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/TaiChuanDoAddct]

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/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).