A problem I have with the '6-8 encounters per day' balancing method in D&D is that there are plenty of times when you really aren't likely to have more than one encounter per short rest, if even that. A variant I was considering for my CoS campaign is:
Long Rest: a long rest can be partial or full. A full rest is identical to a standard long rest. During a partial rest, abilities that only recover on a long rest will only recover if below half their maximum, and will only recover up to half their maximum (round down, but minimum 1 for Hit Dice).
If you have inspiration when you take a long rest, that rest is full and you lose the inspiration. Otherwise the rest is partial. The DM should normally allow a full rest between adventures, as long as activity between adventures is consistent with the characters traits, bonds, or flaws.
Does this seem likely to produce reasonable results?
My DM is doing something like that in our current campaign, in some areas. If we long rest without someone in the party spending an inspiration point, we don’t recover anything, just avoid exhaustion. If someone spends a point, then we all get the standard rest benefits. The only thing to keep in mind is making sure there’s enough points. We usually vote on giving out one per session.
I have not really run into this issue in my games personally. So far in my DM career I have run Storm Kings Thunder, and am now running Curse of Strahd. From what I have found 6-8 encounters really only makes a ton of sense if you are counting social encounters and traps as well. Otherwise the implication is that your PCs are getting into combat 6-8 times a day, which is entirely too much combat (I don't want to bog down my games that much).
Additionally there are certain stop gaps even built into the module itself. For example, in the random encounter sections, it specifically says that you roll of random encounters outside of cities every so many hexes, but that only a maximum of 2 encounters can happen on any given day. Based on the Player's handbook travel times, the PCs can easily make it from any village to the next village and still have plenty of "daylight" left. On top of that, if you average out the encounter checks based on the distance traveled, the players will typically roll 2 encounters anyhow.
Or consider if they stay in a Vallaki for more than a day, how much trouble can they really get into in one day based on the module as written? At that point I might think 6 encounters is the high end, unless they are speed running Vallaki. Even the module itself says that some events happen on certain days after the PCs arrive.
Hit dice are a resource that you do not want to necessarily prevent your players from using (especially since only half of the regenerate on a long rest) and not all abilities come back on a short rest. Additionally you could just introduce consequences for resting at either inopportune times, or in the wrong places. Unless of course you are into that sort of thing, in that case Dark Souls it up, as long as your players are having fun with it.
I have not really run into this issue in my games personally. So far in my DM career I have run Storm Kings Thunder, and am now running Curse of Strahd. From what I have found 6-8 encounters really only makes a ton of sense if you are counting social encounters and traps as well. Otherwise the implication is that your PCs are getting into combat 6-8 times a day, which is entirely too much combat (I don't want to bog down my games that much).
That's the problem. If you don't run 6-8 encounters per long rest, it glitches the power balance (deadly encounters aren't even close to deadly, relative power of casters and non-casters is off). You can also use DMG options for changing how often long rests done, but there's some other problems with doing it that way (mostly, spells that are intended to last a full day; for example, I want wizards to be able to cast mage armor daily).
I just don't let my group take more than 1 long rest in a 24 hour period (based on how much they traveled or progressed). Even long, multi leveled dungeons should take more than a day or 2 and as such shouldn't be allowed to take more than that many long rests
Interesting but I think backwards -- the encounter math assumes 6-8 encounters between long rests, so if you have fewer encounters per day, people are able to use too many long rest abilities per encounter, and at-will abilities (melee attacks, cantrips) are devalued. You're much better off reducing the number of long rest abilities, but you have the problem that you can't really divide once per day abilities (like level 6+ spells) by 3.
I am sitting here trying to imagine what "inspired resting' looks like. I know what an inspired attack looks like - dramatic and well done. I know what an inspired save looks like - hair raising escape.
But I can't imagine anyone recounting a tale of how he defeated the dragon saying " and then I did the most inspired resting of my life. You would not BELIEVE the sleep I got. I have tried to duplicate that particular night's rest many a time, but I have to say I have not come close to that wonderful night since that day."
So I just went a math journey over this, and I can see the approximate genius of the balance team. So going off of the assumed daily XP allotment table found in the DMG, where the recommended 6-8 encounters per day section comes from, it would take 35 in game days for a level 1 character to reach level 20. This assumes the characters never get a day off, and just pushes through getting the maximum suggested allotment of XP per day per character.
At first I thought this was kind of absurd, shouldn't it take more than 35 days for a Wizard to learn all that goes into magic at that level. How does a Monk go from basically a newbie, to a master of martial arts in just over a month?
Then I decided to look at it purely mechanically. For my group in our last session (we are currently in Death House) they fought 4 encounters, and had a low amount of RP. So my thought was it takes 3 hours for my group to play 57% of one days worth of encounters for an adventuring party. So multiplying it all out, at that pace it would take my players about 62 sessions to reach level 20. Which, if I am honest, sounds close to what I expect a typical player would want. Now that assumes none of our sessions are mostly RP, or that we basically speed run the non combat portions of the adventure, which honestly does not sound that fun.
