Critical Role aside, I think the smaller number of combat encounters per day also comes down to the fact that many/most playeers play in homebrew games, and it's easier for the DM to write a couple of very interesting encounters than 6-8 with just the right pauses for short rests.
That's part of it, but in my experience as a DM, I prepare more encounters than the players ever get a chance to interact with. Combat takes too long to resolve to have 6-8 combat encounters in an adventuring day, unless you want that adventuring day to last many sessions, or you skip over all exploration between encounters.
Even with non-homebrew games most published adventures don’t have 6-8 encounters per day. I’m currently running Curse of Strahd and seeing 1-2 encounters per day on average…
it's a lucky evening if my group makes it through *a single* encounter in a session. Since I joined the group about 6 months ago we've long rested a whole three times.
@@matthewparker9276 the only problem with this is classes that reset core abilities every short rest get short changed some of the resources they should have in a given day compared to classes that reset their core abilities on a long rest.
As part of my college group, which works kinda like Adventurers League, I’ve tested making 6-8 small encounters in a single session (and adventuring day). For example a one shot was restoring Elturel from the events of DiA, slaying the fiends roaming the ruined city. I’ve used the daily adventuring day xp budget to design said one shots. The results? Final bosses of deadly challenge become an actual challenge, even at high levels (15-17). Spellcasters totally exhausted, sorcerers scraping their sorcery points to create extra slots, and parties actually taking short rests. As each encounter was bit sized, it didnt become much of a dragon, but it only worked for high action adventures (eliminate all targets, stop this raid, survive until morning, cross this dungeon, etc.) For my next game, I’m only allowing Long Rest in safe places, meaning that long journies will pbbly contain between 6-8 encounters between Long Rests. In other words, i keep the 8:1 encounter per rest ratio, but instead of 1 long rest per in-game day, it is 1 rest per journey which could take days in game.
Our group has gotten to where we run roughly 6 encounters per adventuring day and shifted to a much more dungeon crawl style game. RaW runs so much smoother this way, at least in my experience. A “day” might take multiple sessions run but combat now doesn’t take nearly as long because only 1-2 of those encounters are deadly. The majority of them are easy or medium fights and traps/puzzles. I highly recommend going this route rather than 1-2 encounters per day.
I dont think the average interpretation of an Adventuring Day (2-3 encounters) actually comes from critical roll or other live play shows. I think it's also a product of the game's design. At lower levels its a bit easier to pepper in multiple low level encounters with weaker monsters such as goblins which can challenge your players while still maintaining a sense of narrative cohesiveness. However as the players get stronger with more hitpoints, more powerful abilities, it becomes exponentially harder to do so. This is compounded by party size and starts early. There are only so many beholders I can reasonably throw at my higher level party in one day while still being able to reasonably explain it in my game world. (Slight exaggeration and milage may vary) I think the best way ive seen people counter this is to add restrictions on, or lengthen the ammount of time it takes to complete a Long Rest. Which requires alterations to the core rules and player buy-in.
A big part of that, though, is the game's shift away from dungeon crawling. Which didn't happen with 5e, but which kind of seems like a sacred cow that the designers just aren't willing to kill. Most D&D or D&D-adjacent games are not 8 session long dungeon crawls with the party camping out in the ruins of some long forgotten and buried temple, or in the basement of some big scary castle. As with video games, the growth of the genre has come on the back of narrative, so players expect a lot more story, and a lot less rote skull crushing (and many, many fewer traps requiring 10 foot poles or sacrificial chickens) than long-time fans of the game -- such as those who grew up to become game designers -- are used to.
@ChanJENI The interesting thing about that, is that even the official pre-written adventures and modules for 5e largely don't adhere to the structure of a 6-8 encounter Adventuring Day. There's a dissonance between the mechanical design and adventure writing design even within the official material.
I use the variant rest rule, so a short rest is 8 hours and a long rest 5 days. It works for our intrigue-heavy campaign not just in terms of balance, but it also: - allows me to come up with very varied encounters, including chases, since they don't have to take place within minutes of each other; - allows players to make the most of a urban setting in terms of purchasing potions and making use of healing or even resurrection items: without a 1-hour rest, they need those items to recuperate, but it also makes it possible for me to create a less artificial cap on how many they can find (plus, it depletes their gold). It has required a handful of adjustments to spell durations and certain abilities here and there, and it surely helps that my party is homogenous in composition (4 full casters), but I wouldn't go back for any reason.
I have recently done the same but I modified 8 hour short rests to allow my players to more quickly swap their attunements and allow them to prepare a few spells on a short rest
When I've DM'd I ran 6+ encounter days without fail with many dungeons and it was really fun! This method really let everyone feel important in the party and definitely felt well balanced mechanically however it was very rare that my players were able to finish an adventuring day and me having to create 6+ encounters everyday did feel exhausting. I'm not fully sure if it was worth it the fodder did make the player's feel stronger which is what they seemed to want and I really did enjoy it just now I'm in university I really don't have time to run games like that.
Six plus encounters per day - That is 1974 Dungeons and Dragons. In a dungeon crawl, roll for wandering monsters once every 10 mins (a turn). Three encounters going in and another three encounters on the way out. Very common. And remember, Magic Users got the spells only once per day.
The issue I have with the 6-8 encounter Adventuring Day is player agency. There is no mechanical support to discourage players from choosing to take a short or long rest before at least the sixth encounter. I wonder if they would have added a rule about not being able to take a long rest in a dungeon or hostile environment if that would have helped? As much as I like the natural language of something like Adventuring Day, the most common denominator is a single combat. i wonder what kind of resources we would have available if the game intended you to go nova and then recover before the next fight.
There's the idea that you cannot successfully gain a Long Rest while inside a dungeon. Your party will be discovered and attacked while sleeping thereby prefventing them from gaining the Long Rest benefits.
One long rest per 24 hours, long rest being interrupted by wandering monsters, future encounters being harder because the monsters know you're there and thus have time to prep (the room ahead was just a standard goblin encounter is now deadly because they were able to set up fortifications and traps), or just the boss of the dungeon was able to escape with the plot device making the trip a waste entirely.
One of the most truly insightful videos on the state of the game and an under the hood analysis I've seen in a very long time. Well done. And, for what its worth, I agree completely. I've been DMing since 1980 and the Basic and Expert games (especially of the BECMI version) and 1st and 2nd Edition all managed game balance in the gaming day quite well - which I've only considered now having watched your video. We had "epic" long days back then - I recall amazing battles in G1-3 (Against the Giants) and in D1-3 (Descent into the Depths of the Earth) where martials never felt overshadowed by casters because those casters had to be critically mindful of their resources - for those who may not know, a high level magic-user would needs literal days of study time to prepare all the spells in their repertoire if they'd drained themselves fully - so they would need to default to magic items and other alternatives at times and only unleash their real power when the situation demanded it. I'm not saying older versions of the game were superior in any way - in fact, I haven't returned to earlier editions in 10+ years: 5th Ed is superior in too many ways to list here. But I have become extremely disillusioned by the power creep and superhero feel of 5th Ed in recent years and am literally reading the full rules of Pathfinder 2E Remastered right now as a serious alternative (and my Shadowdark kickstarter pack also just arrived today, which is the other potential candidate to replace 5E as my home system of choice). But perhaps the fault is mine as DM in how I've also fallen into the pacing state of 2-3 encounters per day (add me to the 71% list ; ) ). And your video has made me recall the last few sessions of my daughter's Descent into Avernus campaign that I'm a player in: for three sessions we were pressed through the ruins of Elturel, chased at times, bumbling into enemies at others, and seeking any refuge to get catch our breath (re: short rest at a minimum) - but it never worked for us. My daughter kept the stress on us at a high level, and we were run entirely out of resources and had to keep pushing for survival (even more so at that point) with no respite in sight. The pacing of it all felt wrong to me as a 5E DM (though we didn't criticize her...at least not beyond some grumbling around the table LOL) - but looking back on it with your video perspective in my mind, I see how it actually echoed all those great sessions from my 1st Ed memory! And the session after we were finally able to rest, the players (all young and new to D&D within the last few years) talked fervently about how close to death they felt and the ideas they'd had away from the game about how they might find other ways to survive... It all felt great to me in that light. And so in combination with my daughter's game and your insights here, I see I can make some adjustments to my own game to put the stress back in the game - and hopefully thereby find the "super" dropped from how I view 5E, and the characters becoming just "heroes" once again like they used to be. Cheers!
It's pretty well documented that a big part of what Gygax meant by "meaningful campaign" was one where he could keep track of when and where in his world all the different adventuring parties where at any given point. Because he ran what is now referred to as a "West Marches" type of game.
Thank you! I was thinking of responding the same thing. Gygax and Arneson and the rest of the core group of gamers who created DnD would create their own dungeons and the other players would play their dungeons. Gygax mentions in his dungeon design article that dungeon masters should have 5 levels of a dungeon prepared for play, and that players should ideally have game time continue outside of the day of game. So staying in a dungeon for a week in between games is likely lethal for the group, and they’ll need to leave the dungeon before the end of the evening and go back to town to rest and resupply. Making game time = real world time gives more emphasis to the idea that a long rest is 1 week long, that players need downtime, and that dungeons restock with enemies and loot. They’re living worlds, underground cities full of enemies with treasure hoarded away from evil dragons who roam the surface world looking to snatch up any hoards for themselves.
Oh totally, and I’ve mentioned something similar in another comment. I understand that the definition of “campaign” is be eh different now than it was in AD&D. That part was really meant to just draw parallels and have something of a through line during the video. The games function dramatically differently and I mentioned that too. The point was really just to emphasize time as a core component of the game more than anything else :)
I ran an entire adventure from 5th to 12th level using 6-8 encounters per day. Well, i used the adventuring day xp budget. Often i did 3-9 per day, with a short rest after every deadly encounter or 2 hards or 3 mediums. The group had two fighters, a warlock, and a cleric, so I expressly wanted the short rest classes to not get overshadowed by the cleric. We played on roll20, and just didnt get a long rest every session. Easy to keep the sheets untouched for the week.
A more accurate way to put this would be "The rules of the game no longer reflect the way the majority of players like to play, and should be changed."
My parties tend to enjoy a tough deadly encounter over grinding through endless groups of 5, 6 or 8 trash mobs every day. The CR calculated medium encounters tend to take up exactly 0 resources, and a hard might take one spell to completely unravel. They could do this almost endlessly. All it ends up doing is introducing a big dose of tedium into a game that's supposed to be fun. Set up the battle, roll initiative, players talk strategy, someone finally goes, and hypnotic pattern or fireball invalidates the whole encounter anyway. Then you carry on in a circle, readying actions to all hit all the CCed enemies one at a time until everything's dead, or clean up what survived the fireball. That's an hour of your life you're never getting back, fighting wolves that have no plot significance. Not every fight is like that, but so many of them are in Tier 2 that I really don't think the mass encounter strategy is very interesting, even if you're playing creatures as mean as possible. I'd rather have a big ambush that feels like lives were actually on the line, or a ritual with 20 or 30 participants that's really tense than any number of random encounters of small groups, or Ogres strangely obsessed with committing seppuku via adventurer.
This is what I ended up doing as well, when I ran 5e. A couple of deadly encounters per long rest. After the first 5 levels, normal monsters are just a joke to a well optimized party and take nearly no resources to defeat, while wasting time.
So I personally only let players reat in safe locations. However, I see people complain that many encounters would take the whole session. But nothing is saying an adventuring day equals a session. I often have my players go 2-3 sessions without getting a long rest. That way there is still time for the other pillars.
Assuming a game session is 4 hours of play time, 8 encounters is 2 per hour. Or it's multiple sessions per game day. Most games I've seen in 5e are 1 day per 1 to 2 sessions and are maybe 1 to 2 minor battles and a role play encounters or 1 major battle per session. I remember when I played in the 80s and 90s that dungeon crawls or intense overland travel had 2 to 4 planned encounter and about 2 or more random encounters. So, I'd say the story telling element has done to the game the same as what happened in comic books... decompression, longer pauses, long gaps for rest.
6-8 encounters per day is absurd unless the party is in a dungeon, or dealing with a crisis. I've run 2 wizards premade campaigns and most of the time it gets nowhere NEAR that amount until you get to the dungeon of the chapter. It's especially obnoxious in the first chapters of tomb of annihilation, where the party is all but guaranteed to have 1 or fewer encounters per day.
Nice video, you have good pacing and visuals. Your stuff is always very nicely edited. Some people say dungeons are the answer but you can't run encounters like that all the time, and it doesn't mesh well for those games that want a more "critical role" feeling like you said. Personally, I think players like at least one encounter per session to break things up. I like the way 13th age does it where you do a long rest after a certain number of encounters. You can rest before hand but it doesn't replenish resources. Done this way you can space out encounters as much as you like and still have them challenging for the players and bridge the martial caster divide. I'm hoping to do a video on this approach for D&D sometime.
Hi. I dm 6-8 adventure days, but only during dungeons. We break our adventures into dungeons and 'everything else', don't @ me , i'm not writing a guide, i dont need names for everything. This isn't a super hard and fast rule, but in general, exploration, towns, some travel, etc is paced for whatever ends up making sense for the story, generally 2-5 encounters a day or whatever seems about right. However, once we start a dungeon (keep in mind dungeons can be open world or anywhere) players know to start managing resources and focusing on the tactical portion of dnd. I always communicate when this change of pace happens, and in general it works pretty well for our table that wants to be able to use and make powerful characters, but also enjoys the flexibility that comes with a more narrative game. Some observations: 1) We stopped using Leo's tiny hut. It wasn't really a choice and the players like finding creative ways to rest. 2) Longer days nerf melee martials. HP is a resource, and melee martials run through it faster than other classes run through theirs. Keep this in mind. 3) Long days don't work well at lvls 1 and 2. Which is fine, just plan accordingly. 4) Fewer combats with harder fights do not work as well. Mostly it just makes casters even more mandatory. 5) Players REALLY start to look for creative ways to deal with encounters. Some of our highest tension moments were social checks in dungeons to recruit allies, or avoid a fight when low on resources. 6) Sometimes players end up having to rest, thats fine. For us its usually a retreat and rest since resting in a dungeon situation is usually very risky. Resting or Retreating resets parts of the dungeon. Deal with it on a case by case basis. This applies to a lesser degree to dungeons that are meant to be cleared over multiple days. 7) I know Matt Coville says that 5e isn't a dungeon crawler and he knows more about game design than me, so fair. But 5e seems to work a lot better when you utilize the dungeon format as a significant portion of your adventures. Rules are there to add structure and support your game. Just make sure that they are supporting the type of game that is enjoyable for you and your table. For us, we use the rules for the part of the game where they make the most sense.
Casters still blow martials out of the water on 6-8 encounter adventuring days btw. Casters can't nova anywhere near as hard, true, but martials aren't resourceless by any stretch (even Rogues have to track HP), and in fact consistently have fewer resources to stretch across an adventuring day. Meanwhile casters have far more powerful class features, and much stronger defensive tools, and superior/numerous tactics and build options. Also, D&D did get rid of the adventuring day once. In 4e. Specifically because they knew since fairly early into 3.5 (forget Tiny Hut, Rope Trick was even more abusive and gave birth to the 15 minute adventuring day) that people weren't playing the kind of dungeon crawls the adventuring day was designed for anymore (and indeed if you look at the resource recovery of late 3.5 classes like those from the Tome of Battle and Dungeonscape (and to a lesser extent the Tome of Magic), you can see how they tried to meet players where they were at (notably these were considered some of the most balanced classes in the edition) and playtest what would become core structures of 4e). Many people hated 4e, because oftentimes tradition matters more than good design in this community. But 5e was a very weird aberration. It was D&D's last hurrah before the underperforming division was to be shut down, a weird hodgepodge of all editions of D&D (and a return to the OGL after the GSL fiasco) that did nothing particularly well, but also managed to avoid most of the worst flaws of each edition while including modern design sensibilities. But then Stranger Things and Critical Role happened and made the edition incomparably more successful than anyone could have predicted (and almost completely removed quality from WotC's feedback cycle). And almost all the influx of new players played it like 4e, because that's how Critical Role plays. Hell, it's the first edition to include narrativist mechanics, and nobody uses them because Critical Role doesn't (despite TBIFs and Inspiration probably being the best features in the edition for the modern style of play). And so now that 4e is retro (from the perspective of the new blood in the hobby), it's actually seeing a resurgence in popularity as people appreciate how its design was ahead of its time (see also the popularity of 13th Age, PF2e, MCDM, and DC20, all of which take most of their design cues from 4e). But WotC is in the very weird position of being unable (indeed, as we're learning about Hasbro's stock troubles, they literally can't afford to) to return to a game design that actually matches how people actually play the game, because they can't afford to alienate their new customer base for whom 5e is the tradition that matters to them more than good design, and because they've promised backwards compatibility. One interesting thing we thought we were seeing with Monsters of the Multiverse and much of the early playtest was a push to consolidate almost all resource recovery into a single rest type, because the split rest recovery creates too many problems, all of which change in complex ways based on different playstyles. I applauded this consolidation, even if I was very annoyed they were more moving everything to long rests instead of short rests (ie reinforcing the adventuring day structure rather than shifting to a more per-encounter balance)... but circa playtest 6 they seem to have abandoned even this incremental positive change.
