Pretty much the same here, though depends if you count social interactions as an encounter. TBH I don't really see the point of any combat that is less than Hard, seems like a waste of everyone's time to run a combat where the outcome is completely forgone before the combat even starts.
4 Deadly encounters per adventuring day? Serious question: are you able to do all four of those encounters in a single session? This seems like it would be very hard to do, especially at higher levels, unless your sessions routinely go longer than 4 hours. Or your sessions are nothing but combat? I'm not being snarky, I'm just trying to figure out how a DM would be able to fit 4 deadly encounters for, say, a party of 8th level characters into a single session.
Also, I really disagree with your last statement. Sometimes it's fun for everyone to give the party an encounter that's not about peril but about giving them a chance to really go to town on an enemy with tactics, magic, and class features. I've done this, and I can tell you, the wizard LOVES blasting a gnoll war party with a fireball or two, and the druid has a blast turning into a cave bear and mauling the ever loving s**t out of those gnolls. And so on.
4 Deadly encounters per adventuring day? Serious question: are you able to do all four of those encounters in a single session? This seems like it would be very hard to do, especially at higher levels, unless your sessions routinely go longer than 4 hours.
Session length varies dramatically between groups, but one deadly encounter is typically faster to resolve than two medium encounters, so if you actually use up your adventuring day budget, you'll be fastest with 3 deadly or 2 deadly+ encounters (a single deadly++ encounter may prove hairy to resolve).
At that point your, running outside expectations because that encounter design is what you enjoy. However basing the whole game on it is not good because it forces your tables style of play rather than a design that allows for multiple styles. Having more flexibility should be a design goal.
It's OK to have every class shine but it doesn't have to be at the same time. A mix of long and short days are ideal.
4 Deadly encounters per adventuring day? Serious question: are you able to do all four of those encounters in a single session?
I'm guessing no, but I think it's interesting and worth discussing that you've connected long rests in your mind with session ends. It's something I've heard from other players as well.
As for time constraints, it's actually been my experience that easier fights take less time to resolve for two reasons. 1) Players aren't pressured to make the best possible plays every turn. In more dangerous fights, the margin for error shrinks and every turn has to be analyzed and optimized, but in easier fights you can just go with what feels correct for the moment. 2) They don't always end based on HP depletion. An easy fight isn't expected to be razor's-edge. It doesn't have to tax resources to the max. So it doesn't have to wring every ounce of value out of its monsters -- they can surrender, run away, or otherwise end the fight if the narrative suggests they should, before all of them have been reduced to 0 HP.
Easy fights can also be more easily avoided altogether -- the DM isn't relying so heavily on the fight to carry the challenge of the day, so they're not pressured to force it to happen. You often hear about DMs forcing repeated Stealth checks until one fails, or conspicuously relocating their Quantum Ogres, or otherwise rejecting the players' right to influence the outcome of the game by their choices, and it's easy to see why: they only wrote a few big encounters, and if you skip one, you're skipping a huge percentage of the challenge.
My first campaign playing a warlock resulted in either one encounter per day, or barely enough time to loot the bodies between encounters. Needless to say, never being able to use one of the core advantages of your class isn't a whole lot of fun.
The second time we often were able to get short rests (mostly due to implementing the Critical Roll house rule reducing the time for a short rest down to 15 minutes) but the most short rests in a single day was 3. By that time we were too short on HP to be able to function on anything outside of a long rest.
If you include non-combat encounters, then typically 6-10 encounters per adventuring day, 2-3 between short or long rests.
If you’re only counting combat encounters then 3-4 per adventuring day. But I typically make them all Deadly+, so it still works with the 2ish (1-3) short rests per adventuring day, 1 rest in between each encounter (more or less).
Pretty much the same here, though depends if you count social interactions as an encounter. TBH I don't really see the point of any combat that is less than Hard, seems like a waste of everyone's time to run a combat where the outcome is completely forgone before the combat even starts.
