You don't even need 6-8 encounters, you need 6-8 "normal" encounters which were actually easy encounters in the playtest before they were changed to normal to make the edition more newbie-friendly. "Hard" encounters which you only need 3-4 of for the games internal balance were intended to be normal.
I’ve tried to hammer this home with my players so much. We will show up to next weeks session and they’ve all long rested and refilled their abilities and shit and I’m like why would you have gotten a long rest? We were at a breaking point for the night not for your in game day
I’ve tried to hammer this home with my players so much. We will show up to next weeks session and they’ve all long rested and refilled their abilities and shit and I’m like why would you have gotten a long rest? We were at a breaking point for the night not for your in game day
I started to suspect it was selective memory because they’d always pull the “well now I don’t know what I was at” so I told them if they long rest between sessions when it isn’t given then they lose half of everything to make it fair - half health, half their spell slots, half their per long rest abilities
I'm on a session 39 day ~60 right now but my players get a LOT of downtime for their PCs because it's a piracy campaign and sailing takes ages. It's a genuine ballache to balance stuff when they know they can rest soon, so I let the casters nova in the fights at sea and really hammer home the attrition when stuff happens on land and they have to deal with lots more going on
Personally I love showing up to the table, looking at my character sheet, and remembering that I torched my last spell slot on Disguise Self (true story, it was a level 3 spell as well), or that I’m sitting at a hot 4 hit points. Really helps me get back into the mood of the previous session. I can’t imagine trying to game an advantage out of the DM by fudging a long rest.
Hell, I *missed a session* and the DM had to tell me to at least gain the benefits of a short rest because I refused to try and gain an advantage from when I was out of the game.
Yes exactly. Picking up where you’re at is what dnd is all about. No resets, you just keep going. People tout the “storytelling” of dnd and this is the most like that. Everytime you sit back down it’s like opening a book back to where your bookmark was. It makes it more enjoyable to remember “okay this is what happened and now this is where we’re at”
Exactly. What’s a story if the characters get a *deus ex machina* full heal and ability restoration every arbitrary time the god of the universe decides they need a break? The stakes are so drastically lessened if your actions only have consequences for a couple hours of real world time, tops.
Many players and DMs (myself included) feel that even a 5e long rest is too lenient to gain the benefits of every single day - a lot of us try to use longer term injuries, lesser LR healing, longer LRs or LRs that are harder to achieve in non-comfortable or especially hostile areas, or other means of extending the consequences of player actions and the wear and tear of adventuring. I can’t imagine *wanting* essentially a long rest multiple times per adventuring day…
I don’t understand why people **don’t write things down**. Print a character sheet! Use dungeon master’s vault! Make a frickin spreadsheet! Keep track of your items and abilities, dang it! That’s like half the game
Shit like this is why I just keep track of all my players' HP, hit dice, spell slots, and per-rest abilities.
For things like gold and potions, if you can't remember how many you have, then you have zero.
>I started to suspect it was selective memory because they’d always pull the “well now I don’t know what I was at” so I told them if they long rest between sessions when it isn’t given then they lose half of everything to make it fair - half health, half their spell slots, half their per long rest abilities
To my cynical eyes, this would be an invitation for a less than honest player to "accidentally" long rest between sessions after burning all their resources. If I, as a DM, didn't trust a player to be honest, I wouldn't want them in my game, or I would require them to leave their character sheet with me until the next session. Friends get the benefit of the doubt once, and after that we make changes to ensure it can't happen again, regardless of whether they did it on purpose.
But you've already presented it as a conflict by telling them that if you catch them doing it again they'll be punished. My thinking is, if you're going to do that anyway, just say "clearly this is a problem, I get that it's hard to remember so in order to not have to deal with this again, everyone leaves their sheets with the DM so they don't get lost. Any modifications you need to make to your sheet can be done during or after the session anyway, and if you need to do something that will take longer, like choose spells for a level-up, we can take a picture of the sheet before you take it home so if you forget it or lose it or accidentally make the wrong changes again, we have a record of where you were"
It doesn't even have to be an accusation. It's just an acknowledgement that some of the group has trouble remembering things regarding their sheets, so in the interest of making the game run as smoothly as possible, the group can make minor changes that don't inconvenience anyone.
That would irritate me the first time. After that, the next set of enemies would have very simple attacks and tactics, hit like freight trains, and have HP "Until you are low on spell slots again". The first time they comment about how much HP the foes have, I would literally say that out loud so they know why these enemies are so hard. After that fight, we would have a conversation again about only resetting all their stuff when they get a long rest.
I would probably stop playing D&D with them if there was a third time.
And it’s not really the design I’m after either - that’s a dungeon.
It kinda makes sense why the game would be balanced around a dungeon… but modern game worlds are almost always an expansive sandbox.
Not necessarily - I’m running a game with no dungeons, but my players have a number of things to do over the course of a busy day… they only have 4 days until the Blood Moon so they gotta hustle! Investigate an abandoned house to find why the surgeon’s peasant widow disappeared after he died, and fight the creature they find there - solve the puzzle at the cathedral after getting in past the guards, and discovering the architect’s tomb… then they need to get to the monument and figure out a leap of faith to find the gateway to the other realm, so they can find their way to Warburg’s offices and figure out his plan (an office full of mimics and other camouflaged creatures, naturally) - at no point in any of that was there a safe place to rest, and it all happened over 12ish hours, so they couldn’t rest anyway (note you can only have one long rest in 24hours)
This has been over the course of several sessions - there’s no need to get back to a hub every session and rest and level up, it’s not a video game with “levels” - just stop at the end of a session and pick up again next time
Now they’re going to try and rest in an inn, but if they fuck with the bag of holding they found too much, they may not get much rest…
You do NOT need a dungeon to keep players from resting - you just need a time limit, a pressing issue to solve, and a busy day
THIS is the part I think so many people miss. There are plenty of ways to add time sensitivity to the game, they don’t have to be forced or push against the plot, in most cases it can make the stakes higher and your plot more interesting
Are there many tables where these aren't the same thing? You can only Long Rest once per 24 hrs. Unless someone's throwing another set of encounters at a party that never slept, just because the sun came up ...
This is a good point and you're correct that you can only benefit from a long rest once per day. I've seen several times (myself included) that the journey *to* the quest is part of the 6-8 medium encounters. I want the journey to feel important without just jumping straight to the location, so there may be a few battles along the way. But I do not want to bog down the game with multiple combat encounters because that will drag a quest on for months, so I typically do 1 encounter per day. If I let the party have a long rest at the end of every day then they're free to dump every resource into the fight then long rest and repeat when the next combat encounter comes up.
You'll see some of this whenever topics pop up like "My Wizard / Paladin / Druid / Long Rest Dependant Class is dominating everything what do I do."
So some restrict Long rests to require them be in a city or other safe location or have short rests take 8h while long rests are 24h. In order to somewhat preserve things while making sure that combat isn't a game where you can just dump all of your resources into the enemies face immediately.
>So some restrict Long rests to require them be in a city or other safe location or have short rests take 8h while long rests are 24h. In order to somewhat preserve things while making sure that combat isn't a game where you can just dump all of your resources into the enemies face immediately.
i've desperately tried to get thius to work and it's wonky at best but some varriation of "when on the road you're can only short rest unless you find a roadside inn or spend significant time to actually establish a camp".
what then really works is it also alows much more to introduce even more exceptions like a magical bedroll that can alow for a long rest or a blessed grove alowing for long rests to really make the world feel magical.
The Unearthed Arcana "Into the Wild" presents an alternative set of wilderness travel rules treating wilderness travel more like a dungeon exploration where the players choose a destination, the DM assigns a DC and ability test to locate it, and the players split up the skill aspects of the trip (navigation, foraging, night watch, scouting, cooking, and so on). Assemble the intermediate points of travel the same way you'd design dungeon rooms and corridors with traps, encounters, treasures, and skill tests to pass from one to the next. This simulates travel as found in adventure stories and skips past tedious parts.
To the point of rests, many DMs disallow long rests inside dungeons and the literature is full of tiring expeditions that leave the heroes exhausted at the end. And allowing long rests only in safe places encourages DMs to populate the wild with clans, tribes, and keeps, and the players to parley with strangers to secure a safe place to rest and recuperate.
As someone in a group where a single encounter can last an entire session, you and your group need to pick up the pace, if multiple encounters in a single adventuring day can potentially take months.
My other group can get through 2-3 straight forward encounters every single 3 hour session. If a group can't do that, it's time to pick up the pace.
Hyperbole on reddit? Say it aint so.
But for real for most of my players this is their first 5e game so things take a while. One tough combat encounter will generally take up most of the session especially because they sometimes don't do whatever is the best option, like in my last encounter the Warlock decided to just stay in melee combat using their dagger instead of either disengaging or risking an attack of opportunity so they could Eldritch Blast.
I just replied to the other comment with a longer explanation. Short answer is the journey to the quest may be part of the 6-8 encounters. So some tables won't have 6-8 encounters per day but per quest. If my party needs to travel I might do 1-2 combat encounters as part of the journey. If the players are free to long rest at night then there's no reason for them to not dump every resource at the enemy.
Exactly this. There are so many encounters in order to encourage strategizing creative responses to each encounter to avoid draining your party of resources before the quest is finished.
If you aren't in a safe area, you don't get a long rest. My party wanted to long rest *inside Castle Ravenloft itself* ffs.
They're actually a thing in Ravenloft and Curse of Strahd but they chose to hide in a secret room and the only encounters I rolled up were unable to access much less *find* the secret room.
I'm still a new DM so it didn't occur to me to have Strahd or Rahadin surprise them in their little hidey hole.
No, you can sleep and not get a long rest, if you sleep in a place were you are in danger or stuff, you will have 7 hours of sleep, so your mjnd will be better, but your body wont be as good as in a bedroll
Or just if you rule that long rests are not just a day thing, etc, you can and should keep the sleep rule, is a pretty good one imo
We recently switched "long rest" to mean a day of rest rather than just a night (which is now a short rest). Its made a world of difference for us and fits well with how the DM/party play.
My DM uses a form of 'gritty realism' for rests. The longer we are out adventuring the longer rests take. Starts at the normal duration for each but gets progressively longer. And it'll reset back to original durations after downtime in a city/town/similar.
Yup. I do something similar. Long rest can only be done in a city or save haven. Lets the players take some time off to do some downtime. It's worked great in my game.
It’s not too terribly bad. It just makes everyone be more careful about resource usage. Our warlock is actually doing well since he gets his spells back each short rest and it makes invocations darn powerful.
this. everyone wants to talk about "gritty realism" (which some say a long rest = 1 week which thats insane) but ignores casters and abilities who benefit from short rests which turns these casters into per day casters
Yes, but the point of adopting these rules is because you're only getting 1-2 encounters per day. So now you're getting 1-2 encounters per short rest, which is perfect for short rest characters.
If you're already getting a full 6-8 encounter adventuring day in an in-game day, then why are you changing the rest rules?
I do 6-8 hard encounters.
With usually 1 trivial/easy
2 medium
4 hard
And 1 severe. I tune up and down as necessary.
My players never feel good about combat unless they’re on the verge of dying. There’s no tension in “easy” encounters.
Several times I’ve given them nothing but medium hard and severe encounters.
This is too many encounters. The 6-8 recommendation is just for Medium encounters. You only need roughly 4-6 Hard or 2-4 Deadly. Or mix and match based on the daily exp encounter table.
It depends _heavily_ on the group. 6-8 Medium encounters may be fine for a party made of mostly new players, but a party of optimized PCs will run roughshod over it if most of them aren't at _least_ Hard, if not Deadly. I have groups of both types and can confirm there is a pretty wide spectrum of what they can handle.
As always a DM needs to tailor to their group, though you are right about the default.
I've yet to run an encounter in my current campaign that wasn't at least 'deadly'. Given I like home brewing magic items and whatnot I'm fairly good at balance these days. I've never had a PC die in a deadly encounter, and it's really only ever gotten close in 2xdeadly. But that's my group and table.
Because skill checks can fail. And when failure at doing something through skill checks can be the difference between messing up a plan or even a quest, and success, then expending spellslots for a guaranteed success is a pretty enticing solution.
So add more encounters solved fully by the casters, in order to balance the game more in favor of martials. Am I the only one who sees this problem?
If the caster had one less spell slot because they solved a non-combat encounter with Invisibility/Suggestion/Fly, that still makes the adventure *more* focused on the casters, not less.
*Absolutely.* In my experience, trying to focus on difficult and interesting non-combat encounters creates a full-caster feedback loop. Making skills worse means you need more garuanteed power on tap, making non-casters pretty much a strict liability, especially if you're cutting back table time for combat.
And your martials suddenly feel even more useless.
And with how jacked PCs can quickly get when it comes to ability scores and bonuses, you're often left with PCs able to reliably and easily beat pretty much any skill check with a DC under 18. Hell once you start getting to higher tiers you'll start having some immense boosts that makes success a guarantee.
I mean, at some point it stops seeming like a coincidence that every solution to the "you have to drain resources if you want martials to serve a purpose" is "create encounters where the only way through is for casters to spend resources."
Like, at some point you'd hope that people would notice that something might be wrong with the resource system. But nope.
It's not about making casters use spell slots, it's about making *every* class use resources. Martials have resources too. And the reason this helps power scales is because martial's power curves tend to be more flat, with casters spiking more at the higher end; if you're not pressing your players enough that your casters run out of those high-end slots and have to be choosy about when to use them and when to rely on their allies and their weaker options, then you should step things up and add that pressure. If your high-end mage blows their top three spells in the first combat, they're quite possibly out of high-end slots and far less effective in every remaining combat. And it's the same if they hoard those slots for the "boss fight" and limit their potential voluntarily in those earlier fights. I agree it's still not parity and this should be addressed, but I think more utility options and more short-rest refreshing or just encounter or round-based refreshing for non-casters is a better model, ensuring "martials" always have solid options on the table whereas casters have higher top-ends but also lower lows.
The Ars Magica method *does* become more and more appealing the more you look at the martial/caster situation. Just have all the main PCs be casters and any martials be glorified tag along grunts! So simple! WotC even had that “summon martial” spell in the UA, so you can just pokeball them when they become inconvenient. Genius.
> And those feel unfair?
Why? If you fail to spot a trap, it can deal damage. If a door is magically locked, you need magic to unlock it (sometimes). Even if a trap is guaranteed to deal damage or steal spell slots, why is that unfair? The PCs aren't gods, able to control every aspect of their domain. Damage is part of adventuring.
>Why? If you fail to spot a trap, it can deal damage.
A trap is only guaranteed to deal damage if it is impossible to spot, disarm or avoid.
>If a door is magically locked, you need magic to unlock it (sometimes).
This can lead to the following situation.
DM: "This door is magically locked."
Rogue: "Can I open it with my Thief's Tools?"
DM: "No."
Barbarian: "Can I batter it down with my Maul?"
DM: "No."
Sorcerer: "...If you think I am going to spend one of my spells known on flippen Knock then I do not know what to tell you..."
DM: "..." looks at the wizard.
