Is default number of encounters per day in 5E it's biggest flaw?

[Rukelnikov]

Here's the thing. Traveling encounters are spice. They're not designed to be the major threat unless there's something keeping you from resting. They're just set dressing. So balance for travel encounters is meaningless unless you're doing a logistics heavy game (where every day spent is precious food resources spent). If you want them to be important in and of themselves, use the other Rest Variants from the DMG. Or even a mixture of rest variants:

* Modified Gritty (8 hr short rests, 24-hour long rests) for travel
* Normal (1 hr short rests, 8 hour long rests) for on-location exploration
* Heroic (5 minute short rests, 1 hour long rests) for those heroic pushes through major dungeons.

We tried something of the sort, full caster would only recover a certain ammount of slot levels per long rest instead of full allotment (effective "CL" plus highest casting stat), Monks and BMs recovered fully in long rest, and only 1 or 2 uses in short rests, only 1 HD recovered per long rest. It worked better for us than regular, but still didn't fully cut it, next adventure I'm gonna try Gritty to see how it plays out.

No one balances around traveling encounters. If you look at published adventures, they're always in this format:
* travel with 0+ encounters.
* locations with time pressure (usually due to consequences such as reinforcements or just no safe place to rest nearby) with many encounters.

Many, if not most, groups don't even do random encounters for travel at all. Mine certainly doesn't. So if the paladin shines during those--who cares? Those aren't that important either way.

Yeah, I guess the system is not aimed at travelling being that relevant, but I like it when some regions are dangerous, and just reaching the evil temple of doom is kind of a quest in and of itself.

[sophontteks]

Pretty sure none of the published adventures tell you how to have 6-8 encounters per long rest.

Probably not out of the abyss. Curse of strahd easily hit that number every day.

[Pelle]

The default number of encounters per day is certainly one of the things I dislike the most about the game.

One adventuring day =|= session, but it would be a lot smoother if it was! It's quite annoying when you play irregular sessions of 3-4 hours each, that you need to keep track of which resources you spent 3 or more weeks ago. Yes, you can record stuff on you sheet, but regardless the dynamic isn't fun since when you spend your best resources, you need to wait several sessions to get them back. It would be much more fun for the resource management aspect if it was easier to go through roughly one cycle per session.

[Unoriginal]

Pretty sure none of the published adventures tell you how to have 6-8 encounters per long rest.

Which is good because it is not an assumption of the game.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Which is good because it is not an assumption of the game.

Right. It's an extrapolation from the ceiling on encounters before people are hard out of resources. For balance all you need is opportunities to take short rests 2x or so on average with an encounter or more between each rest.

[Skylivedk]

Session and long rest are not the same thing.

Our table usually sees 1 long rest every 2-3 sessions. We usually end the session on a short rest.

I am glad they designed the game around dungeons. I want to have a goal and a finite amount of resources to achieve that goal. Long rests always reset that tension and make the game less interesting. I think it's great that 5e has been designed with that in mind. Short rests are the perfect solution to it.

But honestly, even one hour rests make no sense in a dungeon. I've yet to hear about a secured area from any friends or army colleagues where you would wait around an hour to catch your breath in hostile territory. Before going away from short rests, we did 20-30 minutes to simulate the downtime

Side Note: If anyone is having trouble with having 6-8 encounters per long rest, just run a published adventure. The published adventures will teach you how to play the game. They're fun, try them.

This isn't true for the majority of the campaigns in:

Lost Mines of Phandelver

Tomb of Annihilation

Storm King's Thunder (my group is almost done and there's been tops 3 probably rather two dungeons/chapters where short rests made sense/where more than 1 was required. I made more)

Hoard of the Dragon Queen (at least the beginning).

I don't want to sound like I am whining I just found that having that Short Rests and Long Rests makes game less natural.
(...)
Maybe I should just double Warlock slots and make him long-rest too.... That would solve all issues.

