D&D General 6-8 encounters (combat?)

[Jahydin]

Wizards and Paladins rule on single encounter adventuring days, but Fighters and Warlocks rule on longer ones, with plenty of short rests thrown in.

Agree.

I played as a Paladin and my friend was a Wizard. My DM was very lenient on resting and I could tell we were sucking all the fun out of combats by going absolutely "nova" while the rest of the party barely did anything (in comparison).

One thing that will peak my interest in buying a new edition is a rebalance around 3 combat encounters, which I find to be more in line with what I see at the table.

 

[Iosue]

That doesn't add up. A 6th level party is expected to get 24000xp over the adventuring day. That's 4.28 deadly encounters worth of experience. 5 hard encounters adds up to 6.7 encounters, so basically 7. 6 hard encounters and 1 medium encounter fits the 24000xp exactly.

Wait, that doesn't add up. 24,000 at Level 6 assumes a party of six. The encounter difficulty tables are for a party of 3 to 5.

A 6th level party of 5 can be expected to get 20,000 XP (4,000 XP per character) over the adventuring day before needing a rest. Their thresholds are Easy: 1,500, Medium: 3,000, Hard: 4,500, and Deadly, 7,000. So, basically 2 Deadly encounters and 2 Medium Encounters. Or 5 Hard encounters. Or 6 Medium and 1 Easy. They don't have to meet the threshold, just not go over it.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

It's much easier to adjust the resting system, than to try to fit in enough encounters. Also gets rid of the 'alpha strike and sleep' syndrome.

Just needs to scale, because long rests become more powerful the higher the (caster) level gets. And now OneDnD is tying more limited-amount powers to long rest ('you get proficiency amount of uses per long rest'), so it has some side effects.

So the answer is clearly to have a separate long rest schedule for anyone with caster levels!

 

[Flamestrike]

The 6-8 encounter advice is based on the expected resources expended in a Medium combat encounter. No, an encounter doesn’t have to consume resources to count as an encounter, but resource expenditure is what this balance assumption is built around.

Yeah, but an encounter where the PCs circumvent it without expending resources is kind of the point.

It means they have more gas in the tank for the BBEG at the end of the day or whatever.

Why blow slots on levitating the party over a trap (for example) when they can use ropes and skill checks? Why blow rages, sup dice, hp, HD, Action surge, slots etc, when a Social skill check or two and some RP might be all that is needed?

It encourages good resource management, problem solving skills, and thinking by the players.

 

[Flamestrike]

Agree.

I played as a Paladin and my friend was a Wizard. My DM was very lenient on resting and I could tell we were sucking all the fun out of combats by going absolutely "nova" while the rest of the party barely did anything (in comparison).

One thing that will peak my interest in buying a new edition is a rebalance around 3 combat encounters, which I find to be more in line with what I see at the table.

You probably mean 3 combat encounter sessions.

Where most tables go wrong is they conflate 'adventuring day' with 'game session'.

I generally just toss in a doom clock in my games. 'Stop the BBEG by midnight or else the ritual is completed, and bad thing Y happens' type of thing. Then you can just place your encounters within those temporal limits (knock up a dungeon with 6-8 encounters in it, and a few places and enough time to short rest a few times safely) and you're largely done.

Can get the whole thing done in a single longish session, or usually two shorter ones.

 

[DND_Reborn]

You should care.

Nah...

I get what you're saying about 'narrative' but the mechanical reality of 5E is that the classes are balanced around getting 2-3 short rests per long rest, and roughly 6 or so encounters per adventuring day (however long that may be, depending on which rest variant you're using).

The classes balance at roughly 2 encounters per short rest, and roughly 2-3 short rests per long rest. Some classes rely on (weaker) short rest resources, while some rely on (stronger) long rest resources. Wizards and Paladins rule on single encounter adventuring days, but Fighters and Warlocks rule on longer ones, with plenty of short rests thrown in.

If you "get it" then you wouldn't have bothered explaining about the reasons (balance, blah blah blah) for 6-8 encounters in an "adventuring day."

You can always adjust the mechanics to fit the narrative remember (gritty rest variant etc).

Or I can just keep running the game I have been for decades and not worry about "balance".