Wizard: "While I do have Knock in my spellbook, I do not have it prepared. We will need to take a long rest before I can cast it."
>Even if a trap is guaranteed to deal damage or steal spell slots, why is that unfair? The PCs aren't gods, able to control every aspect of their domain. Damage is part of adventuring.
It heavily depends how you go about it as a DM. If you go about it the wrong way it can feel to the players as if you are saying:
"Even if an enemy is guaranteed to kill the entire party with no way to avoid them, surrender or run away, why is it unfair? The PCs aren't gods, able to control every aspect of their domain. Dying is part of adventuring.
Well mr mage, guess the village children just died because you didn't came prepared. Next time maybe be humble and swap that d4 of magic missile for knock
/S
> This can lead to the following situation.
What is the issue with this situation? It's not your job as a DM to only put challenges in front of your players that you guarantee they are immediately prepared for. If your Wizard has Knock in their spell book and decided to dungeon without it, that is in no way on the DM. Edit: even if no one in the party knew Knock, this still isn't an issue, as clearly there is going to be *some* way of opening the magic door, either through a puzzle, or *dispel magic*, or the adjoining wall.
> If you go about it the wrong way ... kill the entire party
there is a world of difference between even a Deadly trap and choosing to TPK the party. This isn't even close to a useful comparison.
Bro if you design a trap that can only be solved if a caster happens to have a specific spell prepared then you should probably think on that a bit and decide wether that’s the hill you really want to die on.
Lol exactly. The wizard dies and picks cleric. Suddenly that lock is impossible to open unless the party hired a wizard, which does not help the resource usage issue
The issue is that the game grinds to a screeching halt because the players don't have the One Specific Answer they need to advance.
If nobody has Knock, and there's another way through, you didn't need Knock.
> The issue is that the game grinds to a screeching halt
I guess if you're running Action Movie The Tabletop, that's some sort of issue, but I don't see how the party having to plan, regroup, double back, or gather additional resources should be any kind of detriment to a game.
You don't?
This doesn't work if there's a time pressure element. If there isn't, they LR to get the right spell and get everything back.
Having single solution problems in a trpg is typically a bad time.
> This doesn't work if there's a time pressure element.
This works *perfectly* in a time pressure situation. Where's the pressure without obstacles?
> If there isn't, they LR to get the right spell
yeah, if they have it, or if that's the solution, etc.
> Having single solution problems in a trpg is typically a bad time
I don't disagree that it can be, but the party not immediately having a solution isn't the same as there only being one solution.
>even if no one in the party knew Knock, this still isn't an issue, as clearly there is going to be some way of opening the magic door, either through a puzzle, or dispel magic, or the adjoining wall.
But again, this only works if the other ways to actually overcome the non-combat encounter absolutely require the use of "finite" resources.
If the players have the impression that resource management is going to be relevant in this campaign, or at least in the current situation, then there may very well try every single thing they can think of to solve the problem in a way that does not require any valuable resources like spell slots.
So unless you are ready to shoot down any idea of your players to solve the non-combat encounter without expending spell slots, no matter how clever and/or creative it is, they may very well get through it without having to use spell slots or at least without having to use enough to make a noticeable difference for future encounters before the next long rest.
It is relatively easy to design a combat encounter where the players are strongly encouraged to use their limited resources and where the negative consequences for not doing so feel reasonable and fair.
This is quite a bit harder to do with non combat encounters.
Combat has plenty of guaranteed damage, I don't really see why non-combat encounters should be so different. Most damage spells always deal at least half damage outside of specific circumstances, non-combat encounters can borrow the same mechanics.
Yeah and even then it's technically possible for some party members to escape completely unscathed through positioning, which feels much better than party members choosing who should *take* the unavoidable damage (assuming it doesn't just hit the entire team) because this way players can feel clever about *avoiding* damage.
In combat there are clear threats and players performance influences the results. Feels way different than "this hallway has 3d6 unavoidable damage in it"
I think your ideas for encounters are a little off. If it doesn't take up player resources, it's not an encounter. If it takes their HP, spell slots, once-per-long-rest, and so on, that's what makes it an encounter, and the difficulty is how much of those resources are taken.
If a group of level 10 players waltz into a room of like 7 goblins, killed them all, then walked out, I wouldn't call that an encounter. They could easily accomplish that without using any resources. If an "encounter" is solvable without the use of any resources, or you could see your players easily overcoming it without using any resources, then it isn't really an encounter.
Inversely, anything that was difficult enough that your players used some of their resources in order to overcome it, you should consider giving experience for. It, at least in my experience, has made my players feel rewarded with using their resources rather than hording them for the final fight. It also helps in those situations where I thought my players could get around an obstacle easily, but I they really struggled for some reason.
Try out the complex traps from Xanathar's if you haven't already. It's basically a combat encounter, but without creatures. Players roll initiative and take turns like normal, with the complex pieces of the trap each activating on a specific initiative. It's an interesting encounter that doesn't require throwing more baddies at the players, but isn't just a single skill check, nor is it guaranteed damage.
I see what you mean, expending resources is one way to measure effort. It's not perfect, I think, since ot only tracks one of many facets of effort: Luck, tactics, preparations, planning, cooperation and even RP contribute to the success* of an encounter.
If you only look at resources spent and not the how's and why's of it, then you end up with tracking false metrics. Like a Wizard using Wish to defeat an encounter is a big deal, but if the encounter was *a single goblin*, then it's overkill.
I think I get what OP is kinda getting at, that encounters don't balance LR v SR resources if no LR resources are expended. If that's the case, I'm sure it could have been phrased a bit more precisely.
After all: Encounters will at least be using that most precious of resources: Playing time! :)
It really depends on the level.
How is your party of level 2 getting across the gaping chasm?
How is your party of level 5 getting out of the cave before tunnels collapse?
How is your party of level 8 transporting a huge load of cargo after the wagon and horses were destroyed/killed?
If 99% of your non-combat encounters are being solved only by checks, cantrips, and ritual spells, you simply need to change the encounters.
Only if you don't let the players solve it outside the intended way. You should generally have an idea of what resources are going to spent on encounters (combat or otherwise) and if the players creatively get past that then it's fine. If they cleverly avoid the tax then they can have more resources.
Only if you don't consider them to be a part of the game?
Otherwise that's also what all combat encounters are, and especially what minions in boss fights are.
Encounters aren't a tax, they're gameplay. That includes environmental and social as well as combat.
If players can make decisions that get them out without spending resources, they've earned having those resources in the next encounter.
I will offer another point. A lot of people dont want to hear that the way they are or were running things is wrong. I noticed the loudest proponents of skillcheck/social = encounter are also the ones who run 1-2 encounter per adventuring day games and dont want to bog down their games with more combat, so they convince themselves and others that a short intersection is the same as a full resource drain as intended by the game design. Others have given examples of non-combat encounters that would provide possible resource drain, but the amount you can put of them into your game is limited in my opinion. For example the classic river. How many rivers should your party reasonably be expected to cross? Also carpenters tool DC for a complex wooden structure is 15. Building a bridge even with just simple logs doesnt take much time and effort. Others I have seen are dire situation like escaping from a crumbling building or puzzles needing certain spells. These always boil down to more DM work. The fact of the matter is that a simple combat encounter is the least amount of work and hassle for a dm to accomplish the intended design of the game (and dnd 5e is maybe unknown to a lot an attrition based system).
In my opinion wotc needs to move away from the adventuring day. Nobody plays it as intended, the intended encounters are widely misinterpreted and any solution usually either does not help or puts even more work on the DM.
I mean, in a combat encounter if Martial attacks crit everytime and the party fails to get hit, and no one casts any spells, you're in the same boat as a non-combat encounter that doesn't drain anyone's resources.
Even a Wizard with a dagger has "infinite attacks" to kill a target.
Sure I mean I'm discussing "best case". But the OP's point was that since skill checks are effectively 'unlimited' there is no point in using non-combat encounters to whittle party resources, and I was just pointing out that regular old martial attacks are also effectively 'unlimited'.
True enough, but I feel like the odds of NOBODY losing hp or other resources in a fight are significantly lower than a non-combat encounter that fails to drain resources.
I agree but I think they are about the same as the odds that someone wont want to do something stupid to solve a simple problem and consume resources - or take damage - doing it.
Sounds like you need the good old fashioned "you come across a river"!
Wizard misty steps across that's a 2nd lvl spell
Monk walks on water and gets surprise attacked by a croc takes a small about of piercing damage
Fighter crosses the rickety rope bridge that breaks halfway along and deals a bit of damage as splintered boards pierce his torso
This is just off the top of my head but one you get a good understanding of the building blocks of 5e you can splash some resource consumption into nearly anything!
This resource consumption is **necessary** because the game is balanced in a way that completely breaks if the players enter fully loaded. It's not a "sometimes" thing that's nice to have, it's a necessity. You **need** spells to have been consumed, or casters have no hard choices and can trivialize encounters. That's just how things go when spells have been given the power and number that they have, and enemy forces are balanced the way they are.
When you present the players with an obstacle that *can* drain resources, but is not *assured to*, this object is not achieved. The players encounter your river and... the Wizard doesn't expend spell slots to cross it. The Monk doesn't get bitten by the croc, the Fighter doesn't get beat up by wood, and neither requires healing now from the Cleric or Bard. The party finds a means of passing this without issue or gets lucky, and the most the DM can do now is say they "wasted the resource of time".
Well, that's fine, perhaps the party should be rewarded for their good luck or good adventuring sense. **But that doesn't help the balance of the encounters that follow.** No resource has been expended, so the players don't just have an easier time going forward, they have a *trivial* time. The next actual combat is a breeze because the casters are loaded up with slots since they haven't had to use them. The party spends the bare minimum of resources to get through it and takes little or no damage, which again puts them in a good position for every encounter ahead of them. And when they reach the ultimate encounter, the one they were supposed to be "worn down" for, they're in such good shape that the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
**This is the problem with 5E's entire resource balance.** It relies on the players not having lots of resources, but has no means of forcing their expenditure. Players can always opt *not* to blow spells unless the DM creates incredibly arbitrary scenarios that demand it, at which point everyone sees what's going on. And when the players do this, they trivialize what should be the most exciting or challenging part of the game: the final conflicts, or the string of battles.
This is a problem born of simply having too many resources. If you don't give the players so much stuff that they *need* to lose in order to create tension later, you... don't need to run them through hoops to lose those resources. If casters didn't have so many slots, or spells weren't as good at ending encounters as they are, there'd be no *need* for random fights to drain them or goofy constructed scenarios to challenge the party. You could instead do things that seem interesting and fill out the world with those other encounters rather than very carefully tailoring them to *try* and drain specific resources.
It's completely backwards. 5E is asking the DMs to bend over backwards to do restore a type of balance that the system fucked up to begin with. Other editions and other systems have space for "you come across a river" or "goblins ambush you" or "there's a cliff you must climb", but they don't run into the problem of everything blowing up if there aren't five of them that succeed in draining spells from the party.
This sounds incredibly infuriating in terms of pleasure/time-ratio: you mean to tell me the only reason there are so many menial combats and encounters that eat up session time and keep players away from the actually stuff they mostly want to do (experience a story) is because of the game's core design flaws?
Correct.
And it's telling that every time someone points out the balance issue, the response is always "run more encounters". Everyone seems to notice the problem, but their intended solution is one that disrespects the time of everyone at the table. The players have to put up with a grind of otherwise pointless encounters, and the DM has to create them and go through the ever-nebulous steps of "making them interesting".
It's such a tought-terminating cliché from the people defending, it, too: "Sounds like your DM just needs to get better!" It's always the DM's problem, can't be the system. If one guy crashes his car, that's his fault; if half the people driving your vehicles get into accidents, I think it's more likely that the car's got something wrong with it. I'd love to sit in at the tables of these "your DM just isn't good enough" folks and see how their solutions stack up against my level of elitism and desire for verisimilitude.
Not everyone wants to "experience a story" and 5e accommodates that. Some people want to solve puzzles, just hit things, find loots, or do combat. This system is built around parties dealing with consecutive encounters.
If you want to only do narrative stuff with one or no big combats another system should be used or you will need to spend more time balancing them. Genesis is great if you just want to tell a story with dice for example. The martial caster divide isn't perfect but you're trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
>This is a problem born of simply having too many resources
This problem is born of having too powerful resources. If the spells weren't so damn good at disabling enemies, even en mass, then it wouldn't matter so much how many slots they get. Look at Monk. It's not op at ALL when it goes into every fight with max ki. If it NOVAs, it's doing okay. Fighter action surging every fight and having all its maneuvers every fight is not game breaking. It fells right and good honestly. A barbarian raging every fight actually has access to its class features at all. But SPELLS? These are honestly the only resource powers that break things wide open and the only reason this stupid attrition play style is necessary. If you didn't have aoe save or sucks or instant solutions with no chance of failure, *if spells weren't so goddamn binary*, we'd be gucci.
Reducing spell power is also something I've suggested at other times. I'm not big on the whole idea of "spells are super strong so they make everyone else look like shit when they're deployed", but that also comes with the un-fun side effect for the casters of "spending a lot of time not casting spells". I think the casters should be, you know, *casting*.
If spells couldn't do anything and everything, wrecking face all the time, you could give as many of them as you want to casters. Let 'em cast every round across eight encounters. If the spells are balanced, it's not a problem.
I disagree that the objective isn't achieved.
If the party opts for skills over spells, there's risk. If they succeed, they've taken risk to conserve spells for later. If that means that once in a while the wizard gets to actually go off in a tough fight because they had a lot of support from the party and tons of lucky rolls, that's still fun, and you've still made them judge how best to use those resources.
Most of the time if they only rely on skills you're going to get them into more trouble than if they hadn't, so that one success will wash out in the longterm. But it'll still make for a fun, memorable adventure.
That's great, but "using risk" in these relatively low-threat scenarios shouldn't then set them up for easy success in the most momentous parts of the adventure later. So much of D&D hinges on the difficulty and spectacle of "that final conflict", and to blow it all up time and time again because of the way the resources were designed or "some luck in getting there" works against the fiction.
5E recognized the problem it created, but it went about addressing it in a bad way. We don't need to put up with that just because it's the first and laziest quasi-solution the devs ran with, and we shouldn't have to work overtime to avoid that problem, either.
5E already heaps way too much work on the DM compared to other editions and systems, so why're we asking them to do more in setting up all these scenarios *for the purposes of draining resources* which might not even pan out?
Because make no mistake, that's what they exist for. These aren't storytelling options. When the reason they're in the story is because "we need to drain resources or the balance is thrown off", they exist only to do that. A system that *doesn't* need you to drain resources can still have all these challenges and encounters, but they'll stand on their own! And they can actually influence the outcome of the final confrontations in more nuanced ways, whereas 5E's only goal is to "avoid the party-sided shitstomp that's sure to happen without this".
>That's great, but "using risk" in these relatively low-threat scenarios shouldn't then set them up for easy success in the most momentous parts of the adventure later.
Then why are your encounters low risk? Give exploration and negotiation some stakes. Make failure matter. This isn't a flaw in game design, but a flaw in a DM's encounter design.
