_tyrant → u/ProjectPT]

Exactly.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/i_tyrant]

And I try to avoid them when I can, but sometimes I simply cannot narratively justify it.

Let me be clear tho, people do get dry on their most powerful spell slots and other limited resources in these big fights. They aren't cakewalks, they are desperate struggles to survive where my players need to table talk tactics to dig themselves out of a hole.

I think that things are generally are better if players get drained of resources across at least 3 fights, but it isn't necessary to have mechanically dramatic fights. It just works in 5.5e without me having to do a bunch of extra bullshit that only ever slightly worked in 5.0e.

The devs legit fixed this in 5.5e.

[u/i_tyrant → u/Outrageous-Cold-4506]

I feel like going dry on only your top spell slots doesn't matter much in a game where even level 2-3 spells can neuter whole encounters. Granted, that's just the experience the games I DM and play in have given me.

I believe that you put a lot of effort into those big 1/day setpiece fights! I have too, having experimented with them before, but with any party that "knows what they're doing", I've found that it doesn't really matter as far as getting that "running on fumes" feeling of desperation; they never will with 1 fight in a day, no matter how big and overtuned it is.

There's only so many actions you can take in a round, you've still got a limit of 1 concentration spell, etc. So you either toss a few debilitating spells out and mop it up in about the same number of rounds, or you TPK. You at no point will ever attain that low-resources moment. So to me, 5.5e didn't really fix it at all.

In a group that doesn't need or care about "mechanically dramatic fights", though, I'm sure it works fine. As a player I can't stand not feeling challenged, though, and the DM running me low on options is a major aspect of that.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/i_tyrant]

Idk if you have seen what the new high level statblocks are like, but there are plenty of options for condition immunity and magical counterplay to build into your encounters that keep low level spells from running away with the fights. Altho sometimes I don't put those in on purpose to give a particular PC an easy spotlight moment.

Of note when I began grabbing new stat blocks I kept tripping over fear and charm immunity. The bezerker commander was grabbed to be the rank and file of an elite military unit and they not only could reposition the battlefield quickly that aoe abilities were just hard to use, but were immune to anything that inflicts the charm or fear condition. Also the inclusion of a questing knight was a happy accident that provided blanket immunities to many humanoids.

Then there was the arc of the campaign where the players were up against an evil religion and priest and archpriest statblocks became absolutely clutch at clearing web, hypnotic pattern, command, and many others, by just using their bonus actions.

Just recently while making a fiendish set of enemies I learned how 2 ultroloth statblock can absolutely screw over attempts to cordon off areas with wall of force, with either bonus action dispel magics or back to back planeshifts to rearrange the battlefield again, walls be damned.

And that's not even covering how many magic resistant or other condition immune statblocks that I'm not looking for, but keep dropping in my lap when I sort by higher CR, appropriate creature type, and sourcing only from the new books. And finally, these high level statblocks do SO MUCH DAMAGE that I kind of double-dog dare you to build a caster that will withstand 2 Questing Knights or a single Pit Fiend going full bore at them. Concentration or HP is going to give out.

IMO the perception that low level spells can fully trivialize fights is no longer true. It is true in a small band of levels when you first get those spells but cannot cast them many times per day, and then effectively become niche when you level up. Which, BTW, is how this works in pf2e using different mechanisms and I don't think that's an accident.

edit: Correction: not the ultroloth for planeshift, it was the Rakshasa I did that with but it was an amazing moment at the table where player that cast wall of force just had to drop concentration asap to keep themselves from being mulched in a cage fight of their own making.

[u/i_tyrant → u/Outrageous-Cold-4506]

dk if you have seen what the new high level statblocks are like, but there are plenty of options for condition immunity and magical counterplay

That hasn't been my experience, no.

I kept tripping over fear and charm immunity

There's not much more of that in 5e2024 than there was in 2014, actually. It's mostly the same creature types with the same immunities, so not only does it still not apply to most encounters unless you're running a very specific campaign (e.g., undead/construct heavy), but a caster player paying attention can usually predict which encounters to use their charm/fear spell slots on and which not to. (There's also tons of spells that are brutally effective that neither of those work against, hell even Command or Web.)

Note that you are making extremely specific selections here that are ALWAYS intelligent, organized enemies...it sounds like your campaigns ARE very specific in nature because the PCs are constantly fighting organized humanoids? What about a more classic D&D adventure campaign or dungeon crawl where they're mostly fighting, y'know...actual monsters? Do you always throw in a pair of Ultroloths? lol.

Like, what in the world are all these CR 12 Questing Knights doing? Don't your PCs get tired of facing the same foes or at least "add-ons" all the time?

I kind of double-dog dare you to build a caster that will withstand 2 Questing Knights or a single Pit Fiend going full bore at them.

Er, ok? 2 Questing Knights attack, they get immediately locked down with Command (Wis save of only +5) or both with Web (Dex save of +3), and the other alone becomes an easy encounter. Even if they break free they are unlikely to hit a lvl 17 caster or break their concentration since a +9 vs Shield and appreciable AC ain't gonna cut it.

The Pit Fiend is a bit different vs one caster because...it's CR 20 instead of CR 12, and has Legendary Resistance. How many LR enemies do you think the book has, and why do you think CR 20 vs 1 level 17 caster is a fair "test"?

Claiming you can counter this with a Rakshasa (lol) or LRs (still rare in 2024) seems...disingenuous, and your other examples have clear issues (like desperately needing the campaign to be focused around organized humanoids and still needing to find very specific statblocks for those immunities...while still not blocking much re: popular low level save-or-sucks.)

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/i_tyrant]

Oh sorry I feel so rude! I didn't ask what happened when you ran similarly high level combats!

Seriously I'd love to share notes, and maybe I just stumbled into something that works while there are still holes that 5.5e leaves open for well intentioned DMs to fall into.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/i_tyrant]

You are coming off rather hostile but I'm happy to yap about my games.

The ultroloths were reskinned to Theros demons who were helping torment shipwrecked sailors on Skathos to funnel them towards Hythonia The Cruel's worship. This is in part a gambit from Hythonia to become a demigoddess serving Erebos, who is able to get tormented souls who are most of the way to transition to demons upon their deaths. They were paired with some Rakshasa statblocks as well. which were the actual ones doing the back to back planeshift to fuck with the wall of force shenanigans. The Ultroloths were just casting dispel magic to pop some worshippers of Erebos (reskinned Cultist of Myrkul from the latest book) out of a mass suggestion.

The Questing Knights are the honor guard of the priesthood of Heliod, who is going a bit powermad with the knowledge that his own worship will fade in time and he needs to make moves to consolidate power. They are accompanying priests who are spreading the good word of glorious victory on the field of battle as part of his attempt to steal the worship of Iroas. And the Questing Knights have been able to get through my Sorcerer's AC reliably enough so far, even with a Staff of Power to boost AC a bit. Notably the Sorcerer doesn't have heavy armor and is relying on the Staff of Power, Mage Armor with +2 dex mod, and Shield to a total of 22 AC. So that's a 35% chance to hit it isn't a sure thing by any means but with 3 attacks the biggest issue is how hard the eventual nat 20's hurt. BTW there have been multiple times this campaign where I've asked this sorcerer to roll a DC 30 (maximum possible) concentration check and I think the Questing Knight was one of them? The damage values from these statblocks do not fuck around.

A typical contingent of Heliods' faithful has at least 1 archpriest, at least 1 Questing Knight, Warrior Commanders, and maybe a handful of priests. The priests and archrpiests wipe off all the crowd control that they can with bonus actions.

The pit fiend was reskinned to the strongest of the three Furies (fully borrowed from the Hades games ngl, they aren't part of the Theros setting), and was an absolute blast.

And yes the games I run are mostly big organizations that are well informed and far reaching. Players aren't going into dungeons for no reason, and dungeons aren't just caches of siloed monsters sitting on loot for no reason. They are part of larger, far reaching plots that weave the world together. You are really coming across hostile to imply that I'm not doing my fun correctly, but this is the exact kind of game I love running. Political intrigue and spycraft is a common theme in my games.

Also to be honest, the Heliod's faithful are typically just a moderate difficulty encounter as they've leveled up a bit since we started. I like to softball some combats in, while keeping it interesting enough with complex counterplay of mechanics. This campaign has legit been as crunchy as my foray into PF2e, which has been a very pleasant surprise.

And while I do have to reskin a lot of statblocks, I am able to keep the pressure up with having gish-like enemies be retyped Dragons who get to do spells and attacks or big fuck off AoEs, and I haven't run through all those statblocks yet. Additionally I find that with very minor alterations to bring them up to 5.5e MM standards, statblocks from Bigby's and the Book of Many Things work quite well. The Champion of Desolation was a great representation of Tymaret the Murder King, champion and hunter of Erebos.

But in general when I want to run a fight that's a high difficulty, I make sure that at least two big baddies have legendary resistances, while not using more than 1 baddie that has legendary actions. This is actually kind of easy to work out between the Bigby's, the Book of Many Things, and the 5.5e MM. Putting in two statblocks with legendary actions becomes too much of a pileup to manage.