X 3 or X 2,5 with a cap pr encounter of previous short rest has been our solution. Warlock is very weak otherwise.

Which is good because it is not an assumption of the game.

Except it kind of is. Reference the Warlock and the Battlemaster. They're not comparable to the long rest classes if you don't allow short rests.

[Xetheral]

I think the biggest problem with modern D&D is that it is relying more and more on expendable resource effects (it's not just Magic Users and half of a Cleric's abilities which have such recharge abilities), that many effects are so big that they need X/day constraint, and for whatever reason they have to yes recharge after a long rest (as opposed to 'spend money', or 'find gnosis'-style mechanics). It is a unique set of circumstances and I'm not sure how best to address it (other than the 4e model--modify the system past the point that it is accepted by the base audience).

I too am not a big fan of expendable resources that quickly recharge over time. It turns resources into a fixed supply that needs to be rationed at a tactical level. I find it much more interesting when resources need to be acquired, accumulated, and triaged at the strategic level.

In the former case, all that matter is when a resource is spent, and the extent to which that expenditure reduces (or increases) the likelihood of running out prior to recharging. In the latter case, it becomes much more important how and why a resource is spent, and what goals those resources are devoted to.

5e has an element of the latter with gold, (and followers and political influence, etc.), but most of the rules focus is on the rechargable resources. I find it helps to run the game at a pace where those rechargable resources are rarely fully expended prior to recharging. The focus is still at the tactical level, but at least "how" and "why" resources are spent matters more when there isn't an omnipresent threat of resource exhaustion. This is because there is more freedom to spend resources on non-critical goals when they aren't under constant pressure.

[Unoriginal]

Except it kind of is. Reference the Warlock and the Battlemaster. They're not comparable to the long rest classes if you don't allow short rests.

That has nothing to do with having 6 to 8 encounters a day. The published modules certainly give you the time to short rests appropriately for those classes to work.

[ad_hoc]

Yes, you can record stuff on you sheet, but regardless the dynamic isn't fun since when you spend your best resources, you need to wait several sessions to get them back.

Then either don't spend them early or play a character like a Rogue who doesn't rely on them.

Long rest characters have huge potential power but are limited in how often they get to use it. High level spell slots should be pulled out when they are needed, not just whenever. This is a big source of strength for the Warlock, as they can cast many high level spells over the course of an adventuring day.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I find it helps to run the game at a pace where those rechargable resources are rarely fully expended prior to recharging. The focus is still at the tactical level, but at least "how" and "why" resources are spent matters more when there isn't an omnipresent threat of resource exhaustion. This is because there is more freedom to spend resources on non-critical goals when they aren't under constant pressure.

This is very true IMX. There should be the threat of running dry if you overextend yourself, but most of the time you should have gas left when you replenish things. That's why it's critical to remember that the whole 6-8 encounter thing is a ceiling on the average endurance of a character, not a norm. In fact, if you're consistently pushing the cap then you'll death spiral sooner or later once you have 2 bad days in a row and burn all your HD (which don't come back completely on a long rest) and don't have enough for the next full day.

And for balance concerns, mostly its enough for people to be adults and to not spotlight hog. That may mean holding back and not double-smiting. It may mean taking a "sub-optimal" action to set someone else up. Etc. And with most groups (other than AL) a simple "hey guys, let's not do the 5-minute working day thing even if it's tempting" OOC chat fixes it all. Most groups of friends are more than willing to play nice together.

[MaxWilson]

This is part of why 5e D&D seems too easy. Very few DMs are going to get 6-8 encounters per day done in anything except a dungeon. So most fights will be at near peak resources because narratives aren't that rigid and arbitrarily changing "what counts as a long rest" depending on the encounter/time density of the given story arch in the campaign breaks immersion just as much as jamming in 5-7 encounters before a boss fight.

It's the biggest flaw of the system at low levels. At high levels, I think the lack of dangerous monsters is the biggest flaw (that is only fixed by making your own monsters or buying Tome of Beasts).