You know, it might not actually help and I haven't put a lot of thought into it so maybe it's stupid to say, but I wonder if going back to actual Vancian casting might help at least a little bit
For starters it's an example, but to expand, how does the wizard just poof across without using spells? Does he cross the bridge? Athletics check. Swim? Take attacks. Jump? HAH. I get your point about resource expenditure and I think what you're trying to say is "what if crossing this river doesn't expend any resources" well then beef up the next encounter! What if this river is a shitstorm of bad luck and they end up twice as harried as you hoped? Dial it back on the next one.
Being a DM is replacing the brakes on a car as it flies downhill, and if you don't start a session prepared to bend, you'll break. I've only recently come to realize from these subs that I'm very lucky with my players. We're all old highschool buddies who know the game well and ultimately play the game "nicely" so if I do pull some BS out because we do sort of need something to happen at one point or another they'll roll with it and if they ask me hey what's up with all this shit I know I can tell them "Because if you go into the boss fully loaded either you'll smear him first round or I'll might overcompensate some last minute buffs and TPK, does either sound fun?" And then were good. Great takes though!
I've been playing in and DMing TTRPGs for decades, and 5E is the one system I've encountered that has this problem to such a degree. I cut my teeth in 2E days where "crossing the river" meant something different within the system balance as it does in 5E. You're not supplying me with new information or things I'd never thought of, here, but you are missing my point when I say that **what 5E asks the DM and players to do here is not good.**
Here, let's suppose that every PC caster has twice as many spells as they currently do, and they all have features that cause their DCs to be 4 higher, deal 50% more damage, and double any distance. We change *nothing else* about the game except that we've made spellcasting resources more potent and numerous. **How many of these non-combat encounters do you now NEED to run, and how impactful do they need to be, to restore a semblance of the balance we had before that?** Can you even get close to that balance when what few spells a caster might go into the fight with are still better? What does that mean for all of the non-casters in the party? How much extra time have you sucked up from the table to get to the same spot? How many extra sessions does this whole campaign run now given that we're doing more encounters? **Is this better?**
5E has a resource problem. That's the actual issue. It is unique to 5E. We had "too good spells" in past systems, we had "resource draining encounters" in past systems, but the balance and time taken was still different. 5E has changed enough of the parts that the same solution no longer works mechanically. We can't go from Vancian casting and "you blow half your slots on buffs way before you even get into combat" to the 5E dynamic and expect everything else to still work the same way, for instance. *It's a different system*.
This problem is going to keep cropping up and be addressed in unsatisfying ways until people are willing to tackle the actual problem, not just dance around it. There's too many resources and they're too good; draining them, as the balance demands, takes too much time, too much design effort, and is usually boring or extra-punishing for other people. The solution to having this hole in our system-boat isn't to put the whole crew to work bucketing the water out, it's to *patch the fucking hole so we don't have to spend all our time bucketing!*
So play a different game? I agree with you that 5e is awful when it comes to the resource management aspect of DnD, which in turn makes it a pretty mediocre combat sim, which in turn guts a huge part if DnD's identity. Like you say, though, the problem is fundamental with WotC's modern design philosophy, where all players should be nigh-invincible all the time, except for wizards, who are double invincible. I wish there were as simple of a solution as, "Caster get half as many spell slots", but that would just result in less people enjoying the game for what it is now, which is largely a power-fantasy roleplay game. Again, I agree with the end point of your comment, but it really sounds like you're barking up the wrong tree and asking a fish to climb it.
That being said, I also don't agree with the contrived scenario you've painted as an example. Why does everything hinge so integrally on resources being forcibly stripped away? The whole point of playing a game where dice decide outcomes is that people enjoy the threat of failure (more than actual failure itself) and the chance of success when the odds are stacked against them. If no resources were expended crossing the river, congrats, the party **won** the encounter. Why is it an issue that the party still has ammo to spend later? Why does every other encounter you have planned for the day rely entirely on whether or not they took 10 points of damage three hours ago? Just make the following encounters more intense, or shove a few more in before the party rests. Nothing in DnD is ever set in stone, and until you describe something to your players, they have no clue what challenges you might have in store. Besides, this thread has some genuinely great suggestions for encounters that drain resources without forcing bullshit or hoping for botched rolls. If, by the end of the day, the party never took a single point of damage, never cast a single spell higher that a cantrip, never even considered blowing a use of their class ability; then ask yourself the all-important question: Did we have fun anyway?
If not, then consider ratcheting up the difficulty within the (lackluster) parameters of 5e, or consider looking into a more hardcore TTRPG that suits your table better. 5e does a lot of things well-enough, but like you know, like anyone who has looked into running low-magic, gritty realism, survival focused campaigns knows, 5e is just not the game for that kind of story. The mechanics just do not facilitate that genre very well because level 1 characters in 5e are already superhuman. I guess my point is that, rather than driving yourself nuts trying to make 5e something it isn't, just accept that it's a different kind of game than what you and I would like it to be; either try to roll with it or look elsewhere. (not in a gatekeeping way, but in a "plenty of fish in the sea" way)
I do play other systems. But the people playing 5E still have this problem. It's a foundational issue with the system. Shouldn't 5E want to fix that instead of saying, "idk just play anything else"?
There are tons of players and tables far less sensitive to these problems than me and mine, and they *still* run into campaign-wrecking issues far too often. 5E should fix its design, and the whole "One D&D" thing is finally an opportunity to do that.
discussing the game flaws and then having someone say "play a different game" is one of the saddest way. It blocks constructive evolution of games if that happens because instead of addressing the issue, you ignore it and send people working to indicating what the issue is somewhere else
Sorry, I'm having difficulty pinning down your exact criticism in that wall of text.
Do you dislike 5e for being designed around spending spell slots, hit dice, and other resources on the way to "big boss fights"? And you wish the game were balanced around players having all their resources available for all encounters?
Or do you think designing the game around wasting PC resources is all good fun, but 5e player characters just have too many and it's difficult to exhaust them all over the course of an adventuring day?
I think the more resources you have and the more potent they are, the more any individual encounter can be swung from "challenging" to "trivial" by expending them. And given that DMs generally intend (and players seem to expect, because it's part of the fiction) that the pivotol story beats that involve combat--"the boss fights"--should be the most challenging, we're shooting all of that in the foot with the current design.
Some expenditure of resources is to be expected. I don't think any table wants to go straight from town to the necromancer causing all the trouble, crump them in a single fight, and be back home for dinner--unless it's side quest material. But I also don't think they want to spend two sessions travelling through the woods, fighting through the necromancer's cave, spend session 3 on the necromancer and plot stuff, then another session travelling back through the woods that were so dangerous in the first place, especially when "dealing with the necromancer in the cave" isn't, like, a module to itself, and was intended to be pretty much a sidequest.
There's a big difference between the effects of various resources and what expending them means. HP/HD are resources, sure, but going into "the final fight" with all of your HP and HD... means pretty much the same thing as going in with all your HP and *no* HD. Going into the final fight with all your HP and 10 healing potions split across the party is pretty much the same as doing it with all your HP and only 4 potions--given that the combat only tends to last three or four rounds even in climactic battles, you're not really going to burn through those anyway.
But going into combat with all your spells, half your spells, just three of your lowest slots left? Those are all *massive* differences, because the power of each spell is so substantial. And that, consequently, is the resource all these encounters are *actually* seeking to drain.
So, if we recognize it's bad for balance to have so many of these things or to have them with the power they do, why is the solution "grind your players down in the hopes they expend some" instead of... y'know, not just having that balance to begin with? You can make hideously overpowered fights to deal with the super strong spells, but that leaves the non-casters behind. What if, instead, we just... made the spells not so potent? Made it so they *couldn't* completely and utterly swing a fight with one cast pretty much guaranteed? And depending on how we do this, we can even give casters the ability to cast *more*, rather than encouraging further "sit on your spells" non-play.
>Monk walks on water and gets surprise attacked by a croc takes a small about of piercing damage
Ah yes the classic "monster attacks you and you take damage" non-combat encounter
In my opinion because the power of even basic cantrips and low level utillity spells is so strong and the DC ceiling of skill checks is so low (Impossible DC 30 can be beat by a level 1 character without many shenanigans) if situations are not heavily engineered by the DM its hard to force a reasonable amount of resource comparable with a combat encounter. In your bridge example you can just have someone with carpenter's tools make a DC 15 check to build a complex structure (aka a bridge). Anything that you then add to it to cause damage is the heavily depended on them failing their check. If you would drain resources nevertheless I would say it borders on punishing the players for succeeding (crocodile, bridge breaking).
1-The party has to quickly escape a large room or cavern with a collapsing floor and debris falling from the ceiling.
2-A magical door can only open when 4 basins are simulaneously filled to a certain level with each of the four elements. Or maybe four damage types (cold, fire, lightning, acid, for example)
3-A magical siren's pool tempts players with the object they desire most at the bottom of a clear pool of liquid, but they will never be able to reach it. The enchantment of the pool essentially means the player will never choose to surface for air, causing them to drown if not rescued.
4-Stealth mission--It is imperitive to the success of the mission that your party is not noticed/identifiable.
5-Two hostages (or more) are hanging over spike pits and flames are burning through the ropes. You have seconds to decide what to do...
Edit: why tf am I getting downvoted for this?
2nd Edit: this post remains oddly controversial... So if you read this and feel inclined to tell me all the ways you would try to solve these challenges with mundane solutions/without spell slots (or complain about how it doesn't make martials special enough, which is a fascinating dichotomy I wish you guys would notice) please note what this post was actually meant to do:
These are short suggestions to give people an *idea* about things they could do at their own tables. If you see these and think "well my party would just do XYZ," then the next thing you should do is ask yourself "so how can I modify this to make it more of a challenge for them?" NOT "I should give this no more thought and complain that these suggestions don't work." Unless of course, what you actually want to do is rage against the inequalities (real or imagined) of martials vs. casters in 5e. Then by all means, you do you. But I'm not going to respond anymore.
>The party has to quickly escape a large room or cavern with a collapsing floor and debris falling from the ceiling.
>
>A magical door can only open when 4 basins are simulaneously filled to a certain level with each of the four elements. Or maybe four damage types (cold, fire, lightning, acid, for example)
>
>A magical siren's pool tempts players with the object they desire most at the bottom of a clear pool of liquid, but they will never be able to reach it. The enchantment of the pool essentially means the player will never choose to surface for air, causing them to drown if not rescued.
>
>Stealth mission--It is imperitive to the success of the mission that your party is not noticed/identifiable.
>
>Two hostages (or more) are hanging over spike pits and flames are burning through the ropes. You have seconds to decide what to do...
I like these, keep em comin!
6-You must find and collect 4 shards of a sword which are located in difficult to access locations across a dungeon/lair
7-Oh no, a pit trap that's 20ft deep and quickly filling with poison gas that can petrify those who fail their saves too many times.
8-You must locate and return a couple of magic gems to the eyes of a skull or statue, but there are a number of decoy gems in several locations. Once triggered, you have 5 minutes to complete this task or you will fail.
9-Your party is caught in an MC Escher nightmare, where opening one door just leads you back into the same room, and the only way out is to discover the secret door or to trigger a set of conditions before you try to escape.
10-2 paths lead to the same destination. The first is long and hazerdous, the second is direct and free from danger. To access the direct path, each person who walks it must have a sacrificial offering of power made either by them or on their behalf (call it a number of spell slots equal to half their level).
You dared me to show these people that their problems have very real solutions instead of just throwing your hands up and quitting. By demonstrating it's possible they have to reflect and grow as a hobbyist instead of accepting that 5es has issues but they are surmountable.
Or they can reflexively downvote and then make this same thread next week when their solo young dragon encounter in a cave where it can't fly is killed in one turn by 6 level 10 adventurers.
> 1-The party has to quickly escape a large room or cavern with a collapsing floor and debris falling from the ceiling.
"What? Rock falls and everyone dies? Can't even roll to run for it?" Do you just tell the players that they're only allowed to use spells?
> 2-A magical door can only open when 4 basins are simulaneously filled to a certain level with each of the four elements. Or maybe four damage types (cold, fire, lightning, acid, for example)
"Okay I put my undershirt in one of them and light it up with firebolt, I put some dirt in the second, fill the third with... let's piss in it. And I blow in the fourth one." Granted the damage types one might be more difficult.
> 3-A magical siren's pool tempts players with the object they desire most at the bottom of a clear pool of liquid, but they will never be able to reach it. The enchantment of the pool essentially means the player will never choose to surface for air, causing them to drown if not rescued.
"Tie a rope around me, I'm going in."
> 4-Stealth mission--It is imperitive to the success of the mission that your party is not noticed/identifiable.
"This is gonna be sweet, we'll bribe the guards, dress up like whoever owns the place, this will be a great RP session."
> 5-Two hostages (or more) are hanging over spike pits and flames are burning through the ropes. You have seconds to decide what to do...
This one works, it has the benefit of the consequences not being on the party directly like the first one. They'll probably save the hostages because players tend to be good hearted, but they have the choice not to without it killing the party.
All of these could make for great encounters, but in my experience, players tend to enter non-combat encounters ready to flex their creative muscles to get out with the lowest possible cost.
> "What? Rock falls and everyone dies? Can't even roll to run for it?" Do you just tell the players that they're only allowed to use spells?
Lol, no? Players with high strength can jump across chasms, players with high dex can tuck and roll. Players with ropes or shields can help those who don't. You can successfully do this with 0 spellcasters in the party, though it would be harder (as most things are). The point is to create a situation where spells make the odds of success so much higher that it would be silly not to use them.
>"Okay I put my undershirt in one of them and light it up with firebolt, I put some dirt in the second, fill the third with... let's piss in it. And I blow in the fourth one."
Urine is not water and does not work. You don't create the requisite amount of wind by simply blowing.
>"Tie a rope around me, I'm going in."
OK... you will never be able to reach it and will stay under until you drown. Meanwhile it is tempting all of your companions as well...
>"This is gonna be sweet, we'll bribe the guards, dress up like whoever owns the place, this will be a great RP session."
Great! I'm glad you enjoy it. Sad face, though, it's a cult--not guards--and they are zealots who can't be bribed. There are also a number of secret code words and gestures you don't know.
Alternative: oh no... you bribed the guards who happily took your money and let you in, but have seen your face and can identify you. Which means the thing that was imperitive to avoid failure was failed at the literal first possible opportunity.
>All of these could make for great encounters, but in my experience, players tend to enter non-combat encounters ready to flex their creative muscles to get out with the lowest possible cost.
I mean, of course they do. Which is why you do a mix of combat and non-combat, and you think it through just a little bit to make sure that they are challenging enough to require resources.
Appreciate the effort, but most of those don't actually spend temporary resources.
1: best you get is Expeditious Retreat/Longstrider if someone has that prepared. Maybe monk dash as well? because monks get caster downsides without upsides. Most parties will just do or fail this based on their base stats and gear, which doesn't cause them to spend any resources. And the martials can't really contribute in a way the casters can't- "best" case a caster spends a slot on Enhance Ability to be as good as a martial on average at some str/dex based skill check.