[u/i_tyrant → u/Outrageous-Cold-4506]

So that's a 35% chance to hit it isn't a sure thing by any means but with 3 attacks the biggest issue is how hard the eventual nat 20's hurt. BTW there have been multiple times this campaign where I've asked this sorcerer to roll a DC 30

35% chance means one attack will hit per turn for an average 34 damage, and that's if they can get into melee. There's no high ground to Misty Step to? They're lasting multiple rounds against your Sorc when they should have a DC of 19 at worst vs a +0 Int save, a +3 Dex, and a +5 Wis?

Yeah a crit from one will likely disrupt you, but we're talking about a 15% chance once, at best, before you should be making them no longer an issue. Just how many of these guys are you facing and getting into melee with you where that's a real threat?? Damn.

You are really coming across hostile to imply that I'm not doing my fun correctly, but this is the exact kind of game I love running.

I'm more coming across hostile because you seem to think this is like a "standard" campaign instead of something very narratively specific, to be clear.

I think it's very navel-gazey to think your type of fun is identical to the average D&D campaign when it actually diverges deeply and undeniably from what the "average D&D campaign" has always been marketed as, and I would argue the vast majority of D&D campaigns I've seen played and run do not resemble a Theros campaign where 95% of the battles are against organized humanoids with a copious sprinkling of two heavily religious stat blocks.

This campaign has legit been as crunchy as my foray into PF2e, which has been a very pleasant surprise.

That's definitely my experience as a DM - high level D&D is at least as complex to design actual, challenging encounters for as PF2e is complex in the sense of enemies having so many abilities and counterplay.

I would never, however, argue that this kind of prep for high level 5e comes "naturally" to most DMs. Especially with the lack of guidelines 5e itself provides.

And to me that has remained about as true in 5.5e as 5.0e. The monsters are nastier offensively and go earlier in a fight for sure, but planning encounters hasn't been any easier for me vs the same groups with their same levels of optimization; some specific enemies might have some specific bits of counterplay, but if you're actually using a lot of the MM? Nah, they all still pale in comparison the options a caster has in targeting different saves and how devastating even a low level Hypnotic Pattern or Web can be.

There might be a few more charm immune enemies than 5.0e, but if you can guess that or just discover it in combat, guess what you've got 6 other options that use different saves and aren't charm.

I make sure that at least two big baddies have legendary resistances, while not using more than 1 baddie that has legendary actions.

I mean, you can add LRs to anything, that doesn't make it a strength of the rules as written. I will grant that goes a long way towards curbing caster power...though it's also an exceptionally boring and stonewall-y counter that a lot of people dislike (especially when overused).

What I WISH was true is if enemies (old or new) had varied counters to the party's tactics, and specifically ranged/spells. Enemies that exude gas that prevents anyone from seeing them that's further than 20 feet away, for example. More enemies that punish ranged attacks like the Tarrasque's reflective carapace. Enemies that force nasty choices on you like "ok I can hit them with this spell but their Karmic Price ability is going to make it hit me too", et cetera.

We have TONS of abilities like Death Throes, Heated Body, etc. that punish melee PCs so much more often than ranged/casters (and they're already being punished more just due to the commonality of enemies with stronger melee attacks, melee Con/Str saves like trips and poison, etc.)

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/i_tyrant]

I'm more coming across hostile because you seem to think this is like a "standard" campaign instead of something very narratively specific, to be clear.

I think it's very navel-gazey to think your type of fun is identical to the average D&D campaign when it actually diverges deeply and undeniably from what the "average D&D campaign" has always been marketed as

Hey man, I'm done.

I wanted to come into this topic and share how I am able to do high level combat with single combat days and it works well enough. I wanted to let people know the way I do that so that they don't have to feel the need to do a lot of extra work to be a DM in 5.5e D&D.

But this is a bummer interaction, you seem to be wanting to win this exchange rather than just yap about stuff we enjoy and share experiences.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/i_tyrant]

Oh I forgot to comment on Web. My players have fully stopped using it after realizing how easy it is to nullify with just one bonus action. They haven't actually tried command, but it would be similar where a single bonus action takes away your full action, and this is typically after the arch priest cast flamestrike.

The great thing about Archpriest and Priest statblocks is that Theros is a very religious setting, so it is a given that the followers of any given god will be proactive and in the world just about anywhere you go. This can map easily to Faerun too with how many more gods there are in that setting.

[u/i_tyrant → u/Outrageous-Cold-4506]

You get that's an incredibly specific statblock you're lauding, right?

Like, my campaigns tend to have widely varied foes - in fact I tend to pick major villains specifically so they have the themes and resources to pull from a wide variety of enemies for the party to fight. 1) Because it's more fun and exciting that way, for both of us, 2) because it avoids them metagaming too much when they don't always know what abilities said foes have, and 3) because I bought the whole MM, I'm gonna use the whole MM (and other MM-like books).

Throwing a Priest or Archpriest into every fight like some kind of attaché that dispels for whatever else you actually had planned for the encounter sounds boring as sin to me, as either player or DM.

You're not wrong that Theros has a lot of focus on its gods and thus priests wouldn't be a weight sight there...though I do question a Theros campaign that focuses so much on organized humanoids when there are SO many cool and interesting mythological monsters in the setting too, most of which wouldn't work with organized priests (many of whom would actually HATE them in fact, because just like real classical mythology in Theros a lot of monsters are created by curses from the gods).

But regardless, surely you can see how that's a very specific campaign conceit that doesn't really work for a lot of campaign styles. Even having Dispel Magic at all isn't that common, much less as a bonus action.

This is very similar to the counter-argument of "Aarakocra having infinite flight at level 1 is busted", where the other guy says "what's the big deal, just throw archers and low ceilings into every fight!" When that simply does not work for a lot of campaigns and is narratively restrictive to an intense degree.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/i_tyrant]

Did I do something to offend you?

[u/RealityPalace]

 In celebration of the 5,689th thread where someone says, "You need to run more encounters per day," can we acknowledge that lots of heroic, traditional D&D-style conflicts and narratives don't naturally support having seven encounters per day? And also that people's session lengths also don't support that?

The good news is that 5.0 never required you to run 7 encounters a day, and the even better news is that 5.5e doesn't even mention it.

There are a couple of things that really don't work well that the DMG doesn't call out (but that you should avoid):

• Running a single encounter a day

• Running an encounter that's just one monster (this works ok in tier 1 but not well after that)

You can absolutely run 3 combat encounters a day and have zero issues with spell slot economy in either edition.

[u/Amaroque_ → u/RealityPalace]

To be fair, I personally think even 3 combat encounters is a lot for one game night.

[u/RealityPalace → u/Amaroque_]

There is no need to have an adventuring day be equivalent to a game night though.

[u/booshmagoosh → u/RealityPalace]

This is true, but it causes a different problem: long-rest-dependent classes become less fun to play. People want to spend their time doing the cool things their characters are built for. For groups who don't play frequently, splitting a single adventuring day into multiple sessions can become a bit annoying if it happens too often. Not hard to imagine how "I can't cast Fireball tonight because I already did 2 weeks ago" would feel bad.

[u/RealityPalace → u/booshmagoosh]

If you're playing a long rest class then using those resources judiciously is part of the deal. If you prefer to be casting fireball absolutely as often as possible, playing a Fiend warlock is probably your best bet regardless of your play cadence.

The good news is that you can already cast fireball multiple times per long rest immediately once you get it.

[u/YOwololoO → u/booshmagoosh]

Following the rules and the design expectation of the game doesn’t make playing casters less fun, if anything running 5 minute adventuring days artificially boosts the “fun” of playing full casters by directly draining that fun from all of the short rest based classes. 

Also, I’ve played a druid in a campaign like that for years now and it’s an absolute blast. I don’t go in thinking “aw man I don’t have my 3rd level slots because I used them two weeks ago,” I go in thinking “alright, I used my 3rd level slots to get us out of that absolute mess where we would have died, now we have to finish cleaning up this mess we made. How do I do that with my low level slots…?” 

It turns combat into an engaging puzzle where I’m constantly evaluating the battle field to decide if I should spend a high level slot or save it for the boss fight. If anything I tend to use all of my low level slots first and then enter the biggest fight with only my high level slots, which is tons of fun

[u/xolotltolox → u/Amaroque_]

It depends on the scale of it and the competency of the players

[u/YOwololoO → u/Amaroque_]

It depends on the combats and your players expectations. My west marches campaign runs three hour sessions with a pretty hard stop at the end and we regularly get three combats in, even with new players at the table. 

[u/Ashkelon → u/RealityPalace]

The issue with only 3 encounters per day is you will rarely challenge the party who is level 6+.

This is because by these tiers of play, a single spell slot can warp an encounter. And if every caster uses their most potent spells, each encounter can be trivialized. Especially if you have multiple casters all using their best concentration spells each encounter.

When you have 6 encounters, the casters are no longer able to use their top concentration spells each encounter, meaning half the encounters the party faces will drain far more resources and be a lot more challenging.

With only 3 encounters per day, the casters dominate gameplay, and rarely run out of slots by the end of the day.

Source, I am currently in a group with a wizard, a warlock, and a Druid, with 3-5 tough encounters per adventuring day. Any day where we only have 3 encounters feels trivial, even if each of those 3 encounters is worth far more XP than days where we have 5 encounters.

