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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Yes, the modern style of play is 1-3 encounters per day with 0-1 short rests. No more dungeons, go nova on every encounter
This blew my fucking mind when I learned this.
Nothing about the game's precarious balance works well if you don't follow the adventuring day.
I push my players to the limit before they can take a long rest. If you blow your spell slots on stupid shit, you're probably going to wipe later. If you take five days to find the lost children, they'll be long eaten.
"Do you want to play a game that's not a resource management game at its core?" "No we like DND"
I need to stop playing DND.
Back when I played D&D I followed the adventuring day except for during overland travel. The key thing is that not all encounters are combat. A riddle door, a trap, and a stubborn NPC are all encounters and the game is designed for you to include those too. I see kids these days saying 7 combats in a day is too much and I'm like "I agree, you don't understand the adventuring day". Instead of trying to learn, kids these days just ignore everything except combat and then complain combat is too slow
Yes, that's true the advice is 6-8 medium "encounters" which aren't usually fights. But D&D is kind of bad at codifying costs of non-combat encounters. It doesn't have progress clocks so trade-offs like "let's go around the gorge instead of using Fly" aren't mechanically represented very well. It has shit for social rules so it's hard to do a social encounter that taxes resources. It can be done, of course, but the rules aren't really helping much.
I think some people also confuse "per day" with "per session". I've had multiple people tell me there's no way they can do six combats in a three hour session, and I'm like what are you even talking about. One in-game day can go many sessions. Some people even give their players a long rest at the start of the session automatically!
Yup, it's so hard to make resource expending non-combat encounters without effectively sidelining some of the party members. If you build an encounter that effectively requires spell slot expenditure, the martials are basically relegated to an audience position. And if you build an encounter where spell slot use isn't absolutely necessary, the party will try every imaginable way of conquering it without using up resources first, defeating the whole point of forcing resource expenditure.
I guess one key part of this issue is that generally speaking, caster resources (slots) have universal uses in combat, exploration and social interactions, whereas martial resources only ever have combat applications. This, in presence of resource expending non-combat encounters, kind of creates a situation where your choice of caster or martial decides whether you want to participate in the game the entire time or just half of it.
Bloody hell, no wonder you see so many posts and maymays about the game being broken, none of these chumps even know how to play!
I can understand strongly limiting long rests. Letting players long rest between every encounter makes difficulty non-existent. Short rests though... classes that get resources back on short rests are balanced around the fact that they'll likely get them frequently.
It's a big reason for why martials are losing relevance. If everyone's going nova all the time then consistent damage per turn can't keep up
Yeah, that is so frustrating as somebody who plays a character that requires short rests. Our sorcerer throws out her 5th level spells every encounter and I have 2 spell slots as a warlock...
Yeah, that's why I've started liking the idea of long rests are a week of rest, with short rests being a single night.
Really makes the resources a lot more precious if you're not getting them back during the same session. So many times of players being like, "whelp, I just burnt five spells, let's long rest"
What I should be doing is if you're long resting in the dungeon is having monsters show up, but I can literally see my players eyes glaze over when it's a random encounter like that.
I feel like that's going to do weird things to your story pacing, and possibly put your players in an unwind position.
Like maybe they're idiots or unlucky and use a lot of resources, and need a rest. Does the plot allow a full week of the bad guys/natural disaster/whatever to do ita thing unimpeded?
The solution remains kill the adventuring day. It's not how most players actually want to play the game.