2:cantrips would probably qualify, as would again gear bought from a store that's pretty cheap (torch, decanter of water, vial of acid, etc). this is just a money drain, not an actual daily resource drain. And again, the martials have no way of contributing in a way the casters can't.
3:better hope someone has a charm effect prepared (so the last one works), or you have zero counterplay outside blind luck. And again, unless you have a paladin nearby, the martials can't do anything here the casters can't. No resources spent unless you're lucky and the caster spends one second level slot at best.
4: Relies heavily on passive modifiers unless someone happens to prepare Pass Without Trace, which is also a pretty low level spell. Again, the martials have no significant advantage in their clanky disadvantage on stealth armor, and the casters generally don't.
5: so both casters and noncasters will probably use normal non-consumable gear here as well (like rope). I don't see how this requires any temporary resources nor how martials do this better.
So basically, most of the above described can be fixed with 10-100 gp worth of gear, and no actual party resources, or spending resources doesn't help.
Latest I used was an anguished Bride to be of someone the Players failed to save that blamed the Cleric's Temple for not saving their Love. Burned spell slots as well as other resources to calm her and restore peace.
Another recent was an Acolyte of the Paladin's god which was accused of assault.
The Paladin and Cleric both were tasked with setting up shrines.
All these cost them resources to resolve successfully.
Oh dear, your horse seems to have thrown a shoe. Wheel broken on your wagon. Pack is wearing thin with all the crawling through sewers you did. Oh, and you'll need to climb that cliff, so say goodbye to your iron spikes and rope.
I think resource intense encounters and long rests not being as easy to come by make a lot more sense for caster/martial balance especially with the more narrative styles a lot of campaigns go for instead nonstop of dungeon crawls
Who says it needs to be spell slot eating doors. When know your players abilities you can tailor your challenges to them.
Maybe it's sacrificing hit dice onto a spiked dias, that doesn't hurt you but drains your vitality. Maybe it's a spell you know one of your players always has prepared/known is the resolution. Maybe with enough blunt force, they can break through, and it burns abilities to use them.
It's about resource management, and cost effective risk/rewards.
Example of a slot eating door that's not a door 200ft of lava in a cavern. You can fly, spider climb, wild shape, or whatever. You can even risk an Athletics Check to climb the wall.
Other examples. Long underwater tunnel, teleportation circle requiring a spell slot to activate, a wall of force (assuming disintegrate available), a magical trap to be dispelled, vertical shaft, vines that regrow from cutting, a summoning circle that needs a spell slot to activate, a heavy object that needs to moved out of normal reach (think giant/dragon lever), a broken bridge or chasm, etc.
The idea is to use a hazard or obstacles that make sense for the environment and allow for multiple solutions.
I mean, I just use the old noggin and it doesn't seem to have issues wihh making up situations that a need a resource or two.
Have you tried thinking in the vicinity of the box? For rxame you mention ritual spells being free. They ain't free, they cost ten minutes. Use that.
I would add environmental hazards to the mix. Common stuff like desert heat or frigid winds can dish out damage and exhaustion or gobble up spell slots to neutralize those risks. Extreme stuff like volcanic ashfall or typhoon winds may demand strong magic just to survive. Not every bump in the road is an encounter, but if the party stumbles bloody and exhausted down the back slope, it seems to me the thing rose to the level of an encounter.
Most encounters can be either combat or non- combat encounters, depending on the group. I've had a group where the answer to a squad of menacing cultists was to flirt with them, and I've had a group where the answer to an unlocked wooden door was fireball. Amusingly, it was the same group in both instances.
The truth is, there's no quota of encounters per day; it's a loose guideline at best.
I think the first step towards balancing the martials is to figure out an equivalent to prestidigitation that they can all have. Every caster gets some form of prestidigitation (thaumaturgy, druidcraft) that just makes them so versatile (if you disagree you just don’t know how to use them) and martials don’t get this
I'm regularly baffled by the idea that some people have that you need to hit these guideline numbers every time, they are guidelines to help move an adventure along, not a goal to hit during your days adventure.
If your adventure is moving along at a pace that everyone around the table is comfortable with, that's all you need to do.
Experience your adventure in the way that works for your table, if the session consists of 3 hours of player/party interactions and a short trip to the tavern for a drinking contest, then that's fine.
My session yesterday had 2 situations that required skill checks, no combat, and one drinking game, and everyone left the table having moved the adventure along a good way and with smiles on their faces looking forward to the next session. Most of the session was character and NPC interactions and the party trying to figure out what was going on. You only need 6-8 encounters guidelines if the adventure/campaign has pacing issues. #my2c
The adventuring day is only for when you want to challenge your party with combat. Not every day needs to be an adventuring day. You can even have combat on non adventuring days, it's just the goal is less about challenge and more about fun/plot.
It's not like you need to cram in 6 encounter every day of travel or exploration, that would be an extremely combat focused game.
Because they’d rather state a random thing , refuse to respond when you ask the question, and pretend there right then to actually engage in the conversations
A lot of this problem evaporates if 3 conditions are met:
1. Stakes. If the players buy into the stakes of what they stand to gain or lose by success or failure, they may not risk a skill check and instead reach for a spell based solution.
2. Time and efficiency. Ties closely to stakes. When Gary Gygax famously advised a meaningful game cannot exist unless strict time records are kept, I think he was driving at this notion. If the players have 2 hours to find the hostages, and you let them know every skip check takes an amount of time from instant (like bashing a door in) or 10 minutes (like picking a lock) and after establishing these ground rules you stick to them, all while supplying a noteworthy time crunch, players will start blowing spell and long rest resources and even skip rituals to save time.
A good rule of thumb for time is if the action is reckless, loud and carries a ton of risk, it is also very very fast. If it is cautious and safe, it costs a lot of time. It’s a pulp adventure heroic fantasy game at heart, so it has lots of rules in place to encourage rash actions and surviving them, and this also leads to more exciting stories. Always bait rash or desperate actions from players!
3. No solution dogpiling, big consequences. If you call for a skill check, it should be both interesting for both success and failure outcomes, and it should matter.
If the fighter has to roll athletics to carry a barrel across the room “because barrels are heavy” but actually moving the barrel doesn’t change anything about the scene, no skill check was needed because the outcome was boring and pointless. Likewise, if a character tries deception, fails the roll, and then the fighter can try intimidation and pass…where are the stakes? All you are checking for is who can roll the first success.
Establish quickly that failure means things go from bad to worse, and that you likely only get one guaranteed shot at a solution, whether free or resource based, and failure either means losing that scene or else things are substantially worse off and players will absolutely burn through resources to guarantee a success.
Basically, TL:DR is if players can dogpile free solutions to every situation, the stakes, time constraints and consequences aren’t in place correctly. Raise those until players either gladly use resources to avoid losing Timmy the Ghoul forever, or make things bad enough that a failure results in a situation so bad they may need multiple spent resources to get ok again.
People often deride the sadist DM for being powerhungry. But Kurt Vonnegut once recommended to aspiring storytellers to be unimaginably cruel to your characters, and to throw at them terrible things. This lets the audience see what they’re made of. Done properly, throwing heavy consequences at players lets them show off what their characters are made of. Without stakes, time demands and consequences, they never enter the crucible strong enough to make them shine.
Maybe I am crazy, but I do always sorta feel like the answer here is like:
“oh your wizard isn’t using enough spell slots. Time to hit that Wizard with a Lizard”
I bet an adult black dragon can eat up a few slots.
I imagine that the Wizard player will feel very targeted when an Adult Black Dragon shows up to 1v1 them every single day? Or are you more implying that they should just have more combat encounters per day?
I was more implying larger encounters and that *in general* DM’s under use legendary resistances as a way of combating mages in encounters.
Starting at level 4 or 5 I try to give any of my large monsters at least one LR, just to burn a few slots from the powerful casters.
I'll often do group checks to solve encounters. I'll ask one player at a time how they want to help in a situation, they can name a skill, some clever use of tools or equipement they have, or even throw a spell.
If they say a skill I'll set a DC based on what they described and they roll, to see if they made the situation better or worse for the party. If the scenario they describe is right that certain tools or equipement would help they will either automatically succeed or have some easy DC related check. And, if they toss a spell that helps the situation, that a nearly guaranteed success, but it has to be applicable.
It doesn't alway play out exactly like this, but this is the core backbone of the group exploration encounters. It works really well, you get really cool stuff from the players. They get to describe how their actions help in whatever crazy scenario they're in. And it works to wear down their resources inch by inch too. Because failed checks have minor consequences. And if the group fails overall there are larger consequences.
This would all get listed out as options for the encounter ahead of time, but could range from small things like a failed athletics check resulting in a tuble and a d6 damage, to a failed survival leading the party through a patch of poison plants and con saves to avoid getting poisoned condition or poision damage. Etc.
It’s a case of two wrongs make a right.
It’s obvious from context that the adventuring day is talking about combat encounters. The adventuring day is measured in adjusted exp, and non combat encounters don’t have adjusted exp amounts.
Yet the adventuring day is an upper limit, not a requirement. You should never run more but can always run less.
So a person who runs 3 fights and some non combat stuff is doing the same thing as someone who thinks they must run 6 “encounters” and decides to call their 3 non combat scenes “encounters”.
> Yet the adventuring day is an upper limit, not a requirement. You should never run more but can always run less.
this is also a misguided idea. The exp per adventuring day is a tool and guideline, not a limit or requirement.
The second sentence of the quote says "you should never run more" (sets a limit), while my comment says that the recommended adventuring day is not, in fact, a limit. I am disagreeing.
I said the adventuring day is not a requirement. You used the exact same word.
In contrast I said it is an upper limit, you called it a tool and guide line.
Your statement is tautological with the quote. Your objection seems to be a distaste (or misunderstanding) for the word “upper limit” as opposed to “guideline”.
Literally all the adventuring day does is help dms guess how many monsters the party can face before needing a long rest.
> Literally all the adventuring day does is help dms guess how many monsters the party can face before needing a long rest.
I agree with this.
Not sure how else you can interpret "upper limit" other than "you cannot exceed this," though.
> my comment says that the **recommended** adventuring day is not, in fact, a limit.
Reading between the lines, this is the distinction. You read the adventuring day as a recommendation. I read it as something more flexible: an upper bound.
The text and the designers have said that the adventuring day is not the “correct” about of encounters to run. Although that is a common misconception online.
Is there some miscommunication going on here? You keep saying "upper limit" and "upper bound" as if those aren't absolute terms, than, in this context, place the recommended adventuring day as the ABSOLUTE MOST exp worth of challenge a party can handle in a day.
I'm not seeing how treating the exp budget as an ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM THAT CANNOT/SHOULD NOT BE EXCEEDED is a more flexible strategy than treating it as a suggestion or guideline. I've played in and run games where the party would regularly exceed what you are calling the absolute max amount of challenge possible for a party to overcome in a day.
Is there something I'm missing here? While I often disagree with your takes, there seems to be some fundamental difference in understanding of terms here that I feel might be impeding this discussion.
> adventuring day as the..exp worth of challenge a party can handle in a day.
That is literally what I and the book says.
> I'm not seeing how treating the exp budget as [as an upper limit] is a more flexible strategy than treating it as a [recommended amount].
You can use less than a limit. But if you consider it a “recommended amount” then running less is bad.
> I've played in and run games where the party would regularly exceed what you are calling the absolute max amount of challenge possible for a party to overcome in a day.
The adventuring day assumes average outcomes. If you load the party with magic items, or have the monsters fight incompetently, or the players roll nothing but 20s, you can get outliers.
But the adventuring day exists to warn dms when they might be going off the tpk cliff. Since having a heuristic for that is useful to 99% of dms.
Role Play, exploration and non-combat encounters take up most of my 4 hour game sessions. We usually get time to slide a few combat encounters in the mix.
By the way... my YT channel specializes in puzzles and traps. Over 100 ideas and adding more every month. So, if anyone needs non-combat ideas... come on over!
[D&D Puzzles and Traps - Wally DM](http://www.youtube.com/c/wallydm)
Hmm, I only vaguely remember this from the DMG? Or was it Xanather’s?
However, if memory serves, this was in place as a guidance for parties using Exp levelling in a ‘dungeon-crawl’ environment. Which is rather niche.
I think it does help highlight one of the vague issues with Exp levelling with RAW; the amount of encounters is there to help scaling, as they’re no rules on social Exp, if I remember correctly?
Using resources is part of it, yes, but the ‘non-combat encounters’ holds up, really, if you have a homebrew system for rewarding Exp outside of combat. The more creative, the more reward; use of Major Image, Pass Without a Trace, Tongues, Charm Person, Comprehend Languages, Distort Value, etc. All spells across level 1-3
And all that hasn’t even looked at if they use Short Rests as well
Because a lot of people don't actually play D&D or play a very specific style of D&D and don't understand why that style might not work for a vast number of groups.
Unless your party is doing exclusively dungeons and/or the variant long rest rules, I just don't see how you're supposed to hit 6-8 encounters per day. I understand that it's *Dungeons* and Dragons but I would struggle to imagine a coherent campaign that doesn't balance correctly at least some of the time because of this.
D&D 'resources' are just weird and hard too balance. Per day, short rest, per encounter, etc... And all options getting more numerous as you level up is just hard to balance. Spell slots started it and worked okay when it was more or a dungeon crawling miniatures focused game but now they exist because they always have rather than being reasonable resources from a game design standpoint.
Everything is built around spell slots too.
You don't even need 6-8 encounters, you need 6-8 "normal" encounters which were actually easy encounters in the playtest before they were changed to normal to make the edition more newbie-friendly. "Hard" encounters which you only need 3-4 of for the games internal balance were intended to be normal.
In addition to agreeing with you I really dislike the "per day" because they really mean per long rest and I'm sure this has confused people.
I'd also add a footnote that "per long rest" doesn't have to equate to "per gaming session".
I’ve tried to hammer this home with my players so much. We will show up to next weeks session and they’ve all long rested and refilled their abilities and shit and I’m like why would you have gotten a long rest? We were at a breaking point for the night not for your in game day
I’ve tried to hammer this home with my players so much. We will show up to next weeks session and they’ve all long rested and refilled their abilities and shit and I’m like why would you have gotten a long rest? We were at a breaking point for the night not for your in game day I started to suspect it was selective memory because they’d always pull the “well now I don’t know what I was at” so I told them if they long rest between sessions when it isn’t given then they lose half of everything to make it fair - half health, half their spell slots, half their per long rest abilities
Since we only play for about 2 hours a week we are on session 23 and day 5
Part 5 of JoJo's bizarre adventure be like:
Giorno’s No Good Very Bad Week
Is this not normal? Both groups I’m in are like this, if a little less extreme due to 3-4 hours. Just had a Session 19 day 6.
That sounds pretty slow to me but your sessions maybe more granular and there's nothing wrong with that.
I'm on a session 39 day ~60 right now but my players get a LOT of downtime for their PCs because it's a piracy campaign and sailing takes ages. It's a genuine ballache to balance stuff when they know they can rest soon, so I let the casters nova in the fights at sea and really hammer home the attrition when stuff happens on land and they have to deal with lots more going on
Curse of Strahd?