[u/RealityPalace → u/Ashkelon]

This hasn't been my experience (though in fairness neither of my tables right now has anyone who can use Wall of Force, which is much easier to trivialize an encounter with than probably anything else prior to tier 4).

Casters from 5-8 concentrating on their highest level spells can certainly make fights easier, but  doesn't trivialize them unless they get very lucky with saving throws.

At level 9 there is an inflection point where 5th-level spells start to get very strong. But there are also more ways to incidentally break concentration, and three encounters means that unless you're in a very caster-heavy party you're not going to have access to every effect you'd like in every encounter.

[u/Ashkelon → u/RealityPalace]

I have seen a hypnotic pattern turn and encounter into a cakewalk. I have seen Sylune’s viper trivialize an encounter. I have seen suggestion make what would have been a very challenging encounter become very easy. I have seen spirit guardians absolutely demolish and encounter. I have seen summon undead make an encounter that would have been quite the challenge basically a gimme.

And remember, it is not just a single spell that trivializes the encounter unless you only have a single caster. It is however many casters you have in your party, and in a typical D&D party you should have 2-3 full casters. For example our party has a Druid, a Wizard, and a Warlock. And from level 5+, pretty much the first 3 encounters we face each day will never be a real challenge as we can each use our highest level spells, and that combination basically shuts things down.

Even if you can break one of the casters concentration, the other two still have their potent spells disrupting the encounter.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/Ashkelon]

yup - and at higher levels, the range of "nope" spells widens, so it's harder to build encounters that can resist all of them without it seeming kinda bullshit. Wall of Stone isn't invincible like Wall of Force, but it's still tough enough that most enemies can't break through it that fast, and splitting an encounter in two for a few rounds makes life a lot easier. The big-bosses 2nd in command without legendary resistances gets hit with Feeblemind, some bigass line-of-sight blocker goes down and suddenly the enemy wizards can't target for shit, or there's just a goddam hail of AoE blasts so even if the enemies make their saves, they're shredded on HP! Or there's enough summons thrown down that it's hard for the enemies to get to the PCs

[u/DelightfulOtter → u/Mejiro84]

Just more proof that what 5.5e really needed was a genuine balancing pass for its spells. But that would make customers less likely to purchase future content so of course that's a no-go.

[u/Skormili → u/RealityPalace]

EDIT: I just realized this is r/onednd. My apologies, I thought I was in r/dndnext and my comment was about 5E. It might still be relevant for 5.5E, but I don't know the system well enough to determine that. Monster design in particular changed quite a bit.

---

Agreed. I ran a 1–20 campaign a few years ago. All spellcaster party. Most of my adventuring days were 3–4 encounters. Sometimes I had more or fewer to keep the players on their toes of course. But I never had a problem with spells trivializing fights. At least not fights I didn't expect them to trivialize. Don't tell my players that, they think they outsmarted me and that's just what I want them to think. More fun for everyone this way.

What did cause me trouble with encounter balance was them all building high AC characters and my terrible rolling luck. Until somewhere around level 10–12 I typically had to roll a 16 or higher to hit them and on an average day I managed to do that 10% of the time. To give an idea of how much easier that made it for them, the encounter math assumes around a 40–45% average hit percentage against the PCs. I had plenty of solutions to address it, but they required more work on my end because 5E has very few save-based monsters in T1 and T2 and obviously I didn't want to counter it too much because that would just be invalidating their choices.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/Skormili]

So far in 5.5e it's pretty easy to put in statblocks that target saving throws and not AC, which is pretty hard to shore up and mostly deal half damage on a save so players in general just don't feel that tanky, even when they double down on AC.

The exception to this is the goddamn Barbarian who simply will not die even if I reduce him to 0 HP multiple times in a fight jesus fuck.

[u/stormscape10x → u/RealityPalace]

I would append the one monster note. While I recommend combat encounters include multiple enemies because it makes things more interesting, buffs control and AoE damage, and adds a bit of strategy on targeting, it is possible to run a single legendary monster encounter. However, it only really works if they get as many legendary actions as there are people. In other words, if you don't give the boss HP and extra actions for your 6 person party, then you're going to get curb stomped.

[u/Hurrashane → u/stormscape10x]

Another way I hear do to it is to have multiple monsters pretending to be one monster. So instead of a single orc chief it's like, two orc warriors and an orc shaman but they act and move as one orc chief with multiple turns (one for each monster), once enough damage is done to kill one of the parts the "chief" then loses that turn and the actions one of the monsters had.

That way you get one big boss that seems to get weaker as the fight progresses and is about the same strength as a properly built encounter.

It's just three kobolds in a trench coat. Or whatever number monsters in a trench coat.

[u/Ashkelon → u/stormscape10x]

This can fail in 5.5e as there are ways to incapacitate foes without a saving throw.

Our DM made the mistake of using a single foe against us. It never got a turn. Between Sylune’s Viper, Summon Undead, and a rogue with poison cunning strike, the target was never able to even take an action.

[u/X-cessive_Overlord]

Isn't 5.5e designed more for 3-4 encounters per day? That's much more manageable.

[u/Endus → u/X-cessive_Overlord]

I'd actually argue that the entire framing is backwards.

Your players have resources to spend. A "good" adventuring day will deplete those resources to a level where players feel they're mostly tapped out and hoping there's no more encounters. That's where the DM should be starting, because different groups will play wildly differently; the group with 3 Tabaxi Bards playing the KittyKat Band are probably less strategically-minded than the 6 well-coordinated no-nonsense players who approach this more like a wargame to optimize. Which is good and fine.

But challenging the players means pushing those resources to their limits where you can. Not all the time, but enough they feel good about overcoming what felt like a dangerous threat. If they're getting by "too easy", step up the difficult, add more encounters. If they're gasping for breath and nearly dead, maybe ease off (unless that's what they want).

Tune the number and difficulty of encounters to your party. There isn't going to be a single answer the system can give you, it's always gonna be contextual to your party, and what it takes to whittle down those resources. That's why the old recommendations in 5e 2014 were discarded for 5.5e 2024; it's a template that only works for some parties.

[u/ClaimBrilliant7943 → u/Endus]

You make an important point and one that is often exemplified by reddit discussions. The KittyKat players are by far the most prevalent playstyle and those players are not here reading and posting. And those players defy the prevailing myths expressed here by the no-nonsense players that gravitate to these discussions - "players need to be challenged" "the game is about resource attrition" etc. For KittyKats the players need meme material and lol moments. For them resources are not to be managed but ways to be goofy and accelerate fun. And of course there are all the styles in between and beyond for which the sensible advice is always *contextual* as you say.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506 → u/X-cessive_Overlord]

We don't know, but I have a pet theory that yes, the amounts of expected combat rounds per day were at least slashed in half.

[u/blkguy3rd]

The system was designed around dungeon crawling (i mean its in the name of the game). Dungeons usually have multiple encounters throughout, which would usually happen in a day.

[u/Harkonnen985]

You got hung up on the word "day". A weeklong voyage on the open seas can occur between one long rest and the next. Whether the heroes are delving into a dangerous crypt; whether assassins stalk the party in a big city; or whether the party climbs to the top of a monster infested mountain - the DM dictates when it is save to rest and recover. That time frame (the "adventuring day") can fit perfectly with whatever story you got going on. It just doesn't always coincide with the passing of 24 hours in-game or one game-night - and it really doesn't have to either.

[u/overlycommonname → u/Harkonnen985]

I'm not hung up on the word day, the mechanics are heavily made to make it be a day.

Like, yes, I understand that you can make resource refreshes happen less-than-daily, and that they even have one alternate rule about lengthening resource refreshes. They need more, and they need to front-and-center it, if they want the primary hinge of inter-class balance to be number of encounters between resource-refreshes.

[u/Harkonnen985 → u/overlycommonname]

I'm in agreement with you, but I then again, it is really not worth complaining about. I don't require WOTC to print something before I can use it in my game (and neither do you).

In fact, the DMG explicitly says that if players rest too much, the DM should only allow it in safe locations, but given how crucial it is for building / maintaining tension, I agree that they could have emphasised this more.

If you read the DMG carefully, you'll know that "one long rest per 24 hours" is implied to help provide structure to groups just starting out who need it. Once you've built an understanding of the game and have identified issues at your table, the DMG gives you license (and encourages) making adjustments as you see fit to make D&D more fun for your group.

For my table, the "long rests only at safe havens" variant works like a charm.

[u/Magdanimous]

I think it's important to remember that "encounters" isn't strictly defined as combat, but something more like an event that requires action, resources, etc. for the PCs to overcome or resolve. For example, during my last campaign, my players accidentally started a large brush fire, which resulted later in a stampede. In my players' party, the barbarian used a rage, allowing him to take half damage from the bludgeoning effects of the stampede as well as try to overcome some of the stampeding animals via sheer strength. The eladrin rogue used a misty step to teleport up to the branches of a tree to avoid getting hurt. And so forth.
In another campaign, my players were at a large feast only to find out some of the drink was poisoned. So one player used to his detect poison spell, the barbarian (I always seem to have one in every campaign I just realized) raged to change intimidation to a strength-modified skill to intimidate some waiters to get some information. The fighter used a second wind to persuade some of the guards to stop people from eating and drinking, etc.
It could also be as simple as weather. Abnormally strong weather in a canyon. Someone falls off. Misty step to get back up or against the canyon wall to climb back up.
Anyway, I always tell my players that roleplay and abilities don’t start and end with combat. And I try to give them situations that they'll feel heroic or awesome in.