I agree. Anything less than Hard is there mostly for narrative reasons. Those encounters are basically either just speed bumps, something for the party to go off on for lolz, or purely because they make sense from a narrative perspective but aren’t intended to really challenge the party. I basically view them as on par with social encounters.
As for time constraints, it's actually been my experience that easier fights take less time to resolve for two reasons. 1) Players aren't pressured to make the best possible plays every turn. In more dangerous fights, the margin for error shrinks and every turn has to be analyzed and optimized, but in easier fights you can just go with what feels correct for the moment. 2) They don't always end based on HP depletion. An easy fight isn't expected to be razor's-edge. It doesn't have to tax resources to the max. So it doesn't have to wring every ounce of value out of its monsters -- they can surrender, run away, or otherwise end the fight if the narrative suggests they should, before all of them have been reduced to 0 HP.
Easy fights can also be more easily avoided altogether -- the DM isn't relying so heavily on the fight to carry the challenge of the day, so they're not pressured to force it to happen. You often hear about DMs forcing repeated Stealth checks until one fails, or conspicuously relocating their Quantum Ogres, or otherwise rejecting the players' right to influence the outcome of the game by their choices, and it's easy to see why: they only wrote a few big encounters, and if you skip one, you're skipping a huge percentage of the challenge.
True, but I consider anything less than Hard encounters to be “easy” encounters, and even treat Hard encounters that way where villains surrender or run away once the outcome of the encounter is obvious to them.
Pretty much the same here, though depends if you count social interactions as an encounter. TBH I don't really see the point of any combat that is less than Hard, seems like a waste of everyone's time to run a combat where the outcome is completely forgone before the combat even starts.
4 Deadly encounters per adventuring day? Serious question: are you able to do all four of those encounters in a single session? This seems like it would be very hard to do, especially at higher levels, unless your sessions routinely go longer than 4 hours. Or your sessions are nothing but combat? I'm not being snarky, I'm just trying to figure out how a DM would be able to fit 4 deadly encounters for, say, a party of 8th level characters into a single session.
No, we don’t get through all four fights in a single session, but I don’t necessarily treat a single session as an adventuring day either. Sometimes a day fits within a single session, but it can sometimes take 3-6 sessions to work through an entire adventuring day, sometimes longer. The last campaign I ran took almost 2 years IRL, but was only about 2 weeks in-game time. But I also designed it that way to have time feel like it was dragging on and on and on to reinforce the feeling of the campaign. It was very, very Lovecraftian. We used the Sanity and Madness rules and everything. So it fit the feel of the campaign for things to be that slow. There was still a lot of action and lots and lots of stuff happened, but I fight that took 2 sessions (2-3 hours per session) would only take maybe a minute in game time, so it leaves a lot of additional time in that adventuring day to do lots of other non-combat stuff, which would take multiple other sessions to resolve. Other times we might get 2 fights done in the same session.
1) Players aren't pressured to make the best possible plays every turn. In more dangerous fights, the margin for error shrinks and every turn has to be analyzed and optimized, but in easier fights you can just go with what feels correct for the moment.
If you're actually filling your daily encounter budget, players are absolutely pressured to make the best play, because it's a problem if you run out of consumable resources and there's still two more fights left to get through.
1) Players aren't pressured to make the best possible plays every turn. In more dangerous fights, the margin for error shrinks and every turn has to be analyzed and optimized, but in easier fights you can just go with what feels correct for the moment.
If you're actually filling your daily encounter budget, players are absolutely pressured to make the best play, because it's a problem if you run out of consumable resources and there's still two more fights left to get through.
I agree, but the correct play is simpler. "Which spell" is one question, "which spells and in what order" is two.
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4 Deadly encounters per adventuring day? Serious question: are you able to do all four of those encounters in a single session? This seems like it would be very hard to do, especially at higher levels, unless your sessions routinely go longer than 4 hours. Or your sessions are nothing but combat? I'm not being snarky, I'm just trying to figure out how a DM would be able to fit 4 deadly encounters for, say, a party of 8th level characters into a single session.