So having said all that. I can see what I failed to see before, and that I was approaching this from the wrong angle.
So the OP seems to be most concerned with Martial classes being outshined by their caster counter parts because they will get access to their top tier spells more often than the comparably flat Martial classes who mostly have short rest refresh abilities (which are less flashy). One way to potentially remedy this is actually in the DMG, a variant resting method called Gritty Realism. It turns Short resting into an 8 hour affair, and Long rest is only achieved if the characters rest for 7 days. This would certainly make the players really think about getting into any fight lest they expend resources that take a week of in game time to get back. Though if your group is like my group at all, this will not go over super well (I had once joked about switching to it). Turns out caster players get really upset when you take away their cool toys.
Perhaps something more of a hybrid is what you would want? A short rest is the only option available to you while you are out on an adventure/mission, and in order to long rest you must be in a town or city and not currently under siege?
Interesting but I think backwards -- the encounter math assumes 6-8 encounters between long rests, so if you have fewer encounters per day, people are able to use too many long rest abilities per encounter, and at-will abilities (melee attacks, cantrips) are devalued. You're much better off reducing the number of long rest abilities, but you have the problem that you can't really divide once per day abilities (like level 6+ spells) by 3.
I think the approach described in the link solves the balancing issues (i.e. short rest classes have similar resources to long rest classes).
If there is only one encounter per day, everyone can go all in, instead of just the long rest casters. So you can scale that one encounter far more difficult than anything the DMG would recommend. Basically you roll your 6-8 medium (often boring) encounters into one big and epic encounter.
On the other hand if you follow the 6-8 encounters per day, everyone will still be on equal footing, without further changes to the rules. That means the resting rules will be more consistent than they are now and fit the narrative even when the pace of the story changes.
That is actually one of the main problems with the DMG's rest variants. We tried gritty realism during RP / travel-heavy times and it worked. But then we had a dungeon crawl and it didn't work anymore, because we suddenly had way more encounters with less time between.
I think the approach described in the link solves the balancing issues (i.e. short rest classes have similar resources to long rest classes).
There's two reasons that doesn't work.
One, there aren't 'long rest' and 'short rest' classes. There are 'long rest', 'short rest', and 'at will' classes. If you look at fifth level characters, the balance for 'wizards can do 28 damage to multiple targets; fighters can do 21 damage to one target, or 42 if they ' is "fighters can do it every round, wizards can do it twice per day". At an average of 20 rounds of combat per adventuring day, that high DPR is a big bonus; when you have only five rounds, it just isn't as significant.
Two, the balancing problem isn't just class vs class. It's also PC vs NPC. In general you need to about triple encounter budgets to get equivalent challenge levels out of a single daily encounter rather than multiple encounters. That's not inherently unacceptable, but it means the fights you do have are big gnarly messes.
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A problem I have with the '6-8 encounters per day' balancing method in D&D is that there are plenty of times when you really aren't likely to have more than one encounter per short rest, if even that. A variant I was considering for my CoS campaign is:
Does this seem likely to produce reasonable results?
My DM is doing something like that in our current campaign, in some areas. If we long rest without someone in the party spending an inspiration point, we don’t recover anything, just avoid exhaustion. If someone spends a point, then we all get the standard rest benefits.
The only thing to keep in mind is making sure there’s enough points. We usually vote on giving out one per session.
I have not really run into this issue in my games personally. So far in my DM career I have run Storm Kings Thunder, and am now running Curse of Strahd. From what I have found 6-8 encounters really only makes a ton of sense if you are counting social encounters and traps as well. Otherwise the implication is that your PCs are getting into combat 6-8 times a day, which is entirely too much combat (I don't want to bog down my games that much).
Additionally there are certain stop gaps even built into the module itself. For example, in the random encounter sections, it specifically says that you roll of random encounters outside of cities every so many hexes, but that only a maximum of 2 encounters can happen on any given day. Based on the Player's handbook travel times, the PCs can easily make it from any village to the next village and still have plenty of "daylight" left. On top of that, if you average out the encounter checks based on the distance traveled, the players will typically roll 2 encounters anyhow.
Or consider if they stay in a Vallaki for more than a day, how much trouble can they really get into in one day based on the module as written? At that point I might think 6 encounters is the high end, unless they are speed running Vallaki. Even the module itself says that some events happen on certain days after the PCs arrive.
Hit dice are a resource that you do not want to necessarily prevent your players from using (especially since only half of the regenerate on a long rest) and not all abilities come back on a short rest. Additionally you could just introduce consequences for resting at either inopportune times, or in the wrong places. Unless of course you are into that sort of thing, in that case Dark Souls it up, as long as your players are having fun with it.