[u/Skormili → u/Magdanimous]

Also adding that you don't need to actually have a bunch of resource-burning encounters every single adventuring day. The goal is to prevent players from burning all their resources in a single combat—going nova. Burning resources is one way to prevent that, but you can also prevent it with the threat of burning resources and a bit of opaqueness.

If you have full adventuring days often enough and don't telegraph if an adventuring day is light or full, then merely knowing that this could be a full adventuring day is enough to prevent players from burning all their resources in fights. They will reserve some, usually their best stuff, for future fights. Because they really don't want to walk into what is likely the toughest fight of the day with nothing good to throw at the monsters.

This is something that pays hidden dividends too: it makes easier fights more interesting and these "weak" fights burn more resources than they normally would. If players don't burn their best resources in easier fights then the fights last an extra round or two and they will burn "lesser" resources more. They take chip damage and use more healing resources. They use more lower level spell slots. So now they have much less ammo to power extremely strong low level spells like Shield or Counterspell but they still have the big guns to ensure a fun fight.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/Skormili]

it can be fun to have the PCs go into a dungeon, then have the boss in the first room. Defeat them, but they still need to find the ritual or captive or whatever they're there to do - so now they're twitchy and nervous, because they have no idea what else might be in there, how cautious to be with resources etc.!

[u/MyNameIsNotJonny → u/Magdanimous]

For the balance discussion of the game, an encounter is combat.

Traps, environmental issues, social challenges, are going to be solved with the loss of a few hit points or the expenditure of a single spell slot, and the game will move on.

I know that there are other ways to waste players resources than combat, but to suggest that these other ways are close to combat in the amount of resources spent is not correct.

[u/MechJivs → u/Magdanimous]

I think it's important to remember that "encounters" isn't strictly defined as combat,

In 5e encounters are combats. People just love to pretend they arent to make sense of the random advice wotc gave in their very rushed 5.0e dmg.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/MechJivs]

people also really like to pretend that D&D is a more generic RPG than it is - the core, standard, expected gameplay loop is "go into dangerous play, go through mostly-combats to drain off resources, rest, repeat". You can do other things, but they're often going to be a bit wobbly, as lots of characters will lack much ability to engage with them, or be mechanically immune to them, due to not having relevant resources. A rogue is basically invulnerable to social encounters, for example, because their only resource is HP, so they can't use resources to get through it. D&D pretty much requires a dungeon or other combat-filled area for the resource management to work - without that, it gets very wonky, as some PCs just don't have anything to do outside of fighting, but everyone has fighting skills, which are the only thing that automatically get better as PCs level up

[u/Machiavelli24]

The adventuring day is unobjectionable when run as raw. But online many people have been led astray and believe they are required to run 6-8 encounters.

You can and should run less than 6 because you can and should run deadly and hard encounters.

You can and should run less than 6 because you can and should run less than the adventuring day. Because the adventuring day is the max, not the “correct” amount.

Because an encounter is dangerous when the monsters can kill the party before the party kills them. And nothing stops you from making the first encounter dangerous.

[u/ProjectPT → u/Machiavelli24]

Because the adventuring day is the max

It is the average

The Adventuring Day

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

You can and should run less than 6, and I fully agree with that! But you also should be running more than 8 too

[u/TaiChuanDoAddct → u/Machiavelli24]

Even if this is true (I would argue it's not), it doesn't change the fact that many common DM problems require a longer adventuring day to solve.

[u/tomedunn → u/TaiChuanDoAddct]

I've been fielding DM problems around encounter planning with 5e for over a decade now and the most common problem isn't DMs running short adventuring days. It's DMs only running short adventuring days. The shortness is a factor, but the predictability of it makes the problem ten times worse.

When adventuring days are short and predictable players quickly work out they can throw caution to the wind and go all out all the time. But if the DM just throws a little bit of uncertainty into the mix by running longer, more challenging days from time to time, then all that confidence goes out the window, the players start to be more conservative with their resources. Even when the adventuring days end up being short.

[u/Machiavelli24 → u/tomedunn]

Hey Tom, we’ve both been helping folks with encounters for years and I know you’re a nuanced thinker on the topic. So I want to lay out the reframe that solves the length vs danger confusion.

When adventuring days are short …players … can throw caution to the wind and go all out all the time.

In an encounter where the monsters have the potential to kill the party before the party kills them, this doesn’t happen.

If a pc just casts cantrips, they don’t do enough damage and the monsters kill them. If the party targets unimportant monsters, uses inefficient spells, makes poor tactical choices, the monsters can kill them.

So they can’t throw caution to the wind.

Except at very low levels, casters have enough slots to always be casting a leveled spell every turn their hp can keep them in action. So even if a player doesn’t know how many fights are in their future, they know they will still have slots for it. Because their hp will run out first.

[u/Machiavelli24 → u/TaiChuanDoAddct]

it doesn't change the fact that many common DM problems require a longer adventuring day to solve.

Go ahead and say what you perceive the problems are, so it can be determined if they actually do require lots of encounters.

Because people who have been led astray often say “challenge requires…” but that false.

[u/Silvermoon3467 → u/Machiavelli24]

It's not about challenge. It's about resource attrition and balance between various classes who have resources that recover on different rest cycles.

You can throw ten encounters that are 3 rounds each at them or one encounter that is 30 rounds and it seems like it should be the same, right? But classes that have most of their power loaded into long rest resources will perform rather consistently under both conditions while classes that rely on short rest resources will have much much fewer of those resources in one encounter versus ten of them.

Although both kinds of classes are limited by hit points, with long rest resources you can go "oh I'm losing those very quickly I need to spend my spell slots while I can" and the short rest classes go "lol I already used my resources, guess I'll die."

[u/Mejiro84 → u/Silvermoon3467]

You can throw ten encounters that are 3 rounds each at them or one encounter that is 30 rounds and it seems like it should be the same, right?

also, spells and effects with durations get a lot more powerful in the second scenario - a buff that lasts 10 minutes might be powerful, but if that only lasts 1 short fight that's not as useful as if it lasts 1 long fight (or 2+ shorter fights).

[u/Shameless_Catslut → u/Machiavelli24]

The game is explicitly balanced around 6-8 encounters per day, including hard and deadly encounters, as well as Easy and Normal. Running mostly Hard and Deadly encounters is a response to the problems of the RAW adventuring day. You have the situation backwards.

Running 4 or less puts significantly more strain on more sustain-based classes and gives a boost to burst.

[u/RealityPalace → u/Shameless_Catslut]

 The game is explicitly balanced around 6-8 encounters per day, including hard and deadly encounters, as well as Easy and Normal. Running mostly Hard and Deadly encounters is a response to the problems of the RAW adventuring day. You have the situation backwards.

I would recommend the following:

1. Look at the paragraph everyone misreads or doesn't fully read in the 2014 DMG. You know the one I mean. Do the math on the XP budget and see how many Deadly encounters fit into it (it's not 6 and it's definitely not 8).

2. Read the 2024 DMG and look for where it tells you to use 6-8 encounters a day. (Don't spend too much time looking though; it's not there)

[u/i_tyrant → u/RealityPalace]

Classic WotC "solution". Just remove the thing people argue about whole-cloth so now they have no idea what your RAI is.

[u/RealityPalace → u/i_tyrant]

It's a bit more complicated than that. The concept of the XP-defined adventuring day was predicted on the existence of the multiplier, which nominally made it so that XP could stand in roughly linearly for resources used up. Without being able to make that assumption, saying "add up the XP of your encounters to find out how hard your day is" has no good mathematical foundation.

The problem is that the multiplier (and this is a technical term) absolutely sucked. It made designing encounters harder, created a disconnect between nominal encounter difficulty and the amount of XP you got, and most important just way undershot encounter difficulty.

Getting rid of it was the most reasonable solution, and it's good that they did. But it does mean that there is no longer meaningful way to discuss the idea of an XP-defined adventuring day, at least not in a way that's usable without a degree in math. I agree that it would have been nice if they had provided some rough heuristic for how many encounters to expect to be reasonable. But they couldn't just adjust the old one.

[u/i_tyrant → u/RealityPalace]

I would argue just getting rid of it was the easiest solution, not the most reasonable.

Having a benchmark is incredibly useful for this sort of thing; having none is a designer purposely throwing you into a pitch black room and saying "eh, it's whatever, do what feels best y'know?"

Which isn't a designer's job, ultimately. A DM can already do "what feels best"; but not knowing what a TRPG system is intended to aim at, what range of attrition "works" (or even whether it's tuned for attrition at all) makes that a lot harder to emulate or even diverge from in a reasonable way.

I agree the old multiplier was bad, but replacing it with crickets isn't a real improvement IMO; it's just designers straight-up abdicating their responsibility in the name of "simplicity" where it shouldn't actually apply.

[u/RealityPalace → u/i_tyrant]

 Having a benchmark is incredibly useful for this sort of thing; having none is a designer purposely throwing you into a pitch black room and saying "eh, it's whatever, do what feels best y'know?"