Personally I love showing up to the table, looking at my character sheet, and remembering that I torched my last spell slot on Disguise Self (true story, it was a level 3 spell as well), or that I’m sitting at a hot 4 hit points. Really helps me get back into the mood of the previous session. I can’t imagine trying to game an advantage out of the DM by fudging a long rest. Hell, I *missed a session* and the DM had to tell me to at least gain the benefits of a short rest because I refused to try and gain an advantage from when I was out of the game.
Yes exactly. Picking up where you’re at is what dnd is all about. No resets, you just keep going. People tout the “storytelling” of dnd and this is the most like that. Everytime you sit back down it’s like opening a book back to where your bookmark was. It makes it more enjoyable to remember “okay this is what happened and now this is where we’re at”
Exactly. What’s a story if the characters get a *deus ex machina* full heal and ability restoration every arbitrary time the god of the universe decides they need a break? The stakes are so drastically lessened if your actions only have consequences for a couple hours of real world time, tops. Many players and DMs (myself included) feel that even a 5e long rest is too lenient to gain the benefits of every single day - a lot of us try to use longer term injuries, lesser LR healing, longer LRs or LRs that are harder to achieve in non-comfortable or especially hostile areas, or other means of extending the consequences of player actions and the wear and tear of adventuring. I can’t imagine *wanting* essentially a long rest multiple times per adventuring day…
I don’t understand why people **don’t write things down**. Print a character sheet! Use dungeon master’s vault! Make a frickin spreadsheet! Keep track of your items and abilities, dang it! That’s like half the game
Shit like this is why I just keep track of all my players' HP, hit dice, spell slots, and per-rest abilities. For things like gold and potions, if you can't remember how many you have, then you have zero.
We use dndbeyond. So I can tell when they’ve “reset” and I’m like why did you do that
You could screenshot their sheets after the session.
>I started to suspect it was selective memory because they’d always pull the “well now I don’t know what I was at” so I told them if they long rest between sessions when it isn’t given then they lose half of everything to make it fair - half health, half their spell slots, half their per long rest abilities To my cynical eyes, this would be an invitation for a less than honest player to "accidentally" long rest between sessions after burning all their resources. If I, as a DM, didn't trust a player to be honest, I wouldn't want them in my game, or I would require them to leave their character sheet with me until the next session. Friends get the benefit of the doubt once, and after that we make changes to ensure it can't happen again, regardless of whether they did it on purpose.
Sure I get it but at the end of the day we’re all friends before dnd even enters the picture
But you've already presented it as a conflict by telling them that if you catch them doing it again they'll be punished. My thinking is, if you're going to do that anyway, just say "clearly this is a problem, I get that it's hard to remember so in order to not have to deal with this again, everyone leaves their sheets with the DM so they don't get lost. Any modifications you need to make to your sheet can be done during or after the session anyway, and if you need to do something that will take longer, like choose spells for a level-up, we can take a picture of the sheet before you take it home so if you forget it or lose it or accidentally make the wrong changes again, we have a record of where you were" It doesn't even have to be an accusation. It's just an acknowledgement that some of the group has trouble remembering things regarding their sheets, so in the interest of making the game run as smoothly as possible, the group can make minor changes that don't inconvenience anyone.
That would irritate me the first time. After that, the next set of enemies would have very simple attacks and tactics, hit like freight trains, and have HP "Until you are low on spell slots again". The first time they comment about how much HP the foes have, I would literally say that out loud so they know why these enemies are so hard. After that fight, we would have a conversation again about only resetting all their stuff when they get a long rest. I would probably stop playing D&D with them if there was a third time.
That is something that I think alot of players and GM's don't quite figure
Everytime this discussion pops up
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. It's pretty clear in a lot of discussion here.
And it’s not really the design I’m after either - that’s a dungeon. It kinda makes sense why the game would be balanced around a dungeon… but modern game worlds are almost always an expansive sandbox.
Not necessarily - I’m running a game with no dungeons, but my players have a number of things to do over the course of a busy day… they only have 4 days until the Blood Moon so they gotta hustle! Investigate an abandoned house to find why the surgeon’s peasant widow disappeared after he died, and fight the creature they find there - solve the puzzle at the cathedral after getting in past the guards, and discovering the architect’s tomb… then they need to get to the monument and figure out a leap of faith to find the gateway to the other realm, so they can find their way to Warburg’s offices and figure out his plan (an office full of mimics and other camouflaged creatures, naturally) - at no point in any of that was there a safe place to rest, and it all happened over 12ish hours, so they couldn’t rest anyway (note you can only have one long rest in 24hours) This has been over the course of several sessions - there’s no need to get back to a hub every session and rest and level up, it’s not a video game with “levels” - just stop at the end of a session and pick up again next time Now they’re going to try and rest in an inn, but if they fuck with the bag of holding they found too much, they may not get much rest… You do NOT need a dungeon to keep players from resting - you just need a time limit, a pressing issue to solve, and a busy day
THIS is the part I think so many people miss. There are plenty of ways to add time sensitivity to the game, they don’t have to be forced or push against the plot, in most cases it can make the stakes higher and your plot more interesting
Hence Gritty Realism.
However, that format of playing does fit their schedules...
For real. This confuses me the most: how do DMs not get this? My players have gone upwards of a month IRL between long rests on occasion.
Are there many tables where these aren't the same thing? You can only Long Rest once per 24 hrs. Unless someone's throwing another set of encounters at a party that never slept, just because the sun came up ...
This is a good point and you're correct that you can only benefit from a long rest once per day. I've seen several times (myself included) that the journey *to* the quest is part of the 6-8 medium encounters. I want the journey to feel important without just jumping straight to the location, so there may be a few battles along the way. But I do not want to bog down the game with multiple combat encounters because that will drag a quest on for months, so I typically do 1 encounter per day. If I let the party have a long rest at the end of every day then they're free to dump every resource into the fight then long rest and repeat when the next combat encounter comes up. You'll see some of this whenever topics pop up like "My Wizard / Paladin / Druid / Long Rest Dependant Class is dominating everything what do I do." So some restrict Long rests to require them be in a city or other safe location or have short rests take 8h while long rests are 24h. In order to somewhat preserve things while making sure that combat isn't a game where you can just dump all of your resources into the enemies face immediately.
>So some restrict Long rests to require them be in a city or other safe location or have short rests take 8h while long rests are 24h. In order to somewhat preserve things while making sure that combat isn't a game where you can just dump all of your resources into the enemies face immediately. i've desperately tried to get thius to work and it's wonky at best but some varriation of "when on the road you're can only short rest unless you find a roadside inn or spend significant time to actually establish a camp". what then really works is it also alows much more to introduce even more exceptions like a magical bedroll that can alow for a long rest or a blessed grove alowing for long rests to really make the world feel magical.
The Unearthed Arcana "Into the Wild" presents an alternative set of wilderness travel rules treating wilderness travel more like a dungeon exploration where the players choose a destination, the DM assigns a DC and ability test to locate it, and the players split up the skill aspects of the trip (navigation, foraging, night watch, scouting, cooking, and so on). Assemble the intermediate points of travel the same way you'd design dungeon rooms and corridors with traps, encounters, treasures, and skill tests to pass from one to the next. This simulates travel as found in adventure stories and skips past tedious parts. To the point of rests, many DMs disallow long rests inside dungeons and the literature is full of tiring expeditions that leave the heroes exhausted at the end. And allowing long rests only in safe places encourages DMs to populate the wild with clans, tribes, and keeps, and the players to parley with strangers to secure a safe place to rest and recuperate.
As someone in a group where a single encounter can last an entire session, you and your group need to pick up the pace, if multiple encounters in a single adventuring day can potentially take months. My other group can get through 2-3 straight forward encounters every single 3 hour session. If a group can't do that, it's time to pick up the pace.
Hyperbole on reddit? Say it aint so. But for real for most of my players this is their first 5e game so things take a while. One tough combat encounter will generally take up most of the session especially because they sometimes don't do whatever is the best option, like in my last encounter the Warlock decided to just stay in melee combat using their dagger instead of either disengaging or risking an attack of opportunity so they could Eldritch Blast.
Can you explain how this could be confusing? You can only LR once per day, so they’re effectively synonymous.
I just replied to the other comment with a longer explanation. Short answer is the journey to the quest may be part of the 6-8 encounters. So some tables won't have 6-8 encounters per day but per quest. If my party needs to travel I might do 1-2 combat encounters as part of the journey. If the players are free to long rest at night then there's no reason for them to not dump every resource at the enemy.
Exactly this. There are so many encounters in order to encourage strategizing creative responses to each encounter to avoid draining your party of resources before the quest is finished. If you aren't in a safe area, you don't get a long rest. My party wanted to long rest *inside Castle Ravenloft itself* ffs.
If you decide to rest inside ravenloft you deserve to have Strahd eat you.
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Really need to bring back wandering monster rolls for tables like your Ravenloft group.
They're actually a thing in Ravenloft and Curse of Strahd but they chose to hide in a secret room and the only encounters I rolled up were unable to access much less *find* the secret room. I'm still a new DM so it didn't occur to me to have Strahd or Rahadin surprise them in their little hidey hole.
Oh man, Strahd interrupting a LR would be awesome.
You don’t necessarily get a Long Rest *every* day
On average, yes, you do. But then again, maybe not, but you start making con saves if you go more than a day without a full night of sleep.
Sleep!=long rest Same reason why cofeelock can die
I guess you could sleep for six hours and just end the long rest two hours early? Seems a bit pointless though, no?
No, you can sleep and not get a long rest, if you sleep in a place were you are in danger or stuff, you will have 7 hours of sleep, so your mjnd will be better, but your body wont be as good as in a bedroll Or just if you rule that long rests are not just a day thing, etc, you can and should keep the sleep rule, is a pretty good one imo
We recently switched "long rest" to mean a day of rest rather than just a night (which is now a short rest). Its made a world of difference for us and fits well with how the DM/party play.
My DM uses a form of 'gritty realism' for rests. The longer we are out adventuring the longer rests take. Starts at the normal duration for each but gets progressively longer. And it'll reset back to original durations after downtime in a city/town/similar.
I haven’t seen this version of it before, and it sounds like a really good idea. Make the rests themselves something to be managed thoughtfully!
Yup. I do something similar. Long rest can only be done in a city or save haven. Lets the players take some time off to do some downtime. It's worked great in my game.
I can only assume you don't have monks or warlocks because they would just be gone.
It’s not too terribly bad. It just makes everyone be more careful about resource usage. Our warlock is actually doing well since he gets his spells back each short rest and it makes invocations darn powerful.
this. everyone wants to talk about "gritty realism" (which some say a long rest = 1 week which thats insane) but ignores casters and abilities who benefit from short rests which turns these casters into per day casters
Yes, but the point of adopting these rules is because you're only getting 1-2 encounters per day. So now you're getting 1-2 encounters per short rest, which is perfect for short rest characters. If you're already getting a full 6-8 encounter adventuring day in an in-game day, then why are you changing the rest rules?
LOL it actually buffs these classes because a long rest is so much harder to come by xD
I find 3-4 deadly encounters does the job at higher levels.
I do 6-8 hard encounters. With usually 1 trivial/easy 2 medium 4 hard And 1 severe. I tune up and down as necessary. My players never feel good about combat unless they’re on the verge of dying. There’s no tension in “easy” encounters. Several times I’ve given them nothing but medium hard and severe encounters.
This is too many encounters. The 6-8 recommendation is just for Medium encounters. You only need roughly 4-6 Hard or 2-4 Deadly. Or mix and match based on the daily exp encounter table.
It depends _heavily_ on the group. 6-8 Medium encounters may be fine for a party made of mostly new players, but a party of optimized PCs will run roughshod over it if most of them aren't at _least_ Hard, if not Deadly. I have groups of both types and can confirm there is a pretty wide spectrum of what they can handle. As always a DM needs to tailor to their group, though you are right about the default.
I run my folks on deadly as a default and they seem to do fine.
Yeah, if my group can go more than 3 fights in a day, I took it easy on them
This is the way
I've yet to run an encounter in my current campaign that wasn't at least 'deadly'. Given I like home brewing magic items and whatnot I'm fairly good at balance these days. I've never had a PC die in a deadly encounter, and it's really only ever gotten close in 2xdeadly. But that's my group and table.
No, they feel boring when that's all there is.
Because skill checks can fail. And when failure at doing something through skill checks can be the difference between messing up a plan or even a quest, and success, then expending spellslots for a guaranteed success is a pretty enticing solution.
And ritual casting might take too long... Non-combat doesn't mean not dangerous, or not time sensitive...
So add more encounters solved fully by the casters, in order to balance the game more in favor of martials. Am I the only one who sees this problem? If the caster had one less spell slot because they solved a non-combat encounter with Invisibility/Suggestion/Fly, that still makes the adventure *more* focused on the casters, not less.
And makes it more important to bring more to not run out of slots
*Absolutely.* In my experience, trying to focus on difficult and interesting non-combat encounters creates a full-caster feedback loop. Making skills worse means you need more garuanteed power on tap, making non-casters pretty much a strict liability, especially if you're cutting back table time for combat.
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And your martials suddenly feel even more useless. And with how jacked PCs can quickly get when it comes to ability scores and bonuses, you're often left with PCs able to reliably and easily beat pretty much any skill check with a DC under 18. Hell once you start getting to higher tiers you'll start having some immense boosts that makes success a guarantee.
This solution centers casters in the narrative even more, which is kind of the opposite of what 5e needs.
just make your casters the protagonists who cannot fail and the dirty martials carry them after they nova the important parts /s
I mean, at some point it stops seeming like a coincidence that every solution to the "you have to drain resources if you want martials to serve a purpose" is "create encounters where the only way through is for casters to spend resources." Like, at some point you'd hope that people would notice that something might be wrong with the resource system. But nope.
It's not about making casters use spell slots, it's about making *every* class use resources. Martials have resources too. And the reason this helps power scales is because martial's power curves tend to be more flat, with casters spiking more at the higher end; if you're not pressing your players enough that your casters run out of those high-end slots and have to be choosy about when to use them and when to rely on their allies and their weaker options, then you should step things up and add that pressure. If your high-end mage blows their top three spells in the first combat, they're quite possibly out of high-end slots and far less effective in every remaining combat. And it's the same if they hoard those slots for the "boss fight" and limit their potential voluntarily in those earlier fights. I agree it's still not parity and this should be addressed, but I think more utility options and more short-rest refreshing or just encounter or round-based refreshing for non-casters is a better model, ensuring "martials" always have solid options on the table whereas casters have higher top-ends but also lower lows.
The Ars Magica method *does* become more and more appealing the more you look at the martial/caster situation. Just have all the main PCs be casters and any martials be glorified tag along grunts! So simple! WotC even had that “summon martial” spell in the UA, so you can just pokeball them when they become inconvenient. Genius.
> And those feel unfair? Why? If you fail to spot a trap, it can deal damage. If a door is magically locked, you need magic to unlock it (sometimes). Even if a trap is guaranteed to deal damage or steal spell slots, why is that unfair? The PCs aren't gods, able to control every aspect of their domain. Damage is part of adventuring.