That's the problem. If you don't run 6-8 encounters per long rest, it glitches the power balance (deadly encounters aren't even close to deadly, relative power of casters and non-casters is off). You can also use DMG options for changing how often long rests done, but there's some other problems with doing it that way (mostly, spells that are intended to last a full day; for example, I want wizards to be able to cast mage armor daily).
I just don't let my group take more than 1 long rest in a 24 hour period (based on how much they traveled or progressed). Even long, multi leveled dungeons should take more than a day or 2 and as such shouldn't be allowed to take more than that many long rests
This might be an interesting idea for the balance issues that come with too few encounters per day:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/thinkdm.org/2018/09/01/agnostic-adventuring-day/amp/
Interesting but I think backwards -- the encounter math assumes 6-8 encounters between long rests, so if you have fewer encounters per day, people are able to use too many long rest abilities per encounter, and at-will abilities (melee attacks, cantrips) are devalued. You're much better off reducing the number of long rest abilities, but you have the problem that you can't really divide once per day abilities (like level 6+ spells) by 3.
I am sitting here trying to imagine what "inspired resting' looks like. I know what an inspired attack looks like - dramatic and well done. I know what an inspired save looks like - hair raising escape.
But I can't imagine anyone recounting a tale of how he defeated the dragon saying " and then I did the most inspired resting of my life. You would not BELIEVE the sleep I got. I have tried to duplicate that particular night's rest many a time, but I have to say I have not come close to that wonderful night since that day."
Sorry, but I vote no to inspired resting.
So I just went a math journey over this, and I can see the approximate genius of the balance team. So going off of the assumed daily XP allotment table found in the DMG, where the recommended 6-8 encounters per day section comes from, it would take 35 in game days for a level 1 character to reach level 20. This assumes the characters never get a day off, and just pushes through getting the maximum suggested allotment of XP per day per character.
At first I thought this was kind of absurd, shouldn't it take more than 35 days for a Wizard to learn all that goes into magic at that level. How does a Monk go from basically a newbie, to a master of martial arts in just over a month?
Then I decided to look at it purely mechanically. For my group in our last session (we are currently in Death House) they fought 4 encounters, and had a low amount of RP. So my thought was it takes 3 hours for my group to play 57% of one days worth of encounters for an adventuring party. So multiplying it all out, at that pace it would take my players about 62 sessions to reach level 20. Which, if I am honest, sounds close to what I expect a typical player would want. Now that assumes none of our sessions are mostly RP, or that we basically speed run the non combat portions of the adventure, which honestly does not sound that fun.
So having said all that. I can see what I failed to see before, and that I was approaching this from the wrong angle.
So the OP seems to be most concerned with Martial classes being outshined by their caster counter parts because they will get access to their top tier spells more often than the comparably flat Martial classes who mostly have short rest refresh abilities (which are less flashy). One way to potentially remedy this is actually in the DMG, a variant resting method called Gritty Realism. It turns Short resting into an 8 hour affair, and Long rest is only achieved if the characters rest for 7 days. This would certainly make the players really think about getting into any fight lest they expend resources that take a week of in game time to get back. Though if your group is like my group at all, this will not go over super well (I had once joked about switching to it). Turns out caster players get really upset when you take away their cool toys.
Perhaps something more of a hybrid is what you would want? A short rest is the only option available to you while you are out on an adventure/mission, and in order to long rest you must be in a town or city and not currently under siege?
I think the approach described in the link solves the balancing issues (i.e. short rest classes have similar resources to long rest classes).
If there is only one encounter per day, everyone can go all in, instead of just the long rest casters. So you can scale that one encounter far more difficult than anything the DMG would recommend. Basically you roll your 6-8 medium (often boring) encounters into one big and epic encounter.
On the other hand if you follow the 6-8 encounters per day, everyone will still be on equal footing, without further changes to the rules. That means the resting rules will be more consistent than they are now and fit the narrative even when the pace of the story changes.
That is actually one of the main problems with the DMG's rest variants. We tried gritty realism during RP / travel-heavy times and it worked. But then we had a dungeon crawl and it didn't work anymore, because we suddenly had way more encounters with less time between.
There's two reasons that doesn't work.
One, there aren't 'long rest' and 'short rest' classes. There are 'long rest', 'short rest', and 'at will' classes. If you look at fifth level characters, the balance for 'wizards can do 28 damage to multiple targets; fighters can do 21 damage to one target, or 42 if they ' is "fighters can do it every round, wizards can do it twice per day". At an average of 20 rounds of combat per adventuring day, that high DPR is a big bonus; when you have only five rounds, it just isn't as significant.
Two, the balancing problem isn't just class vs class. It's also PC vs NPC. In general you need to about triple encounter budgets to get equivalent challenge levels out of a single daily encounter rather than multiple encounters. That's not inherently unacceptable, but it means the fights you do have are big gnarly messes.