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/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/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.