I don't think this is the key factor. The thing is, if you break the adventuring day up into 6-8 Easy or Medium encounters, it gets even easier than if you've got 2-3 Deadly ones. An Easy or Medium encounter is frequently beatable without expending any resources at all, zero, so from an attrition standpoint they might as well not even exist. All they are is free XP.

The game is actually harder and IMO more interesting with a small number of Deadly encounters, or a good random distribution of Easy-through-uber-Deadly encounters, instead of a bunch of Easy/Mediums.

But then, I'm a fan of combat-lite games, where combat doesn't happen unless it has narrative weight and real stakes worth killing or dying for, so I am biased against the lots-of-fights paradigm.

[WilliamHuggins]

I think Easy/Medium encounters are waste of time, I would never have them unless my players fight something that I did not expect them to fight, an adventuring day should be either one encounter that is pushing the upper limits of a deadly encounter(they play smart or someone dies, you usually put these encounters where narrative is closing, or when they **** something up and they rushed into something without trying to even the odds), or it should be two hard encounters(upper limits) and one proper deadly encounter(somone could die if too many bad rolls stack up or someone decides to throw the fight) with a short rest between each encounter. I tell my players that if they want to play warlocks, I could come up with a way to homebrew it to reduce its short rest dependency, none of them ever wanted to play a warlock yet. With these encounter rules, I only killed 3 characters in our 2 year long campaign, and we had a few close calls. I tried upping the number of encounters in the new campaign we started last month, I tried to put 5 combat encounters in a single session and they hated it (remind you we use roll20 and everyone has their fancy macros so it goes fast).

[MaxWilson]

So in those systems a fight is inherently relevant, because winning also takes its toll, and thus having had a streak of fights along some time means the group is in a weakened state. In DnD you need to have this happen within the span of a long rest for any of it to have any impact, and outside of a dungeon its somewhat hard to pull off, thus rendering travel either deadly or trivial, which IMO is one of the biggest problems.

IMO the sweet spot is when it is uncertain, which isn't necessarily the same thing as "risky." It means "you can't quantify the risk," and therefore there is dramatic tension.

An encounter with three belligerent knights in ebon-black armor, demanding to share your campsite, can be fun and interesting even if it turns out in the end that the three knights are all overconfident 3rd level mooks, because you don't know when you decide to kick them out of your sleeping bag that they are in fact going to be mooks.

Same goes for a deep hole in the ground, from within which you think you see a glint of something shiny about 40' down. Is it a treasure trove or the gullet of a Purple Worm? Climb down and find out! (Perhaps even the DM does not know until you climb down and he rolls the dice to find out what happens!)

As you ride through the pass, a frost giant descends the mountain slopes towards you, carrying a large sack. It doesn't look angry but it does look very big. Do you ride away at top speed or wait to see what it has to say?

Uncertainty. That is what good dungeon fantasy is all about.

[Skylivedk]

That has nothing to do with having 6 to 8 encounters a day. The published modules certainly give you the time to short rests appropriately for those classes to work.

No, they don't. Not for the majority of their chapters.

Spoiler

Show

Storm King's Thunder

Goldenfields: town is attacked plus you have to make the commander extra stupid if the town guard isn't strong enough to kill them on their own (so I made him that). But an hour's rest as the city is burning?

The Wild Frontier: an entire chapter basically without a single dungeon needing a short rest.

The Oracle: first proper dungeon where short rests make sense... Well, besides the encounters being super easy until BBEG shows up and resources hardly matter anyway.

Frost giants hold: tops one short rest needed (but a long rest group could blast through and be fine)

Maelstrom: 0-1 SR

In the Tentacles: only long rest encounters (I added a Doomsday clock twice to change that).

Under the Desert: look forward to trying it.

Tomb of Annihilation:
All the hex crawling encounters are basically Nova fodder. Short rest has only been an advantage if sleep was lost. Only mattered to our cleric.

