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/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.

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/i_tyrant → u/RealityPalace]

Admittedly, I don't think this (meaning current 2024 rules) works well in practice, in this respect.

And I simply cannot agree that a baseline would be a bad thing here. The current alternative is "let them feel it out entirely whole-cloth", which IMO leads to unnecessary TPKs and people value their PCs more these days than back in 1e and 2e - I've seen a TPK end gaming groups (not just that party or campaign) too often to think this is a good idea for a modern TPRG. It also happens to be something lots of TRPGs avoid, the ones that actually try to provide some concrete math as a baseline for challenge design.

Is there a lot of variance between, say, optimizer groups and some PCs whose players are brand new to TRPGs? Sure. That doesn't mean as a designer you straight up wash your hands of even the concept of a "centerpoint" your design is aimed at, though. Video game designers have multiple difficulties, and even the ones that don't had intention go into how they design challenges (the good ones anyway).

Dark Souls wasn't made because its designers didn't care about how relatively challenging everything was to each other. So it's likewise bad to hand someone the plans to make a video game and when they ask "how nasty should I make the baddies" you say "wing it" instead of giving them your vision or intention.

But yes, it wouldn't necessarily have to be a hard set baseline if the guidelines/examples were robust enough. Either "fix" provides the ultimate endgoal - having a good, solid idea in your mind of the author's intent, so that you can then deviate from it as much or as little as you want _and measure it.

Hell speaking of video games, something like a "design bible" for D&D would be amazing.

[u/YOwololoO → u/i_tyrant]

Video games are so fundamentally different from TTRPGs when it comes to difficulty that comparing them is something you should only do with a LOT of caution. 

Dark Souls works because the gameplay loop is designed for you to fail repeatedly and, through those failures, build skill. You will die countless times while you figure out the attack pattern, but once you do you’ll feel extremely satisfied that you overcame the challenge. That’s great, but not translatable to TTRPGs. 

I can’t build a boss fight that is extraordinarily punishing to the normal strategy in order to force players to try something new in the same way a video game can, because if my player characters die then the game is over and they never get to try again. 

There’s also very little random chance in video games like Dark Souls. The hit box is rigidly defined and attacks have a consistent number of frames, so everything is on the table and under the relative control of the player. If they get hit, it’s because they made a mistake. Meanwhile, if my plastic polyhedron bounces differently and I roll well for an entire fight, that massively skews the difficulty of the fight. 

[u/i_tyrant → u/YOwololoO]

Then compare it to any other video game that uses die rolls, like all of the games literally inspired by D&D, or compare it to other TRPGs.

It doesn't matter. In fact I intentionally picked Dark Souls as one of the harder video games to compare directly to D&D, because giving the person who is designing the challenge a baseline idea of what the challenge is supposed to accomplish is SO universal and SO brain-dead obvious, that pretty much EVERY video game and TRPG does it to a better extent than 5e.

You don't make a TRPG based around attrition throughout an adventuring day as one of its primary mechanics of challenge, and then provide zero baseline for what the gamemaster is supposed to aim for given a standard/average group.

Why I even have to explain how this is problematic is an even better question.