Page 84 of the DMG talks about the adventuring day, experience points, and number of encounters expected in an typical day. Page 82 of the DMG talks about creating encounters based on desired encounter difficulty and character level.
I have never used the adventuring day as an actual in game day, as in sun up to sun down. For me the two are separate. You have an in game day, which is literally sun up to sun down, 24 hours, etc. Then you have the “adventuring day”, which is directly tied to building encounters (combat or non-combat) using experience points (or xp converted to challenge rating) and how that interacts with the mechanics of short rests and a long rest.
The DMG gives us a table which provides how much xp an adventurer, at any given level, is expected to overcome in between long rests, with two short rests during that time. This makes for an excellent guide for the DM when balancing over several encounters, helps to stem the PCs from short rest “novaing” lots of encounters, and makes for more interesting overland travel and long journey travel.
Using the table on page 84 of the DMG as a guide to how much xp the PCs should overcome between long rests per actual game day is both unrealistic and exhausting at times. But not using that guideline makes for encounters that are easily overcome by the party because they have more resources available to them then the game is balanced for. Using an “adventuring day” makes each encounter count, so to speak, as the party doesn’t mechanically gain the benefit of a long rest until the xp threshold is met, and they don’t mechanically gain the benefit of a short rest until 1/3rds and 2/3rds of the threshold is met.
I'd love to ask them where they got the idea that 6-8 encounters "per day" is "normal." I'm not sure we've ever had 6-8 per day going all the way back to AD&D and B/X. Back in those days it took 10 minutes to go 90' in a dungeon (per AD&D DMG, assuming mapping, checking for traps, etc.) and PCs were expected to rest for 10 minutes per hour, so you could not move very quickly. Wandering monsters occurred on a 1 in 1d10 or 1d8 or 1d12 roll (depending on the dungeon or wilderness) and only occurred every so often (maybe once per hour in a dungeon, once per 4 hours outside). So you were only going to get, on average, maybe 1-2 random encounters to pop per day.... More than that would only happen in a highly concentrated dungeon with lots of closely packed rooms and all of them filled with monsters, traps, or other interesting items. And at least if you look at the written adventures, many of those had 30 or 40 rooms but only 10 or 12 of those rooms had actual encounters, with the rest being storage, library, secret treasure room, etc.
And in modern 5e, it's even more uncommon because of the de-emphasis on random encounters and increased emphasis on RP/story compared to 1e.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Honestly, even the "threat" of the typical "Adventuring Day" is enough to constrain player use of resources which is the main reason for it. It is better to end a day with something left over because you didn't have as many fights than to die because you didn't spread the resources out. This especially applies to wizards and other spell casters using high level slots to make some encounters much easier but if they do that too often then later encounters can become much harder.
If the players/characters know that, then they budget accordingly and the DM can feel free to have any number of encounters in a day since the players never know how many will come up.
On the other hand, if the characters know that they can get away with one big encounter, run off to an inn for the afternoon for tea and crumpets followed by a nice rest and go out the next morning fully rested to continue their adventures then the characters use everything they can in the one encounter. It's up to the DM to change the paradigm by creating situations where that play style doesn't work so the characters realize they need to conserve resources.
Anyway, I agree with the OP that the 6-8 encounter day is somewhat mythical since each day should fit the story and narrative and many won't have as many as 6-8 encounters while others could possibly have more.
I'd love to ask them where they got the idea that 6-8 encounters "per day" is "normal."
It seems to be a long-standing assumption -- both 3e and 4e had similar assumptions in their encounter building system (prior editions lacked encounter builders) -- and caused problems in both 3e and 4e for the same reason it causes problems in 5e, because outside of somewhat specialized dungeons very few games actually ran that way. The easiest way to actually achieve it is to discard the concept of time-based resting: instead, you can only take a long rest after you complete a waypoint (or some other measure that is likely to amount to an adventuring day). This is fairly unnatural from a simulationist perspective, unless you decide that all PCs are really necromancers who feed on the energy of their defeated foes, thus accounting for both this and the need to kill things for experience points.