Wow. I’ve never played a dnd campaign where we would have more than 1 battle encounter per session. And I played with a lot of DMs. Usually we have some social stuff most of the session, but nothing where we have to spend a lot or even some of our recourses. Maybe this is a tradition of play in my country? :) Maybe if we would have had more resource draining encounters, casters wouldn’t be so OP at most of the tables?
There's a few inaccuracies in this video. Firstly, you don't need 6 to 8 encounters per day. If you run Deadly encounters according to CR then 3 encounters fills the adventuring day. That would be a good fit for many groups. Secondly, not every day is an adventuring day. Sometimes you have no encounters. Sometimes you have just one. That's fine. The adventuring day is simply a measure of how many encounters the party can handle before they need a long rest.
For number 1, this is true and I explicitly mention it in the video at 5:02 as well! As for number2, I fully agree. I don't believe I ever suggested that every day was an adventuring day, hence the name "adventuring day".
3 Deadly encounters per day tend to be very swingy: either the party stomps through them, or the DCs/damage done by monsters are so high that players risk a TPK. And magic items break CR, so there's that too.
@@InsightCheck I see what you mean, although it seemed as though you were talking about '6 to 8 encounters' for the rest of the video. That might be a misunderstanding of mine. Regardless, it's helpful to remember that we can absolutely run 3 or 4 encounter days and that works fine so long as those encounters are more challenging.
@@tibot4228 It's true that the encounters will be more swingy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if you WANT the risk of a TPK. If you don't want a TPK then don't run a full adventuring day. You can do two CR Hard encounters and the game will run fine.
@@tibot4228 You can technically have multiple monster deadly encounters. These wont have high ACs, DCs, etc. In fact, this should really be the case since single entity encounters over and over massively skew balance too.
When I was DMing and I pushed for 6-8 encounters it was very difficult to make all of them require real resource usage of any kind. Frequently 2-3 would get passed by good rolls and guidance or good old fashion barbarian smashing without even using a rage. Effectively I could’ve just done 4-5 encounters. Group fell apart at level 5 though.
I don't really understand why it's more work to prep more encounters per day. Prep time is based on the number of encounters per session, not per day. One adventuring day could last three sessions. To keep narrative pacing from suffering you balance mini-climax resolutions around the typical time per session. For example, if you know your party can usually get through 3-4 encounters per session, the DM only need plan 3-4 encounters whether that's half a day or a full day in-game.
When I run my games, I want to challenge the party when I can. I have noticed that when they are being pushed into difficult situations they tend to be the most innovative and run into some great RPing opportunities. I do not force 6-8 encounters a day, but when they make bad decisions, roll very poorly or are heading to beat up a "Big Bad" I throw more encounters at them. I also try to make intelligent monsters act intelligently. The smart enemies tend to chase down the characters, flank the players, set impromptu traps/ambuses or run and tell their boss, warning them that players are getting close. My intention is to tax the casters of the group (my play group tends to lean towards caster classes). My players know my proclivity to push for more encounters, so the players will try and balance spell slots for combats and skill challenges. They sometimes burn through big ticket spells to see if they can blitz through areas and avoid extra fights altogether, and if they do well on the rolls and the RPing they can knock encounters off the day. The game gets way to easy if the casters fire all their best spells in the first few combats without the fear of them being out of spells for an encounter or two.
excellent video! Something that can’t be said enough. I think (just my assumption) that the martial and caster divide is also less of a problem if you use these encounter rules. I recently switched to the gritty rest variant rule and had a player switch to a martial when he needed a new character. Wizard actually says “no” when partymembers ask him for a spell in a simple encounter instead of just blasting everything 😂 I’m curious tho about all the input for “one dnd” that comes from the community and the skewered experience in 5th edition because of the playstyles not matching up. Or what WOTC will do about this balancing mechanic
I really like your poll-analysis. Surprisingly nuanced statistical insights ;). Also, very good video! Strongly agree with the pacing argument. In addition to that though, I also think a part of it is that in the campaigns I play, we tend to just like going supernova quite regularly. If I have to stretch my resources out over 7 encounters, especially if I'm low level, that's going to mean I get to use like 1 or 2 of my resources in one encounter. That's not as fun as just using everything in my toolbox regularly. So, we tend to just spend basically all we have in 2 to 3 encounters and then go for a long rest. This leads to adventuring days which feel full (2 or 3 things in 1 day is quite a lot) but not like a slog. The narrative pace is pretty good and we get to use our toys often.
Does the DMG imply that all of those encounters should be COMBAT encounters? If they mean two or three combat encounters, a couple of traps, a negotiation, and a few challenges or obstacles, that makes more sense to me. EIGHT combat encounters per rest I feel is only possible when the party is locked into a situation where they cannot rest without serious consequences.
People defend it by saying this but it doesn't make sense: social encounters and environmental encounters absolutely do not drain resources the way combat encounters do, and most player resources are combat oriented: how is a Barbarian going to get Rages drained by a trap encounter, how is a social encounter going to burn hitpoints/hit dice? Yeah, it's true that spells can be used out of combat, but it's nowhere near as intensive or as multi-faceted as combat, and a situation like that if it uses an expendable spell at all that's not a ritual or a cantrip might use *one* spell. And maybe more importantly, personally as a DM, the idea that my out of combat "encounters" are supposed to be chipping away at player resources like combat is itself a weird design burden. I design my out of combat stuff for verisimilitude, my characters to behave like characters and my hazardous environments to behave like pseudo-real places. It's hard enough making balanced combat encounters, now I have to figure out the CR of a fuckin *riddle*?
In the video "encounter" was defined as anything designed to drain resources. I don't recall the exact DMG definition offhand, but that's functionally what it it is.
@Brian-rt5bb example of a non combat encounter burning a barbarian's resources. The party enters a room and unfortunately none of them saw the slightly raised tile the sorcerer stepped on causing the doors to lock and the walls to slide closer. The rogue tries to pick the lock on the door out but due to bad rolls is taking longer than expected so the barbarian uses their near superhuman strength to hold the walls apart. Seeing that success on the athletics check the DM is going to call for they use one of their 3 rages to gain advantage on the check.
@@sam7559 Of course its possible to think up examples like that, but it still doesn't work systematically. In the example you've given three things needed to happen: 1) The sorcerer "doesn't notice" a trap and stumbles into it 2) The rogue "tries to pick the lock and gets bad rolls" and you have a situation where they can't keep trying. 3) The barbarian has to burn a Rage to get advantage instead of just taking a help action from everyone else. Why? There's a normal version of this encounter where none of those things happen and zero resources are expended. There's no way to systematically design encounters like this that predictably drain resources and have it not be super contrived, and even if you do, the cure is just as bad as the disease. You go from the DM scrambling to fill a 6-8 encounter "adventuring day" with combats to the DM having to come up with goofy non-combat "encounters" that nonetheless expend resources, and hoping the player characters can't come up with better solutions.
@Brian-rt5bb well yes, traps are the easy-medium at are designed to nick at resources, if you want to drain the barbarian's resources make non combat encounters that value strength, as a barbarian player unless you are running the most optimized of tables, I will gladly spend a rage to have a cool moment instead of having my moment shared with the 8 Str sorcerer because they said they "helped"
We partially solved this with a house rule. I use to artificially bunch up encounters. On a three weeks trip, they’d have a day with 3 and 20 days with 0 encounter. Not any more. Now When traveling overland and camping, you get the benefit of a short rest unless you’re in a very safe and comfortable place. To get a long rest, they have to stay 24 hours at a campsite. If there’s a ticking clock that gives them pause. They usually take one long rest at end of travel, before entering the crawl. This makes overland and dungeon crawls more similar in terms of encounters per “day”. The big win is PCs don’t dump every resource on an overland encounter thinking they’ll almost certainly get a long rest afterwards.
I’ve noticed a lot of people say over my time that these adventuring day assumptions result in too many encounters (to the point it becomes boring), and I agree. My personal solution was to make long rests take a full day. Instead of simply sleeping (which just prevents exhaustion), the players must be in a safe space for the full 24 hour period. This means that I can have 6+ encounters over the course of several days, but still a singular long rest. It helps set up concrete ‘arcs’ and adventures in the campaign and has generally worked quite well. (Ps; I didn’t touch short rests at all for this)
A random tangent I’d bring up is One Piece’s East blue saga. The fact Zoro is still injured in Arlong Park, despite taking those injuries in the prior arc, is a really fun bit of writing that adds so much more to the story. It feels somewhat akin to that, wherein my change works like a way of having long-lasting injuries without like, cutting off a PC’s arm or something
I run 3 rest types: Short rests (10 mins, max 2/day) same as normal short rests, spend HD (no rolling, just get max hp per die plus con) Long rests (8 hours, max 1/day) acts as a short rest, except you regain half your HD and each spell caster gets back an arcane recovery (wizard feature, so wizards can do it 2x per day) of spells slots. Recover 1 level of exhaustion. Regain non-spell level related long rest abilities. Full rests (24 hours, requires a “safe” location… essentially, not in the wilderness or dungeon on adventure. Likely back at town or the main camp of the campaign). Recover all spells, HD, hp, etc. This is a much grittier experience, but I find that the pacing when you end up with just a few combats per day (not the 6-8 expected, but the 2-3 most groups seems to actually experience) feels more balanced. Not having casters blow their whole wad every fight, or the paladin smite every attack makes the encounter building much easier. Full slot recovery each day and full HD/hp recovery each day makes sense when you are fully taxing the their daily resources, but that’s not how most groups I’ve played with actually play. Also, the limit of 2 SR/day keeps the monks/warlocks/fighters in check.
I am currently running a homebrew version of Tomb of Anhilation. To emphasise the survival aspect, we have among other things, changed the resting rules. Resting in the jungle, you require 8hrs to get the benefits of a Short Rest, and you can only get the benefits of a Long Rest is you rest in a safe area as determind by the GM (me). So if you consider an Adventuring Day as the time between Longs Rests, I am able to get 8 encounters. And since it is over a number of Narative Days, the pacing does not suffer. That all being said, this decision is under the session zero doc fo rthe campaign as "Special Campaign Rules Changes" and is not how we normally play. This chnage is considered a 'feature' of the current campaign as to what makes it different from other campaigns we've played. It's been fun, but doubtful it will be a pernanent adaptation.
A couple of thoughts: 1) I always think of 4th edition when people discuss this which achieved balance by giving all classes the same number of rechargable powers. People hated 4th edition, but it was better balanced. 2) We're currently trying something like the variant rest rules which is that an overnight rest outside of civilization is a short rest and you only get a long rest when you rest over night in town. A lot easier pacing. The DM has also added that a 1 hour rest can let you roll 1 hit die, and you can do up to 2 of those per short rest.
Having played for years online and in person, I have never once seen a party do more then 3 fights for an entire session. 8 fights for an in game day, never once have I seen this happen. not even close. Again, 3 is the most I have seen having played for over 10 years. Frankly a session with 5 or so small insignificant encounters sounds unfun.
Despite the fact that the adventuring day comes from original d&d, people not following it is also not new. I've been playing dnd since 2nd edition and I dont think I ever had more than 4 encounters in a day
I'm trying to think of what balanced martial classes would be like if you tried to upscale them to caster power, assuming the encounter # from your poll, so like... 1 short rest and 1 long rest every 3 or 4 encounters. Might be a fun homebrew/thought experiment.
Thinking very magic like burst abilities on short rest, only rechargable once per long rest. Like barbs being able to smash the ground to create an 40ft earthquake, dealing some blud damage, save vs knock prone and difficult terrain as a high level feature they could do a couple times a short rest.
When you are using the term 'encounter' are you exclusively referring to combat encounters? I remember the writing guidelines for most convention style modules that were meant to be played in a 3 to 4 hour spot. It was to be 6 encounters divided as; 2 combat, 1 social, 1 puzzle, 1 environment, and 1 writer's choice of the other categories.
But some of them would only apply I think if they use up resources. You could have a dozen puzzle encounters that are designed to be solved by the players figuring them out and that wouldn't affect the balance for the day.
@@jeffmacdonald9863 This goes to what is meant by encounters in a working day. I am gronard old school and we used to roll for random encounters, depending on location, from as little as every 10 minutes game time (back when a melee round was 1 minute in length) to every hour in the wilderness. It was usually a 1 in 6 chance of a random encounter though occasionally higher if some alert had changed the situation. After an encounter was determined then the encounter table was filled with a mixture of events that ranged from friendly, to neutral, to potentially hostile, to immediately hostile. There were also a variety of natural events, animals, and wierdness in a good encounter table. The numbers on an encounter table could also be exceedingly large. Kobolds could appear in groups of up to 400. You also would respond to things like large tribes of Orcs or Goblins by finding help instead of attempting to charge in. The idea of a story approach to DnD with a few encounters per day really takes hold in 3rd edition when it became more normal for characters (particularly spell casters) to focus on going Nova for 1 or 2 combats and then resting to recover spells. This is one of the reasons 4th Ed focused on only a small select group of resources being daily and having milestones to increase recovery. They wanted more combat encounters per day (unfortunately the combat encounters, while extremely fun, took much longer to resolve and countered the original purpose of increased availability of resources). Version matters in how we discuss what counts as an encounter and what designers mean when they use the term. Many 5th Ed designers described how they played sessions under each Ed of the rules to get their bearings when writing the rules for 5th Ed. I am sure they absorbed some of the hex crawl and sandbox approach to thinking of encounters instead of the sculpted story approach to gaming that shows like Dimension 20 or Critical Roll popularize.
I don't think it will ever go this way, but a relatively simple fix is to list the resource refresh intervals as x times in initiative. So, instead of say "long rest" it was 5 times in initiative. A short rest might be 2 times. This way, the rate of usage is normalized across encounters regardless of whether you cluster them in one day or several. Especially resources that are solely used in combat, a "when you roll initiative you have x uses available" simplifies the whole issue.
If there are six combat encounters in a day, I expect at least two of them to be the party beating down a couple of sickly goblins or stepping on a few spiders. Four real fights might take our entire session, with no roleplay or exploration.
It's six to eight encounters, not combat encounters. If the party is expecting more resource draining encounters then they'll choose which ones are worth fighting or finding other solutions to get by.
The Adventures of Stormwreck Isle series I published on DMsGuild has 4-6 encounters per module and each module is effectively 1 day. The combats are all hard to deadly to make up for the lack of extra encounters. Most of my work is in Adventurer's League these days, so you're hard capped at 4 hours per session/module. If the AL standard was 6 hours, I'd love to cram another encounter or two into the modules. If you look at the DRW series, many of them are 6 hour modules that we have to trim down to 4 hours for AL.
6 encounters per day are not even that hard to imagine if you think about it, these six could be like 3 combats (maybe one medium, one difficult and one "boss fight" more difficult) and 3 other encouters like (1 roleplaying encounter, 1 exploration and 1 puzzle). I don't know, i was just thinking about it.