Medusa had a good balance of encounters.

Temple of the night serpent has been good for short rest // temple town in general had us do some... Well, mostly because I asked for them. We could have sacrificed more NPCs.

Lost Mines:
The Red Hoods. That's it. Haven't played the whole thing through yet.

SKT, player level 1-9: two areas
ToA, 1-7: two areas
Lost Mines 1-4: 1 area

[Snowbluff]

If you run an official published adventure, you'll notice there is almost no guidance for DMs on achieving 6-8 encounters per day.

I strongly suspected the 6-8 encounters guidelines was abandoned early on by Wotc for their published adventures when they realized how hard it is to implement in practice.

Jeremy Crawford himself has backpedaled, stating "D&D doesn’t require a certain number of encounters per day" & "There is no minimum".

I have to agree with this up to this point. I run a lot of published adventures and basically none of them uphold anything resembling a 6-8 encounter day. These season 5 mods feels like they're 2-3 by default (whether or not you consider the call to arms encounters, etc), and topping off with 5 with bonus objectives.

As a result, I find SR based classes harder to play. They have few resources per day effectively, as they're no reason for the rest of the party to take a short rest most of the time.

[Rukelnikov]

IMO the sweet spot is when it is uncertain, which isn't necessarily the same thing as "risky." It means "you can't quantify the risk," and therefore there is dramatic tension.

An encounter with three belligerent knights in ebon-black armor, demanding to share your campsite, can be fun and interesting even if it turns out in the end that the three knights are all overconfident 3rd level mooks, because you don't know when you decide to kick them out of your sleeping bag that they are in fact going to be mooks.

Same goes for a deep hole in the ground, from within which you think you see a glint of something shiny about 40' down. Is it a treasure trove or the gullet of a Purple Worm? Climb down and find out! (Perhaps even the DM does not know until you climb down and he rolls the dice to find out what happens!)

As you ride through the pass, a frost giant descends the mountain slopes towards you, carrying a large sack. It doesn't look angry but it does look very big. Do you ride away at top speed or wait to see what it has to say?

Uncertainty. That is what good dungeon fantasy is all about.

I wholeheartedly agree with that (and that's one of my biggest gripes with linear systems like dnd, but that's a discussion for another time).

Problem is, every bet has to be all or nothing, in any given situation, a player knows that the only possible risk is death (at least in the lower levels, then you can threaten their magic items), because either you defeat the encounter and rest, so nothing happened (actually you are stronger than before), or you die, dnd is pretty much "what does not kill me makes me stronger".

And that puts the DM in a tricky situation, do I wanna turn every encounter into a potential TPK? Not really, every now and then maybe. Then most of my encounters will have no repercussion in the PCs, except they do, because players get XP from those encounters, then either they are challenging but not fatal, resulting in players earning sizeable XP, which over the course of a campaign would amount to a lot, or they have to be boringly trivial, so they don't overlevel the adventure too fast.

There are of course other things that can be done besides death, enemies stealing/destroying magic items is one of the most dangerous things to happen, very often far worse than death. PCs can be taken prisioners, but that's not something that fits most adventures.

I think my problem is the lack (mostly) of manageable lasting resource drain.

[Agent-KI7KO]

The word “encounter” includes elaborate trap rooms, puzzles, diplomacy. It’s not just combat, and yes you can award XP for these.

[Tanarii]

The one thing you can always notice when playing with "older" RPG people is that there is always more roleplay and story and less dices than when you play with new people or when you started with RPGs. Story and roleplay comes first, dialogues, diplomacy etc. Combat is still important and essential but it's not anymore a main focus, more likely it just serves the story and it's meant to be an "epic" piece of it.