Yes I guess one could say that a "long rest" can only be taken after 6 encounters, no matter how many hours you sleep... and that would make all the charts work in DMG.
But as you say it would not be very good at simulating the setting.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Yeah, I ignore most of that crap too. The party still takes a long rest every solar day because it’s largely irrelevant for the way I DM. They will regularly have multiple solar days in a row with little to no combat whatsoever, but when they do see a combat-centric day, I try to shove them through a meat grinder. We’re talking around 4ish Deadly+ encounters that day, and typically one of those encounters will require two whole sessions to get through all by itself.
Frankly, I have always found the DMG to be the least useful of the three main books for D&D. That goes all the way back to ncludie 2e, 3/3.5, and now in 5e as well. (Even as a green as I was way back in 2e when I started it seemed the least useful of the three.) Every edition it seems to be at least half filled with stuff like this that doesn’t seem to work “as advertised” so to speak.
I found the AD&D version of DMG to be quite useful. Still do.
I think at least for 5e, the main problem is organization. I never know where to freaking find stuff, even when I know I have seen it in there before. I don't generally have that problem with 1e.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
The other way of achieving actually having six encounters per long rest is to use gritty realism from the DMG. Unfortunately, this completely breaks certain classes of spells (most notably, anyone trying to use Animate Dead is hosed) so you'd need to make additional house rules to adjust it.
6-8 encounters in a day sounds insane to me. Can you imagine, running from one combat to the next? Sure if you are trying to get thru a building. But random encounters? Seems a little unrealstic for a world. I mean no one would come out of their house or travel to another town if every hour they were out meant they had to fight of orcs, goblins, or bandits, etc. It sounds more like a rule put in place for computer game dynamics, not a rpg table top. I recently came across this and thought how do you do that? Of course I am confused how people go through an entire adventure book multiple times, in a year? How are they fitting in any role playing? shoot...my combat takes several hours. But thats because we have fun describing the combat, and not just you hit, its dead. Guess I am too old school d&d that way.
The 6-8 encounters per day clearly was designed around the dungeon, and nowhere else. It is not possible to imagine that anyone would run 6-8 encounters per day in the wilderness -- as you say, no one would ever get anywhere. On the sea -- really, 6-8 ship encounters per day? Underwater -- with the sheer volume of an ocean, you'd need the entire thing to be packed wall to wall with schools of merfolk, pods of krakens, etc. It defies belief that you could do this many encounters in between long rests anywhere but in a meatgrinder dungeon.
I mean, on some days, sure -- wilderness where you are approaching a bandit hideout and they have outposts that you hit one at a time or something. But as a general rule? No.
Remember, an encounter doesn’t have to mean specifically combat. Any encounter that forces the party to consume resources counts. If any of the party take damage that would cause them to spend hit dice, and/or use spell slots, limited use features, consumable items and/or money that all counts. There are numerous ways that social, puzzle, and trap encounters could all force a party to consume resources like that.
If one of them falls into a spiked pit trap and takes damage and then uses a Potion of Climbing to get back out then resources were consumed which is the whole point.
If there is a challenging social encounter (like a tough interrogation or something), and the Whispers Bard used Words of Terror and a Bardic Inspiration, the Enchanter uses Hypnotic Gaze and casts Detect Thoughts, the Artificer uses a Flash of Genius and a charge from their Replicate Eyes of Charming Infusion, and in the end the party spends a couple hundred gp on bribes.... That’s a lot of resources spent without anything even resembling combat.
Most encounters that consume significant resources are going to be combat encounters, but they don’t all have to be combat. But even so, 6-8 encounters in a day is a very fast pace. If the players don’t experience some slower points in their characters’ story then the pacing still suffers. Any good story needs an ebb and flow of pacing. Without the slower moments to lull the audience, the ramp up to action doesn’t have the same impact. The scene has to get quiet at times so it can’t suck the audience in to hang on every word, then when the sudden whammy of the next plot twist hits them it has added impact. If there are never any ups and downs to the story, if it’s nothing but nonstop action, then the story suffers.