No matter what edition of the game yr playing (can't speak for 4e, I hated it, don't remember much about it now) it is fundamentally based upon a game that was 99.9% focused on dungeon crawls, the various editions we've gotten over time have generally become more of an abstraction from this original state. Not only is time important in terms of how many encounters you have in a day, but the time you spend fighting, the time you spend exploring, and the time you spend lighting and burning through torches all matters down to the minute. 5e made the confusing choice of nominally making a big deal about keeping track of time while simultaneously neglecting to print the dungeon crawling procedure which has been in pretty much every other edition, that the need for keeping time is based upon. It would probably seem more intuitive to run adventures the way the designers intended if they had included this one essential bit, in the BECMI "rules 'cyclopedia" it's like... 2 pages, very short and concise, could probably be dropped right into 5e the way I've dropped it into 3.5. But, it's like you said; just because the game was intended to be run some kind of way doesn't mean one shouldn't fiddle around with the mechanics as they see fit. DnD might have begun as an elaborate spelunking simulator (I'm joking but... Am I tho?) But even then a lot of us were taking a game that was essentially that spelunking wargame and making it into massively narrative driven stories even if many of the published adventures where what the old heads like to call "funhouse dungeons" that don't often even have an internal consistency, like why was there a vampire just chillin in room 37 of the goblin caves, the kitchen pantry, as I recall? Gary? But seriously, maybe VTM corrupted my soul but I favor narrative focused play, with combat being as plentiful or scarce as the vibe commands, and so I am running every moment either as narrative (loose) time or tactical (controlled) time and usually get between 5 and 10 encounters in any in-game day. I worry less about balancing encounters, I prefer to let narrative dictate what should be in a location because everything being balanced to the party level feels a bit Oblivion/Skyrim after awhile, and I always though Morrowind was more immersive in that sometimes I could walk into a place and clear it out without even getting winded, sometimes the look out, the low level sentry, would stomp my ass so hard I knew I better gtfo and live to fight another day. Likewise, however, if my PCs come up with some asymmetrical plan to beat the big nasty thing that can easily stomp them under equal odds, then that's exactly what I'm gonna let them do. Planescape dumping my 3rd level players into Baator to interact with hilariously powerful devils, who survived as intended btw, kinda shaped my views of DnD a lot as well, and Planescape is part of why I love 2e and why I became interested in the philosophy of a rules system as a toolbox, one you take what you need out of and leave all the rest for another time. Sorry I loredumped but yr video got me thinking
I recall this research being done in much wider scope already, but I am not sure; it's been a while. But it largely mirrors your finding - it actually skews more toward 1 encounter per day or so.
I'm a DM who is running my players through a series of modules called Dungeon On Demand. They typically have 8-11 rooms or encounter areas. At the start, resting wasn't overly considered until I started to notice they were really breezing through the modules. Well, after a talk and putting some ground rules that I'm trying to make fun and challenging adventures for them, we all agreed I'd have to be arbitor of saying when to rest. Typically, they get one short rest per module, and it works pretty well. If there is a bit of bad luck or an encounter really went awry, they might get a long rest. I normally don't like removing agency from my PC's but sometimes not giving them an outlet to rest means they have to get creative to conserve resources.
Magic-users would have to risk bringing their entire library of spells with them. 1e AD&D it seemed to imply that a magic-user wouldn't get an opportunity for a long rest every day. If a group wanted to take a long rest in the wilderness for a magic-user. The group will have to protect against a hostile encounter without the magic-user. Asking everyone to remain in a dangerous area, and deal with the danger without magical intervention. That may not be an option players are willing to take.
Keep in mind that one Deadly encounter is the same as one Medium and one Hard, so 3 deadly encounters fits into a designed adventuring day. Also, keep in mind that ‘adventuring day’ isn’t ‘day’. Many days are going to be relatively safe travel days, shopping days, etc, between when you actually do the risky adventuring days where you go to the lair of the bad guy(s). I suspect that’s what tilting the average in your survey. Another point I wanted to bring up is that ‘game session’ and ‘adventuring day’ don’t need to match up one-to-one. You can have an adventuring day span multiple game sessions. And if you try to run 8 straight combat sessions, yes, that will feel exhausting; as you note, not every encounter needs to be a combat, you can, and should, have traps, social interactions, puzzles, environmental hazards, etc. As a someone who’s played since the ‘70s, I think the shift towards milestone levelling and away from needing good resource management hasn’t been a positive. Insert grognard joke here. But, hey, everyone should have fun in whatever way works best for them, I personally like the added tension of dwindling resources, but to each his/her own. Very good overall point, just raising some points to think about.
I don't think you explained time management in AD&D that well. Gary Gygax ran his Greyhawk campaign for multiple parties. He had a different party on each night of the week in the same world. Tracking which PC was where at which moment was an absolute necessity to be able to play on that level.
6-8 encounters per adventuring day is simply garbage design. Combat in 5e is long and tends to be tedious. The tedium is far worse if the combat encounter isn’t potentially deadly. This means (assuming 30 minutes for a medium difficulty combat - and that’s a fast encounter) THREE hours of combat before players should long rest. You’re right that the subsystems of the game are interconnected. It’s just that the pacing of the game doesn’t work for so many encounters. 5e is just not well designed. It relies overly heavily on the DM to adjust, often on the fly, to challenge the players.
That's another distinction that may lead to a lot of the difference. AD&D had a ton of flaws, but it played a lot faster. You could fit more combats in a reasonable amount of time.
Just use the Longer Rests optional rule. Short rest is 8 hours, long rest is a whole week. Also, settign up camp (and finding a suitable spot to camp in the first place) is in and of itself a resources draining event. I have only once come across a DM since moving to UK who actually gave a damn about us tracking our daily living upkeep. Sadly, he ruined it by completely abstracting it. Instead of having to make sure, we got rations and water and firewood, he just declared a number of nondescript "Recourse Points" per nights rest to avoid suffering Fatigue. I would have kept the tracking of specific item types and broken it down even further, declaring a max number of uses non-consumables (tents, bedrolls, etc..) have before needing skilled repair checks for maintainance (Mending cantrip not withstanding) or loose HP (yes, items also have HP).
I wonder if player pressure has an impact. Recently in my Mad Mage game a player who plays a sorcerer was nearly out of spell slots and sorcery points long before they had an opportunity to take a long rest and kept on whining that she needed a long rest. I had to repeatedly say that they needed to find a safe place to take a long rest and just trying to take one anywhere would not work, they WILL be interrupted. I think looking at the WotC published adventures is a good guide as to how the game is expected to progress. Take LMoP for example. The adventure starts with the ambush on the road, then you have traps on the trail to the hideout followed by at least another 5 encounters in the hideout itself. This is widely considered too hard for 1st level characters but it’s 5-7encounters never-the-less. The adventure goes on to have more 5-7 encounter days interspersed with 1 encounter days. This appears to be a pattern repeated throughout the published adventures. It’s also how I design my homebrew as well. An exception is Mad Mage in which the players have day after adventuring day with in excess of 10 encounters. The spell casters still perform well, they just start complaining for long rests earlier than the martials 😊
this is why i only allow long rests in safe locations. when the party is traveling or questing, they only are able to take short rests over night. so they usually get more encounters per long rest. much closer to the intended adventuring day. it's really just a shift in the players thinking about how they manage their resources. they actually need to use hit dice, arcane recovery, and consumables. and they don't enter every encounter at full power so they tend to have to plan better. 0-3 encounters a day and a long rest every sleep is playing the game wrong. it really does fix the martial/caster divide too.
If the goal is to narrow the martial/ caster divide, and enforcing the 6-8 encounters a day rule would create less fun games, what's the solution? Do we halve the number of spell slots, and end up a little closer to 1e and 2e? Do we give martials a powerful resource to compete, like 4e?
I think boosting martials up would only exacerbate the problems that casters and their runaway power scaling already exhibit. I think the answer to balancing casters lies somewhere in a combination of some of these things: - reduce spell slots - address overtuned spells like Fireball to be more level/power appropriate - reduce the number of spells that effectively nullify the need for skill checks - Implement some sort of spell check or roll-to-cast system that makes magic feel less predictable/more dangerous -work with casting times of certain spells (some may take more than one turn to cast) Lastly and most controversially, in my opinion, a class redesign within the system to reduce the number of spellcaster classes would make the biggest difference. Currently, 8 of the 12 classes available to play are spellcasters. 6 of the 12 are 1-9th level "full casters." Theoretically, this means it's likely half if not more of any given party at the table will consist of spellcasters and likely mostly full casters. I think if the ubiquity of spellcasters were reduced, the conversation would be a lot less fervent. (For the sake of this idea, a class can still have magical abilities without being a "spellcaster", the storm herald barbarian is a good example of what I mean. If there were only one wizard in a party of martials, the wizard would feel much more important and valuable, and the martials would feel much less redundant and overshadowed.
I think the the gap between what the DMG says a DM should do and how the game plays is that we forget to count the encounters that never happen! A good DM will often have a bunch of extra challenges and encounters to handle player choices, so what might look like 0-3 encounters may have been 6 behind the screen - but the players skipped or avoided some or all of them or may choose to shorten the adventuring day or have a shopping session. The lesson from this is more about how a DM can adjust the difficulty or tone of the game simply by interrupting long rests or stealing the classic line from videogames that you can't rest here/right now. I've run games where they couldn't rest without solving a puzzle of a cat stuck under the floor who would keep making noises to wake them up. Other times we've been unable to rest because we'd gotten ourselves into a dangerous environment, had run out of food or water or were being chased or on the clock to finish a quest before time ran out. As a DM I love tossing players these kind of curveballs and as a player I've learned to love the challenge of being pushed to the edge of my characters abilities. I've played a Wizard who had to figure out how to be useful on Athas, and in my high level Ravenloft game the players have intentionally chosen to skip long rests giving the whole game a wild frantic pace that has allowed me to keep expert players with high level abilities on their toes. Without these 'missing encounters' you end up taking away a players choice, or the ability to adjust pacing to suit everyone's mood and play style...and when done well players have no idea when they're having a planned encounter or the events were the result of the DM changing the story on the fly in response to their choices.
This is a super interesting way of thinking back on encounter planning. Keeping track of time in sessions is one of my favorite ways to give the players some extra stakes when they are choosing between "side quests". I try to make it obvious that if they leave one too long, it'll have consequences
This is why I think having one edition be 'active' at a time is a flawed premise - we are quite strongly now in a situation where you essentially have two types of D&D historically; 3.5e and earlier, and 5e. OK, yeah there is also 4e, but very few seem to enjoy that so I wont count it - although I do think there were elements there that worked and would be great if imported into another edition. So, we have nitty gritty D&D, and we have fast and loose D&D. Perhaps we should have content being actively made for both, and fixes/improvements being made for both. --- That said, personally I would love a 6e that used computer assistance to make more gritty gameplay accessible and quick - getting the best of both. We have systems like Roll20, Beyond, and already available. We have some... unofficial 'tools' too. Yet all of these are being used with 5e - an edition that is notoriously 'simple' and barely makes use of them. Imagine what these systems could do for an actual edition built around taking advantage of them. I'm not talking about a virtual tabletop edition per say - it would still be designed to be played sitting around an actual table. It would however use smart phones/tablets/laptops in the hands of players taking care of mechanic calculations - and grognards can remain using an abacus if they prefer. There are a number of tabletop games that already do this - the one I'm most familiar with is Mansions of Madness 2e and it rocks. Gloomhaven also has an app that helps massively speed it up, which is great because it can be quite slow otherwise. The power of human-controlled DMing, lacking the rail roads and unforeseen interactions of a video game, but with the power of a video game for calculating weight, hit, dodges, blocks, glances, damage by type, spell resources, etc. This edition would say: "We don't need to lose all the nuances and details to play quickly - we have the technology to get the best of both".
The DMG seems to contradict itself (only by a little) with the statement saying that the party "can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day." There are two tables in that section that show that you should be taking 4 to 5 hard encounters or 6 to 7 normal encounters.
Ranged martials can avoid taking damage, however. They are generally better in every way than a melee martial too, so its not unexpected. If I knew I was in a campaign where there were going to be guaranteed 8 combat encounters, I would hope for at least half the party to be ranged martials able to pick off enemies while kiting backwards until the fight is won or near enough. The other half I would want as casters judiciously throwing out battlefield control, crowd control, and AoE damage as appropriate. After Tier 1 this should get easier and easier as the caster resources increase and the ranged get Feats like CBE and SS. The one thing I would absolutely be hoping not to get is melee martials.
I never run anything less than hard encounters. Usually I aim for deady. If I know there will only be one or two combats, very deadly. For example, I ran a one-shot with a few social and exploration encounters, but only one combat: a beholder IN THEIR LAIR. One fun fight is better than six boring ones.
I’ve been running this game since 2nd edition. I’ve always run 1, maybe 2 encounters per day for the most part, unless it was a dungeon. But I’ve always been more story driven. And unless the story is about a war, you just don’t fight that many times in one day.
Focusing on 2 or less encounters per day kinda ruins short rest dependent classes. In almost all 5e games I have played in, full casters demand long rests after only 2 encounters. You can say the DM can control this BUT when the table demands, it’s easier said than done.
good conversation! Keep it up. :) 3 pillars... - social rarely expends "resources" since this is generally conversation with maybe a non-resource ability check. - exploration is usually one or more ability checks and saving throws ... maybe some damage is taken or movement-adjacent class features are used which is mostly not resources... most likely spells will be cast in this pillar. - combat is where the majority of resources are expended... spells, hit points, class features are largely combat-related. a table with 1 or 2 battles per day and 1 or 2 exploration challenges that would require a spell or feature to resolve is easily sitting in your majority "2 - 3 per day". here's a quick breakdown of an adventuring day that most teams can process in a 4 hour game: puzzle trap combat trap trap combat combat puzzle combat if each of these take hit points and feature/spells to resolves, your adventuring day will pace as intended. That's a huge door to additional conversations about how to maintain meaningful moments in all 9 of these things.
My issue with adventuring days and time in 5e is that not only does it lean towards the dungeon crawl aspect but also that it means time actually has NO meaning. Going zero to superman in barely a few weeks, and just the lack of connection to the world. It probably stems from the sense of urgency modern adventures have, the big bad needs to be stopped vs the type of playstyle that is a bunch of mercs bumbling thru life, making coin and enjoying life before they die.
When I answered that question I misunderstood. I thought you were asking about boss battles which consume a great deal of resources. I bet others did the same.
Enjoyed your video. Some of your conclusions seemed to me as if they were equating encounters per day with encounters per session? No further prep is required for a 6-8 encounter day than a 1-2 encounter day, in my experience, they just take place over a longer period of time in real life. I believe that is a healthy base assumption, and not something that needs adjusting. What would be helpful would be stories designed in such a manner as to allow for days when adventurers kick butt and take names, knowing they’ve got 1-2 encounters and can unload, and circumstances built in to obviously encourage people to push on to a “normal” adventuring day, or even an extended one. Anyhow, that’s just my impression and opinion, but I enjoyed your thoughtful analysis. Thanks!
Hey! Definitely not trying to conflate adventuring day with session, I tried to go out of my way to ensure those were distinguished! As for it not being more work, I think you’re the second or third person to mention that but but I definitely don’t think that’s the case. If the campaign takes place over a very short period of in game time then yes, it would be functionally the same but if the campaign is taking place over any “meaningful” amount of time it would be much much more work. Just from my current campaign that I mentioned has been going for 3.5 years I typically run 2-3 encounters per adventuring day, not per session. If I were running 6-8 per adventuring day, I would be planning 3 to 4 times more encounters than I currently am and my campaign would take substantially longer to run as most times when you are engaging in a medium to hard encounter it adds a not insignificant amount of time to the session itself. I’m not sure if that makes sense lol… anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts, I genuinely love your channel and your insights as well :)
@@InsightCheck I think my first response to this got eaten. If this is a duplicate, feel free to delete it! :) First and foremost, thank you for the response and the kind words, I appreciate both! My thought on this is that if the time to play at table increases, as does the number of encounters, then while you have a greater amount of work per adventuring day, you do not have an increase in work required per session. Does that make sense? Both increase at about the same rate, has been my experience. By having the bar set so high, you allow for days that can be a full slog, and days that allow the characters to cut loose and feel like they're totally awesome. If we halved the average adventuring days expectation, then we wouldn't halve those opportunities, we would remove half of the spectrum between "long slog" and "minor encounter on the road". I'd rather concrete tools to teach people how to set a good balance, and adventures that are designed knowing that 6-8 is the "full day" but that not EVERY day needs to be a "full day" to be a FUN day. Hope that makes sense. p.s. I am genuinely jealous of your upcoming game with other creators, I bet it's going to be a blast. Kudos to you on getting in on that!! Keep up the amazing work.
I think I understand where I may have not been clear in the video and that’s not that I was talking about an increase in work per session but an increase in work overall, across the entirety of the campaign. If you’re doubling or tripling the amount of encounters in total well… that’s double or triple the amount of work total. More encounters = more preparation. The individual session might be the same but now there would be more sessions with more work total even if the average work per session remains the same. For what it’s worth I fully beyond agree with you that I would rather better tools exist and better guidance overall from WotC to teach DMs how to determine a good encounter balance and not just shoot for a number. This video was really trying to distill an incredibly nuanced topic down to 15 minutes, I know you know that struggle too haha! As for the game I’m beyond excited! I couldn’t believe that they said yes when I proposed the idea, I’m still freaking out about it! Beyond excited to be running it and hope you’ll tune in if you can :) Also also, I know I’ve mentioned it to you before but it would be super fun to collaborate on something in the future, I’m just really bad at following up on stuff but I’m trying to get better at that in 2024 :P
@@InsightCheck oh my yes, the struggle of distilling topics is SO real. Incidentally, I see where you’re coming from on the work side. It is definitely a fair point. On the collaboration side, let’s do it! What’s the best method of reaching out?