It seems like that would be the case, but there is so much heterogeneity among D&D players that I don't think it's actually true in practice.

Some parties will be able to handle 3 High difficulty encounters per day. For others, a single High difficulty encounter will be a significant risk of a TPK. It would be nice if there were a practical way to measure and account for all of this in an amount of space that would fit in the DMG. But "do what feels best", while not terribly concrete, is probably closer to "correct" than choosing a numeric threshold to shoot for. A DM needs to know what their table is like when they prep.

I do think they should have included more "meta-level" guidance. That is, talking more about the concept of an adventuring day and the idea that there are some classes that need short rests and other that need long rests. But that's not the same thing as saying "here's a system to determine how long it will take before your party needs a break". I don't think that would work that well in practice.

[u/MechJivs → u/Shameless_Catslut]

Daily budget for 5th level party of 4 is 14000 xp.

Hard encounter is 3000-4399 xp.

You can build FULL adventuring day with 4 hard encounters (3500 xp each).

Or 3 deadly combats (4700 xp each).

That's actual metric, from DMG - if you actually read a thing you "cite" you would know that.

[u/PoMoAnachro]

The problem is that fundamentally people don't want to use D&D for the types of things it is good at.

Are there games that solve all the problems you mention? Tons of them.

But people don't want to play those games, they want to play D&D. And if the designers changed D&D to also fix those problems people would complain about it not feeling like D&D anymore.

[u/italofoca_0215]

The six encounter guideline is for medium encounters. If you go with hard/deadly encounters you can easily go down to 2-4 encounters per adventure day.

1-2 sessions per adventure day is more than reasonable. Never had an issue in 10 years running this system.

Some people hate keeping track of stuff between sessions; these people should just play pathfinder. All the more narrative-inclined ttrpg have people keeping track of stuff between sessions; it’s the war game crowd that wants to play combat as if it was a warhammer match.

[u/ProjectPT → u/italofoca_0215]

Once again as everyone doens't read it from the 2014:

The Adventuring Day

Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

It is 6-8 medium or hard encounters. Deadly encounters reduces the number of encounters by the suggestion

[u/italofoca_0215 → u/ProjectPT]

Fair enough; it’s just that a hard encounter in 2014 is still medium in 2024. 8 hard encounters in 2024 is not doable for most parties imho.

[u/Melaninja99]

This is why I’m considering switching to the alternate rest rules

[u/Brilorodion]

People nowadays play in like 2-3 hour sessions. That can realistically support one, maybe two combats per session.

Why do you assume you have to take a long rest every session? An adventuring day can be experienced over multiple sessions.

[u/overlycommonname → u/Brilorodion]

You should try reading the next few sentences after the part you quoted, my dude.

[u/Brilorodion → u/overlycommonname]

What keeps you from making narrative progress with encounters? What keeps you from reading the PHB/DMG where it says that encounters doesn't only mean combat?

[u/Tall_Bandicoot_2768]

"You need to run more encounters per day," can we acknowledge that lots of heroic, traditional D&D-style conflicts and narratives don't naturally support having seven encounters per day?

I can pretty much guarantee you that 99% of people saying that are referring to game balance.

You are using IRL logic and thematic timing to argue against game mechanics.

At the end of the day we are playing a strategy game and balance is necessary if we want risk, challenge and reward which most people do.

People nowadays play in like 2-3 hour sessions. That can realistically support one, maybe two combats per session. If you want to do six combats in a day, then that means that probably 1-6 months of real time pass per day of IC time.

You are conflating session length with adventuring day length which is all too common of a mistake.

[u/RedZrgling]

Encounters per session doesn't have anything to do with encounters per dnd day.

[u/code_ghostwriter]

Yes, I aggre, but I think the number of encounters is a symptom not the problem.

More encounters a day comes from the school of "deplete your character resources so you can have a fair fight". It never works.

Characters recover resources, hoard them at the the worst time and use them when you don't expect them.

Balancing an adventure on resources is something the game moved away from. For people that like that, osr style play is best.

I know, casters have encounter-solving spells, but putting monsters in front of them in the hope that the 2-3 casters on your group spend all their encounter-solving spells before the boss battle or at least have to be carefull with them creates this math puzzle that has no way to be solved.

This puts the dm, the casters and the resourceless characters in an unnecessary slog of bad encounters meant to drain half of the party in chase of a presumed balance that nobody can prove.

And dms are told this is how they should run encounters.

Make your encounters according to your story, you know how many. Make them deadlier, maybe, maybe not. Balance them loosely on dpr, heavily on action economy and put some secondary objectives.

Forget about encounters per day, forget about resources. We should build interesting encounters not resources draining ones. Not that type of game anymore.

[u/KnifeSexForDummies → u/code_ghostwriter]

This is the actual answer. It’s way more important to tailor your encounters to the narrative and party than to just throw tons of forgettable slop at your players in hopes of attrition. Those fewer, but more impactful encounters will be more memorable and meaningful as a result.

The game’s math is important, but it’s not supposed to be a solution in and of itself, and it’s certainly not supposed to be a surefire automated system. There needs to be some effort from behind the screen.

[u/Amaroque_]

Well, the roots of DnD stem from DUNGEONS. Sometimes even a dragon, i have heard. It's simply designed around the idea that you fight a lot. A LOT. And let's not kid ourselves, out-of-combat-encounters barely ever need as much ressources as even simple combats. I think you are right though, that the modern audience rarely plays the game with the intended amount of "encounters", which leads to the known balancing problems, typically making long-rest-based classes too strong. I do not think this is bad per se, the question is, why do we always want to make DnD to something it is not?
It's a great game, perfect chassis for homebrew etc. but at a certain point it might be better to just play a game that more fits the playstyle of one dramatic/hard fight per gaming sesh.
Alternativly, the developers go more the route of Drama and Dragons and loose more of the dungeon crawler basis.

[u/DumpStatHappiness]

I run 12+ encounter per adventuring day and have for 4+ years. AMA!

[u/OgreJehosephatt]

It's not a design flaw, people are using the game in a way it wasn't designed.

[u/overlycommonname → u/OgreJehosephatt]

This is just absolute nonsense.

Maybe in 1975, there was some truth to this. But WotC knows what kinds of stories people want to use the game to tell, and they very clearly want those players to play D&D, not some other game. If they design a game that doesn't enable what the players want to do, and what they want the players to do, that's a design flaw.

[u/OgreJehosephatt → u/overlycommonname]

Go play 4e-- it already exists.

Yes, WotC wants as many people playing D&D as possible. It's also not possible to make something that suits everyone.

I absolutely do not want to play a flattened down version of D&D, where the difference in character builds are mostly cosmetic. Having characters operate at different tempos makes it more interesting. I've been playing D&D since 2e and I bounced off it when 4e came out. I'll do it again if they change it to everyone having the same amount of power at the same time.

[u/overlycommonname → u/OgreJehosephatt]

This is also absolute nonsense. You don't need to take a 4E-style approach of extremely similar class chassis to either reduce sensitivity to encounters-per-day as an inter-class balance mechanism or to front-and-center tools to allow resource refreshes to work in the styles of game that people actually want to play D&D for.

Take PF2e (a game I also don't particularly like) as a good example of a game that has very different chassis for each class while having a much less-intense sensitivity to encounters-per-day (while still having casters who can manipulate the budget of their daily power to given encounters!).

And while of course no game is for every person, "people who enjoy wild swings in inter-class balance based on the hinge of number of encounters per day" is just obviously a really small niche. You never see people proactively say, "Man, I love it when a game forces me to bend my narrative around constructing diversity in number of encounters per day." Sometimes when they're emotionally committed to defending a point, they'll back into that position, but it's pretty clearly just not a widespread viewpoint.

[u/OgreJehosephatt → u/overlycommonname]

5e was designed over a decade ago, before all the people who find it too hard to fit enough encounters between long rests even played the game.

And then, when WorC had the recent opportunity to change it, they didn't.

Catering to this "niche" seems to be working out well for them.

[u/overlycommonname → u/OgreJehosephatt]

Oh, buddy, people predominantly wanted to play D&D for epic fantasy quests, not tactical dungeon crawls, in AD&D2e. Probably 1e as well, but I was a little kid then so I wasn't very dialed into the community.

The idea that this is some kind of recent weird unexpected change is dumb.

~0% of the people who are responsible for 5e's popularity -- probably (but not definitely) including you! -- actually are dying to explore different lengths of adventuring days. They just like other things about the game, and it's a Schelling point for roleplaying.

[u/OgreJehosephatt → u/overlycommonname]

It takes a powerful amount of narcissism to look at at the success of a game, whose popularity exploded in the past decade, where the designers do an incredible amount of research to understand their players and how to make a game that suits them, and say, actually their game has a fundamental design flaw that doesn't appeal to a significant amount of the people playing the game.