The other thing is an encounter, combat or not, takes significant real time. At 6-8 encounters per day, if you figure 2 traps, 2 social, and 2-3 combat... you're looking at a couple of sessions. PER DAY of game time. That's a heck of a lot of real time to take up per game day -- almost like you are taking up the equivalent of minute by minute.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
The other thing is an encounter, combat or not, takes significant real time. At 6-8 encounters per day, if you figure 2 traps, 2 social, and 2-3 combat... you're looking at a couple of sessions. PER DAY of game time. That's a heck of a lot of real time to take up per game day -- almost like you are taking up the equivalent of minute by minute.
A medium combat encounter doesn't actually take that long, in a dungeon crawl you could likely manage an encounter (including the crawl part getting you there) every hour if you've got a good setup for running through them quickly (either mapless, or using a VTT that can bring maps up really fast).
Having just discovered this "Adventuring Day" I have to say I really, really dislike it....in fact I hate it as a concept.
1. It promotes less narrative building. Seriously not every story involves or should involve a cast of hundreds of bad guys in multiple battles. I actually loathe the idea of DnD being 4 PCs wiping out battalions of baddies over the course of an "adventuring day".
2. Makes the game less cinematic. I like the idea of a big end boss fight. If you're meant to grind players over 6-8 encounters to get them to burn up all their spells, potions and HD, they're going to get smashed by whatever big bad is at the end.
Which leads me to:
3. Balancing issues. Game is already hard enough to balance as the XP/CR systems are not balanced (I've found them too easy). Try balancing 6-8 encounters so they get to the big bad depleted just enough to make it a challenge but not enough to get wiped and not so little that it's not a challenge.
4. DM workload - that's a lot of effort for one small chunk of narrative.
Try concocting 6-8 encounters that make sense n the context of a story. Sure you can do it if you have 8 rooms, each one with random monsters. Try doing it within a story - "You're trying to rescue someone from bandits:"
Encounter 1: bash up bandits,
Encounter 2: bash up bandits with slight variations
Encounter 3: bash up bandits with slight variations
Etc etc etc, Rinse repeat for 6-8 encounters.
Doesn't make sense to throw in an ogre or an ooze or a naga or a genie or a demigod in a bandit camp now does it? "Just smashing some bandits, oh look it's Tiamat hanging around playing a ukelele. FIGHT!"
Same applies to anything else really, except the Random Monster Dungeon.
I don't regard social/obstacles the same as combat encounters. They generally don't consume resources or the resources they do consume don't contribute to anything within combat sphere. "Oh they glugged a potion of climbing to clamber over a wall." Not going to stop them dealing out hits (especially as most players IME just view combat as hitting/shooting stuff).
I do recognise the social/obstacle encounter is part of the story building element.
5. Not every narrative or environment requires 6-8 encounters to tell a tale.
6. It seems like a grind based on attrition. I hate grinds and attrition - especially when most of the encounters won't further the story. It also risks having your players lose interest, which leads me to point 7:
7. Time as in real time. I've only ever had 1 session of D&D (both AD&D and 5e)as both a player and a DM where players smashed through the encounters quickly (that was recently). Usually it's 1-2 encounters at the most per session. People talk, and discuss things and occasionally talk about something outside of D&D. There's rules discussions and queries.
So you would have to run a single adventuring day over 3-4 sessions by which time people have forgotten why they are there in the first place.
8. Finally why the obsession with consumption of resources?!? I don't see that as particular goal to anything. Yay I glugged a potion and expended 1 HD. So?