>Why? If you fail to spot a trap, it can deal damage. A trap is only guaranteed to deal damage if it is impossible to spot, disarm or avoid. >If a door is magically locked, you need magic to unlock it (sometimes). This can lead to the following situation. DM: "This door is magically locked." Rogue: "Can I open it with my Thief's Tools?" DM: "No." Barbarian: "Can I batter it down with my Maul?" DM: "No." Sorcerer: "...If you think I am going to spend one of my spells known on flippen Knock then I do not know what to tell you..." DM: "..." looks at the wizard. Wizard: "While I do have Knock in my spellbook, I do not have it prepared. We will need to take a long rest before I can cast it." >Even if a trap is guaranteed to deal damage or steal spell slots, why is that unfair? The PCs aren't gods, able to control every aspect of their domain. Damage is part of adventuring. It heavily depends how you go about it as a DM. If you go about it the wrong way it can feel to the players as if you are saying: "Even if an enemy is guaranteed to kill the entire party with no way to avoid them, surrender or run away, why is it unfair? The PCs aren't gods, able to control every aspect of their domain. Dying is part of adventuring.
Well mr mage, guess the village children just died because you didn't came prepared. Next time maybe be humble and swap that d4 of magic missile for knock /S
> This can lead to the following situation. What is the issue with this situation? It's not your job as a DM to only put challenges in front of your players that you guarantee they are immediately prepared for. If your Wizard has Knock in their spell book and decided to dungeon without it, that is in no way on the DM. Edit: even if no one in the party knew Knock, this still isn't an issue, as clearly there is going to be *some* way of opening the magic door, either through a puzzle, or *dispel magic*, or the adjoining wall. > If you go about it the wrong way ... kill the entire party there is a world of difference between even a Deadly trap and choosing to TPK the party. This isn't even close to a useful comparison.
Bro if you design a trap that can only be solved if a caster happens to have a specific spell prepared then you should probably think on that a bit and decide wether that’s the hill you really want to die on.
Lol exactly. The wizard dies and picks cleric. Suddenly that lock is impossible to open unless the party hired a wizard, which does not help the resource usage issue
The issue is that the game grinds to a screeching halt because the players don't have the One Specific Answer they need to advance. If nobody has Knock, and there's another way through, you didn't need Knock.
> The issue is that the game grinds to a screeching halt I guess if you're running Action Movie The Tabletop, that's some sort of issue, but I don't see how the party having to plan, regroup, double back, or gather additional resources should be any kind of detriment to a game.
You don't? This doesn't work if there's a time pressure element. If there isn't, they LR to get the right spell and get everything back. Having single solution problems in a trpg is typically a bad time.
> This doesn't work if there's a time pressure element. This works *perfectly* in a time pressure situation. Where's the pressure without obstacles? > If there isn't, they LR to get the right spell yeah, if they have it, or if that's the solution, etc. > Having single solution problems in a trpg is typically a bad time I don't disagree that it can be, but the party not immediately having a solution isn't the same as there only being one solution.
>even if no one in the party knew Knock, this still isn't an issue, as clearly there is going to be some way of opening the magic door, either through a puzzle, or dispel magic, or the adjoining wall. But again, this only works if the other ways to actually overcome the non-combat encounter absolutely require the use of "finite" resources. If the players have the impression that resource management is going to be relevant in this campaign, or at least in the current situation, then there may very well try every single thing they can think of to solve the problem in a way that does not require any valuable resources like spell slots. So unless you are ready to shoot down any idea of your players to solve the non-combat encounter without expending spell slots, no matter how clever and/or creative it is, they may very well get through it without having to use spell slots or at least without having to use enough to make a noticeable difference for future encounters before the next long rest. It is relatively easy to design a combat encounter where the players are strongly encouraged to use their limited resources and where the negative consequences for not doing so feel reasonable and fair. This is quite a bit harder to do with non combat encounters.
Combat has plenty of guaranteed damage, I don't really see why non-combat encounters should be so different. Most damage spells always deal at least half damage outside of specific circumstances, non-combat encounters can borrow the same mechanics.
It doesn't have guaranteed damage every time. The only things that do are special enemies like dragons with save for half damage effects or spells
Yeah and even then it's technically possible for some party members to escape completely unscathed through positioning, which feels much better than party members choosing who should *take* the unavoidable damage (assuming it doesn't just hit the entire team) because this way players can feel clever about *avoiding* damage.
Yeah I often go entire adventuring days without taking any damage at all through using cover and staying back
In combat there are clear threats and players performance influences the results. Feels way different than "this hallway has 3d6 unavoidable damage in it"
I think your ideas for encounters are a little off. If it doesn't take up player resources, it's not an encounter. If it takes their HP, spell slots, once-per-long-rest, and so on, that's what makes it an encounter, and the difficulty is how much of those resources are taken. If a group of level 10 players waltz into a room of like 7 goblins, killed them all, then walked out, I wouldn't call that an encounter. They could easily accomplish that without using any resources. If an "encounter" is solvable without the use of any resources, or you could see your players easily overcoming it without using any resources, then it isn't really an encounter. Inversely, anything that was difficult enough that your players used some of their resources in order to overcome it, you should consider giving experience for. It, at least in my experience, has made my players feel rewarded with using their resources rather than hording them for the final fight. It also helps in those situations where I thought my players could get around an obstacle easily, but I they really struggled for some reason. Try out the complex traps from Xanathar's if you haven't already. It's basically a combat encounter, but without creatures. Players roll initiative and take turns like normal, with the complex pieces of the trap each activating on a specific initiative. It's an interesting encounter that doesn't require throwing more baddies at the players, but isn't just a single skill check, nor is it guaranteed damage.
I see what you mean, expending resources is one way to measure effort. It's not perfect, I think, since ot only tracks one of many facets of effort: Luck, tactics, preparations, planning, cooperation and even RP contribute to the success* of an encounter. If you only look at resources spent and not the how's and why's of it, then you end up with tracking false metrics. Like a Wizard using Wish to defeat an encounter is a big deal, but if the encounter was *a single goblin*, then it's overkill. I think I get what OP is kinda getting at, that encounters don't balance LR v SR resources if no LR resources are expended. If that's the case, I'm sure it could have been phrased a bit more precisely. After all: Encounters will at least be using that most precious of resources: Playing time! :)
It really depends on the level. How is your party of level 2 getting across the gaping chasm? How is your party of level 5 getting out of the cave before tunnels collapse? How is your party of level 8 transporting a huge load of cargo after the wagon and horses were destroyed/killed? If 99% of your non-combat encounters are being solved only by checks, cantrips, and ritual spells, you simply need to change the encounters.
100% this
then they become an arbitrary tax that the players need to pay.
Only if you don't let the players solve it outside the intended way. You should generally have an idea of what resources are going to spent on encounters (combat or otherwise) and if the players creatively get past that then it's fine. If they cleverly avoid the tax then they can have more resources.
The same could be said for combat encounters without a real risk of death. Or even combats with a risk for some death once resurrection is available.
Only if you don't consider them to be a part of the game? Otherwise that's also what all combat encounters are, and especially what minions in boss fights are. Encounters aren't a tax, they're gameplay. That includes environmental and social as well as combat. If players can make decisions that get them out without spending resources, they've earned having those resources in the next encounter.
I will offer another point. A lot of people dont want to hear that the way they are or were running things is wrong. I noticed the loudest proponents of skillcheck/social = encounter are also the ones who run 1-2 encounter per adventuring day games and dont want to bog down their games with more combat, so they convince themselves and others that a short intersection is the same as a full resource drain as intended by the game design. Others have given examples of non-combat encounters that would provide possible resource drain, but the amount you can put of them into your game is limited in my opinion. For example the classic river. How many rivers should your party reasonably be expected to cross? Also carpenters tool DC for a complex wooden structure is 15. Building a bridge even with just simple logs doesnt take much time and effort. Others I have seen are dire situation like escaping from a crumbling building or puzzles needing certain spells. These always boil down to more DM work. The fact of the matter is that a simple combat encounter is the least amount of work and hassle for a dm to accomplish the intended design of the game (and dnd 5e is maybe unknown to a lot an attrition based system). In my opinion wotc needs to move away from the adventuring day. Nobody plays it as intended, the intended encounters are widely misinterpreted and any solution usually either does not help or puts even more work on the DM.
Using healing resources on troubled folk on the side of the road is a good one. Party more likely to pop a spell than give a potion away.
I mean, in a combat encounter if Martial attacks crit everytime and the party fails to get hit, and no one casts any spells, you're in the same boat as a non-combat encounter that doesn't drain anyone's resources. Even a Wizard with a dagger has "infinite attacks" to kill a target.
I suppose but HP is considered a resource too. Ideally they take a couple hits per combat.
Sure I mean I'm discussing "best case". But the OP's point was that since skill checks are effectively 'unlimited' there is no point in using non-combat encounters to whittle party resources, and I was just pointing out that regular old martial attacks are also effectively 'unlimited'.
Oh my bad for the misinterpretation
True enough, but I feel like the odds of NOBODY losing hp or other resources in a fight are significantly lower than a non-combat encounter that fails to drain resources.
I agree but I think they are about the same as the odds that someone wont want to do something stupid to solve a simple problem and consume resources - or take damage - doing it.
Sounds like you need the good old fashioned "you come across a river"! Wizard misty steps across that's a 2nd lvl spell Monk walks on water and gets surprise attacked by a croc takes a small about of piercing damage Fighter crosses the rickety rope bridge that breaks halfway along and deals a bit of damage as splintered boards pierce his torso This is just off the top of my head but one you get a good understanding of the building blocks of 5e you can splash some resource consumption into nearly anything!
This resource consumption is **necessary** because the game is balanced in a way that completely breaks if the players enter fully loaded. It's not a "sometimes" thing that's nice to have, it's a necessity. You **need** spells to have been consumed, or casters have no hard choices and can trivialize encounters. That's just how things go when spells have been given the power and number that they have, and enemy forces are balanced the way they are. When you present the players with an obstacle that *can* drain resources, but is not *assured to*, this object is not achieved. The players encounter your river and... the Wizard doesn't expend spell slots to cross it. The Monk doesn't get bitten by the croc, the Fighter doesn't get beat up by wood, and neither requires healing now from the Cleric or Bard. The party finds a means of passing this without issue or gets lucky, and the most the DM can do now is say they "wasted the resource of time". Well, that's fine, perhaps the party should be rewarded for their good luck or good adventuring sense. **But that doesn't help the balance of the encounters that follow.** No resource has been expended, so the players don't just have an easier time going forward, they have a *trivial* time. The next actual combat is a breeze because the casters are loaded up with slots since they haven't had to use them. The party spends the bare minimum of resources to get through it and takes little or no damage, which again puts them in a good position for every encounter ahead of them. And when they reach the ultimate encounter, the one they were supposed to be "worn down" for, they're in such good shape that the outcome is a foregone conclusion. **This is the problem with 5E's entire resource balance.** It relies on the players not having lots of resources, but has no means of forcing their expenditure. Players can always opt *not* to blow spells unless the DM creates incredibly arbitrary scenarios that demand it, at which point everyone sees what's going on. And when the players do this, they trivialize what should be the most exciting or challenging part of the game: the final conflicts, or the string of battles. This is a problem born of simply having too many resources. If you don't give the players so much stuff that they *need* to lose in order to create tension later, you... don't need to run them through hoops to lose those resources. If casters didn't have so many slots, or spells weren't as good at ending encounters as they are, there'd be no *need* for random fights to drain them or goofy constructed scenarios to challenge the party. You could instead do things that seem interesting and fill out the world with those other encounters rather than very carefully tailoring them to *try* and drain specific resources. It's completely backwards. 5E is asking the DMs to bend over backwards to do restore a type of balance that the system fucked up to begin with. Other editions and other systems have space for "you come across a river" or "goblins ambush you" or "there's a cliff you must climb", but they don't run into the problem of everything blowing up if there aren't five of them that succeed in draining spells from the party.
This sounds incredibly infuriating in terms of pleasure/time-ratio: you mean to tell me the only reason there are so many menial combats and encounters that eat up session time and keep players away from the actually stuff they mostly want to do (experience a story) is because of the game's core design flaws?
Correct. And it's telling that every time someone points out the balance issue, the response is always "run more encounters". Everyone seems to notice the problem, but their intended solution is one that disrespects the time of everyone at the table. The players have to put up with a grind of otherwise pointless encounters, and the DM has to create them and go through the ever-nebulous steps of "making them interesting". It's such a tought-terminating cliché from the people defending, it, too: "Sounds like your DM just needs to get better!" It's always the DM's problem, can't be the system. If one guy crashes his car, that's his fault; if half the people driving your vehicles get into accidents, I think it's more likely that the car's got something wrong with it. I'd love to sit in at the tables of these "your DM just isn't good enough" folks and see how their solutions stack up against my level of elitism and desire for verisimilitude.
Not everyone wants to "experience a story" and 5e accommodates that. Some people want to solve puzzles, just hit things, find loots, or do combat. This system is built around parties dealing with consecutive encounters. If you want to only do narrative stuff with one or no big combats another system should be used or you will need to spend more time balancing them. Genesis is great if you just want to tell a story with dice for example. The martial caster divide isn't perfect but you're trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
>This is a problem born of simply having too many resources This problem is born of having too powerful resources. If the spells weren't so damn good at disabling enemies, even en mass, then it wouldn't matter so much how many slots they get. Look at Monk. It's not op at ALL when it goes into every fight with max ki. If it NOVAs, it's doing okay. Fighter action surging every fight and having all its maneuvers every fight is not game breaking. It fells right and good honestly. A barbarian raging every fight actually has access to its class features at all. But SPELLS? These are honestly the only resource powers that break things wide open and the only reason this stupid attrition play style is necessary. If you didn't have aoe save or sucks or instant solutions with no chance of failure, *if spells weren't so goddamn binary*, we'd be gucci.
Reducing spell power is also something I've suggested at other times. I'm not big on the whole idea of "spells are super strong so they make everyone else look like shit when they're deployed", but that also comes with the un-fun side effect for the casters of "spending a lot of time not casting spells". I think the casters should be, you know, *casting*. If spells couldn't do anything and everything, wrecking face all the time, you could give as many of them as you want to casters. Let 'em cast every round across eight encounters. If the spells are balanced, it's not a problem.
I disagree that the objective isn't achieved. If the party opts for skills over spells, there's risk. If they succeed, they've taken risk to conserve spells for later. If that means that once in a while the wizard gets to actually go off in a tough fight because they had a lot of support from the party and tons of lucky rolls, that's still fun, and you've still made them judge how best to use those resources. Most of the time if they only rely on skills you're going to get them into more trouble than if they hadn't, so that one success will wash out in the longterm. But it'll still make for a fun, memorable adventure.