The 6-8 encounters are only exhausting if you are doing 20+ min battles on a single sesssion. An adventuring day doesn't mean a session, you can have 2-3 sessions happen in a day without a problem
I dislike the Adventuring Day and CR to include encounter balance. I'll not go off on a rant about Rest mechanics either. The world should be a dangerous place and leveling up should be an accomplishment and not arbitrarily expected to just happen anyway (fairly rapidly, BTW.) But, it's a game: play it the way you want to play it. Keep it the same, or change it as you will. Excellent video. Thanks for this. I'll definitely check out your other videos.
“Encounter” seems to me a misunderstood term. It refers to social encounters too. Maybe “scene” would be a less confusing term to use for everyone. If three role playing scenes, an investigation/exploration scene and two combat scenes occurred, that’s a 6 encounter session. Shows like critical role do 5-6 “encounters” per session, it’s just that usually only 1 of them are combat, and sometimes none of them are. But they’re still doing 5-6 encounters, just most are RPing and some are investigation/exploration.
Encounters is a useful term. Equating encounters with combat encounters is the problem. Even when a party stumbles upon a group of orcs it doesn't need to become a combat encounter. The party can try to intimidate, trick, bribe, cooperate or even flee.
@@InsightCheck I’m more talking about your theory about people who might watch Critical Role and think that they’re an example of “low-encounter” play. If people watch CR and think “encounters” make up little of a typical session then they are under a misapprehension as to what an encounter actually is. It seems to me like some of your poll responders are under the same misapprehension, because while I’ve had plenty of sessions with only one combat encounter. I’ve never had a session with less than 3 total encounters. Typically my sessions run 5 encounters. My mouth was agape when I saw that your poll had anyone answer 0-1 and after a few seconds, it dawned on me that they would have answered higher if they realized encounter means more than just combat.
5:58 not that they'll have these situations every day, no. Only that the meaningful days -- the days you bother playing out in full -- are the ones where that happens.
I'm not sure if "encounters" mean the same thing as you think it means. I see "encounters" as moments of interactions. IE: 1) Encounter - Bard uses charm to gain influence over the bar maid who knows something important. 2) Encounter - Go to shop pick up equipment and the Rogue knows the shop keep through Thieve's Guild so group gets discount. 3) Encounter - Rogue picks the pocket of a rich politican to get the key to the basement. 4) Encounter - Party opens door to basement then are faced with some sort of "magically locked" door/entrance to a hidden dungeon in the basement. 5) Once inside the dungeon the party faces a set of giant rats. 6) ..... etc... I think each "encounter" is a moment when at least one party member has to use an ability (possibly resource draining). So a party of 4-6 should be able to use at least 1 ability/spell/or some sort of resource to get past that encounter. Then some encounters are actual combat requiring the usage of some abilities/spells/resources(potion? of breath underwater/healing/etc).. Then some encounters cost hit points, some cost resources, some cost multiple spells. I would say that most of sessions which lasted on average between 4-6 hours max easily have 6+ encounters in them.
Just a further note to the above. I believe that an encounter is any point of contact or moment where the characters in the party are required to use up some sort of resource to drive the story forward. So as long as one character is required to use their skills/abilities/spells etc than that is an encounter. So 6-8 is very easy to do when looked at like that. If it's all just combat, then all those other skills/spells/abilities don't have as much meaning as they should. Not every character is built for combat and by varying the encounter types you give everyone in the part something that makes their character special/useful and fun for them. Then the sessions and encounter types should be adjusted based on the character classes and the players personal preferences(play styles). IE: If you have 3/4 players that all have combat based characters, there should be more combat encounters. If you have 4 players that are all about exploring and investigations than you should have far fewer combat encounters and more skills based encounters.
For what it’s worth I was very specific in the video that I was not talking about combat exclusive encounters. However, none of what you’re describing here would meet the definition in the DMG either. It’s 6-8 medium to hard encounters, not just encounters. I mention that the DMG even says it can be more if the encounters are easy but none of the ones you listed would qualify as medium to hard except maybe the set of Giant Rats depending on the party level and number. I think we very much have the same definition of what encounter means, but this video is referencing a specific difficulty level of encounter as the DMG suggests.
well my examples were only vague outlines.. i would assume that any DM that knew what they were doing would alter the complexity level and challenge to correspond with the the abilities of the players. So how difficult (Medium - Hard Encounters) anything is becomes about the specific situation presented to the players. IT can be infinitely harder to solve a clue to a mystery than it might be for a high level party to take down a dragon... it's all about the RP/story. Fast Example is something as simple as whether or not it takes a roll of 15 or higher to charm someone.. or if it takes a whole lot of talking/charming/persuasion/spells and the DC's are 25 and not 15... because the people being talked to are higher level. Which might be all played out in a matter of just a few minutes of game time and could utilize multiple members of the player part to accomplish. ... not sure how else to explain that other than it just takes some imagination/creativity to envision what I was saying in my previous comments... Of course you're probably right that it doesn't meet the definition of what's in the DMG so I guess it's all moot. But I'm not entirely convinced that it doesn't.
Most the 5e PH and DMG state the world is low magic but never treated as such. The DMG also states that you should interpret the rules to your favored style of play, death a 0hp being one more deadly option. The problem, and the art also suggests this, is that players make it a high magic fantasy straight out of the final scene of never ending story.
I think this is partially because 3/4 of the classes in the game are spellcasters and 1/2 of all classes are "full casters". It's really hard to make your world feel low magic when most of your party are able to launch fire and lighting from their fingertips with abandon, and even the martials have magic items.
The five minute workday is not new... it's always been hard to have more than a few encounters per session and I've been playing from back in the day. The design team were smoking crack. I've tried running things more the way they set things up and it does make for more of a challenge for the long rest type classes. It's pretty tough to make it happen, though---you really do have to have some intermediate resource drain encounters built in.
honestly if you're going to make a radical change nerf the crap out of spells and remove spell slots, make it so the combat's difficulty doesn't require the party to have gone through 3 other encounters to whittle down their resources
The fundamental problem is that the adventuring day doesn't SCALE. Many people think the problem would be ENTIRELY (rather than partially) solved by: 1. Using 1 day short rests / 1 week long rests 2. Using shorter short rests (10 minutes) 3. Adjusting your healing per day (slow natural healing) These and many more solutions don't *actually* fix the problem. Instead, what they do is they tend to fit within NARRATIVE time slots or they simply encourage players to play the way it's intended anyway. #1 doesn't matter if all you actually need from your group is a time pressure or the assurance that consequences matter; such that if you're trying to mount a rescue, expect your foes to be refortified or to have fled if you flee to rest. #2 only matters if your players feel like they couldn't reasonably take 1 hour rests, but could take 10 minute rests. It doesn't matter if they were going to take a long rest anyway due to a complete lack of time pressure, nor if they were short resting anyway. #3 doesn't matter when you can use magic healing unless you semi-occasionally throw random medium encounter muggings at them back in town, or packs of wolves in the middle of the night. (I'm actually a huge fan of #2 and #3, and advocate it a lot, but it's a band-aid to get players to behave more than it is a systems solution.) Given the rather girthy 1 hour short rest in 5e, it might be possible to address this by directly attacking spell slots, since that's the biggest discrepancy between short and long rests, and would reduce the daily power of spellcasters. Something like half the number of spell slots, and then regaining only a quarter of your level in slots per short rest (a universal Arcane Recovery), might put characters on a more even playing field and encourage more rests per day, without infinite problem-solving potential from spellcasters (a 20th level caster would only regain a 5th level slot at most). But none of that would address other tiny issues sprinkled throughout, like the Barbarian's Rage, but it would at least work as a broad systems-level rule rather than individual nitpicking of features and concepts for classes and subclasses that everyone has a million variations of.
I wonder if the view of dnd 5e being “easy” is due to a lot people not hitting that 8 encounters per day threshold. When I dm I try to get 5 or so a day, that really can stretch out a party’s resources and add tension to the game without each encounter having to be “deadly”
Most players spend all their mental energy at the end of their 3rd encounter / combat / puzzle and need a meal to recover it. Also scheduling means you only get so much time to play anyway. A.G.
I am almost certain that this survey consisted of respondents who equate the term “encounter” with “combat”. In other words, I suspect they have many encounters without realizing it.
What tipped me off into believing that this is indeed the case, are the large number of people claiming zero to one encounters per day. There is no way that these games consist of zero exploration challenges zero social interactions, etc..
@@roberttschaefer I think there's a difference between social interaction and social encounter. If you're the type of group that happily spends a day wandering around town shopping, chatting with locals and roleplaying among yourselves, those aren't really "encounters". If you're negotiating with the bandit king, that probably is.
Yeah if the adventure book does not help the DM set time pressure, the party will just long rest instead of short rest. Only alternative is bumping up those two encounters to deadly difficulty. As is, short rest is wasted on warlocks :P
I have to use story elements to force my players to engage in more than 3 encounters per day (however I don't do this often). When they got trapped in a dungeon and found out they couldn't take long rests, they became more careful about burning through their remaining resources. I think 5.24 should limit short rests to 2 per day and reduce the amount of spell slots gained as casters level up (I use spell points, so this would be even easier). They won't do it - they actually made long rests 'better' for players. I think another challenge in the adventuring workday is encounter length. I try to make non-boss encounters quick since our sessions are typically 3.5 hours.
geez, read this paragraph again, please. That isn't a recommendation, or a rule or smth, the whole intention of this thing with adventuring day is to warn a newbie DM about LIMITS. That isn't a guideline or smth. And if we talking about a classical dungeon crawler DM even does not regulate the amount of encounters. The players do! They think about resources and when their bedtime
For clarity: at no point during this video did I say it was a rule or even a recommendation. The entire point of the video was to discuss an underlying design element of the game that has impacts on perceived balance to most players. The game *is* designed around the assumption that players will be enduring 6-8 medium to hard encounters per day. That isn’t a rule. It’s not a recommendation. It’s just the underlying premise. The impacts of that are everything I mentioned in the video that has caused a shift in the way players experience things like Spellcasters having seemingly limitless resources.
I disagree, short version: The argument 6-8 encounters being required to make the game work is kind of a misreading of something in the DMG which itself has problems. It's really advice about how much encounter budget you have in dungeons. And that being taken for fact has kind of been because of worries about balance which are far more theoretical than an at the table problem. On top of that it's not actual plays but the reality of balancing combat encounters taking a significant amount of time against pacing of story. It still comes into play in dungeons, but even then that just adds resource management. PCs will tend to functionally have all of their core resources for the big fight. Expanding a bit on the first point, the text on P84 of the DMG says nothing about those encounters being needed to attrition player resources. It talks about more being too much, but it makes no mention of less being a problem. Reading the chapter as a whole I just can't see that being the intention reading between the lines, if anything the advice in the chapter is really geared to not killing your PCs.
Good vid, for the most part. I don’t disagree with the commentary about the ‘adventuring day’. My focus, though, is on the comment that 5th edition is ‘the most popular’ edition of the game to date. Though numbers are difficult to nail down, it’s estimated that in 1981, just seven years after hitting the market, D&D boasted some 3-million players worldwide. By 2023, that number was estimated to be in the range of 50-million. Admittedly, that’s quite a lot of growth, even though it spans over forty years. “Popularity” can, however, be arguable. How many players of today - and I speak specifically about *everyone* who started playing from 3rd edition and afterwards - have experienced anything like The Satanic Panic? How many are openly accused by mainstream media (television and print), by politicians, school officials, police, and even close family members of practicing black magic, doing human sacrifices, and worshiping the Devil? How many of them were subjected to formal interventions (as done for drug or alcohol problems), or even outright exorcisms, because one or more of the above fed so deeply on the anti-game propaganda that they bought the lie in an extreme way? How many have had their lives literally threatened if they continued to play? I argue that the game was far more ‘popular’ in those days than now - not because of raw numbers playing, but because the people who played through, and survived, that period continued to loved it deeply enough to play it despite the ‘hell on earth’ atmosphere they had to endure to play it. Call me crazy, but playing through - and despite - the Satanic Panic demonstrates a ‘popularity’ that the current crop of ‘gamers’ couldn’t match if they had to. Just one old-time gamer’s view. Take it or leave it at your option.
This is essentially my thoughts as well. I think depending on the types of encoutners it caaaaan work but it definitely requires a lot of effort from the DM to get it to be that way.
I could be misinterpreting your words, but if I understand correctly it seems like you're assuming 6+ encounter players are always running that many encounters in a real life day. Again, I could be misunderstanding the words in the rules, but I'm pretty sure the rules are trying to use 6-8 encounters in the GAME day to balance Short/Long Rest mechanics. Regardless, interesting conceptual video :)
Nah I wasn’t referring to a real life day, I can see how that may have come across but that was part of why I tried to say “adventuring day” way too many times during the video hahaha.
@@InsightCheck Thank you for directly clarifying to me. I was listening while cooking so I must've not been as attentive as I should've been haha. If it's all the same to you, I think I'll leave my comment just in case anyone else gets mixed up like I did.
... You missed an important point because of how terms have changed over time. The reason why the original book said you cannot have a "meaningful campaign" without keeping track of time is because what a "campaign" was NOT the adventures of one group of protagonists-- a "campaign" was MANY adventuring parties all doing their own things in a shared world with the things one adventuring party doing affecting others and characters being able to jump from one group to another. Because a "campaign" involved many DMs and many adventuring parties all shaping a shared world, it was very important to know when various events occurred. Obviously, you cannot create a proper sequence of events if you don't know what days various things occurred and you will end up with wild anomalies. But once a "campaign" is contained to a single group of characters and no one else besides them is altering the state of the world and the consequences of their actions will only affect them-- suddenly the importance of precisely what days anything occurred gets quite a bit relaxed. Furthermore, once everyone just completely heals after any 8-hour rest also means you don't even need to be keeping track of the days in order to keep track of hit point recovery. The fact that you completely misunderstood this fundamental thing at the very beginning of your argument taints pretty much everything you had to say afterward.
You’re exactly correct, terms change and evolve over time. The meaning of the word “campaign” in the context of AD&D versus now in 5e is very different I’m totally with you on that, it’s part of why I said “AD&D functions substantially differently and the modern game does, but that doesn’t make the assumption any less valid today” without going into full detail as it wasn’t really the point I was trying to make. You can remove the word campaign entirely and the main premise still remains the same which is to say that time in D&D, regardless of context of which edition you are playing, is core to the functionality of the game. I totally get your point, I see where you’re coming from I just don’t think it actually undermines the fundamental point I was trying to make by way of analogy which is simply to say that the importance and relevance of time in the game has been a consistent one :).
The only way to play D&D "wrong" is if you're not having fun. And for all his contributions to D&D, Gygax was full of shit about a lot of things, and the stuff about keeping time records is one of them.
Critical Role aside, I think the smaller number of combat encounters per day also comes down to the fact that many/most playeers play in homebrew games, and it's easier for the DM to write a couple of very interesting encounters than 6-8 with just the right pauses for short rests.
That's part of it, but in my experience as a DM, I prepare more encounters than the players ever get a chance to interact with. Combat takes too long to resolve to have 6-8 combat encounters in an adventuring day, unless you want that adventuring day to last many sessions, or you skip over all exploration between encounters.
Even with non-homebrew games most published adventures don’t have 6-8 encounters per day.
I’m currently running Curse of Strahd and seeing 1-2 encounters per day on average…
it's a lucky evening if my group makes it through *a single* encounter in a session. Since I joined the group about 6 months ago we've long rested a whole three times.
@@matthewparker9276 the only problem with this is classes that reset core abilities every short rest get short changed some of the resources they should have in a given day compared to classes that reset their core abilities on a long rest.
As part of my college group, which works kinda like Adventurers League, I’ve tested making 6-8 small encounters in a single session (and adventuring day).
For example a one shot was restoring Elturel from the events of DiA, slaying the fiends roaming the ruined city. I’ve used the daily adventuring day xp budget to design said one shots.
The results? Final bosses of deadly challenge become an actual challenge, even at high levels (15-17). Spellcasters totally exhausted, sorcerers scraping their sorcery points to create extra slots, and parties actually taking short rests.
As each encounter was bit sized, it didnt become much of a dragon, but it only worked for high action adventures (eliminate all targets, stop this raid, survive until morning, cross this dungeon, etc.)
For my next game, I’m only allowing Long Rest in safe places, meaning that long journies will pbbly contain between 6-8 encounters between Long Rests. In other words, i keep the 8:1 encounter per rest ratio, but instead of 1 long rest per in-game day, it is 1 rest per journey which could take days in game.