One thing I have to say about the " adventuring day" is that they expect you will be taking a short rest between encounters, sure, sitting around a tavern, riding in a carriage, or studying all count as light activity, but some people simply interpret it as " sitting around a campfire, eating " which does constitute as resting, but resting is so much more than that, it is simply light activity, and in a lot of instances ( like in a dungeon or otherwise chock-full of hostile creatures ), this is simply just not the case,
The other thing is an encounter, combat or not, takes significant real time. At 6-8 encounters per day, if you figure 2 traps, 2 social, and 2-3 combat... you're looking at a couple of sessions. PER DAY of game time. That's a heck of a lot of real time to take up per game day -- almost like you are taking up the equivalent of minute by minute.
Most of the in-game days I run take anywhere from 2-5 sessions. In the campaign I am currently DMing, the PCs have been “boots on ground” approximately 2.5 solar days, the game has been going since Oct/Nov 2020 with a 3-4 hour session almost every week.
The only thing to keep in mind is that various classes consume resources differently, and it WILL have an impact on the fun of some of your players if you do not keep in mind that some characters can go nova, others not, that some classes rely on long rests, others on short rests, etc. and this even if you play a more narrative game (like I do).
This is the main reason the 'adventuring day' concept is problematic; while it's okay for some classes to be situationally better or worse than others, it should be balanced to be equal in the most common case, and 5e is treating the most common case as being the adventuring day.
I think too many people put too much emphasis on the 6-8 encounters bit. Whether your table likes little to no fighting every day, lots of fights each day, or one big epic fight per day, the charts on those pages are the key no matter what to making it work. Throw the 6-8 out the window. The charts give us how much xp worth of encounters the classes are designed to encounter before a new mechanical long rest, with two short rests along the way. They give a little more insight on over powered CR monsters and back to back monsters, but the charts are the big thing. The other chart gives you how much xp per PC for each level to make encounters of varying difficulty.
My two points in the OP were:
1. Use the chart's xp thresholds to design your encounters, whatever they may be. This is how the classes, all of the classes, are designed in regards to short rests, long rests, and expenditure of resources.
2. The day, in game, has (or shouldn't have) nothing to do with mechanical short or long rests. The PCs can rest if they want to. The PCs have to sleep, eat, and drink water. But the PCs DON'T gain the mechanical class benefit of a short or long rest until they have overcome the xp threshold for their level. Meaning no matter how many 8 hour rests they take, they don't get back hit points, spell slots, abilities, or anything, until the make the encounter xp threshold.
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Page 84 of the DMG talks about the adventuring day, experience points, and number of encounters expected in an typical day. Page 82 of the DMG talks about creating encounters based on desired encounter difficulty and character level.
I have never used the adventuring day as an actual in game day, as in sun up to sun down. For me the two are separate. You have an in game day, which is literally sun up to sun down, 24 hours, etc. Then you have the “adventuring day”, which is directly tied to building encounters (combat or non-combat) using experience points (or xp converted to challenge rating) and how that interacts with the mechanics of short rests and a long rest.
The DMG gives us a table which provides how much xp an adventurer, at any given level, is expected to overcome in between long rests, with two short rests during that time. This makes for an excellent guide for the DM when balancing over several encounters, helps to stem the PCs from short rest “novaing” lots of encounters, and makes for more interesting overland travel and long journey travel.
Using the table on page 84 of the DMG as a guide to how much xp the PCs should overcome between long rests per actual game day is both unrealistic and exhausting at times. But not using that guideline makes for encounters that are easily overcome by the party because they have more resources available to them then the game is balanced for. Using an “adventuring day” makes each encounter count, so to speak, as the party doesn’t mechanically gain the benefit of a long rest until the xp threshold is met, and they don’t mechanically gain the benefit of a short rest until 1/3rds and 2/3rds of the threshold is met.