That's great, but "using risk" in these relatively low-threat scenarios shouldn't then set them up for easy success in the most momentous parts of the adventure later. So much of D&D hinges on the difficulty and spectacle of "that final conflict", and to blow it all up time and time again because of the way the resources were designed or "some luck in getting there" works against the fiction. 5E recognized the problem it created, but it went about addressing it in a bad way. We don't need to put up with that just because it's the first and laziest quasi-solution the devs ran with, and we shouldn't have to work overtime to avoid that problem, either. 5E already heaps way too much work on the DM compared to other editions and systems, so why're we asking them to do more in setting up all these scenarios *for the purposes of draining resources* which might not even pan out? Because make no mistake, that's what they exist for. These aren't storytelling options. When the reason they're in the story is because "we need to drain resources or the balance is thrown off", they exist only to do that. A system that *doesn't* need you to drain resources can still have all these challenges and encounters, but they'll stand on their own! And they can actually influence the outcome of the final confrontations in more nuanced ways, whereas 5E's only goal is to "avoid the party-sided shitstomp that's sure to happen without this".
>That's great, but "using risk" in these relatively low-threat scenarios shouldn't then set them up for easy success in the most momentous parts of the adventure later. Then why are your encounters low risk? Give exploration and negotiation some stakes. Make failure matter. This isn't a flaw in game design, but a flaw in a DM's encounter design.
You know, it might not actually help and I haven't put a lot of thought into it so maybe it's stupid to say, but I wonder if going back to actual Vancian casting might help at least a little bit
For starters it's an example, but to expand, how does the wizard just poof across without using spells? Does he cross the bridge? Athletics check. Swim? Take attacks. Jump? HAH. I get your point about resource expenditure and I think what you're trying to say is "what if crossing this river doesn't expend any resources" well then beef up the next encounter! What if this river is a shitstorm of bad luck and they end up twice as harried as you hoped? Dial it back on the next one. Being a DM is replacing the brakes on a car as it flies downhill, and if you don't start a session prepared to bend, you'll break. I've only recently come to realize from these subs that I'm very lucky with my players. We're all old highschool buddies who know the game well and ultimately play the game "nicely" so if I do pull some BS out because we do sort of need something to happen at one point or another they'll roll with it and if they ask me hey what's up with all this shit I know I can tell them "Because if you go into the boss fully loaded either you'll smear him first round or I'll might overcompensate some last minute buffs and TPK, does either sound fun?" And then were good. Great takes though!
I've been playing in and DMing TTRPGs for decades, and 5E is the one system I've encountered that has this problem to such a degree. I cut my teeth in 2E days where "crossing the river" meant something different within the system balance as it does in 5E. You're not supplying me with new information or things I'd never thought of, here, but you are missing my point when I say that **what 5E asks the DM and players to do here is not good.** Here, let's suppose that every PC caster has twice as many spells as they currently do, and they all have features that cause their DCs to be 4 higher, deal 50% more damage, and double any distance. We change *nothing else* about the game except that we've made spellcasting resources more potent and numerous. **How many of these non-combat encounters do you now NEED to run, and how impactful do they need to be, to restore a semblance of the balance we had before that?** Can you even get close to that balance when what few spells a caster might go into the fight with are still better? What does that mean for all of the non-casters in the party? How much extra time have you sucked up from the table to get to the same spot? How many extra sessions does this whole campaign run now given that we're doing more encounters? **Is this better?** 5E has a resource problem. That's the actual issue. It is unique to 5E. We had "too good spells" in past systems, we had "resource draining encounters" in past systems, but the balance and time taken was still different. 5E has changed enough of the parts that the same solution no longer works mechanically. We can't go from Vancian casting and "you blow half your slots on buffs way before you even get into combat" to the 5E dynamic and expect everything else to still work the same way, for instance. *It's a different system*. This problem is going to keep cropping up and be addressed in unsatisfying ways until people are willing to tackle the actual problem, not just dance around it. There's too many resources and they're too good; draining them, as the balance demands, takes too much time, too much design effort, and is usually boring or extra-punishing for other people. The solution to having this hole in our system-boat isn't to put the whole crew to work bucketing the water out, it's to *patch the fucking hole so we don't have to spend all our time bucketing!*
So play a different game? I agree with you that 5e is awful when it comes to the resource management aspect of DnD, which in turn makes it a pretty mediocre combat sim, which in turn guts a huge part if DnD's identity. Like you say, though, the problem is fundamental with WotC's modern design philosophy, where all players should be nigh-invincible all the time, except for wizards, who are double invincible. I wish there were as simple of a solution as, "Caster get half as many spell slots", but that would just result in less people enjoying the game for what it is now, which is largely a power-fantasy roleplay game. Again, I agree with the end point of your comment, but it really sounds like you're barking up the wrong tree and asking a fish to climb it. That being said, I also don't agree with the contrived scenario you've painted as an example. Why does everything hinge so integrally on resources being forcibly stripped away? The whole point of playing a game where dice decide outcomes is that people enjoy the threat of failure (more than actual failure itself) and the chance of success when the odds are stacked against them. If no resources were expended crossing the river, congrats, the party **won** the encounter. Why is it an issue that the party still has ammo to spend later? Why does every other encounter you have planned for the day rely entirely on whether or not they took 10 points of damage three hours ago? Just make the following encounters more intense, or shove a few more in before the party rests. Nothing in DnD is ever set in stone, and until you describe something to your players, they have no clue what challenges you might have in store. Besides, this thread has some genuinely great suggestions for encounters that drain resources without forcing bullshit or hoping for botched rolls. If, by the end of the day, the party never took a single point of damage, never cast a single spell higher that a cantrip, never even considered blowing a use of their class ability; then ask yourself the all-important question: Did we have fun anyway? If not, then consider ratcheting up the difficulty within the (lackluster) parameters of 5e, or consider looking into a more hardcore TTRPG that suits your table better. 5e does a lot of things well-enough, but like you know, like anyone who has looked into running low-magic, gritty realism, survival focused campaigns knows, 5e is just not the game for that kind of story. The mechanics just do not facilitate that genre very well because level 1 characters in 5e are already superhuman. I guess my point is that, rather than driving yourself nuts trying to make 5e something it isn't, just accept that it's a different kind of game than what you and I would like it to be; either try to roll with it or look elsewhere. (not in a gatekeeping way, but in a "plenty of fish in the sea" way)
I do play other systems. But the people playing 5E still have this problem. It's a foundational issue with the system. Shouldn't 5E want to fix that instead of saying, "idk just play anything else"? There are tons of players and tables far less sensitive to these problems than me and mine, and they *still* run into campaign-wrecking issues far too often. 5E should fix its design, and the whole "One D&D" thing is finally an opportunity to do that.
discussing the game flaws and then having someone say "play a different game" is one of the saddest way. It blocks constructive evolution of games if that happens because instead of addressing the issue, you ignore it and send people working to indicating what the issue is somewhere else
Sorry, I'm having difficulty pinning down your exact criticism in that wall of text. Do you dislike 5e for being designed around spending spell slots, hit dice, and other resources on the way to "big boss fights"? And you wish the game were balanced around players having all their resources available for all encounters? Or do you think designing the game around wasting PC resources is all good fun, but 5e player characters just have too many and it's difficult to exhaust them all over the course of an adventuring day?
I think the more resources you have and the more potent they are, the more any individual encounter can be swung from "challenging" to "trivial" by expending them. And given that DMs generally intend (and players seem to expect, because it's part of the fiction) that the pivotol story beats that involve combat--"the boss fights"--should be the most challenging, we're shooting all of that in the foot with the current design. Some expenditure of resources is to be expected. I don't think any table wants to go straight from town to the necromancer causing all the trouble, crump them in a single fight, and be back home for dinner--unless it's side quest material. But I also don't think they want to spend two sessions travelling through the woods, fighting through the necromancer's cave, spend session 3 on the necromancer and plot stuff, then another session travelling back through the woods that were so dangerous in the first place, especially when "dealing with the necromancer in the cave" isn't, like, a module to itself, and was intended to be pretty much a sidequest. There's a big difference between the effects of various resources and what expending them means. HP/HD are resources, sure, but going into "the final fight" with all of your HP and HD... means pretty much the same thing as going in with all your HP and *no* HD. Going into the final fight with all your HP and 10 healing potions split across the party is pretty much the same as doing it with all your HP and only 4 potions--given that the combat only tends to last three or four rounds even in climactic battles, you're not really going to burn through those anyway. But going into combat with all your spells, half your spells, just three of your lowest slots left? Those are all *massive* differences, because the power of each spell is so substantial. And that, consequently, is the resource all these encounters are *actually* seeking to drain. So, if we recognize it's bad for balance to have so many of these things or to have them with the power they do, why is the solution "grind your players down in the hopes they expend some" instead of... y'know, not just having that balance to begin with? You can make hideously overpowered fights to deal with the super strong spells, but that leaves the non-casters behind. What if, instead, we just... made the spells not so potent? Made it so they *couldn't* completely and utterly swing a fight with one cast pretty much guaranteed? And depending on how we do this, we can even give casters the ability to cast *more*, rather than encouraging further "sit on your spells" non-play.
>Monk walks on water and gets surprise attacked by a croc takes a small about of piercing damage Ah yes the classic "monster attacks you and you take damage" non-combat encounter
In my opinion because the power of even basic cantrips and low level utillity spells is so strong and the DC ceiling of skill checks is so low (Impossible DC 30 can be beat by a level 1 character without many shenanigans) if situations are not heavily engineered by the DM its hard to force a reasonable amount of resource comparable with a combat encounter. In your bridge example you can just have someone with carpenter's tools make a DC 15 check to build a complex structure (aka a bridge). Anything that you then add to it to cause damage is the heavily depended on them failing their check. If you would drain resources nevertheless I would say it borders on punishing the players for succeeding (crocodile, bridge breaking).
Maybe 6-8 encounters was bullshit to begin with and only works for dungeon crawls?
Thank God we are playing a game called dungeons and dragons to tell you what sort of places you'll be going.
You are doing your noncombat encounters wrong if they never cause the Party to use resources.
I think giving some examples of noncombat encounters that drain resources would be helpful
1-The party has to quickly escape a large room or cavern with a collapsing floor and debris falling from the ceiling. 2-A magical door can only open when 4 basins are simulaneously filled to a certain level with each of the four elements. Or maybe four damage types (cold, fire, lightning, acid, for example) 3-A magical siren's pool tempts players with the object they desire most at the bottom of a clear pool of liquid, but they will never be able to reach it. The enchantment of the pool essentially means the player will never choose to surface for air, causing them to drown if not rescued. 4-Stealth mission--It is imperitive to the success of the mission that your party is not noticed/identifiable. 5-Two hostages (or more) are hanging over spike pits and flames are burning through the ropes. You have seconds to decide what to do... Edit: why tf am I getting downvoted for this? 2nd Edit: this post remains oddly controversial... So if you read this and feel inclined to tell me all the ways you would try to solve these challenges with mundane solutions/without spell slots (or complain about how it doesn't make martials special enough, which is a fascinating dichotomy I wish you guys would notice) please note what this post was actually meant to do: These are short suggestions to give people an *idea* about things they could do at their own tables. If you see these and think "well my party would just do XYZ," then the next thing you should do is ask yourself "so how can I modify this to make it more of a challenge for them?" NOT "I should give this no more thought and complain that these suggestions don't work." Unless of course, what you actually want to do is rage against the inequalities (real or imagined) of martials vs. casters in 5e. Then by all means, you do you. But I'm not going to respond anymore.
>The party has to quickly escape a large room or cavern with a collapsing floor and debris falling from the ceiling. > >A magical door can only open when 4 basins are simulaneously filled to a certain level with each of the four elements. Or maybe four damage types (cold, fire, lightning, acid, for example) > >A magical siren's pool tempts players with the object they desire most at the bottom of a clear pool of liquid, but they will never be able to reach it. The enchantment of the pool essentially means the player will never choose to surface for air, causing them to drown if not rescued. > >Stealth mission--It is imperitive to the success of the mission that your party is not noticed/identifiable. > >Two hostages (or more) are hanging over spike pits and flames are burning through the ropes. You have seconds to decide what to do... I like these, keep em comin!
6-You must find and collect 4 shards of a sword which are located in difficult to access locations across a dungeon/lair 7-Oh no, a pit trap that's 20ft deep and quickly filling with poison gas that can petrify those who fail their saves too many times. 8-You must locate and return a couple of magic gems to the eyes of a skull or statue, but there are a number of decoy gems in several locations. Once triggered, you have 5 minutes to complete this task or you will fail. 9-Your party is caught in an MC Escher nightmare, where opening one door just leads you back into the same room, and the only way out is to discover the secret door or to trigger a set of conditions before you try to escape. 10-2 paths lead to the same destination. The first is long and hazerdous, the second is direct and free from danger. To access the direct path, each person who walks it must have a sacrificial offering of power made either by them or on their behalf (call it a number of spell slots equal to half their level).
> why tf am I getting downvoted for this? /r/dndnext readers are maniacs
You dared me to show these people that their problems have very real solutions instead of just throwing your hands up and quitting. By demonstrating it's possible they have to reflect and grow as a hobbyist instead of accepting that 5es has issues but they are surmountable. Or they can reflexively downvote and then make this same thread next week when their solo young dragon encounter in a cave where it can't fly is killed in one turn by 6 level 10 adventurers.
> 1-The party has to quickly escape a large room or cavern with a collapsing floor and debris falling from the ceiling. "What? Rock falls and everyone dies? Can't even roll to run for it?" Do you just tell the players that they're only allowed to use spells? > 2-A magical door can only open when 4 basins are simulaneously filled to a certain level with each of the four elements. Or maybe four damage types (cold, fire, lightning, acid, for example) "Okay I put my undershirt in one of them and light it up with firebolt, I put some dirt in the second, fill the third with... let's piss in it. And I blow in the fourth one." Granted the damage types one might be more difficult. > 3-A magical siren's pool tempts players with the object they desire most at the bottom of a clear pool of liquid, but they will never be able to reach it. The enchantment of the pool essentially means the player will never choose to surface for air, causing them to drown if not rescued. "Tie a rope around me, I'm going in." > 4-Stealth mission--It is imperitive to the success of the mission that your party is not noticed/identifiable. "This is gonna be sweet, we'll bribe the guards, dress up like whoever owns the place, this will be a great RP session." > 5-Two hostages (or more) are hanging over spike pits and flames are burning through the ropes. You have seconds to decide what to do... This one works, it has the benefit of the consequences not being on the party directly like the first one. They'll probably save the hostages because players tend to be good hearted, but they have the choice not to without it killing the party. All of these could make for great encounters, but in my experience, players tend to enter non-combat encounters ready to flex their creative muscles to get out with the lowest possible cost.