Our group has gotten to where we run roughly 6 encounters per adventuring day and shifted to a much more dungeon crawl style game. RaW runs so much smoother this way, at least in my experience. A “day” might take multiple sessions run but combat now doesn’t take nearly as long because only 1-2 of those encounters are deadly. The majority of them are easy or medium fights and traps/puzzles. I highly recommend going this route rather than 1-2 encounters per day.
This sounds really fun. I wish I could find a group to do this with
I dont think the average interpretation of an Adventuring Day (2-3 encounters) actually comes from critical roll or other live play shows. I think it's also a product of the game's design. At lower levels its a bit easier to pepper in multiple low level encounters with weaker monsters such as goblins which can challenge your players while still maintaining a sense of narrative cohesiveness. However as the players get stronger with more hitpoints, more powerful abilities, it becomes exponentially harder to do so. This is compounded by party size and starts early.
There are only so many beholders I can reasonably throw at my higher level party in one day while still being able to reasonably explain it in my game world. (Slight exaggeration and milage may vary)
I think the best way ive seen people counter this is to add restrictions on, or lengthen the ammount of time it takes to complete a Long Rest. Which requires alterations to the core rules and player buy-in.
A big part of that, though, is the game's shift away from dungeon crawling.
Which didn't happen with 5e, but which kind of seems like a sacred cow that the designers just aren't willing to kill.
Most D&D or D&D-adjacent games are not 8 session long dungeon crawls with the party camping out in the ruins of some long forgotten and buried temple, or in the basement of some big scary castle. As with video games, the growth of the genre has come on the back of narrative, so players expect a lot more story, and a lot less rote skull crushing (and many, many fewer traps requiring 10 foot poles or sacrificial chickens) than long-time fans of the game -- such as those who grew up to become game designers -- are used to.
@ChanJENI The interesting thing about that, is that even the official pre-written adventures and modules for 5e largely don't adhere to the structure of a 6-8 encounter Adventuring Day. There's a dissonance between the mechanical design and adventure writing design even within the official material.
I countered it by buying OSRIC and Lion and Dragon. There are loads of OSR options at the moment, it’s a golden age of the old school.
I use the variant rest rule, so a short rest is 8 hours and a long rest 5 days. It works for our intrigue-heavy campaign not just in terms of balance, but it also:
- allows me to come up with very varied encounters, including chases, since they don't have to take place within minutes of each other;
- allows players to make the most of a urban setting in terms of purchasing potions and making use of healing or even resurrection items: without a 1-hour rest, they need those items to recuperate, but it also makes it possible for me to create a less artificial cap on how many they can find (plus, it depletes their gold).
It has required a handful of adjustments to spell durations and certain abilities here and there, and it surely helps that my party is homogenous in composition (4 full casters), but I wouldn't go back for any reason.
I think adjusting the rest parameters is the best way to work within the majority of 5e's rules while changing as little else as possible.
I have recently done the same but I modified 8 hour short rests to allow my players to more quickly swap their attunements and allow them to prepare a few spells on a short rest
same! I switched and it’s so much easier and natural for the 6-8 encounters where everything is balanced on :)
I hate that and resent whoever does it
@@moonlight2870 Oh wauw! :-p going in to resent mode because of a rule in a game is awesome 😅Just what the world needs 😛
When I've DM'd I ran 6+ encounter days without fail with many dungeons and it was really fun! This method really let everyone feel important in the party and definitely felt well balanced mechanically however it was very rare that my players were able to finish an adventuring day and me having to create 6+ encounters everyday did feel exhausting.
I'm not fully sure if it was worth it the fodder did make the player's feel stronger which is what they seemed to want and I really did enjoy it just now I'm in university I really don't have time to run games like that.
Six plus encounters per day - That is 1974 Dungeons and Dragons. In a dungeon crawl, roll for wandering monsters once every 10 mins (a turn). Three encounters going in and another three encounters on the way out. Very common. And remember, Magic Users got the spells only once per day.
If everyone at your table is having fun, you're doing it right
The issue I have with the 6-8 encounter Adventuring Day is player agency. There is no mechanical support to discourage players from choosing to take a short or long rest before at least the sixth encounter.
I wonder if they would have added a rule about not being able to take a long rest in a dungeon or hostile environment if that would have helped? As much as I like the natural language of something like Adventuring Day, the most common denominator is a single combat. i wonder what kind of resources we would have available if the game intended you to go nova and then recover before the next fight.
There’s the rule that you only gain the benefit from a long rest if you do one every 24 hours.
There's the idea that you cannot successfully gain a Long Rest while inside a dungeon. Your party will be discovered and attacked while sleeping thereby prefventing them from gaining the Long Rest benefits.
One long rest per 24 hours, long rest being interrupted by wandering monsters, future encounters being harder because the monsters know you're there and thus have time to prep (the room ahead was just a standard goblin encounter is now deadly because they were able to set up fortifications and traps), or just the boss of the dungeon was able to escape with the plot device making the trip a waste entirely.
One of the most truly insightful videos on the state of the game and an under the hood analysis I've seen in a very long time. Well done. And, for what its worth, I agree completely. I've been DMing since 1980 and the Basic and Expert games (especially of the BECMI version) and 1st and 2nd Edition all managed game balance in the gaming day quite well - which I've only considered now having watched your video. We had "epic" long days back then - I recall amazing battles in G1-3 (Against the Giants) and in D1-3 (Descent into the Depths of the Earth) where martials never felt overshadowed by casters because those casters had to be critically mindful of their resources - for those who may not know, a high level magic-user would needs literal days of study time to prepare all the spells in their repertoire if they'd drained themselves fully - so they would need to default to magic items and other alternatives at times and only unleash their real power when the situation demanded it. I'm not saying older versions of the game were superior in any way - in fact, I haven't returned to earlier editions in 10+ years: 5th Ed is superior in too many ways to list here. But I have become extremely disillusioned by the power creep and superhero feel of 5th Ed in recent years and am literally reading the full rules of Pathfinder 2E Remastered right now as a serious alternative (and my Shadowdark kickstarter pack also just arrived today, which is the other potential candidate to replace 5E as my home system of choice).
But perhaps the fault is mine as DM in how I've also fallen into the pacing state of 2-3 encounters per day (add me to the 71% list ; ) ). And your video has made me recall the last few sessions of my daughter's Descent into Avernus campaign that I'm a player in: for three sessions we were pressed through the ruins of Elturel, chased at times, bumbling into enemies at others, and seeking any refuge to get catch our breath (re: short rest at a minimum) - but it never worked for us. My daughter kept the stress on us at a high level, and we were run entirely out of resources and had to keep pushing for survival (even more so at that point) with no respite in sight. The pacing of it all felt wrong to me as a 5E DM (though we didn't criticize her...at least not beyond some grumbling around the table LOL) - but looking back on it with your video perspective in my mind, I see how it actually echoed all those great sessions from my 1st Ed memory! And the session after we were finally able to rest, the players (all young and new to D&D within the last few years) talked fervently about how close to death they felt and the ideas they'd had away from the game about how they might find other ways to survive...
It all felt great to me in that light. And so in combination with my daughter's game and your insights here, I see I can make some adjustments to my own game to put the stress back in the game - and hopefully thereby find the "super" dropped from how I view 5E, and the characters becoming just "heroes" once again like they used to be.
Cheers!
It's pretty well documented that a big part of what Gygax meant by "meaningful campaign" was one where he could keep track of when and where in his world all the different adventuring parties where at any given point. Because he ran what is now referred to as a "West Marches" type of game.
Thank you! I was thinking of responding the same thing. Gygax and Arneson and the rest of the core group of gamers who created DnD would create their own dungeons and the other players would play their dungeons. Gygax mentions in his dungeon design article that dungeon masters should have 5 levels of a dungeon prepared for play, and that players should ideally have game time continue outside of the day of game. So staying in a dungeon for a week in between games is likely lethal for the group, and they’ll need to leave the dungeon before the end of the evening and go back to town to rest and resupply. Making game time = real world time gives more emphasis to the idea that a long rest is 1 week long, that players need downtime, and that dungeons restock with enemies and loot. They’re living worlds, underground cities full of enemies with treasure hoarded away from evil dragons who roam the surface world looking to snatch up any hoards for themselves.
Oh totally, and I’ve mentioned something similar in another comment. I understand that the definition of “campaign” is be eh different now than it was in AD&D. That part was really meant to just draw parallels and have something of a through line during the video. The games function dramatically differently and I mentioned that too. The point was really just to emphasize time as a core component of the game more than anything else :)
I ran an entire adventure from 5th to 12th level using 6-8 encounters per day. Well, i used the adventuring day xp budget. Often i did 3-9 per day, with a short rest after every deadly encounter or 2 hards or 3 mediums. The group had two fighters, a warlock, and a cleric, so I expressly wanted the short rest classes to not get overshadowed by the cleric.
We played on roll20, and just didnt get a long rest every session. Easy to keep the sheets untouched for the week.
A more accurate way to put this would be "The rules of the game no longer reflect the way the majority of players like to play, and should be changed."
My parties tend to enjoy a tough deadly encounter over grinding through endless groups of 5, 6 or 8 trash mobs every day. The CR calculated medium encounters tend to take up exactly 0 resources, and a hard might take one spell to completely unravel. They could do this almost endlessly. All it ends up doing is introducing a big dose of tedium into a game that's supposed to be fun.
Set up the battle, roll initiative, players talk strategy, someone finally goes, and hypnotic pattern or fireball invalidates the whole encounter anyway. Then you carry on in a circle, readying actions to all hit all the CCed enemies one at a time until everything's dead, or clean up what survived the fireball. That's an hour of your life you're never getting back, fighting wolves that have no plot significance.
Not every fight is like that, but so many of them are in Tier 2 that I really don't think the mass encounter strategy is very interesting, even if you're playing creatures as mean as possible. I'd rather have a big ambush that feels like lives were actually on the line, or a ritual with 20 or 30 participants that's really tense than any number of random encounters of small groups, or Ogres strangely obsessed with committing seppuku via adventurer.
Totally agree. Useless combats..........😑
This is what I ended up doing as well, when I ran 5e. A couple of deadly encounters per long rest. After the first 5 levels, normal monsters are just a joke to a well optimized party and take nearly no resources to defeat, while wasting time.
So I personally only let players reat in safe locations.
However, I see people complain that many encounters would take the whole session. But nothing is saying an adventuring day equals a session. I often have my players go 2-3 sessions without getting a long rest. That way there is still time for the other pillars.
I agree with your assessment
The 2-3 encounters could be why 5e seams easier than previous editions
Assuming a game session is 4 hours of play time, 8 encounters is 2 per hour. Or it's multiple sessions per game day.
Most games I've seen in 5e are 1 day per 1 to 2 sessions and are maybe 1 to 2 minor battles and a role play encounters or 1 major battle per session.
I remember when I played in the 80s and 90s that dungeon crawls or intense overland travel had 2 to 4 planned encounter and about 2 or more random encounters. So, I'd say the story telling element has done to the game the same as what happened in comic books... decompression, longer pauses, long gaps for rest.
6-8 encounters per day is absurd unless the party is in a dungeon, or dealing with a crisis. I've run 2 wizards premade campaigns and most of the time it gets nowhere NEAR that amount until you get to the dungeon of the chapter.
It's especially obnoxious in the first chapters of tomb of annihilation, where the party is all but guaranteed to have 1 or fewer encounters per day.
Nice video, you have good pacing and visuals. Your stuff is always very nicely edited. Some people say dungeons are the answer but you can't run encounters like that all the time, and it doesn't mesh well for those games that want a more "critical role" feeling like you said. Personally, I think players like at least one encounter per session to break things up.
I like the way 13th age does it where you do a long rest after a certain number of encounters. You can rest before hand but it doesn't replenish resources. Done this way you can space out encounters as much as you like and still have them challenging for the players and bridge the martial caster divide. I'm hoping to do a video on this approach for D&D sometime.
Hi. I dm 6-8 adventure days, but only during dungeons. We break our adventures into dungeons and 'everything else', don't @ me , i'm not writing a guide, i dont need names for everything.
This isn't a super hard and fast rule, but in general, exploration, towns, some travel, etc is paced for whatever ends up making sense for the story, generally 2-5 encounters a day or whatever seems about right. However, once we start a dungeon (keep in mind dungeons can be open world or anywhere) players know to start managing resources and focusing on the tactical portion of dnd. I always communicate when this change of pace happens, and in general it works pretty well for our table that wants to be able to use and make powerful characters, but also enjoys the flexibility that comes with a more narrative game.
Some observations:
1) We stopped using Leo's tiny hut. It wasn't really a choice and the players like finding creative ways to rest.
2) Longer days nerf melee martials. HP is a resource, and melee martials run through it faster than other classes run through theirs. Keep this in mind.
3) Long days don't work well at lvls 1 and 2. Which is fine, just plan accordingly.
4) Fewer combats with harder fights do not work as well. Mostly it just makes casters even more mandatory.
5) Players REALLY start to look for creative ways to deal with encounters. Some of our highest tension moments were social checks in dungeons to recruit allies, or avoid a fight when low on resources.
6) Sometimes players end up having to rest, thats fine. For us its usually a retreat and rest since resting in a dungeon situation is usually very risky. Resting or Retreating resets parts of the dungeon. Deal with it on a case by case basis. This applies to a lesser degree to dungeons that are meant to be cleared over multiple days.
7) I know Matt Coville says that 5e isn't a dungeon crawler and he knows more about game design than me, so fair. But 5e seems to work a lot better when you utilize the dungeon format as a significant portion of your adventures.
Rules are there to add structure and support your game. Just make sure that they are supporting the type of game that is enjoyable for you and your table. For us, we use the rules for the part of the game where they make the most sense.
Casters still blow martials out of the water on 6-8 encounter adventuring days btw. Casters can't nova anywhere near as hard, true, but martials aren't resourceless by any stretch (even Rogues have to track HP), and in fact consistently have fewer resources to stretch across an adventuring day. Meanwhile casters have far more powerful class features, and much stronger defensive tools, and superior/numerous tactics and build options.
Also, D&D did get rid of the adventuring day once. In 4e. Specifically because they knew since fairly early into 3.5 (forget Tiny Hut, Rope Trick was even more abusive and gave birth to the 15 minute adventuring day) that people weren't playing the kind of dungeon crawls the adventuring day was designed for anymore (and indeed if you look at the resource recovery of late 3.5 classes like those from the Tome of Battle and Dungeonscape (and to a lesser extent the Tome of Magic), you can see how they tried to meet players where they were at (notably these were considered some of the most balanced classes in the edition) and playtest what would become core structures of 4e). Many people hated 4e, because oftentimes tradition matters more than good design in this community.
But 5e was a very weird aberration. It was D&D's last hurrah before the underperforming division was to be shut down, a weird hodgepodge of all editions of D&D (and a return to the OGL after the GSL fiasco) that did nothing particularly well, but also managed to avoid most of the worst flaws of each edition while including modern design sensibilities. But then Stranger Things and Critical Role happened and made the edition incomparably more successful than anyone could have predicted (and almost completely removed quality from WotC's feedback cycle). And almost all the influx of new players played it like 4e, because that's how Critical Role plays. Hell, it's the first edition to include narrativist mechanics, and nobody uses them because Critical Role doesn't (despite TBIFs and Inspiration probably being the best features in the edition for the modern style of play).
And so now that 4e is retro (from the perspective of the new blood in the hobby), it's actually seeing a resurgence in popularity as people appreciate how its design was ahead of its time (see also the popularity of 13th Age, PF2e, MCDM, and DC20, all of which take most of their design cues from 4e). But WotC is in the very weird position of being unable (indeed, as we're learning about Hasbro's stock troubles, they literally can't afford to) to return to a game design that actually matches how people actually play the game, because they can't afford to alienate their new customer base for whom 5e is the tradition that matters to them more than good design, and because they've promised backwards compatibility.
One interesting thing we thought we were seeing with Monsters of the Multiverse and much of the early playtest was a push to consolidate almost all resource recovery into a single rest type, because the split rest recovery creates too many problems, all of which change in complex ways based on different playstyles. I applauded this consolidation, even if I was very annoyed they were more moving everything to long rests instead of short rests (ie reinforcing the adventuring day structure rather than shifting to a more per-encounter balance)... but circa playtest 6 they seem to have abandoned even this incremental positive change.
Best post of the day! I agree completely.