I'd love to ask them where they got the idea that 6-8 encounters "per day" is "normal." I'm not sure we've ever had 6-8 per day going all the way back to AD&D and B/X. Back in those days it took 10 minutes to go 90' in a dungeon (per AD&D DMG, assuming mapping, checking for traps, etc.) and PCs were expected to rest for 10 minutes per hour, so you could not move very quickly. Wandering monsters occurred on a 1 in 1d10 or 1d8 or 1d12 roll (depending on the dungeon or wilderness) and only occurred every so often (maybe once per hour in a dungeon, once per 4 hours outside). So you were only going to get, on average, maybe 1-2 random encounters to pop per day.... More than that would only happen in a highly concentrated dungeon with lots of closely packed rooms and all of them filled with monsters, traps, or other interesting items. And at least if you look at the written adventures, many of those had 30 or 40 rooms but only 10 or 12 of those rooms had actual encounters, with the rest being storage, library, secret treasure room, etc.
And in modern 5e, it's even more uncommon because of the de-emphasis on random encounters and increased emphasis on RP/story compared to 1e.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Honestly, even the "threat" of the typical "Adventuring Day" is enough to constrain player use of resources which is the main reason for it. It is better to end a day with something left over because you didn't have as many fights than to die because you didn't spread the resources out. This especially applies to wizards and other spell casters using high level slots to make some encounters much easier but if they do that too often then later encounters can become much harder.
If the players/characters know that, then they budget accordingly and the DM can feel free to have any number of encounters in a day since the players never know how many will come up.
On the other hand, if the characters know that they can get away with one big encounter, run off to an inn for the afternoon for tea and crumpets followed by a nice rest and go out the next morning fully rested to continue their adventures then the characters use everything they can in the one encounter. It's up to the DM to change the paradigm by creating situations where that play style doesn't work so the characters realize they need to conserve resources.
Anyway, I agree with the OP that the 6-8 encounter day is somewhat mythical since each day should fit the story and narrative and many won't have as many as 6-8 encounters while others could possibly have more.
It seems to be a long-standing assumption -- both 3e and 4e had similar assumptions in their encounter building system (prior editions lacked encounter builders) -- and caused problems in both 3e and 4e for the same reason it causes problems in 5e, because outside of somewhat specialized dungeons very few games actually ran that way. The easiest way to actually achieve it is to discard the concept of time-based resting: instead, you can only take a long rest after you complete a waypoint (or some other measure that is likely to amount to an adventuring day). This is fairly unnatural from a simulationist perspective, unless you decide that all PCs are really necromancers who feed on the energy of their defeated foes, thus accounting for both this and the need to kill things for experience points.
Yes I guess one could say that a "long rest" can only be taken after 6 encounters, no matter how many hours you sleep... and that would make all the charts work in DMG.
But as you say it would not be very good at simulating the setting.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Yeah, I ignore most of that crap too. The party still takes a long rest every solar day because it’s largely irrelevant for the way I DM. They will regularly have multiple solar days in a row with little to no combat whatsoever, but when they do see a combat-centric day, I try to shove them through a meat grinder. We’re talking around 4ish Deadly+ encounters that day, and typically one of those encounters will require two whole sessions to get through all by itself.
Frankly, I have always found the DMG to be the least useful of the three main books for D&D. That goes all the way back to ncludie 2e, 3/3.5, and now in 5e as well. (Even as a green as I was way back in 2e when I started it seemed the least useful of the three.) Every edition it seems to be at least half filled with stuff like this that doesn’t seem to work “as advertised” so to speak.
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I found the AD&D version of DMG to be quite useful. Still do.
I think at least for 5e, the main problem is organization. I never know where to freaking find stuff, even when I know I have seen it in there before. I don't generally have that problem with 1e.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
The other way of achieving actually having six encounters per long rest is to use gritty realism from the DMG. Unfortunately, this completely breaks certain classes of spells (most notably, anyone trying to use Animate Dead is hosed) so you'd need to make additional house rules to adjust it.