Those must be very young "older" people. IMX D&D grognards tend towards being the most old-school dungeon & wilderness adventuring crawl oriented folks around. They won't assume combat, in fact they often try to avoid it or make sure they'll win it. But 6-8 encounters per adventuring day, combat or not, is on the low side for a crawl-type adventure. And course, since roleplaying is making decisions for your character in the fantasy environment, they tend to be some of the heaviest roleplayers too, since dungeon and wilderness crawls usually tend to involve many meaningful decisions being made regularly just to survive.

That's when they play D&D of course. For "story" heavy gaming, old-school grognards tend to play other games instead.

I'm guessing most folks you've encountered that are "older" mostly grew up on 2e, or happen to buy into the idea that roleplaying is about cooperative storytelling.

[Xetheral]

Problem is, every bet has to be all or nothing, in any given situation, a player knows that the only possible risk is death (at least in the lower levels, then you can threaten their magic items), because either you defeat the encounter and rest, so nothing happened (actually you are stronger than before), or you die, dnd is pretty much "what does not kill me makes me stronger".

I can't agree with this at all. Sure, in dangerous, climactic combats, it's sometimes win-or-die. But for most significant combats, the question is whether or not the PCs will achieve their goals, rather than whether they survive. The orc guardsmen are no threat to the PCs... but can the PCs prevent them from raising the alarm? The kidnappers are no threat to the PCs... but can the PCs stop them from killing the victim? The enemy has dispatched a spoiling force to slow the PCs and their army... the PCs' forces can easily crush the enemy detachment, but can they do so fast enough to catch up to the main enemy force? It can even be as simple as opportunity cost: sure, the PCs weren't in any real danger themselves, but by taking the time to move against one foe, another is left unchecked.

[Pex]

The flaw is having some classes be mostly if not entirely short rest dependent while others are mostly if not entirely long rest dependent. Ironic for me to say since I hate the system, they should have had more faith in 4E in giving all the classes long rest dependent goodies and short rest dependent goodies. The sameness problem of 4E wasn't entirely everyone having the same resource mechanic. As long as class abilities are significantly different enough from each other and within themselves as you gain levels in the class the sameness problem of 4E wouldn't be a factor.

The stress is, in my opinion, mostly on short rest dependent classes because it's harder to conserve their resources. They don't get a lot of it because it's expected to be refreshed. However, too often there isn't in game time to take the rest or the party is not in a safe area. There will be short rests but not at the convenience of the short rest dependent characters. Long rest classes aren't pressed for time and a safe place or as safe as can be will be found. When they need a long rest everyone needs a long rest, and they'll get it.

Rests happen when gameplay naturally allows for it. The number of encounters per game day will vary. The DM can try to pace it, but player decisions and randomness of dice rolls will alter it. Short rest classes over or under benefit as the events happen.

Now, if you want the thread title question answered literally in what I think is 5E's biggest flaw, that's a whole other can of worms a few of my regular readers would rather I not bring up here.

[sithlordnergal]

The stress is, in my opinion, mostly on short rest dependent classes because it's harder to conserve their resources. They don't get a lot of it because it's expected to be refreshed. However, too often there isn't in game time to take the rest or the party is not in a safe area. There will be short rests but not at the convenience of the short rest dependent characters. Long rest classes aren't pressed for time and a safe place or as safe as can be will be found. When they need a long rest everyone needs a long rest, and they'll get it.

I actually found a way to balance Short and Long Rests. Even if the party finds a safe place they can long rest, simply tell them what sort of benefits they can gain at that moment in time. For example, if you have a Moon Druid who wakes up, uses a Wild Shape, then tries to short rest before the adventuring day starts so that they have all their Wild Shapes and can start as a Beast/Elemental, tell them they don't get the benefits of a short rest. If the party is in a safe place, and they want to do some of that "5-minute adventuring day" stuff where they want to take nothing but long rests, inform them any resting they do will only grant them the benefits of a short rest.