I cannot comprehend why they have given up in the idea of consolidifying rests
Wow. I’ve never played a dnd campaign where we would have more than 1 battle encounter per session. And I played with a lot of DMs. Usually we have some social stuff most of the session, but nothing where we have to spend a lot or even some of our recourses. Maybe this is a tradition of play in my country? :) Maybe if we would have had more resource draining encounters, casters wouldn’t be so OP at most of the tables?
There's a few inaccuracies in this video. Firstly, you don't need 6 to 8 encounters per day. If you run Deadly encounters according to CR then 3 encounters fills the adventuring day. That would be a good fit for many groups. Secondly, not every day is an adventuring day. Sometimes you have no encounters. Sometimes you have just one. That's fine. The adventuring day is simply a measure of how many encounters the party can handle before they need a long rest.
For number 1, this is true and I explicitly mention it in the video at 5:02 as well! As for number2, I fully agree. I don't believe I ever suggested that every day was an adventuring day, hence the name "adventuring day".
3 Deadly encounters per day tend to be very swingy: either the party stomps through them, or the DCs/damage done by monsters are so high that players risk a TPK.
And magic items break CR, so there's that too.
@@InsightCheck I see what you mean, although it seemed as though you were talking about '6 to 8 encounters' for the rest of the video. That might be a misunderstanding of mine. Regardless, it's helpful to remember that we can absolutely run 3 or 4 encounter days and that works fine so long as those encounters are more challenging.
@@tibot4228 It's true that the encounters will be more swingy, but that's not necessarily a bad thing if you WANT the risk of a TPK. If you don't want a TPK then don't run a full adventuring day. You can do two CR Hard encounters and the game will run fine.
@@tibot4228 You can technically have multiple monster deadly encounters. These wont have high ACs, DCs, etc. In fact, this should really be the case since single entity encounters over and over massively skew balance too.
When I was DMing and I pushed for 6-8 encounters it was very difficult to make all of them require real resource usage of any kind. Frequently 2-3 would get passed by good rolls and guidance or good old fashion barbarian smashing without even using a rage. Effectively I could’ve just done 4-5 encounters. Group fell apart at level 5 though.
I don't really understand why it's more work to prep more encounters per day. Prep time is based on the number of encounters per session, not per day. One adventuring day could last three sessions. To keep narrative pacing from suffering you balance mini-climax resolutions around the typical time per session. For example, if you know your party can usually get through 3-4 encounters per session, the DM only need plan 3-4 encounters whether that's half a day or a full day in-game.
When I run my games, I want to challenge the party when I can. I have noticed that when they are being pushed into difficult situations they tend to be the most innovative and run into some great RPing opportunities. I do not force 6-8 encounters a day, but when they make bad decisions, roll very poorly or are heading to beat up a "Big Bad" I throw more encounters at them. I also try to make intelligent monsters act intelligently. The smart enemies tend to chase down the characters, flank the players, set impromptu traps/ambuses or run and tell their boss, warning them that players are getting close.
My intention is to tax the casters of the group (my play group tends to lean towards caster classes). My players know my proclivity to push for more encounters, so the players will try and balance spell slots for combats and skill challenges. They sometimes burn through big ticket spells to see if they can blitz through areas and avoid extra fights altogether, and if they do well on the rolls and the RPing they can knock encounters off the day. The game gets way to easy if the casters fire all their best spells in the first few combats without the fear of them being out of spells for an encounter or two.
No. It's Hasbro/WotC the one in the wrong, no matter the issue!
Hahahaha obviously!
excellent video! Something that can’t be said enough. I think (just my assumption) that the martial and caster divide is also less of a problem if you use these encounter rules. I recently switched to the gritty rest variant rule and had a player switch to a martial when he needed a new character. Wizard actually says “no” when partymembers ask him for a spell in a simple encounter instead of just blasting everything 😂 I’m curious tho about all the input for “one dnd” that comes from the community and the skewered experience in 5th edition because of the playstyles not matching up. Or what WOTC will do about this balancing mechanic
I really like your poll-analysis. Surprisingly nuanced statistical insights ;).
Also, very good video! Strongly agree with the pacing argument. In addition to that though, I also think a part of it is that in the campaigns I play, we tend to just like going supernova quite regularly. If I have to stretch my resources out over 7 encounters, especially if I'm low level, that's going to mean I get to use like 1 or 2 of my resources in one encounter. That's not as fun as just using everything in my toolbox regularly. So, we tend to just spend basically all we have in 2 to 3 encounters and then go for a long rest. This leads to adventuring days which feel full (2 or 3 things in 1 day is quite a lot) but not like a slog. The narrative pace is pretty good and we get to use our toys often.
if you change the word "encounter" for "obstacle" I guess most groups face a lot more than 0-3 per day
Does the DMG imply that all of those encounters should be COMBAT encounters? If they mean two or three combat encounters, a couple of traps, a negotiation, and a few challenges or obstacles, that makes more sense to me. EIGHT combat encounters per rest I feel is only possible when the party is locked into a situation where they cannot rest without serious consequences.
People defend it by saying this but it doesn't make sense: social encounters and environmental encounters absolutely do not drain resources the way combat encounters do, and most player resources are combat oriented: how is a Barbarian going to get Rages drained by a trap encounter, how is a social encounter going to burn hitpoints/hit dice? Yeah, it's true that spells can be used out of combat, but it's nowhere near as intensive or as multi-faceted as combat, and a situation like that if it uses an expendable spell at all that's not a ritual or a cantrip might use *one* spell. And maybe more importantly, personally as a DM, the idea that my out of combat "encounters" are supposed to be chipping away at player resources like combat is itself a weird design burden. I design my out of combat stuff for verisimilitude, my characters to behave like characters and my hazardous environments to behave like pseudo-real places. It's hard enough making balanced combat encounters, now I have to figure out the CR of a fuckin *riddle*?
In the video "encounter" was defined as anything designed to drain resources. I don't recall the exact DMG definition offhand, but that's functionally what it it is.
@Brian-rt5bb example of a non combat encounter burning a barbarian's resources. The party enters a room and unfortunately none of them saw the slightly raised tile the sorcerer stepped on causing the doors to lock and the walls to slide closer. The rogue tries to pick the lock on the door out but due to bad rolls is taking longer than expected so the barbarian uses their near superhuman strength to hold the walls apart. Seeing that success on the athletics check the DM is going to call for they use one of their 3 rages to gain advantage on the check.
@@sam7559 Of course its possible to think up examples like that, but it still doesn't work systematically. In the example you've given three things needed to happen:
1) The sorcerer "doesn't notice" a trap and stumbles into it
2) The rogue "tries to pick the lock and gets bad rolls" and you have a situation where they can't keep trying.
3) The barbarian has to burn a Rage to get advantage instead of just taking a help action from everyone else. Why?
There's a normal version of this encounter where none of those things happen and zero resources are expended.
There's no way to systematically design encounters like this that predictably drain resources and have it not be super contrived, and even if you do, the cure is just as bad as the disease. You go from the DM scrambling to fill a 6-8 encounter "adventuring day" with combats to the DM having to come up with goofy non-combat "encounters" that nonetheless expend resources, and hoping the player characters can't come up with better solutions.
@Brian-rt5bb well yes, traps are the easy-medium at are designed to nick at resources, if you want to drain the barbarian's resources make non combat encounters that value strength, as a barbarian player unless you are running the most optimized of tables, I will gladly spend a rage to have a cool moment instead of having my moment shared with the 8 Str sorcerer because they said they "helped"
We partially solved this with a house rule. I use to artificially bunch up encounters. On a three weeks trip, they’d have a day with 3 and 20 days with 0 encounter. Not any more. Now When traveling overland and camping, you get the benefit of a short rest unless you’re in a very safe and comfortable place. To get a long rest, they have to stay 24 hours at a campsite. If there’s a ticking clock that gives them pause. They usually take one long rest at end of travel, before entering the crawl. This makes overland and dungeon crawls more similar in terms of encounters per “day”. The big win is PCs don’t dump every resource on an overland encounter thinking they’ll almost certainly get a long rest afterwards.
I’ve noticed a lot of people say over my time that these adventuring day assumptions result in too many encounters (to the point it becomes boring), and I agree. My personal solution was to make long rests take a full day. Instead of simply sleeping (which just prevents exhaustion), the players must be in a safe space for the full 24 hour period. This means that I can have 6+ encounters over the course of several days, but still a singular long rest. It helps set up concrete ‘arcs’ and adventures in the campaign and has generally worked quite well.
(Ps; I didn’t touch short rests at all for this)
A random tangent I’d bring up is One Piece’s East blue saga. The fact Zoro is still injured in Arlong Park, despite taking those injuries in the prior arc, is a really fun bit of writing that adds so much more to the story. It feels somewhat akin to that, wherein my change works like a way of having long-lasting injuries without like, cutting off a PC’s arm or something
Another note: I usually have 0-2 (most of the time 1) combat per session
I run 3 rest types:
Short rests (10 mins, max 2/day) same as normal short rests, spend HD (no rolling, just get max hp per die plus con)
Long rests (8 hours, max 1/day) acts as a short rest, except you regain half your HD and each spell caster gets back an arcane recovery (wizard feature, so wizards can do it 2x per day) of spells slots. Recover 1 level of exhaustion. Regain non-spell level related long rest abilities.
Full rests (24 hours, requires a “safe” location… essentially, not in the wilderness or dungeon on adventure. Likely back at town or the main camp of the campaign). Recover all spells, HD, hp, etc.
This is a much grittier experience, but I find that the pacing when you end up with just a few combats per day (not the 6-8 expected, but the 2-3 most groups seems to actually experience) feels more balanced. Not having casters blow their whole wad every fight, or the paladin smite every attack makes the encounter building much easier.
Full slot recovery each day and full HD/hp recovery each day makes sense when you are fully taxing the their daily resources, but that’s not how most groups I’ve played with actually play. Also, the limit of 2 SR/day keeps the monks/warlocks/fighters in check.
I am currently running a homebrew version of Tomb of Anhilation. To emphasise the survival aspect, we have among other things, changed the resting rules. Resting in the jungle, you require 8hrs to get the benefits of a Short Rest, and you can only get the benefits of a Long Rest is you rest in a safe area as determind by the GM (me). So if you consider an Adventuring Day as the time between Longs Rests, I am able to get 8 encounters. And since it is over a number of Narative Days, the pacing does not suffer.
That all being said, this decision is under the session zero doc fo rthe campaign as "Special Campaign Rules Changes" and is not how we normally play. This chnage is considered a 'feature' of the current campaign as to what makes it different from other campaigns we've played. It's been fun, but doubtful it will be a pernanent adaptation.
A couple of thoughts:
1) I always think of 4th edition when people discuss this which achieved balance by giving all classes the same number of rechargable powers. People hated 4th edition, but it was better balanced.
2) We're currently trying something like the variant rest rules which is that an overnight rest outside of civilization is a short rest and you only get a long rest when you rest over night in town. A lot easier pacing. The DM has also added that a 1 hour rest can let you roll 1 hit die, and you can do up to 2 of those per short rest.
Having played for years online and in person, I have never once seen a party do more then 3 fights for an entire session. 8 fights for an in game day, never once have I seen this happen. not even close. Again, 3 is the most I have seen having played for over 10 years.
Frankly a session with 5 or so small insignificant encounters sounds unfun.
Despite the fact that the adventuring day comes from original d&d, people not following it is also not new. I've been playing dnd since 2nd edition and I dont think I ever had more than 4 encounters in a day
Yeah. I've been playing about as long and that many encounters has always been rare.
In my group we often only have 1 encounter a day, we play multiple systems in multiple settings, but that number is pretty constant.
I'm trying to think of what balanced martial classes would be like if you tried to upscale them to caster power, assuming the encounter # from your poll, so like... 1 short rest and 1 long rest every 3 or 4 encounters. Might be a fun homebrew/thought experiment.
Thinking very magic like burst abilities on short rest, only rechargable once per long rest. Like barbs being able to smash the ground to create an 40ft earthquake, dealing some blud damage, save vs knock prone and difficult terrain as a high level feature they could do a couple times a short rest.
When you are using the term 'encounter' are you exclusively referring to combat encounters? I remember the writing guidelines for most convention style modules that were meant to be played in a 3 to 4 hour spot. It was to be 6 encounters divided as; 2 combat, 1 social, 1 puzzle, 1 environment, and 1 writer's choice of the other categories.
I am not. I specifically mention it in the video :)
But some of them would only apply I think if they use up resources. You could have a dozen puzzle encounters that are designed to be solved by the players figuring them out and that wouldn't affect the balance for the day.
@@jeffmacdonald9863 This goes to what is meant by encounters in a working day. I am gronard old school and we used to roll for random encounters, depending on location, from as little as every 10 minutes game time (back when a melee round was 1 minute in length) to every hour in the wilderness. It was usually a 1 in 6 chance of a random encounter though occasionally higher if some alert had changed the situation. After an encounter was determined then the encounter table was filled with a mixture of events that ranged from friendly, to neutral, to potentially hostile, to immediately hostile. There were also a variety of natural events, animals, and wierdness in a good encounter table. The numbers on an encounter table could also be exceedingly large. Kobolds could appear in groups of up to 400. You also would respond to things like large tribes of Orcs or Goblins by finding help instead of attempting to charge in. The idea of a story approach to DnD with a few encounters per day really takes hold in 3rd edition when it became more normal for characters (particularly spell casters) to focus on going Nova for 1 or 2 combats and then resting to recover spells. This is one of the reasons 4th Ed focused on only a small select group of resources being daily and having milestones to increase recovery. They wanted more combat encounters per day (unfortunately the combat encounters, while extremely fun, took much longer to resolve and countered the original purpose of increased availability of resources). Version matters in how we discuss what counts as an encounter and what designers mean when they use the term. Many 5th Ed designers described how they played sessions under each Ed of the rules to get their bearings when writing the rules for 5th Ed. I am sure they absorbed some of the hex crawl and sandbox approach to thinking of encounters instead of the sculpted story approach to gaming that shows like Dimension 20 or Critical Roll popularize.
I don't think it will ever go this way, but a relatively simple fix is to list the resource refresh intervals as x times in initiative.
So, instead of say "long rest" it was 5 times in initiative. A short rest might be 2 times. This way, the rate of usage is normalized across encounters regardless of whether you cluster them in one day or several.
Especially resources that are solely used in combat, a "when you roll initiative you have x uses available" simplifies the whole issue.
If there are six combat encounters in a day, I expect at least two of them to be the party beating down a couple of sickly goblins or stepping on a few spiders. Four real fights might take our entire session, with no roleplay or exploration.
It's six to eight encounters, not combat encounters. If the party is expecting more resource draining encounters then they'll choose which ones are worth fighting or finding other solutions to get by.
Or a day will be multiple sessions.
The Adventures of Stormwreck Isle series I published on DMsGuild has 4-6 encounters per module and each module is effectively 1 day. The combats are all hard to deadly to make up for the lack of extra encounters.
Most of my work is in Adventurer's League these days, so you're hard capped at 4 hours per session/module. If the AL standard was 6 hours, I'd love to cram another encounter or two into the modules.
If you look at the DRW series, many of them are 6 hour modules that we have to trim down to 4 hours for AL.
6 encounters per day are not even that hard to imagine if you think about it, these six could be like 3 combats (maybe one medium, one difficult and one "boss fight" more difficult) and 3 other encouters like (1 roleplaying encounter, 1 exploration and 1 puzzle).
I don't know, i was just thinking about it.
No matter what edition of the game yr playing (can't speak for 4e, I hated it, don't remember much about it now) it is fundamentally based upon a game that was 99.9% focused on dungeon crawls, the various editions we've gotten over time have generally become more of an abstraction from this original state. Not only is time important in terms of how many encounters you have in a day, but the time you spend fighting, the time you spend exploring, and the time you spend lighting and burning through torches all matters down to the minute. 5e made the confusing choice of nominally making a big deal about keeping track of time while simultaneously neglecting to print the dungeon crawling procedure which has been in pretty much every other edition, that the need for keeping time is based upon. It would probably seem more intuitive to run adventures the way the designers intended if they had included this one essential bit, in the BECMI "rules 'cyclopedia" it's like... 2 pages, very short and concise, could probably be dropped right into 5e the way I've dropped it into 3.5. But, it's like you said; just because the game was intended to be run some kind of way doesn't mean one shouldn't fiddle around with the mechanics as they see fit. DnD might have begun as an elaborate spelunking simulator (I'm joking but... Am I tho?) But even then a lot of us were taking a game that was essentially that spelunking wargame and making it into massively narrative driven stories even if many of the published adventures where what the old heads like to call "funhouse dungeons" that don't often even have an internal consistency, like why was there a vampire just chillin in room 37 of the goblin caves, the kitchen pantry, as I recall? Gary? But seriously, maybe VTM corrupted my soul but I favor narrative focused play, with combat being as plentiful or scarce as the vibe commands, and so I am running every moment either as narrative (loose) time or tactical (controlled) time and usually get between 5 and 10 encounters in any in-game day. I worry less about balancing encounters, I prefer to let narrative dictate what should be in a location because everything being balanced to the party level feels a bit Oblivion/Skyrim after awhile, and I always though Morrowind was more immersive in that sometimes I could walk into a place and clear it out without even getting winded, sometimes the look out, the low level sentry, would stomp my ass so hard I knew I better gtfo and live to fight another day. Likewise, however, if my PCs come up with some asymmetrical plan to beat the big nasty thing that can easily stomp them under equal odds, then that's exactly what I'm gonna let them do. Planescape dumping my 3rd level players into Baator to interact with hilariously powerful devils, who survived as intended btw, kinda shaped my views of DnD a lot as well, and Planescape is part of why I love 2e and why I became interested in the philosophy of a rules system as a toolbox, one you take what you need out of and leave all the rest for another time. Sorry I loredumped but yr video got me thinking
I recall this research being done in much wider scope already, but I am not sure; it's been a while. But it largely mirrors your finding - it actually skews more toward 1 encounter per day or so.