6-8 encounters in a day sounds insane to me. Can you imagine, running from one combat to the next? Sure if you are trying to get thru a building. But random encounters? Seems a little unrealstic for a world. I mean no one would come out of their house or travel to another town if every hour they were out meant they had to fight of orcs, goblins, or bandits, etc. It sounds more like a rule put in place for computer game dynamics, not a rpg table top. I recently came across this and thought how do you do that? Of course I am confused how people go through an entire adventure book multiple times, in a year? How are they fitting in any role playing? shoot...my combat takes several hours. But thats because we have fun describing the combat, and not just you hit, its dead. Guess I am too old school d&d that way.
The 6-8 encounters per day clearly was designed around the dungeon, and nowhere else. It is not possible to imagine that anyone would run 6-8 encounters per day in the wilderness -- as you say, no one would ever get anywhere. On the sea -- really, 6-8 ship encounters per day? Underwater -- with the sheer volume of an ocean, you'd need the entire thing to be packed wall to wall with schools of merfolk, pods of krakens, etc. It defies belief that you could do this many encounters in between long rests anywhere but in a meatgrinder dungeon.
I mean, on some days, sure -- wilderness where you are approaching a bandit hideout and they have outposts that you hit one at a time or something. But as a general rule? No.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
Remember, an encounter doesn’t have to mean specifically combat. Any encounter that forces the party to consume resources counts. If any of the party take damage that would cause them to spend hit dice, and/or use spell slots, limited use features, consumable items and/or money that all counts. There are numerous ways that social, puzzle, and trap encounters could all force a party to consume resources like that.
If one of them falls into a spiked pit trap and takes damage and then uses a Potion of Climbing to get back out then resources were consumed which is the whole point.
If there is a challenging social encounter (like a tough interrogation or something), and the Whispers Bard used Words of Terror and a Bardic Inspiration, the Enchanter uses Hypnotic Gaze and casts Detect Thoughts, the Artificer uses a Flash of Genius and a charge from their Replicate Eyes of Charming Infusion, and in the end the party spends a couple hundred gp on bribes.... That’s a lot of resources spent without anything even resembling combat.
Most encounters that consume significant resources are going to be combat encounters, but they don’t all have to be combat. But even so, 6-8 encounters in a day is a very fast pace. If the players don’t experience some slower points in their characters’ story then the pacing still suffers. Any good story needs an ebb and flow of pacing. Without the slower moments to lull the audience, the ramp up to action doesn’t have the same impact. The scene has to get quiet at times so it can’t suck the audience in to hang on every word, then when the sudden whammy of the next plot twist hits them it has added impact. If there are never any ups and downs to the story, if it’s nothing but nonstop action, then the story suffers.
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The other thing is an encounter, combat or not, takes significant real time. At 6-8 encounters per day, if you figure 2 traps, 2 social, and 2-3 combat... you're looking at a couple of sessions. PER DAY of game time. That's a heck of a lot of real time to take up per game day -- almost like you are taking up the equivalent of minute by minute.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
A medium combat encounter doesn't actually take that long, in a dungeon crawl you could likely manage an encounter (including the crawl part getting you there) every hour if you've got a good setup for running through them quickly (either mapless, or using a VTT that can bring maps up really fast).
Having just discovered this "Adventuring Day" I have to say I really, really dislike it....in fact I hate it as a concept.
1. It promotes less narrative building. Seriously not every story involves or should involve a cast of hundreds of bad guys in multiple battles. I actually loathe the idea of DnD being 4 PCs wiping out battalions of baddies over the course of an "adventuring day".
2. Makes the game less cinematic. I like the idea of a big end boss fight. If you're meant to grind players over 6-8 encounters to get them to burn up all their spells, potions and HD, they're going to get smashed by whatever big bad is at the end.
Which leads me to:
3. Balancing issues. Game is already hard enough to balance as the XP/CR systems are not balanced (I've found them too easy). Try balancing 6-8 encounters so they get to the big bad depleted just enough to make it a challenge but not enough to get wiped and not so little that it's not a challenge.