You don't have to explain it, but if you do want to you can explain it as "You've just been resting, therefore you would not gain any benefits of such a rest". I do it with my players, and it works wonders. Short Rest classes get a proper number of short rests without the issue of the Warlock resting after every encounter, and long rest classes have to actually ration their resources properly. And if you're good at keeping track of party resources in your head, like keeping track of how many spells each spell caster has used, you can generally adjust the encounters throughout their adventuring day accordingly.

[Tanarii]

Long rest classes aren't pressed for time and a safe place or as safe as can be will be found. When they need a long rest everyone needs a long rest, and they'll get it.

IMX it is newer players of long rest casters (in particular) in my campaign that will blow their wad and start crying about a long rest far before anyone else in the party is ready for one.

Otoh I also generally have 1 long rest = one session, which encourages players to press on, as opposed to ending the session early.

I also have no problem fitting 1 to 1-1/3 adventuring days of (combat and non) encounters into a 3-4 hour session. Although I do agree that talking encounters and simple traps/tricks encounters, both of which I generally rate as Easy due to no significant loss of resources expected, take up the most time per slice of the adventuring day.

[BurgerBeast]

I think it’s the rapid healing that is problematic, but it’s my opinion that those two things (rapid healing and encounters per day design goal) are interconnected to the point that it’s a chicken-or-the-egg thing.

So yes, I do think the number of encounters against which the game is balanced is problematic.

At the end of the day, they had to design the game with some number If encounters a in mind... so it’s just preference. My reasons are that I like to have the ability to have slower attrition over days as a possibility. Maybe it is possible and I just haven’t found that balance yet.

[MeeposFire]

Actually in 4e a class with no dailies and all encounter powers could do very well (a slayer with access to his choice of fighter encounter powers would be really nasty and give any striker a run for its money). The "problem" in 5e is not that there are short rest and long rest based classes but rather the fact that in some people's games short rest classes do not get access to their expected short rests. IN 4e encounter powers reset in 5 minutes while dailies took that 8 hours of rest. This meant you had to really try to prevent a character from getting his encounter powers back before the next fight. In 5e the 1 hour time to get back short rest abilities is the real limiting factor not as much the number of encounters (unless you are doing the 1 encounter per long rest but most do not advocate for that). If you change the duration of short rests to work for your game (I have experimented with a 5 minute first short rest, 10 minutes for the 2nd, and 1 hour for every short rest after that) then your short rest characters will be fine in almost any number of encounters.

[djreynolds]

I'm currently DMing Undermountain.

At first I told players we would try in 3 hours to get through each level. Well we are still in level 2, after 5 or 6, three hour sessions.... and they seem content.

It's not just about beating the dungeon for them, they like to look through everything and explore... I just try nudge them along.

They're accumulating wealth, saving poor souls, taking notes, helping Volo finish latest novel.

I encourage short rests and the deal is I roll 17-18 it's a random encounter. If they rest right after a fight, I roll with advantage, because they made ruckus.

Find out what your table wants and what the adventure requires, and really remember to make sure everyone shines

[MaxWilson]

I wholeheartedly agree with that (and that's one of my biggest gripes with linear systems like dnd, but that's a discussion for another time).

Problem is, every bet has to be all or nothing, in any given situation, a player knows that the only possible risk is death (at least in the lower levels, then you can threaten their magic items), because either you defeat the encounter and rest, so nothing happened (actually you are stronger than before), or you die, dnd is pretty much "what does not kill me makes me stronger".

Nitpick: you can still destroy magic items at high level (IMG any item not currently being held by a fully-conscious PC has no plot armor, and I don't think RAW says any differently) and you can kill one PC without it necessarily being a TPK, and you can set up situations that threaten other things (like their income stream or social standing/reputation).