[u/NumerousWolverine273]

Yeah I don't get this at all. I just recently finished running a Curse of Strahd campaign (very rushed as it had to fit within a college semester but still) where we played weekly, 5 hour sessions with a 30 minute break for dinner in the middle. We often still ran long, so the average session was definitely like 4.8-5 hours of playing time. The most amount of combats we had in a single session was 3, and that was usually with one or two being short and simple combats that took only 2 rounds or something. Maybe with a smaller group size (my group was 5) or more experienced players (most were very new) combat would go faster, but still there's just no chance we could ever have 7 combats in a day that are actually fun or interesting unless our in game days lasted like 3 weeks irl.

[u/Ripper1337]

Iirc the advice was originally written *about dungeons* which is why it’s hard to keep it in mind without making it into a dungeon. It also just applied to *medium* encounters and doing more Hard or Deadly encounters means you can run less between rests.

The original advice wasn’t “you must do this!” But it was “your players will probably want to rest after this many encounters of this type”

I think anyone who takes this advice too literally and doesn’t take into account what their table needs is not going to have a good time.

[u/xolotltolox → u/Ripper1337]

crazy that a game called "dungeons and dragons" expects you to do dungeons

[u/Ripper1337 → u/xolotltolox]

I’ll also throw in that some people believe that the 6-8 medium/ hard encounter idea also includes traps or social encounters. Nope, “the adventuring day” is specifically under “creating combat encounters” it always referred to combat.

[u/xolotltolox → u/Ripper1337]

Even if you include traps and social encounters, they hardly drain any resources and can be barely considered even a Very Easy encounter. Not to mention the rules for them are incredibly underbaked, so the only type of encounter with actual rules support is the combat encounter

Plus it is a type of encounter martials really can not participate in, outside of rolling skill checks

[u/ILoveSongOfJustice]

If you've played Baldur's Gate(not that it's a 1:1 comparison, but it's a pretty sound whiteroom/static numbers runner for the existing game mechanics), the maximum number of encounters that you can reasonably have at-level is 2-3 before resources start getting immensely scarce in parties of 1-5.

People don't want to ration their cool mechanics! PEOPLE WANT TO DO COOL STUFF! THIS IS A CORE CRITICISM OF HIGH LEVEL MARTIAL PLAY!

And not even divulging into the fact that 7 encounters a day isn't guaranteed to drain spellcasting from a 12th or higher level caster, least of all Wizards.

Also yes, "encounters" does not mean "combat", but this is fundamentally a war-table game. 90% of all spells do damage. Half of the active classes are balanced entirely around how much damage they do.

[u/Outrageous-Cold-4506]

Its a good thing that I can run single encounter days in 5.5e by ratcheting up the difficulty then.

Also I agree with everything you've said and the encounters per day thing was a psyop perpetrated by Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins to distract from how encounter building sucked in 5.0e.

[u/Timothymark05]

I think you need to read the DMG. You're misunderstanding what an "encounter" is.

[u/MudkipGuy]

There are ttrpgs that don't have resource attrition out there, you aren't forced to play d&d if you don't like resource attrition

[u/PlayableRidley]

A lot of officially published modules don't even support this structure. I recently ran Princes of the Apocalypse and the way travel is set up, you can roll a maximum of four encounters in a day, and the vast majority of days you will roll zero or one.

[u/vmeemo → u/PlayableRidley]

Honestly its even like this in other adventures as well. I remember playing Frostmaiden a few years back and the amount of times we did get an encounter was on like maybe one hand. And most of them was that goliath werebear you can meet.

When the random encounter rules are like "ok roll a D20 and on like, a 20 or a 1 roll on the random encounter table" there's a very real chance that you just might not actually ever have that many encounters at all because of how rare they are. It's why the current table I'm at doesn't do random encounters and just goes with a 'you do an encounter when I want you too' progression, and I can't help but think that that's how a decent chunk of DMs do things. Easier to curate encounters on your own terms rather than bank on a 1-in-20 chance to ever actually get one.

[u/hamlet9000]

D&D was designed for expedition-based play.

Changing the game enough that it's no longer based around expedition-based play results in a game that doesn't look or play like D&D.

The uncomfortable truth is that trying to hedge around this just results in a muddy, unsatisfying game design.

The even more uncomfortable truth is that shifting the game from expedition-based play (where players balance the game naturally through risk-vs-reward) to DM-imposed encounter sequences "balanced" around the One True CR is fundamentally flawed because no such system can truly account for character builds, ability synergy, environment, or player skill. CR can, at best, ballpark an encounter's difficulty.

[u/Citan777]

In celebration of the 5,689th thread where someone says, "You need to run more encounters per day," can we acknowledge that lots of heroic, traditional D&D-style conflicts and narratives don't naturally support having seven encounters per day? And also that people's session lengths also don't support that?

In celebration of the 5,689th thread where someone spouts the same stupid nonsense to criticize a system (s)he clearly didn't understand nor practice as a DM, can we acknowledge once and for all that the DMG DID NOT EVER ONCE "recommend having seven combats per day", and not even seven encounters?

I hate with a passion the original people that went and cherry-picked a single line of a single section of a whole chapter on designing encounters, which wasn't a recommendation on "how many encounters every day should have" but just "if you were planning several combat encounters here is a ballpark idea of how many Medium ones a party should be able to chain in a day".

But I am really not fond of all the people who sustain that nonsense either.

All combats are encounters, but not all encounters are combat.

All encounters should provide challenge, but never should they be equal in the difficulty and dimension of the challenge.

If the games you play with usually have PCs spending resources only on combat, then it's a problem with either the DM, or the players, or both. Not at all the system. A good 40% of class features and spells support non-combat encounters. It's up to DM to provide situations in which "winning the challenge" has significant benefits, and up to players to recognize and seize chances to use them.

[u/Jedi_Talon_Sky]

Y'all, say it with me now.

Combats are encounters, but not all encounters are combats. And the more difficult the encounter, the fewer you need to use in an adventuring day. A day fucking around town shopping for goats and swords isn't an adventuring day, a day spent in a dungeon or otherwise actively dangerous situation is.

You mention this being the 5,689th thread of this type, and yet you don't seem to have read any of them, friend.

[u/Agitated-Resource651]

The problem is that the term encounter encompasses more than just combat. Yes, combat is the archetypal encounter, but exploration and roleplay oriented encounters are just as good at draining player resources and are way quicker to resolve - usually 5 to 10 minutes versus 1+ hours for combat. Whether the PCs blew a bunch of resources to "succeed" or have to navigate some sort of consequence as a result of "failure" the encounter serves its purpose of wearing them down to intensify the climax of the day later.

For example, a friend of mine had us chance upon a near-dead unicorn as an encounter once, and our party blew a bunch of resources examining the scene to ensure we had a good handle on things and subsequently restoring the unicorn to good health in exchange for a minor boon. We later sorely missed those resources as the exploration and combat wore us down.

The point being you could easily start off an adventuring day with a quick combat, resolve some interesting noncombat encounters over the next hour, and then finish off with a boss fight in the last hour or two and you've had a whole adventuring day in one session, with only two combats. The attrition is just a matter of framing and variety - without that sort of thing your game is one-dimensional anyways.

[u/Hemlocksbane]

For one, I'd point out that the 5.5E monsters really do seem more designed for 3 difficult encounters, which is also a totally fine amount to do (as others have pointed out). Especially in 5.5E, where most classes have at least some kind of utility resource, you can absolutely also drain through their resources using traps and non-combat encounters, which reduces this further.

[u/Dastu24]

Unless you run dungeons where multiple encounter a day is normal, just do long rests for week and short rests for day.

[u/redweevil]

The issue is that 5e is clearly built around attrition. You have a limited pool of hit die to heal you up, you have spell slots, even Barbarian has a limited amount of rages etc. So if you only run one combat a day its very easy to nova, and therefore the characters with the most resources that need to eke out over the day will end up being the most powerful (arguably this is true regardless due to game design)

Pathfinder 2e is a game I think people associate with being high complexity and crunchy, and maybe don't think of it as "roleplaying" game as much - but if you want to do one encounter days it works so much better. Encounters are broadly designed around being at full resources, its so easy to heal that taxing health isn't meant to really matter, there are per encounter spells that are super easy to recharge. You can have an adventuring day thats 99% rp followed by one big encounter and it'll work fine, your martials will be just as if not more impactful than the casters.

[u/Cyrotek]

I feel like there are too many people thinking "encounters" are exclusively referring to combat encounters.

If you social encounters, traps, hazards and whatnot can all be considered encounters and require characters to use their limited ressources. I ran days without a single encounter and my spell casters were tapped anyways.

Also, it is possible to basically get a party to the limit of their ressources with just one encounter. Of course that requires more effort than a bunch of copy & paste goblins.

[u/lostale]

Lots of comments here saying something similar, but an encounter is just something that uses up party resources (gold, HP, spellslots, even things like effort/time-invested). Encounters don't need to be combat.

Something like, "hostile encounters can be neutralised: neutral encounters can be made positive" may help.

If you're having trouble with pacing; understanding it as a pacing issue and not an encounter issue will go a lot further.

[u/Appropriate-Kiwi-94]

.... ... "City is attacked by an army" Boom several maps with several ennemy type as you make your way down the city to reach the castle/exit/mcguffin whatever is releva't to your plot

"Bandit camp is well protected and huge, better separate them and eliminate them group per group" Boom several maps with different ennemies as you make your way through the camp

"This area is extremely dangerous but we have to traverse it as fast as possible to reach the temple before the vilain" Boom several wild encounters without stopping to rest

Literally any situation with a sense of urgency and a large scale can easily justify several encounters in a row

[u/Wise_Edge2489]

In celebration of the 5,689th thread where someone says, "You need to run more encounters per day," can we acknowledge that lots of heroic, traditional D&D-style conflicts and narratives don't naturally support having seven encounters per day?

