"Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day."
Have you guys found this to be accurate? It seems like my group needs to rest a lot more than that. Either that or they're not making use of the environment enough (or I'm not giving them options) or something.
Maybe I'm being to hard on them. Do your parties blast through 6 med-hard encounters before a long rest?
Encounters do not need to be combat encounters. Puzzles and social interactions are also considered encounters. Basically anything that may stop the PC's forward progress can be considered an encounter.
Most of my adventures have been 5 encounters per day. The group is bad about taking short tests and have almost had members die because of it.
I also put in 1 deadly encounter per adventure. This is a high stakes high magic world so they have to be challenged. They are also all experienced gamers so no one has done anything dumb yet.
Some of the early encounters they roll through real easy . These set the bad guy tone and introduce the bad guy type they are fighting. After that it will get more serious.
My Dm likes epic stuff. We tend to have 2-3 weak encounters plus one really hard one per game day. It could be that you are not doing medium-hard.
Also, consider that the players may be playing it safe. I.E. they could be NOVAing their spells and abilities and insisting on a rest. Do they use fireballs on kobolds?
"Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day."
Have you guys found this to be accurate?
That seems slightly incorrect. The actual target for an 'adventuring day' is spending your daily encounter budget, and that's generally 6-8* the minimum threshold for a medium encounter, thus resulting in 6-8 easy or medium encounters in a day. For example:
Level 1: daily budget 300, Easy is 25-49, Medium is 50-74, Hard is 75-99, Deadly is 100+. Thus, you can have 6 encounters at 50 xp, but if you vary xp per encounter, you'll generally get slightly over half Medium and the rest Easy.
Level 3: daily budget 1,200, Easy is 75+. Medium is 150+, Hard is 225+, Deadly is 400+. If you split it six ways, you do wind up with mostly medium with a few hard mixed in, if you split it eight ways you wind up at slightly over half Medium and the rest Easy.
That said, while I find a day that uses up the encounter budget a grind to play and run, it is beatable as long as people actually pay attention to conserving resources. On the other hand, if your casters blow all their spells in the first encounter, the day is going to go poorly.
Okay that sounds more reasonable. To be honest I feel totally disadvantaged when I try to wrap my brain around the "budget" thing. I think I just have a memory leak when it comes to that kind of stuff. Thanks for the explanation.
And to be fair... most groups are going to want to rest as often as possible. Only after having some story plot that motivates them to keep going will they push on through instead of taking a lot of short rests. We recently had a intro to town encounter where we saved the town from a group of charioteers that charged out at us, but then found out there were missing kids in town so we rushed into town to find the cultists defeating the last of the visible guards and a spell caster doing some kind of ritual. We did not save the guards, we did not stop the ritual but we did save the kids and defeated the cultists... and then we were immediately attacked by the summoned earth elemental and its minions. So... if you can find good motivations (or consequences) in stringing them together you can teach them how to reserve spells and not require rest as often and they'll find they can get through normal encounters without resting as often if they use better tactics and only need higher level power when the situation warrants it. My cleric was the only fatality as we took down the final boss and I knew it was chancy taking him on but it kept him in place and allowed half the group to focus fire and bring him down (and they were able to heal me before my final death save).
Just don't be a total miser in handing out short rests. I played a Warlock in a campaign that the DM didn't believe in short rests without interrupting them nearly every time, so I just got to where I used invocations and never used spell slots unless we had a big group or a very obviously difficult fight. At the same time, Warlocks shouldn't just rely on using their two spell slots and expect to get them back after every fight.
There is a good balance if you can find it...
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In the DMG it says:
"Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day."
Have you guys found this to be accurate? It seems like my group needs to rest a lot more than that. Either that or they're not making use of the environment enough (or I'm not giving them options) or something.
Maybe I'm being to hard on them. Do your parties blast through 6 med-hard encounters before a long rest?
Encounters do not need to be combat encounters. Puzzles and social interactions are also considered encounters. Basically anything that may stop the PC's forward progress can be considered an encounter.
Most of my adventures have been 5 encounters per day. The group is bad about taking short tests and have almost had members die because of it.
I also put in 1 deadly encounter per adventure. This is a high stakes high magic world so they have to be challenged. They are also all experienced gamers so no one has done anything dumb yet.
Some of the early encounters they roll through real easy . These set the bad guy tone and introduce the bad guy type they are fighting. After that it will get more serious.
My Dm likes epic stuff. We tend to have 2-3 weak encounters plus one really hard one per game day. It could be that you are not doing medium-hard.
Also, consider that the players may be playing it safe. I.E. they could be NOVAing their spells and abilities and insisting on a rest. Do they use fireballs on kobolds?
That seems slightly incorrect. The actual target for an 'adventuring day' is spending your daily encounter budget, and that's generally 6-8* the minimum threshold for a medium encounter, thus resulting in 6-8 easy or medium encounters in a day. For example:
That said, while I find a day that uses up the encounter budget a grind to play and run, it is beatable as long as people actually pay attention to conserving resources. On the other hand, if your casters blow all their spells in the first encounter, the day is going to go poorly.
Okay that sounds more reasonable. To be honest I feel totally disadvantaged when I try to wrap my brain around the "budget" thing. I think I just have a memory leak when it comes to that kind of stuff. Thanks for the explanation.
And to be fair... most groups are going to want to rest as often as possible. Only after having some story plot that motivates them to keep going will they push on through instead of taking a lot of short rests. We recently had a intro to town encounter where we saved the town from a group of charioteers that charged out at us, but then found out there were missing kids in town so we rushed into town to find the cultists defeating the last of the visible guards and a spell caster doing some kind of ritual. We did not save the guards, we did not stop the ritual but we did save the kids and defeated the cultists... and then we were immediately attacked by the summoned earth elemental and its minions. So... if you can find good motivations (or consequences) in stringing them together you can teach them how to reserve spells and not require rest as often and they'll find they can get through normal encounters without resting as often if they use better tactics and only need higher level power when the situation warrants it. My cleric was the only fatality as we took down the final boss and I knew it was chancy taking him on but it kept him in place and allowed half the group to focus fire and bring him down (and they were able to heal me before my final death save).
Just don't be a total miser in handing out short rests. I played a Warlock in a campaign that the DM didn't believe in short rests without interrupting them nearly every time, so I just got to where I used invocations and never used spell slots unless we had a big group or a very obviously difficult fight. At the same time, Warlocks shouldn't just rely on using their two spell slots and expect to get them back after every fight.
There is a good balance if you can find it...