4. DM workload - that's a lot of effort for one small chunk of narrative.
Try concocting 6-8 encounters that make sense n the context of a story. Sure you can do it if you have 8 rooms, each one with random monsters. Try doing it within a story - "You're trying to rescue someone from bandits:"
Encounter 1: bash up bandits,
Encounter 2: bash up bandits with slight variations
Encounter 3: bash up bandits with slight variations
Etc etc etc, Rinse repeat for 6-8 encounters.
Doesn't make sense to throw in an ogre or an ooze or a naga or a genie or a demigod in a bandit camp now does it? "Just smashing some bandits, oh look it's Tiamat hanging around playing a ukelele. FIGHT!"
Same applies to anything else really, except the Random Monster Dungeon.
I don't regard social/obstacles the same as combat encounters. They generally don't consume resources or the resources they do consume don't contribute to anything within combat sphere. "Oh they glugged a potion of climbing to clamber over a wall." Not going to stop them dealing out hits (especially as most players IME just view combat as hitting/shooting stuff).
I do recognise the social/obstacle encounter is part of the story building element.
5. Not every narrative or environment requires 6-8 encounters to tell a tale.
6. It seems like a grind based on attrition. I hate grinds and attrition - especially when most of the encounters won't further the story. It also risks having your players lose interest, which leads me to point 7:
7. Time as in real time. I've only ever had 1 session of D&D (both AD&D and 5e)as both a player and a DM where players smashed through the encounters quickly (that was recently). Usually it's 1-2 encounters at the most per session. People talk, and discuss things and occasionally talk about something outside of D&D. There's rules discussions and queries.
So you would have to run a single adventuring day over 3-4 sessions by which time people have forgotten why they are there in the first place.
8. Finally why the obsession with consumption of resources?!? I don't see that as particular goal to anything. Yay I glugged a potion and expended 1 HD. So?
One thing I have to say about the " adventuring day" is that they expect you will be taking a short rest between encounters, sure, sitting around a tavern, riding in a carriage, or studying all count as light activity, but some people simply interpret it as " sitting around a campfire, eating " which does constitute as resting, but resting is so much more than that, it is simply light activity, and in a lot of instances ( like in a dungeon or otherwise chock-full of hostile creatures ), this is simply just not the case,
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
Most of the in-game days I run take anywhere from 2-5 sessions. In the campaign I am currently DMing, the PCs have been “boots on ground” approximately 2.5 solar days, the game has been going since Oct/Nov 2020 with a 3-4 hour session almost every week.
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Whaoh, bruh that's intense
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
I kinda feel that tho
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
This is the main reason the 'adventuring day' concept is problematic; while it's okay for some classes to be situationally better or worse than others, it should be balanced to be equal in the most common case, and 5e is treating the most common case as being the adventuring day.
I think too many people put too much emphasis on the 6-8 encounters bit. Whether your table likes little to no fighting every day, lots of fights each day, or one big epic fight per day, the charts on those pages are the key no matter what to making it work. Throw the 6-8 out the window. The charts give us how much xp worth of encounters the classes are designed to encounter before a new mechanical long rest, with two short rests along the way. They give a little more insight on over powered CR monsters and back to back monsters, but the charts are the big thing. The other chart gives you how much xp per PC for each level to make encounters of varying difficulty.
My two points in the OP were:
1. Use the chart's xp thresholds to design your encounters, whatever they may be. This is how the classes, all of the classes, are designed in regards to short rests, long rests, and expenditure of resources.
2. The day, in game, has (or shouldn't have) nothing to do with mechanical short or long rests. The PCs can rest if they want to. The PCs have to sleep, eat, and drink water. But the PCs DON'T gain the mechanical class benefit of a short or long rest until they have overcome the xp threshold for their level. Meaning no matter how many 8 hour rests they take, they don't get back hit points, spell slots, abilities, or anything, until the make the encounter xp threshold.