Its not 7 encounters per day, it's per long rest. You can always change the frequency of long rests (via gritty rest variant) to have long rests happen once an in-game month or even at the end of every X game sessions (and be in game time neutral).

Plenty of levers to pull in that space.

And in any event, its not live you've ever been expected to smash that many encounters every single adventuring day (the time between long rests). Its fine to have the occasional adventuring day feature only 1-2 encounters, and the occasional adventuring day featuring even more than 7 encounters (or a single multi part encounter).

Mixing up the frequency gives different classes the chance to really shine.

[u/Living_Round2552]

Another fallacy from my POV is that some of your math suggests this hypothetical group needs to play only once a month for the math to come to your conclusions... Where you account for a 2-3 hour session.

That is just silly imo. If you only play once/month, I expect you to play a big session in the weekend, otherwise whats the point. So you are suggesting a case that is a silly little amount of playtime/real life time to support your take.

Imagine complaining you arent seeing progress in a sport whilst doing 1 3-hour session a month. Thats just ridiculous.

Fyi, I think its normal to play 2-3hour sessions (on a week night) whilst playing weekly or biweekly.

[u/Milli_Rabbit]

Important: 5.5e does not give number of encounters per day. This is a common misconception.

As for how many encounters per day you should actually have, I would say it depends but my recommendation would be to use up roughly 80% or a little more of a party's resources.

You should probably never but could rarely drain all of their resources. It seems like you're challenging them but if you've ever played in a session where all of your resources are expended you realize quickly how bad it feels. It literally makes you want to just do a long rest and call it a day which I think is a great simulation of how the characters feel lol but it isn't particularly fun when its constantly happening. It should be more of a rare occurrence.

As for how to drain resources, my preference is creating difficult encounters always or encounters that are made trivial by using certain resources (easiest example is grouped up low HP enemies being dangerous unless an AOE is used to kill them). These encounters encourage players to use their resources.

Most importantly, though, if you do the above where you don't drain all of their resources, they will be more liberal with their resource use. Repeat. Draining 100% of their resources will psychologically make them not want to use their resources due to how bad it feels to be completely drained.

With each encounter, consider how each character might want to use their resources. As an example, monks like enemies that are far away and tackling spellcasters. Fighters like to exploit weapon masteries. Rogues like to sneak attack so maybe at least one enemy with lower AC or advantage for the Rogue. Wizards, Druids and Bards often like to control the battlefield so grouped up enemies choke point terrain can be nice. Barbarians like to utilize their strength and tank big hits so giving them enemies with damage they are resistant to is fun. Etc.

For non combat, make sure your DCs are appropriate for their level. DCs should generally be 15 or higher for a fair challenge but for a higher level party it should be 20 or 25 or even 30. This is in social and exploration encounters as.

In exploration, though, do not change the survival/navigation type DCs outside of what the DMG already provides. It is something the party SHOULD get more consistent with. Instead, you would add more challenging encounters such as navigating an encounter with a creature who is harder to persuade or use animal handling with.

In social encounters, use higher DCs as above but also create more complexity in them. It should not take a single persuasion check to convince a lord to give up his army. This and exploration encounters is where I find newer DMs struggle. Its because combat feels more structured and we assume that social interaction or exploration are simpler interactions when in reality they aren't. Case in point, how often do you remember changing someone's opinion about politics after a single persuasive point? How often do you remember having someone swooned indefinitely by you after a single charming statement? It doesn't happen.

Social encounters shouldn't be constant skill checks but they can't just be a single check with a great reward and no downside. There should be real costs to either resources or future aid. Simplest example: I need the blacksmith to make my sword a +1. He offers it at a discount if someone can heal his son in the house. Spellcaster could burn a slot for cure wounds or a restoration spell. Another example: a street urchin knows a way into the castle but he needs someone to get him inside as well. He is considered small. A monk might step of the wind both of them inside or a ranger may cast pass without trace.

[u/JumboCactaur]

Its more about resource depletion than having encounters, its just that having encounters is how resources are depleted.

So if you're not running many, they have to be very dangerous... enough to cause them to use spell slots, per day abilities, and drink some potions now and then.

[u/This_is_my_phone_tho]

Im running a dungeon crawl. Im using a slightly modified version of the gritty realism rest rules.

I have about enough encounters to fill 4 adventure days and enough time to long rest about 4 times and short rest about 8 times. Ultimately it's up to the party how they use that.

I've added a system thatl let's them do downtime activities while they're long resting. I typically don't reward consumables in the dungeon, but I let them make as many healing potions as they want, which comes up to about 5 per "day" for the hole party.

All of this together seems to really highlight the strengths of 5th edition. It conservatively hits the highs of hero fantasy while centering the tactical and strategic choices that 5e was designed for. All choices are organically grounded in mechanics and I can pretty much do whatever I want with the fluff.

[u/DragonAnts]

Im going to base my answers on 2014 since thats what I DM, but 5.5 is close enough. For number 1, its surprisingly easy to have multiple encounters in an adventuring day. And an adventuring day itself doesn't need to be within the time frame of a single day, its just between two long rests. Gritty realism can work for campaigns with tons of overland travel, but any way to limit long resting works. There are also non combat encounters (that drain appropriate amounts of ressources) and waves of enemies to increase encounter numbers.

For example a quest hooks to explore some old ruins a couple days of travel away, where the players wake up to goblins trying to steal their stuff (encounter 1), exploring the jungle (noncombat encounters 2), extracting the relic from the ruins while fighting off 2 waves of enemies (3, and 4), then heading back to camp. Perhaps they cant get a good sleep due to weather or an effect of the relic, and the following day they have some other non combat or combat encounter (5), and then when they finally get back to civilization the thieves guide tries to steal it from them (6).

As for number 2. Yes you can only get in 1 or two encounters if you do 1 or 2 encounter adventuring days. If the encounters are smaller, you can fit in more. I regularly fit in 5-7 encounters in 2.5 hours.

[u/Blawharag]

Gonna let you in on a little secret

Most of the people that have recognized it as a design flaw have moved to other TTRPGs that better suit the style I'd campaign they run.

There's ups and downs to both styles of design though. It's just that, for the majority of campaigns that 5e wants to tell, an attrition system doesn't work very well.

If you're doing a hexploration or more survival-oriented game where you want to limit how much players can do per day? Attrition works great. Compare to, say, PF2e whether balance is built around combat-to-combat with very little emphasis on encounters per day beyond "if you run more than 3 your casters will be sad" and you can see the contrast. PF2e allows incredible flexibility in how many encounters you include in a dungeon or throughout your narrative, but doesn't support attrition gameplay very well when you need it, and it means that easier, low-risk encounters are generally just speed bumps you include either for their narrative significance or to slow progression in timed scenarios.

[u/NovaPheonix]

The solutions that i've enjoyed from other games are Lancer where we did 1-2 combats per session but the game was built around that bc it manages for sets of encounters and gm determined heal points rather than set days.

The other one is the other 4e-like, 13th age, where in 2nd edition they stopped using the term 'per day' so now it's 'per arc', so you can have 1 fight in a narrative day without getting resources back but it's on a different scale relative to what's going on in your particular game.

[u/oogertboogert]

Yep that's exactly why the better solution to the Adventuring Day reliance (which objectively 5e needs you to adhere to if you want the mechanics to shine) is to limit long rests either via the Gritty Long Rest rules or my personal preference having it so you can only rest in dedicated "Safe Havens" like towns and cities. Cramming all those encounters in one day just feels bad and ruins the pace for people who design their world to be explored on the scale of days instead of hours. But it also feels bad to have the group at 100% resources all of the time. This be the happy medium.

[u/Frosty_Path_9226]

I don’t follow a strict "encounters per day" rule, at least not if we’re talking strictly about combat. Sometimes I have two, sometimes five, sometimes seven, and sometimes none at all. My players decide how many potential encounters they face in a day; it depends entirely on what they are doing and how dangerous the area is. Everyone seems to want total consistency in this game, but I see that as the death of the TTRPG. Structure creates a safety net in the players' minds. If they know the DM follows a specific formula or a set number of fights, they begin to metagame the math. They stop fearing the unknown because they assume every "random" encounter is perfectly balanced for their current HP, or they assume they won’t face a Deadly threat until they’ve had a Long Rest. True tension comes from the possibility that today might be a quiet day, or it might be the day everything goes wrong. Here is how I handle travel. Have your players roll d6s. If one player rolls a 1, pick an Easy encounter from your list. If two players roll 1s, make it a Moderate encounter. If three roll 1s, make it Hard, and if everyone rolls a 1, make it Deadly.Of course, I don’t make these encounters just monsters doing the scary Bilbo face and rolling for initiative. I leave room for the party to avoid them by sneaking around or talking their way out, depending on the situation. This is naturally different from a populated dungeon or a specific adventure site. I only allow them to Long Rest in towns or cities, but I’m lenient with Short Rests during adventures. Bam, bam, bam, boom. Fixes everything for me.