Also, I really disagree with your last statement. Sometimes it's fun for everyone to give the party an encounter that's not about peril but about giving them a chance to really go to town on an enemy with tactics, magic, and class features. I've done this, and I can tell you, the wizard LOVES blasting a gnoll war party with a fireball or two, and the druid has a blast turning into a cave bear and mauling the ever loving s**t out of those gnolls. And so on.
Session length varies dramatically between groups, but one deadly encounter is typically faster to resolve than two medium encounters, so if you actually use up your adventuring day budget, you'll be fastest with 3 deadly or 2 deadly+ encounters (a single deadly++ encounter may prove hairy to resolve).
At that point your, running outside expectations because that encounter design is what you enjoy. However basing the whole game on it is not good because it forces your tables style of play rather than a design that allows for multiple styles. Having more flexibility should be a design goal.
It's OK to have every class shine but it doesn't have to be at the same time. A mix of long and short days are ideal.
I'm guessing no, but I think it's interesting and worth discussing that you've connected long rests in your mind with session ends. It's something I've heard from other players as well.
As for time constraints, it's actually been my experience that easier fights take less time to resolve for two reasons. 1) Players aren't pressured to make the best possible plays every turn. In more dangerous fights, the margin for error shrinks and every turn has to be analyzed and optimized, but in easier fights you can just go with what feels correct for the moment. 2) They don't always end based on HP depletion. An easy fight isn't expected to be razor's-edge. It doesn't have to tax resources to the max. So it doesn't have to wring every ounce of value out of its monsters -- they can surrender, run away, or otherwise end the fight if the narrative suggests they should, before all of them have been reduced to 0 HP.
Easy fights can also be more easily avoided altogether -- the DM isn't relying so heavily on the fight to carry the challenge of the day, so they're not pressured to force it to happen. You often hear about DMs forcing repeated Stealth checks until one fails, or conspicuously relocating their Quantum Ogres, or otherwise rejecting the players' right to influence the outcome of the game by their choices, and it's easy to see why: they only wrote a few big encounters, and if you skip one, you're skipping a huge percentage of the challenge.
My first campaign playing a warlock resulted in either one encounter per day, or barely enough time to loot the bodies between encounters. Needless to say, never being able to use one of the core advantages of your class isn't a whole lot of fun.
The second time we often were able to get short rests (mostly due to implementing the Critical Roll house rule reducing the time for a short rest down to 15 minutes) but the most short rests in a single day was 3. By that time we were too short on HP to be able to function on anything outside of a long rest.
I agree. Anything less than Hard is there mostly for narrative reasons. Those encounters are basically either just speed bumps, something for the party to go off on for lolz, or purely because they make sense from a narrative perspective but aren’t intended to really challenge the party. I basically view them as on par with social encounters.
True, but I consider anything less than Hard encounters to be “easy” encounters, and even treat Hard encounters that way where villains surrender or run away once the outcome of the encounter is obvious to them.
No, we don’t get through all four fights in a single session, but I don’t necessarily treat a single session as an adventuring day either. Sometimes a day fits within a single session, but it can sometimes take 3-6 sessions to work through an entire adventuring day, sometimes longer. The last campaign I ran took almost 2 years IRL, but was only about 2 weeks in-game time. But I also designed it that way to have time feel like it was dragging on and on and on to reinforce the feeling of the campaign. It was very, very Lovecraftian. We used the Sanity and Madness rules and everything. So it fit the feel of the campaign for things to be that slow. There was still a lot of action and lots and lots of stuff happened, but I fight that took 2 sessions (2-3 hours per session) would only take maybe a minute in game time, so it leaves a lot of additional time in that adventuring day to do lots of other non-combat stuff, which would take multiple other sessions to resolve. Other times we might get 2 fights done in the same session.
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Easier fights take less time to resolve per fight, but it takes more fights to fill out the daily encounter budget.
If you're actually filling your daily encounter budget, players are absolutely pressured to make the best play, because it's a problem if you run out of consumable resources and there's still two more fights left to get through.
I agree, but the correct play is simpler. "Which spell" is one question, "which spells and in what order" is two.