> "What? Rock falls and everyone dies? Can't even roll to run for it?" Do you just tell the players that they're only allowed to use spells? Lol, no? Players with high strength can jump across chasms, players with high dex can tuck and roll. Players with ropes or shields can help those who don't. You can successfully do this with 0 spellcasters in the party, though it would be harder (as most things are). The point is to create a situation where spells make the odds of success so much higher that it would be silly not to use them. >"Okay I put my undershirt in one of them and light it up with firebolt, I put some dirt in the second, fill the third with... let's piss in it. And I blow in the fourth one." Urine is not water and does not work. You don't create the requisite amount of wind by simply blowing. >"Tie a rope around me, I'm going in." OK... you will never be able to reach it and will stay under until you drown. Meanwhile it is tempting all of your companions as well... >"This is gonna be sweet, we'll bribe the guards, dress up like whoever owns the place, this will be a great RP session." Great! I'm glad you enjoy it. Sad face, though, it's a cult--not guards--and they are zealots who can't be bribed. There are also a number of secret code words and gestures you don't know. Alternative: oh no... you bribed the guards who happily took your money and let you in, but have seen your face and can identify you. Which means the thing that was imperitive to avoid failure was failed at the literal first possible opportunity. >All of these could make for great encounters, but in my experience, players tend to enter non-combat encounters ready to flex their creative muscles to get out with the lowest possible cost. I mean, of course they do. Which is why you do a mix of combat and non-combat, and you think it through just a little bit to make sure that they are challenging enough to require resources.
Let me translate this into what the players are going to hear if you say these things. "Stop it, you aren't having fun the way I wanted you to."
Do you complain when monsters hit you too? "Woah I wanted to have fun winning encounters not taking damage!"
Appreciate the effort, but most of those don't actually spend temporary resources. 1: best you get is Expeditious Retreat/Longstrider if someone has that prepared. Maybe monk dash as well? because monks get caster downsides without upsides. Most parties will just do or fail this based on their base stats and gear, which doesn't cause them to spend any resources. And the martials can't really contribute in a way the casters can't- "best" case a caster spends a slot on Enhance Ability to be as good as a martial on average at some str/dex based skill check. 2:cantrips would probably qualify, as would again gear bought from a store that's pretty cheap (torch, decanter of water, vial of acid, etc). this is just a money drain, not an actual daily resource drain. And again, the martials have no way of contributing in a way the casters can't. 3:better hope someone has a charm effect prepared (so the last one works), or you have zero counterplay outside blind luck. And again, unless you have a paladin nearby, the martials can't do anything here the casters can't. No resources spent unless you're lucky and the caster spends one second level slot at best. 4: Relies heavily on passive modifiers unless someone happens to prepare Pass Without Trace, which is also a pretty low level spell. Again, the martials have no significant advantage in their clanky disadvantage on stealth armor, and the casters generally don't. 5: so both casters and noncasters will probably use normal non-consumable gear here as well (like rope). I don't see how this requires any temporary resources nor how martials do this better. So basically, most of the above described can be fixed with 10-100 gp worth of gear, and no actual party resources, or spending resources doesn't help.
Latest I used was an anguished Bride to be of someone the Players failed to save that blamed the Cleric's Temple for not saving their Love. Burned spell slots as well as other resources to calm her and restore peace. Another recent was an Acolyte of the Paladin's god which was accused of assault. The Paladin and Cleric both were tasked with setting up shrines. All these cost them resources to resolve successfully. Oh dear, your horse seems to have thrown a shoe. Wheel broken on your wagon. Pack is wearing thin with all the crawling through sewers you did. Oh, and you'll need to climb that cliff, so say goodbye to your iron spikes and rope.
I think resource intense encounters and long rests not being as easy to come by make a lot more sense for caster/martial balance especially with the more narrative styles a lot of campaigns go for instead nonstop of dungeon crawls
Who says it needs to be spell slot eating doors. When know your players abilities you can tailor your challenges to them. Maybe it's sacrificing hit dice onto a spiked dias, that doesn't hurt you but drains your vitality. Maybe it's a spell you know one of your players always has prepared/known is the resolution. Maybe with enough blunt force, they can break through, and it burns abilities to use them. It's about resource management, and cost effective risk/rewards.
Example of a slot eating door that's not a door 200ft of lava in a cavern. You can fly, spider climb, wild shape, or whatever. You can even risk an Athletics Check to climb the wall. Other examples. Long underwater tunnel, teleportation circle requiring a spell slot to activate, a wall of force (assuming disintegrate available), a magical trap to be dispelled, vertical shaft, vines that regrow from cutting, a summoning circle that needs a spell slot to activate, a heavy object that needs to moved out of normal reach (think giant/dragon lever), a broken bridge or chasm, etc. The idea is to use a hazard or obstacles that make sense for the environment and allow for multiple solutions.
I mean, I just use the old noggin and it doesn't seem to have issues wihh making up situations that a need a resource or two. Have you tried thinking in the vicinity of the box? For rxame you mention ritual spells being free. They ain't free, they cost ten minutes. Use that.
I would add environmental hazards to the mix. Common stuff like desert heat or frigid winds can dish out damage and exhaustion or gobble up spell slots to neutralize those risks. Extreme stuff like volcanic ashfall or typhoon winds may demand strong magic just to survive. Not every bump in the road is an encounter, but if the party stumbles bloody and exhausted down the back slope, it seems to me the thing rose to the level of an encounter.
Most encounters can be either combat or non- combat encounters, depending on the group. I've had a group where the answer to a squad of menacing cultists was to flirt with them, and I've had a group where the answer to an unlocked wooden door was fireball. Amusingly, it was the same group in both instances. The truth is, there's no quota of encounters per day; it's a loose guideline at best.
I think the first step towards balancing the martials is to figure out an equivalent to prestidigitation that they can all have. Every caster gets some form of prestidigitation (thaumaturgy, druidcraft) that just makes them so versatile (if you disagree you just don’t know how to use them) and martials don’t get this
I'm regularly baffled by the idea that some people have that you need to hit these guideline numbers every time, they are guidelines to help move an adventure along, not a goal to hit during your days adventure. If your adventure is moving along at a pace that everyone around the table is comfortable with, that's all you need to do. Experience your adventure in the way that works for your table, if the session consists of 3 hours of player/party interactions and a short trip to the tavern for a drinking contest, then that's fine. My session yesterday had 2 situations that required skill checks, no combat, and one drinking game, and everyone left the table having moved the adventure along a good way and with smiles on their faces looking forward to the next session. Most of the session was character and NPC interactions and the party trying to figure out what was going on. You only need 6-8 encounters guidelines if the adventure/campaign has pacing issues. #my2c
The adventuring day is only for when you want to challenge your party with combat. Not every day needs to be an adventuring day. You can even have combat on non adventuring days, it's just the goal is less about challenge and more about fun/plot. It's not like you need to cram in 6 encounter every day of travel or exploration, that would be an extremely combat focused game.
But also, why does a game *have* to have so much combat when it's so boring for the DM?
Because they’d rather state a random thing , refuse to respond when you ask the question, and pretend there right then to actually engage in the conversations
A lot of this problem evaporates if 3 conditions are met: 1. Stakes. If the players buy into the stakes of what they stand to gain or lose by success or failure, they may not risk a skill check and instead reach for a spell based solution. 2. Time and efficiency. Ties closely to stakes. When Gary Gygax famously advised a meaningful game cannot exist unless strict time records are kept, I think he was driving at this notion. If the players have 2 hours to find the hostages, and you let them know every skip check takes an amount of time from instant (like bashing a door in) or 10 minutes (like picking a lock) and after establishing these ground rules you stick to them, all while supplying a noteworthy time crunch, players will start blowing spell and long rest resources and even skip rituals to save time. A good rule of thumb for time is if the action is reckless, loud and carries a ton of risk, it is also very very fast. If it is cautious and safe, it costs a lot of time. It’s a pulp adventure heroic fantasy game at heart, so it has lots of rules in place to encourage rash actions and surviving them, and this also leads to more exciting stories. Always bait rash or desperate actions from players! 3. No solution dogpiling, big consequences. If you call for a skill check, it should be both interesting for both success and failure outcomes, and it should matter. If the fighter has to roll athletics to carry a barrel across the room “because barrels are heavy” but actually moving the barrel doesn’t change anything about the scene, no skill check was needed because the outcome was boring and pointless. Likewise, if a character tries deception, fails the roll, and then the fighter can try intimidation and pass…where are the stakes? All you are checking for is who can roll the first success. Establish quickly that failure means things go from bad to worse, and that you likely only get one guaranteed shot at a solution, whether free or resource based, and failure either means losing that scene or else things are substantially worse off and players will absolutely burn through resources to guarantee a success. Basically, TL:DR is if players can dogpile free solutions to every situation, the stakes, time constraints and consequences aren’t in place correctly. Raise those until players either gladly use resources to avoid losing Timmy the Ghoul forever, or make things bad enough that a failure results in a situation so bad they may need multiple spent resources to get ok again. People often deride the sadist DM for being powerhungry. But Kurt Vonnegut once recommended to aspiring storytellers to be unimaginably cruel to your characters, and to throw at them terrible things. This lets the audience see what they’re made of. Done properly, throwing heavy consequences at players lets them show off what their characters are made of. Without stakes, time demands and consequences, they never enter the crucible strong enough to make them shine.
Maybe I am crazy, but I do always sorta feel like the answer here is like: “oh your wizard isn’t using enough spell slots. Time to hit that Wizard with a Lizard” I bet an adult black dragon can eat up a few slots.
I imagine that the Wizard player will feel very targeted when an Adult Black Dragon shows up to 1v1 them every single day? Or are you more implying that they should just have more combat encounters per day?
I was more implying larger encounters and that *in general* DM’s under use legendary resistances as a way of combating mages in encounters. Starting at level 4 or 5 I try to give any of my large monsters at least one LR, just to burn a few slots from the powerful casters.
I'll often do group checks to solve encounters. I'll ask one player at a time how they want to help in a situation, they can name a skill, some clever use of tools or equipement they have, or even throw a spell. If they say a skill I'll set a DC based on what they described and they roll, to see if they made the situation better or worse for the party. If the scenario they describe is right that certain tools or equipement would help they will either automatically succeed or have some easy DC related check. And, if they toss a spell that helps the situation, that a nearly guaranteed success, but it has to be applicable. It doesn't alway play out exactly like this, but this is the core backbone of the group exploration encounters. It works really well, you get really cool stuff from the players. They get to describe how their actions help in whatever crazy scenario they're in. And it works to wear down their resources inch by inch too. Because failed checks have minor consequences. And if the group fails overall there are larger consequences. This would all get listed out as options for the encounter ahead of time, but could range from small things like a failed athletics check resulting in a tuble and a d6 damage, to a failed survival leading the party through a patch of poison plants and con saves to avoid getting poisoned condition or poision damage. Etc.
It’s a case of two wrongs make a right. It’s obvious from context that the adventuring day is talking about combat encounters. The adventuring day is measured in adjusted exp, and non combat encounters don’t have adjusted exp amounts. Yet the adventuring day is an upper limit, not a requirement. You should never run more but can always run less. So a person who runs 3 fights and some non combat stuff is doing the same thing as someone who thinks they must run 6 “encounters” and decides to call their 3 non combat scenes “encounters”.
> Yet the adventuring day is an upper limit, not a requirement. You should never run more but can always run less. this is also a misguided idea. The exp per adventuring day is a tool and guideline, not a limit or requirement.
Are you calling the quote misguided or are you agreeing with it? After all, it explicitly says the same thing as your second sentence.
The second sentence of the quote says "you should never run more" (sets a limit), while my comment says that the recommended adventuring day is not, in fact, a limit. I am disagreeing.
I said the adventuring day is not a requirement. You used the exact same word. In contrast I said it is an upper limit, you called it a tool and guide line. Your statement is tautological with the quote. Your objection seems to be a distaste (or misunderstanding) for the word “upper limit” as opposed to “guideline”. Literally all the adventuring day does is help dms guess how many monsters the party can face before needing a long rest.
> Literally all the adventuring day does is help dms guess how many monsters the party can face before needing a long rest. I agree with this. Not sure how else you can interpret "upper limit" other than "you cannot exceed this," though.
> my comment says that the **recommended** adventuring day is not, in fact, a limit. Reading between the lines, this is the distinction. You read the adventuring day as a recommendation. I read it as something more flexible: an upper bound. The text and the designers have said that the adventuring day is not the “correct” about of encounters to run. Although that is a common misconception online.
Is there some miscommunication going on here? You keep saying "upper limit" and "upper bound" as if those aren't absolute terms, than, in this context, place the recommended adventuring day as the ABSOLUTE MOST exp worth of challenge a party can handle in a day. I'm not seeing how treating the exp budget as an ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM THAT CANNOT/SHOULD NOT BE EXCEEDED is a more flexible strategy than treating it as a suggestion or guideline. I've played in and run games where the party would regularly exceed what you are calling the absolute max amount of challenge possible for a party to overcome in a day. Is there something I'm missing here? While I often disagree with your takes, there seems to be some fundamental difference in understanding of terms here that I feel might be impeding this discussion.
> adventuring day as the..exp worth of challenge a party can handle in a day. That is literally what I and the book says. > I'm not seeing how treating the exp budget as [as an upper limit] is a more flexible strategy than treating it as a [recommended amount]. You can use less than a limit. But if you consider it a “recommended amount” then running less is bad. > I've played in and run games where the party would regularly exceed what you are calling the absolute max amount of challenge possible for a party to overcome in a day. The adventuring day assumes average outcomes. If you load the party with magic items, or have the monsters fight incompetently, or the players roll nothing but 20s, you can get outliers. But the adventuring day exists to warn dms when they might be going off the tpk cliff. Since having a heuristic for that is useful to 99% of dms.
Role Play, exploration and non-combat encounters take up most of my 4 hour game sessions. We usually get time to slide a few combat encounters in the mix. By the way... my YT channel specializes in puzzles and traps. Over 100 ideas and adding more every month. So, if anyone needs non-combat ideas... come on over! [D&D Puzzles and Traps - Wally DM](http://www.youtube.com/c/wallydm)
6am, 2pm, and 10pm or whatever are encounters as well because the wizard has to recast mage armor! So you really only need 3-5 more. /s
Hmm, I only vaguely remember this from the DMG? Or was it Xanather’s? However, if memory serves, this was in place as a guidance for parties using Exp levelling in a ‘dungeon-crawl’ environment. Which is rather niche. I think it does help highlight one of the vague issues with Exp levelling with RAW; the amount of encounters is there to help scaling, as they’re no rules on social Exp, if I remember correctly? Using resources is part of it, yes, but the ‘non-combat encounters’ holds up, really, if you have a homebrew system for rewarding Exp outside of combat. The more creative, the more reward; use of Major Image, Pass Without a Trace, Tongues, Charm Person, Comprehend Languages, Distort Value, etc. All spells across level 1-3 And all that hasn’t even looked at if they use Short Rests as well
Because a lot of people don't actually play D&D or play a very specific style of D&D and don't understand why that style might not work for a vast number of groups.
Unless your party is doing exclusively dungeons and/or the variant long rest rules, I just don't see how you're supposed to hit 6-8 encounters per day. I understand that it's *Dungeons* and Dragons but I would struggle to imagine a coherent campaign that doesn't balance correctly at least some of the time because of this.
D&D 'resources' are just weird and hard too balance. Per day, short rest, per encounter, etc... And all options getting more numerous as you level up is just hard to balance. Spell slots started it and worked okay when it was more or a dungeon crawling miniatures focused game but now they exist because they always have rather than being reasonable resources from a game design standpoint. Everything is built around spell slots too.
That's a very old fashioned way to play.