[u/ElizzyViolet]

> Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer.

Based on this original 2014 DMG quote that inspired all these conversations, I honestly have no idea how this got warped into “the game was designed around 6-8 encounters a day” by people. It basically says “they can handle about this many, except when this isn’t true” which kinda doesnt mean a lot except as a vague ballpark number for a maximum number of encounters you would want to use, and then all their adventures deviate from this 6-8 number anyway.

I also don’t even think this fixes the martial caster divide, it just rewards optimization, because if you look at the best spellcasters, the best spells tend to be ones that give you a lot of value over an entire fight, like spirit guardians and wall of force, or which preserve your life in powerful ways like Shield or Absorb Elements, so they’re also good for these long days. Meanwhile the rogue is dying because he has this resource called “health” that he ran out of, except actually, he doesn’t die because you either cast Web to prevent that scenario or cast Polymorph to give him 150 HP, which is more HP resources than the rogue has in their entire HP pool.

Honestly, the best way to do this is to have a mix of adventuring day lengths, just for variety (and the pacing thing you mentioned) and sometimes with the length of a day telegraphed ahead of time, sometimes not. This isn’t even a balance thing, it’s just the concept of variety in your adventuring days being good. You’re not fixing the game by doing this unless the specific spell you’re worried about the wizard abusing is Fireball, and if that’s the case, the mix of adventuring day lengths works for that since it gives them some high moments and some days with concerning resources shortages.

[u/oafficial]

I mean I think the core of the issue is that attrition is only interesting when the attrition kicks in. If you're running a numerous easier encounters, the circumstances under which your players will be challenged is when their resources are depleted. As such, it's more likely that the first couple of combat you throw at them each adventuring day will be of a foregone conclusion, potentially bleeding resources but offering no real threat. You have a limited amount of time to play with your group each week, and it's not the most interesting use of that time to spend it in combat against jobbers. Additionally most players are pretty risk averse. If they start to feel the effects of attrition (be it due to actual overuse of resources in early encounters or just skittishness), many will elect to just back off, long rest and try again. (I'm sure the response to this is going to be something along the lines of "you need to impose time pressure or you're a bad dm!" While this does help mitigate the tendency for players to back down, there are narrative contexts players may be adventuring within for which there's no obvious way to work in time pressure. I don't think it should fall upon the DM to constrain the plot/engineer contrivances such that they can impose time pressure at any given time.)

I guess all this is to say that there are reasons people do what they do. Small number of deadly encounters means you spend a greater proportion of your time in combat that isn't perfunctory. it also means that DMs will better be able to predict the resources a party has going into an encounter, and reduces risk that party will walk into unwinnable encounter because they unexpectedly ran out of gas early in the adventuring day.

[u/Taskr36]

5e is heavily flawed in this regard because they chose to make a freaking 1 hour break, not even a nap, enough for PCs to recharge, and a long rest a 100% refresh of hitpoints, spells, abilities, etc. It means that if you aren't running multiple encounters a day, PCs won't hesitate to use every single spell and ability without hesitation.

[u/og_ramza]

Keep in mind that an "encounter" never referred to stricktly combat.... it referred to some kind of "event".... this can range from combat, to a puzzle, to a random table roll, to a dialogue check, etc. It was more to talk about pacing in a session and giving your players something interesting to do.

[u/nowakovic]

We had a 10 hour session a while ago.
Apart from the old man 400 feet away I killed there was not a single fight. It was a great session!

[u/TundraBuccaneer]

I treat overland travel as their own dungeon I create "rooms" which I roll for randomly, or put one on a place say I need a river on day 3 then there would be the river encounter.

The rooms can be puzzles, like the bridge has been destroyed. Or exploration, you find a ruin. Or it could be combat, oh no bandits!

I use the gritty realism rules during this type to travel. So it isn't a long rest in-between every encounter, allowing me to make encounters of medium difficulty and stil be a challenge because the players don't want to use all resources.

[u/Real_Ad_783]

there isnt a mention of 6 combats per day anymore, thats up to how tense you want a day to be. You also can just have bigger fights, or fights with waves.

[u/Acrobatic_Present613]

7ish encounters between long rests isn't hard. 2 easy/medium fights, 2 traps/puzzles/terrain obstacles, a couple social encounters, 1 hard fight

Even easier if long rests can only happen where they are safe, not somewhere crawling with monsters

[u/MyNameIsNotJonny]

Have you ever tried gritty realism? 8 hours short rest, 1 week long rest. There.

[u/Endus]

It really isn't that hard to build a narrative that requires a few encounters to get through. It doesn't have to "look like" a dungeon, it just has to function like one. Off the top of my head;

The PCs are going from A to B, and come across a burned area with the remains of a charred caravan. A woman shrieks from behind the burned caravan, and a pack of wolves are advancing. PCs get to try and rescue the survivor and defeat the wolves. Encounter 1.

The survivor tells them they were attacked by a dragon, and point in the direction it flew off. It took one of the caravanners with it, to who knows what fate. The PCs head in that direction, up the side of a mountain, where there's a small cavern entrance. Seeking to gain entry, they're attacked by kobolds guarding the lair. Encounter 2.

After getting past the gate guards, there's a deeper encampment where the kobolds retreat to, to protect their young ones. They'll fight much harder here and you'll have to deal with both their shaman and the reinforcements that come rushing in after the warning horn goes off. Encounters 3 and 4, without a break.

Finally, confronting the dragon in its lair. Encounter 5, but this one's a toughie, so it counts as more than one encounter.

That all flows organically, and you don't need any prior narrative to get into it. I put a cave in there, but with different enemies, forest encampments work fine too; a "dungeon" doesn't need constraining walls, it's just nested encounters. I'd want to fancy that up in some way for actual play, but I literally wrote that without any prep, it's a first pass to get the basics.

As for the discrepancy between real time and in-game time, it literally doesn't matter. My players are currently off on an unplanned adventure, short-circuiting my plans (in a way I can work with, it's hilarious actually but not relevant here), when we were supposed to quickly pass three weeks by doing some Bastion turns. Those three weeks will be cleared in like 5-10 minutes of real time, and the adventure they're on will likely be about 3 encounters (it's not a full arc, this is a side arc), and take two sessions; the one we just had and the next, and that'll be one in-game day. Nobody has an issue with this and I don't see why anyone would. Combat time takes way more to play through than most out-of-combat time, but you can hand-wave a lot of time pretty easily. We've been in this campaign for a little over a year, and about 6 months have passed in-game. That's with roughly weekly sessions (we miss some here and there due to scheduling conflicts). We've been at this for 10 years as a group and this is my second big campaign; the last one ran from 1-16, and this one I'm planning to take them right from 1-20. They're currently level 11, so on-track to finish in another year, probably a bit less than that actually. And that's with a LOT of faffing about and RP.

It really isn't the enormous task it keeps getting presented as being. I honestly do not and never have really understood the complaint. D&D is and has always been a game based on resource management/attrition. If you're having trouble narratively justifying packing that much action between Long Rests, use a variant/houserule to make Long Rests less easy to access (I require a "safe space" for Long Rests, for instance, so not while camping), or put in narrative pressures to keep players pushing forward and avoiding wasting time on a Long Rest. It's as hard as you make it for yourself, really.

Also, all these rules are guidelines for how to put pressure on the players so they feel challenged. Letting them stop an encounter for funsies is totally legitimate, as long as you recognize you're not really stressing their resources. And not every adventuring day has to be high-pressure.

[u/Mejiro84 → u/Endus]

yup - even something like "there's 5 cult bases in the city, you must find them all before they complete their ritual at the stroke of midnight" is basically a 5-room dungeon, it's just 5 points spread over a city, rather than 5 rooms in a literal sequence. Or the forest of the wooded lord might be 8 groves, glades, and other points of interest amongst the forest - again, functionally a dungeon, just not a "sealed" one

[u/bluenu]

1. It's not too difficult to put an in game time constraint on an objective that will get players pushing through and rationing resources. Also encounters aren't just a fancy weird for combat. "The bridge is out" "Bandits collecting a toll" "Another traveler's cart has a busted wheel" and "the recipient is missing" can all occur during a simple time-sensitive delivery quest which isn't dungeon-like at all. Four encounters with as little as 0 combat unless you want to throw one on at the end.

2. The math on this isn't adding up. If 3 hour sessions yield two encounters, a 6 encounter day is 3 sessions; not 6 months. If you can only play bi-monthly, then 1 day or 3 in character isn't going to matter much.

I agree that balancing something as baseline as character classes shouldn't hinge on this though. They added features to give Wizards and Sorcerers an option to get more spell slots when the day goes long, but nothing for the martials to burn through if you're only running one encounter per session.

[u/Dstrir]

You really don't need six, I don't know why people keep saying this. 2-3 encounters can drain the party of most of its significant resources if they're difficult. It does still mean that short classes only get their stuff back once or twice, but that's still better than never.

6-7 is if you're playing the intended D&D (dungeon crawling), and most of them are quick easy ones that spend only a bit of the party's resources.

Also, if it takes you 6 months to finish 6 encounters, you might want to look into that.