I'm a DM who is running my players through a series of modules called Dungeon On Demand. They typically have 8-11 rooms or encounter areas. At the start, resting wasn't overly considered until I started to notice they were really breezing through the modules. Well, after a talk and putting some ground rules that I'm trying to make fun and challenging adventures for them, we all agreed I'd have to be arbitor of saying when to rest. Typically, they get one short rest per module, and it works pretty well. If there is a bit of bad luck or an encounter really went awry, they might get a long rest. I normally don't like removing agency from my PC's but sometimes not giving them an outlet to rest means they have to get creative to conserve resources.
Magic-users would have to risk bringing their entire library of spells with them. 1e AD&D it seemed to imply that a magic-user wouldn't get an opportunity for a long rest every day. If a group wanted to take a long rest in the wilderness for a magic-user. The group will have to protect against a hostile encounter without the magic-user. Asking everyone to remain in a dangerous area, and deal with the danger without magical intervention. That may not be an option players are willing to take.
Keep in mind that one Deadly encounter is the same as one Medium and one Hard, so 3 deadly encounters fits into a designed adventuring day.
Also, keep in mind that ‘adventuring day’ isn’t ‘day’. Many days are going to be relatively safe travel days, shopping days, etc, between when you actually do the risky adventuring days where you go to the lair of the bad guy(s). I suspect that’s what tilting the average in your survey.
Another point I wanted to bring up is that ‘game session’ and ‘adventuring day’ don’t need to match up one-to-one. You can have an adventuring day span multiple game sessions. And if you try to run 8 straight combat sessions, yes, that will feel exhausting; as you note, not every encounter needs to be a combat, you can, and should, have traps, social interactions, puzzles, environmental hazards, etc.
As a someone who’s played since the ‘70s, I think the shift towards milestone levelling and away from needing good resource management hasn’t been a positive. Insert grognard joke here. But, hey, everyone should have fun in whatever way works best for them, I personally like the added tension of dwindling resources, but to each his/her own.
Very good overall point, just raising some points to think about.
I don't think you explained time management in AD&D that well. Gary Gygax ran his Greyhawk campaign for multiple parties. He had a different party on each night of the week in the same world. Tracking which PC was where at which moment was an absolute necessity to be able to play on that level.
6-8 encounters per adventuring day is simply garbage design. Combat in 5e is long and tends to be tedious. The tedium is far worse if the combat encounter isn’t potentially deadly. This means (assuming 30 minutes for a medium difficulty combat - and that’s a fast encounter) THREE hours of combat before players should long rest.
You’re right that the subsystems of the game are interconnected. It’s just that the pacing of the game doesn’t work for so many encounters.
5e is just not well designed. It relies overly heavily on the DM to adjust, often on the fly, to challenge the players.
That's another distinction that may lead to a lot of the difference. AD&D had a ton of flaws, but it played a lot faster. You could fit more combats in a reasonable amount of time.
Just use the Longer Rests optional rule. Short rest is 8 hours, long rest is a whole week. Also, settign up camp (and finding a suitable spot to camp in the first place) is in and of itself a resources draining event.
I have only once come across a DM since moving to UK who actually gave a damn about us tracking our daily living upkeep. Sadly, he ruined it by completely abstracting it. Instead of having to make sure, we got rations and water and firewood, he just declared a number of nondescript "Recourse Points" per nights rest to avoid suffering Fatigue. I would have kept the tracking of specific item types and broken it down even further, declaring a max number of uses non-consumables (tents, bedrolls, etc..) have before needing skilled repair checks for maintainance (Mending cantrip not withstanding) or loose HP (yes, items also have HP).
I wonder if player pressure has an impact. Recently in my Mad Mage game a player who plays a sorcerer was nearly out of spell slots and sorcery points long before they had an opportunity to take a long rest and kept on whining that she needed a long rest. I had to repeatedly say that they needed to find a safe place to take a long rest and just trying to take one anywhere would not work, they WILL be interrupted.
I think looking at the WotC published adventures is a good guide as to how the game is expected to progress. Take LMoP for example.
The adventure starts with the ambush on the road, then you have traps on the trail to the hideout followed by at least another 5 encounters in the hideout itself. This is widely considered too hard for 1st level characters but it’s 5-7encounters never-the-less.
The adventure goes on to have more 5-7 encounter days interspersed with 1 encounter days. This appears to be a pattern repeated throughout the published adventures. It’s also how I design my homebrew as well.
An exception is Mad Mage in which the players have day after adventuring day with in excess of 10 encounters. The spell casters still perform well, they just start complaining for long rests earlier than the martials 😊
this is why i only allow long rests in safe locations. when the party is traveling or questing, they only are able to take short rests over night. so they usually get more encounters per long rest. much closer to the intended adventuring day. it's really just a shift in the players thinking about how they manage their resources. they actually need to use hit dice, arcane recovery, and consumables. and they don't enter every encounter at full power so they tend to have to plan better. 0-3 encounters a day and a long rest every sleep is playing the game wrong. it really does fix the martial/caster divide too.
If the goal is to narrow the martial/ caster divide, and enforcing the 6-8 encounters a day rule would create less fun games, what's the solution?
Do we halve the number of spell slots, and end up a little closer to 1e and 2e? Do we give martials a powerful resource to compete, like 4e?
I think boosting martials up would only exacerbate the problems that casters and their runaway power scaling already exhibit.
I think the answer to balancing casters lies somewhere in a combination of some of these things:
- reduce spell slots
- address overtuned spells like Fireball to be more level/power appropriate
- reduce the number of spells that effectively nullify the need for skill checks
- Implement some sort of spell check or roll-to-cast system that makes magic feel less predictable/more dangerous
-work with casting times of certain spells (some may take more than one turn to cast)
Lastly and most controversially, in my opinion, a class redesign within the system to reduce the number of spellcaster classes would make the biggest difference. Currently, 8 of the 12 classes available to play are spellcasters. 6 of the 12 are 1-9th level "full casters." Theoretically, this means it's likely half if not more of any given party at the table will consist of spellcasters and likely mostly full casters. I think if the ubiquity of spellcasters were reduced, the conversation would be a lot less fervent. (For the sake of this idea, a class can still have magical abilities without being a "spellcaster", the storm herald barbarian is a good example of what I mean.
If there were only one wizard in a party of martials, the wizard would feel much more important and valuable, and the martials would feel much less redundant and overshadowed.
I think the the gap between what the DMG says a DM should do and how the game plays is that we forget to count the encounters that never happen! A good DM will often have a bunch of extra challenges and encounters to handle player choices, so what might look like 0-3 encounters may have been 6 behind the screen - but the players skipped or avoided some or all of them or may choose to shorten the adventuring day or have a shopping session. The lesson from this is more about how a DM can adjust the difficulty or tone of the game simply by interrupting long rests or stealing the classic line from videogames that you can't rest here/right now. I've run games where they couldn't rest without solving a puzzle of a cat stuck under the floor who would keep making noises to wake them up. Other times we've been unable to rest because we'd gotten ourselves into a dangerous environment, had run out of food or water or were being chased or on the clock to finish a quest before time ran out. As a DM I love tossing players these kind of curveballs and as a player I've learned to love the challenge of being pushed to the edge of my characters abilities. I've played a Wizard who had to figure out how to be useful on Athas, and in my high level Ravenloft game the players have intentionally chosen to skip long rests giving the whole game a wild frantic pace that has allowed me to keep expert players with high level abilities on their toes. Without these 'missing encounters' you end up taking away a players choice, or the ability to adjust pacing to suit everyone's mood and play style...and when done well players have no idea when they're having a planned encounter or the events were the result of the DM changing the story on the fly in response to their choices.
Gus L. has a couple of pertinent articles on his blog All Dead Generations. “What is a Dungeon Crawl” & “Exploration Play”.
This is a super interesting way of thinking back on encounter planning. Keeping track of time in sessions is one of my favorite ways to give the players some extra stakes when they are choosing between "side quests". I try to make it obvious that if they leave one too long, it'll have consequences
This is why I think having one edition be 'active' at a time is a flawed premise - we are quite strongly now in a situation where you essentially have two types of D&D historically; 3.5e and earlier, and 5e. OK, yeah there is also 4e, but very few seem to enjoy that so I wont count it - although I do think there were elements there that worked and would be great if imported into another edition.
So, we have nitty gritty D&D, and we have fast and loose D&D. Perhaps we should have content being actively made for both, and fixes/improvements being made for both.
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That said, personally I would love a 6e that used computer assistance to make more gritty gameplay accessible and quick - getting the best of both. We have systems like Roll20, Beyond, and already available. We have some... unofficial 'tools' too. Yet all of these are being used with 5e - an edition that is notoriously 'simple' and barely makes use of them. Imagine what these systems could do for an actual edition built around taking advantage of them. I'm not talking about a virtual tabletop edition per say - it would still be designed to be played sitting around an actual table. It would however use smart phones/tablets/laptops in the hands of players taking care of mechanic calculations - and grognards can remain using an abacus if they prefer.
There are a number of tabletop games that already do this - the one I'm most familiar with is Mansions of Madness 2e and it rocks. Gloomhaven also has an app that helps massively speed it up, which is great because it can be quite slow otherwise.
The power of human-controlled DMing, lacking the rail roads and unforeseen interactions of a video game, but with the power of a video game for calculating weight, hit, dodges, blocks, glances, damage by type, spell resources, etc. This edition would say: "We don't need to lose all the nuances and details to play quickly - we have the technology to get the best of both".
The DMG seems to contradict itself (only by a little) with the statement saying that the party "can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day."
There are two tables in that section that show that you should be taking 4 to 5 hard encounters or 6 to 7 normal encounters.
Martial's have the limited resource of HP and hit dice, most martial's don't want to go into battle with 12 of 90 hp!
Ranged martials can avoid taking damage, however. They are generally better in every way than a melee martial too, so its not unexpected. If I knew I was in a campaign where there were going to be guaranteed 8 combat encounters, I would hope for at least half the party to be ranged martials able to pick off enemies while kiting backwards until the fight is won or near enough. The other half I would want as casters judiciously throwing out battlefield control, crowd control, and AoE damage as appropriate. After Tier 1 this should get easier and easier as the caster resources increase and the ranged get Feats like CBE and SS. The one thing I would absolutely be hoping not to get is melee martials.
I never run anything less than hard encounters. Usually I aim for deady. If I know there will only be one or two combats, very deadly.
For example, I ran a one-shot with a few social and exploration encounters, but only one combat: a beholder IN THEIR LAIR.
One fun fight is better than six boring ones.
I’ve been running this game since 2nd edition. I’ve always run 1, maybe 2 encounters per day for the most part, unless it was a dungeon.
But I’ve always been more story driven. And unless the story is about a war, you just don’t fight that many times in one day.
Focusing on 2 or less encounters per day kinda ruins short rest dependent classes. In almost all 5e games I have played in, full casters demand long rests after only 2 encounters. You can say the DM can control this BUT when the table demands, it’s easier said than done.
good conversation! Keep it up. :)
3 pillars...
- social rarely expends "resources" since this is generally conversation with maybe a non-resource ability check.
- exploration is usually one or more ability checks and saving throws ... maybe some damage is taken or movement-adjacent class features are used which is mostly not resources... most likely spells will be cast in this pillar.
- combat is where the majority of resources are expended... spells, hit points, class features are largely combat-related.
a table with 1 or 2 battles per day and 1 or 2 exploration challenges that would require a spell or feature to resolve is easily sitting in your majority "2 - 3 per day".
here's a quick breakdown of an adventuring day that most teams can process in a 4 hour game:
puzzle trap combat
trap trap combat
combat puzzle combat
if each of these take hit points and feature/spells to resolves, your adventuring day will pace as intended.
That's a huge door to additional conversations about how to maintain meaningful moments in all 9 of these things.
My issue with adventuring days and time in 5e is that not only does it lean towards the dungeon crawl aspect but also that it means time actually has NO meaning. Going zero to superman in barely a few weeks, and just the lack of connection to the world. It probably stems from the sense of urgency modern adventures have, the big bad needs to be stopped vs the type of playstyle that is a bunch of mercs bumbling thru life, making coin and enjoying life before they die.
When I answered that question I misunderstood. I thought you were asking about boss battles which consume a great deal of resources. I bet others did the same.
Enjoyed your video. Some of your conclusions seemed to me as if they were equating encounters per day with encounters per session? No further prep is required for a 6-8 encounter day than a 1-2 encounter day, in my experience, they just take place over a longer period of time in real life. I believe that is a healthy base assumption, and not something that needs adjusting. What would be helpful would be stories designed in such a manner as to allow for days when adventurers kick butt and take names, knowing they’ve got 1-2 encounters and can unload, and circumstances built in to obviously encourage people to push on to a “normal” adventuring day, or even an extended one.
Anyhow, that’s just my impression and opinion, but I enjoyed your thoughtful analysis. Thanks!
Hey! Definitely not trying to conflate adventuring day with session, I tried to go out of my way to ensure those were distinguished!
As for it not being more work, I think you’re the second or third person to mention that but but I definitely don’t think that’s the case. If the campaign takes place over a very short period of in game time then yes, it would be functionally the same but if the campaign is taking place over any “meaningful” amount of time it would be much much more work. Just from my current campaign that I mentioned has been going for 3.5 years I typically run 2-3 encounters per adventuring day, not per session. If I were running 6-8 per adventuring day, I would be planning 3 to 4 times more encounters than I currently am and my campaign would take substantially longer to run as most times when you are engaging in a medium to hard encounter it adds a not insignificant amount of time to the session itself.
I’m not sure if that makes sense lol… anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts, I genuinely love your channel and your insights as well :)
@@InsightCheck I think my first response to this got eaten. If this is a duplicate, feel free to delete it! :)
First and foremost, thank you for the response and the kind words, I appreciate both!
My thought on this is that if the time to play at table increases, as does the number of encounters, then while you have a greater amount of work per adventuring day, you do not have an increase in work required per session. Does that make sense? Both increase at about the same rate, has been my experience. By having the bar set so high, you allow for days that can be a full slog, and days that allow the characters to cut loose and feel like they're totally awesome. If we halved the average adventuring days expectation, then we wouldn't halve those opportunities, we would remove half of the spectrum between "long slog" and "minor encounter on the road". I'd rather concrete tools to teach people how to set a good balance, and adventures that are designed knowing that 6-8 is the "full day" but that not EVERY day needs to be a "full day" to be a FUN day.
Hope that makes sense.
p.s. I am genuinely jealous of your upcoming game with other creators, I bet it's going to be a blast. Kudos to you on getting in on that!! Keep up the amazing work.
I think I understand where I may have not been clear in the video and that’s not that I was talking about an increase in work per session but an increase in work overall, across the entirety of the campaign. If you’re doubling or tripling the amount of encounters in total well… that’s double or triple the amount of work total. More encounters = more preparation. The individual session might be the same but now there would be more sessions with more work total even if the average work per session remains the same.
For what it’s worth I fully beyond agree with you that I would rather better tools exist and better guidance overall from WotC to teach DMs how to determine a good encounter balance and not just shoot for a number. This video was really trying to distill an incredibly nuanced topic down to 15 minutes, I know you know that struggle too haha!
As for the game I’m beyond excited! I couldn’t believe that they said yes when I proposed the idea, I’m still freaking out about it! Beyond excited to be running it and hope you’ll tune in if you can :)
Also also, I know I’ve mentioned it to you before but it would be super fun to collaborate on something in the future, I’m just really bad at following up on stuff but I’m trying to get better at that in 2024 :P
@@InsightCheck oh my yes, the struggle of distilling topics is SO real.