Wizard and Paladins cannot rule on single encounter "adventuring days" (still a ridiculous concept) because NO ONE KNOWS when there will only be ONE encounter. If on the first encounter of the day, the paladin novas all smites, they are screwed when the second, third, or more encounters come up.

When the narrative drives encounters, no one knows just how much of their resources they can risk using, so tend to use only what is necessary. The game balances itself this way.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Unless the DM is exceptionally heavy handed, it can go any which way. That seems self evident.

Does the enemy auto-magically detect the party, even if they were sneaking? This might make sense if the area the enemy is guarding is alarmed, but that certainly doesn't make sense for every encounter.

Does the enemy automatically attack like mindless murder-bots, even if the party tries to prevent the combat via a clever ruse? It might make sense if the enemy is a bunch of zombies, but again, it certainly doesn't make sense for every enemy.

I do think that the game is closer to being balanced when the players can expect 6-8 combat encounters between long rests. Though non-combat encounters that consume similar resources are just as effective, they are more challenging to execute effectively. Open ended challenges are more interesting than those with a single, hard-coded solution, but they're also the least easily gauged in terms of expected resource expenditure.

I really doubt that there are many (if any) DMs who are forcing their players through 6-8 combat encounters despite the players doing their best to avoid combat. That seems like bad DMing to me.

It's more likely that 6-8 encounters works if the players go with the flow and do not attempt to avoid combat, but that will only hold true in a subset of campaigns. In my own personal experience, unless the players haven't had a combat in a while and want one, they sometimes will try to avoid unnecessary encounters. And as their DM, I let the dice fall as they may, 6-8 combat encounters or no.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I find that just by varying up every game session and adventuring day between all the different things players and characters can do in all three pillars... there's more than enough stuff to keep everyone engaged and contributing and not inspiring anyone to waste their time comparing themselves to anyone else.

In a white room would the rogue tend to lose out to the paladin in a fight? Sure. But once they are both on the battlefield and the rogue is able to quickly skitter across the ledges in the cavern to get to the archers raining arrows down upon the paladin while the paladin in stuck in hand-to-hand with a single creature on the ground... the "lessened DPR" of the rogue is never even considered. The rogue is imperative to the scene for the things he can do that other characters can't, so needing to compare apples to apples in something like damage per round/fight is rarely ever a thing.

Or when in a social situation with the local baron... the player of the fighter can and does talk just as much as the bard player does, even though the bard character has higher CHA and proficiency in Persuasion. Because the ability score and skill don't matter nearly as much when the players and DM are speaking to each other in character and I give out info based on the questions I'm asked. The player with less game mechanics at their disposal can still contribute just as much in the scene as another, if I just don't use the game mechanics to be the determining factor of what's going on.

I have always found that uneven mechanical distribution just becomes less of a thing when you just don't focus on the mechanics in every scene.

 

[Lazvon]

Qué será, será
Whatever will be, will be.

The mechanics the game was designed around are for the majority to have a good time with I would guess. So, at many tables the 6-8 in whatever mix that means is probably what brings that table satisfaction.

The majority is the largest compromise of course. If folks decide that by aiming for the middle is what they wish to do and it brings them happiness, awesome for them! If they have a single 4-hour session of negotiating a succession plan for when a king is dying though, and they are so very satisfied they have met everything the lords of the lands (DM) have thrown at them… and at the end of the night everyone is grinning and happy to see whatever outcome they decided to make happen, actually happen… that is an incredible night they’ll remember for likely the rest of their lives - lives in my memory at least after a quarter of a century.

The rules and guidelines are there to make things that need them for balance and some level of fairness to be readable and understandable by all around the table to start from common ground for play. Everything else that happens in any given session is for the players and DM/GM to decide or at least see where things take them at whatever pace meets the majority of that table’s expectations.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yeah, it means resource expenditure of 6-8 medium encounters, so it mostly means just combats. That is crazy amount, I assume it won't happen in most tables. I run with gritty rests, and I think the actual amount still is just 3-4 combats per long rest. CR is a joke though, and I've noticed the characters can handle encounters way above deadly, so I tend to run harder combats. That way I need fewer of them and the combats are not complete pushovers all the time (they still sometimes are.) Downside of course is that that is way more risky and the characters might actually get annihilated at some point. It came close couple of times but it hasn't happened yet.