Incidentally, I see where you’re coming from on the work side. It is definitely a fair point.
On the collaboration side, let’s do it! What’s the best method of reaching out?
@DM-Timothy because of the One Shot I’ve started using Discord so probably there? Still trying to figure that aspect out haha
Are you saying we should halve the number of spellslots a caster gets?
The 6-8 encounters are only exhausting if you are doing 20+ min battles on a single sesssion. An adventuring day doesn't mean a session, you can have 2-3 sessions happen in a day without a problem
I dislike the Adventuring Day and CR to include encounter balance. I'll not go off on a rant about Rest mechanics either. The world should be a dangerous place and leveling up should be an accomplishment and not arbitrarily expected to just happen anyway (fairly rapidly, BTW.) But, it's a game: play it the way you want to play it. Keep it the same, or change it as you will. Excellent video. Thanks for this. I'll definitely check out your other videos.
“Encounter” seems to me a misunderstood term. It refers to social encounters too. Maybe “scene” would be a less confusing term to use for everyone. If three role playing scenes, an investigation/exploration scene and two combat scenes occurred, that’s a 6 encounter session.
Shows like critical role do 5-6 “encounters” per session, it’s just that usually only 1 of them are combat, and sometimes none of them are. But they’re still doing 5-6 encounters, just most are RPing and some are investigation/exploration.
Encounters is a useful term. Equating encounters with combat encounters is the problem. Even when a party stumbles upon a group of orcs it doesn't need to become a combat encounter. The party can try to intimidate, trick, bribe, cooperate or even flee.
Absolutely, I was very specific to state that I was not exclusively talking about combat encounters but about them much more broadly than that!
@@InsightCheck I’m more talking about your theory about people who might watch Critical Role and think that they’re an example of “low-encounter” play. If people watch CR and think “encounters” make up little of a typical session then they are under a misapprehension as to what an encounter actually is.
It seems to me like some of your poll responders are under the same misapprehension, because while I’ve had plenty of sessions with only one combat encounter. I’ve never had a session with less than 3 total encounters. Typically my sessions run 5 encounters. My mouth was agape when I saw that your poll had anyone answer 0-1 and after a few seconds, it dawned on me that they would have answered higher if they realized encounter means more than just combat.
5:58 not that they'll have these situations every day, no. Only that the meaningful days -- the days you bother playing out in full -- are the ones where that happens.
I'm not sure if "encounters" mean the same thing as you think it means. I see "encounters" as moments of interactions. IE: 1) Encounter - Bard uses charm to gain influence over the bar maid who knows something important. 2) Encounter - Go to shop pick up equipment and the Rogue knows the shop keep through Thieve's Guild so group gets discount. 3) Encounter - Rogue picks the pocket of a rich politican to get the key to the basement. 4) Encounter - Party opens door to basement then are faced with some sort of "magically locked" door/entrance to a hidden dungeon in the basement. 5) Once inside the dungeon the party faces a set of giant rats. 6) ..... etc... I think each "encounter" is a moment when at least one party member has to use an ability (possibly resource draining). So a party of 4-6 should be able to use at least 1 ability/spell/or some sort of resource to get past that encounter. Then some encounters are actual combat requiring the usage of some abilities/spells/resources(potion? of breath underwater/healing/etc).. Then some encounters cost hit points, some cost resources, some cost multiple spells. I would say that most of sessions which lasted on average between 4-6 hours max easily have 6+ encounters in them.
Just a further note to the above. I believe that an encounter is any point of contact or moment where the characters in the party are required to use up some sort of resource to drive the story forward. So as long as one character is required to use their skills/abilities/spells etc than that is an encounter. So 6-8 is very easy to do when looked at like that. If it's all just combat, then all those other skills/spells/abilities don't have as much meaning as they should. Not every character is built for combat and by varying the encounter types you give everyone in the part something that makes their character special/useful and fun for them. Then the sessions and encounter types should be adjusted based on the character classes and the players personal preferences(play styles). IE: If you have 3/4 players that all have combat based characters, there should be more combat encounters. If you have 4 players that are all about exploring and investigations than you should have far fewer combat encounters and more skills based encounters.
For what it’s worth I was very specific in the video that I was not talking about combat exclusive encounters. However, none of what you’re describing here would meet the definition in the DMG either. It’s 6-8 medium to hard encounters, not just encounters. I mention that the DMG even says it can be more if the encounters are easy but none of the ones you listed would qualify as medium to hard except maybe the set of Giant Rats depending on the party level and number. I think we very much have the same definition of what encounter means, but this video is referencing a specific difficulty level of encounter as the DMG suggests.
well my examples were only vague outlines.. i would assume that any DM that knew what they were doing would alter the complexity level and challenge to correspond with the the abilities of the players. So how difficult (Medium - Hard Encounters) anything is becomes about the specific situation presented to the players. IT can be infinitely harder to solve a clue to a mystery than it might be for a high level party to take down a dragon... it's all about the RP/story. Fast Example is something as simple as whether or not it takes a roll of 15 or higher to charm someone.. or if it takes a whole lot of talking/charming/persuasion/spells and the DC's are 25 and not 15... because the people being talked to are higher level. Which might be all played out in a matter of just a few minutes of game time and could utilize multiple members of the player part to accomplish. ... not sure how else to explain that other than it just takes some imagination/creativity to envision what I was saying in my previous comments... Of course you're probably right that it doesn't meet the definition of what's in the DMG so I guess it's all moot. But I'm not entirely convinced that it doesn't.
Most the 5e PH and DMG state the world is low magic but never treated as such. The DMG also states that you should interpret the rules to your favored style of play, death a 0hp being one more deadly option. The problem, and the art also suggests this, is that players make it a high magic fantasy straight out of the final scene of never ending story.
I think this is partially because 3/4 of the classes in the game are spellcasters and 1/2 of all classes are "full casters". It's really hard to make your world feel low magic when most of your party are able to launch fire and lighting from their fingertips with abandon, and even the martials have magic items.
@@mattlazer902 true, plus the addition of Tiefling and Dragonborn as races doesn’t help!
@@mattlazer902i know the idea is precisely that your characters are exceedengly exceptional, but that clearly isn't conveyed well enough to players
The five minute workday is not new... it's always been hard to have more than a few encounters per session and I've been playing from back in the day. The design team were smoking crack. I've tried running things more the way they set things up and it does make for more of a challenge for the long rest type classes. It's pretty tough to make it happen, though---you really do have to have some intermediate resource drain encounters built in.
honestly if you're going to make a radical change nerf the crap out of spells and remove spell slots, make it so the combat's difficulty doesn't require the party to have gone through 3 other encounters to whittle down their resources
The fundamental problem is that the adventuring day doesn't SCALE. Many people think the problem would be ENTIRELY (rather than partially) solved by:
1. Using 1 day short rests / 1 week long rests
2. Using shorter short rests (10 minutes)
3. Adjusting your healing per day (slow natural healing)
These and many more solutions don't *actually* fix the problem. Instead, what they do is they tend to fit within NARRATIVE time slots or they simply encourage players to play the way it's intended anyway.
#1 doesn't matter if all you actually need from your group is a time pressure or the assurance that consequences matter; such that if you're trying to mount a rescue, expect your foes to be refortified or to have fled if you flee to rest.
#2 only matters if your players feel like they couldn't reasonably take 1 hour rests, but could take 10 minute rests. It doesn't matter if they were going to take a long rest anyway due to a complete lack of time pressure, nor if they were short resting anyway.
#3 doesn't matter when you can use magic healing unless you semi-occasionally throw random medium encounter muggings at them back in town, or packs of wolves in the middle of the night.
(I'm actually a huge fan of #2 and #3, and advocate it a lot, but it's a band-aid to get players to behave more than it is a systems solution.)
Given the rather girthy 1 hour short rest in 5e, it might be possible to address this by directly attacking spell slots, since that's the biggest discrepancy between short and long rests, and would reduce the daily power of spellcasters. Something like half the number of spell slots, and then regaining only a quarter of your level in slots per short rest (a universal Arcane Recovery), might put characters on a more even playing field and encourage more rests per day, without infinite problem-solving potential from spellcasters (a 20th level caster would only regain a 5th level slot at most).
But none of that would address other tiny issues sprinkled throughout, like the Barbarian's Rage, but it would at least work as a broad systems-level rule rather than individual nitpicking of features and concepts for classes and subclasses that everyone has a million variations of.
I wonder if the view of dnd 5e being “easy” is due to a lot people not hitting that 8 encounters per day threshold. When I dm I try to get 5 or so a day, that really can stretch out a party’s resources and add tension to the game without each encounter having to be “deadly”
Ha I posted this before listening to the whole video and you brought this up
Somehow I think that the gritty realism rules were intended to be the default and they chickened out...
Most players spend all their mental energy at the end of their 3rd encounter / combat / puzzle and need a meal to recover it. Also scheduling means you only get so much time to play anyway.
A.G.
This is why I only run Deadly+ encounters for 5e
I am almost certain that this survey consisted of respondents who equate the term “encounter” with “combat”. In other words, I suspect they have many encounters without realizing it.
What tipped me off into believing that this is indeed the case, are the large number of people claiming zero to one encounters per day. There is no way that these games consist of zero exploration challenges zero social interactions, etc..
@@roberttschaefer I think there's a difference between social interaction and social encounter. If you're the type of group that happily spends a day wandering around town shopping, chatting with locals and roleplaying among yourselves, those aren't really "encounters".
If you're negotiating with the bandit king, that probably is.
A roll on the encounter table every four hours of a game day doesn’t result in six combats. It can, but it doesn’t.
Also, published campaigns have a lot less encounters
I do not thinkt hat a company that thinks pinkslipping a lot of people just before Chistmas has any right to tell what is correct in timekeeping
Does the WotC campaigns have 6-8 per day? Otherwise I would assume, they are, as so many, many, many times, are inconsistent again.
Yeah if the adventure book does not help the DM set time pressure, the party will just long rest instead of short rest. Only alternative is bumping up those two encounters to deadly difficulty. As is, short rest is wasted on warlocks :P
I have to use story elements to force my players to engage in more than 3 encounters per day (however I don't do this often). When they got trapped in a dungeon and found out they couldn't take long rests, they became more careful about burning through their remaining resources.
I think 5.24 should limit short rests to 2 per day and reduce the amount of spell slots gained as casters level up (I use spell points, so this would be even easier). They won't do it - they actually made long rests 'better' for players.
I think another challenge in the adventuring workday is encounter length. I try to make non-boss encounters quick since our sessions are typically 3.5 hours.
geez, read this paragraph again, please. That isn't a recommendation, or a rule or smth, the whole intention of this thing with adventuring day is to warn a newbie DM about LIMITS. That isn't a guideline or smth. And if we talking about a classical dungeon crawler DM even does not regulate the amount of encounters. The players do! They think about resources and when their bedtime
For clarity: at no point during this video did I say it was a rule or even a recommendation. The entire point of the video was to discuss an underlying design element of the game that has impacts on perceived balance to most players. The game *is* designed around the assumption that players will be enduring 6-8 medium to hard encounters per day. That isn’t a rule. It’s not a recommendation. It’s just the underlying premise. The impacts of that are everything I mentioned in the video that has caused a shift in the way players experience things like Spellcasters having seemingly limitless resources.
I disagree, short version: The argument 6-8 encounters being required to make the game work is kind of a misreading of something in the DMG which itself has problems. It's really advice about how much encounter budget you have in dungeons. And that being taken for fact has kind of been because of worries about balance which are far more theoretical than an at the table problem. On top of that it's not actual plays but the reality of balancing combat encounters taking a significant amount of time against pacing of story. It still comes into play in dungeons, but even then that just adds resource management. PCs will tend to functionally have all of their core resources for the big fight.
Expanding a bit on the first point, the text on P84 of the DMG says nothing about those encounters being needed to attrition player resources. It talks about more being too much, but it makes no mention of less being a problem. Reading the chapter as a whole I just can't see that being the intention reading between the lines, if anything the advice in the chapter is really geared to not killing your PCs.
this all circles back to the martial caster divide.
A caster in 8 encounters/day is way less powerful.
Good vid, for the most part. I don’t disagree with the commentary about the ‘adventuring day’. My focus, though, is on the comment that 5th edition is ‘the most popular’ edition of the game to date.
Though numbers are difficult to nail down, it’s estimated that in 1981, just seven years after hitting the market, D&D boasted some 3-million players worldwide. By 2023, that number was estimated to be in the range of 50-million. Admittedly, that’s quite a lot of growth, even though it spans over forty years.
“Popularity” can, however, be arguable. How many players of today - and I speak specifically about *everyone* who started playing from 3rd edition and afterwards - have experienced anything like The Satanic Panic? How many are openly accused by mainstream media (television and print), by politicians, school officials, police, and even close family members of practicing black magic, doing human sacrifices, and worshiping the Devil? How many of them were subjected to formal interventions (as done for drug or alcohol problems), or even outright exorcisms, because one or more of the above fed so deeply on the anti-game propaganda that they bought the lie in an extreme way? How many have had their lives literally threatened if they continued to play?
I argue that the game was far more ‘popular’ in those days than now - not because of raw numbers playing, but because the people who played through, and survived, that period continued to loved it deeply enough to play it despite the ‘hell on earth’ atmosphere they had to endure to play it.
Call me crazy, but playing through - and despite - the Satanic Panic demonstrates a ‘popularity’ that the current crop of ‘gamers’ couldn’t match if they had to. Just one old-time gamer’s view. Take it or leave it at your option.
I've ran games using the adventuring day assumptions, but it was too many encounters per day for my group to enjoy.
This is essentially my thoughts as well. I think depending on the types of encoutners it caaaaan work but it definitely requires a lot of effort from the DM to get it to be that way.
I could be misinterpreting your words, but if I understand correctly it seems like you're assuming 6+ encounter players are always running that many encounters in a real life day.
Again, I could be misunderstanding the words in the rules, but I'm pretty sure the rules are trying to use 6-8 encounters in the GAME day to balance Short/Long Rest mechanics.
Regardless, interesting conceptual video :)
Nah I wasn’t referring to a real life day, I can see how that may have come across but that was part of why I tried to say “adventuring day” way too many times during the video hahaha.
@@InsightCheck Thank you for directly clarifying to me. I was listening while cooking so I must've not been as attentive as I should've been haha.
If it's all the same to you, I think I'll leave my comment just in case anyone else gets mixed up like I did.
Not a problem to me at all :)
That blowgun you see.. doesn’t actually have to be viable. 😂
If you aren’t playing with 1:1 time keeping, you are playing it wrong. #BROSR
... You missed an important point because of how terms have changed over time. The reason why the original book said you cannot have a "meaningful campaign" without keeping track of time is because what a "campaign" was NOT the adventures of one group of protagonists-- a "campaign" was MANY adventuring parties all doing their own things in a shared world with the things one adventuring party doing affecting others and characters being able to jump from one group to another. Because a "campaign" involved many DMs and many adventuring parties all shaping a shared world, it was very important to know when various events occurred. Obviously, you cannot create a proper sequence of events if you don't know what days various things occurred and you will end up with wild anomalies.
But once a "campaign" is contained to a single group of characters and no one else besides them is altering the state of the world and the consequences of their actions will only affect them-- suddenly the importance of precisely what days anything occurred gets quite a bit relaxed. Furthermore, once everyone just completely heals after any 8-hour rest also means you don't even need to be keeping track of the days in order to keep track of hit point recovery.
The fact that you completely misunderstood this fundamental thing at the very beginning of your argument taints pretty much everything you had to say afterward.
You’re exactly correct, terms change and evolve over time. The meaning of the word “campaign” in the context of AD&D versus now in 5e is very different I’m totally with you on that, it’s part of why I said “AD&D functions substantially differently and the modern game does, but that doesn’t make the assumption any less valid today” without going into full detail as it wasn’t really the point I was trying to make. You can remove the word campaign entirely and the main premise still remains the same which is to say that time in D&D, regardless of context of which edition you are playing, is core to the functionality of the game.
I totally get your point, I see where you’re coming from I just don’t think it actually undermines the fundamental point I was trying to make by way of analogy which is simply to say that the importance and relevance of time in the game has been a consistent one :).
#BoycottHasbro. #BoycottWotC. Patronize companies that treat their creators like people not used furniture. Play Pathfinder or MCDM.
What is mcdm?
The only way to play D&D "wrong" is if you're not having fun. And for all his contributions to D&D, Gygax was full of shit about a lot of things, and the stuff about keeping time records is one of them.