But that's a nitpick because I agree with your basic point here: D&D, especially 5E, is oriented very much around "what does not kill me makes me stronger." It's un-idiomatic to have PCs grow weaker over time due to losses--this isn't Call of Cthulhu. :-)

And that puts the DM in a tricky situation, do I wanna turn every encounter into a potential TPK? Not really, every now and then maybe. Then most of my encounters will have no repercussion in the PCs, except they do, because players get XP from those encounters, then either they are challenging but not fatal, resulting in players earning sizeable XP, which over the course of a campaign would amount to a lot, or they have to be boringly trivial, so they don't overlevel the adventure too fast.

I feel like this is somewhat of a false dichotomy, because you can tweak the XP rules (e.g. 10x normal XP to advance), but I agree that 5E's built-in XP tables do cause you to rocket up in levels very quickly, especially if you use high-CR monsters against low-level PCs. (Not so much if you use low-CR monsters against mid- or high-level PCs; a company of 200 hobgoblins may be a pain and a half to kill, but they only yield 5000 XP per PC for a party of four.)

There are of course other things that can be done besides death, enemies stealing/destroying magic items is one of the most dangerous things to happen, very often far worse than death. PCs can be taken prisioners, but that's not something that fits most adventures.

I think my problem is the lack (mostly) of manageable lasting resource drain.

I hear you. One of the things that IMO makes 5E not a very good TTRPG is that it's so deeply rooted in consequence-free play as a philosophy. It tends to make the game boring and samey. It is possible to change that, but it's not idiomatic for 5E, and you wind up having to do lots of the work yourself (e.g. inventing economic systems or systems for representing/gaining/losing reputation, so the players can invest themselves in that system and so you can generate dramatic tension by within that system instead of the built-in mostly-consequence-free 5E systems like health and magic items).

5E makes a good basis for a CRPG but a fairly mediocre TTRPG.

Edit: oh, let's not forget how easy it is to break even the parts of 5E that are supposed to represent consumable resources, whether that is the ease of cranking out magical longbows for animated skeletons using Xanathar's rules, or the ridiculous amount of wealth a mid-level party can gain from raiding the hoard of a CR 17 dragon (on the order of hundreds of thousands of gp per dragon hoard, even if you ignore the DMG's advice about rolling multiple times for creatures that like to hoard). It's relatively easy to fix but still somewhat irksome--one gets the sense that whoever wrote up those treasure tables imagined that CR 17 monsters would only be killable by level 17+ adventurers, but due to the rest of the system that just ain't so.

[JoeJ]

I divided the expected average xp per day by the encounter difficulty thresholds at each level. The number of encounters needed to meet the daily average varies slightly from level to levels, so I took the mean.

By this measure, if all encounters are deadly there should be an average of 2.9 encounters per adventure day (a low of 2.6 at levels 12, 13, and 14, and a high of 3.4 at level 4). If all encounters are easy, there should be an average of 13.2 encounters per adventure day (a low of 11.5 at level 12, and a high of 16.0 at level 3). In actual play, most days should have a mix of encounter difficulties, so the number of encounters necessary to reach the average daily xp will be somewhere between these extremes.

[MaxWilson]

I divided the expected average xp per day by the encounter difficulty thresholds at each level. The number of encounters needed to meet the daily average varies slightly from level to levels, so I took the mean.

By this measure, if all encounters are deadly there should be an average of 2.9 encounters per adventure day (a low of 2.6 at levels 12, 13, and 14, and a high of 3.4 at level 4). If all encounters are easy, there should be an average of 13.2 encounters per adventure day (a low of 11.5 at level 12, and a high of 16.0 at level 3). In actual play, most days should have a mix of encounter difficulties, so the number of encounters necessary to reach the average daily xp will be somewhere between these extremes.

Those numbers don't look right to me. For example, at level 12, the daily budget for four PCs is 48,00 XP, the Easy threshold is 4000 XP, and the Medium threshold is 8000 XP. A typical Easy encounter will be 4000-7999 XP, call it 6000 XP on average, so you should have about eight Easy encounters per long rest--not 11.5 of them. At level 3, there should be about ten and a half Easy encounters per day, not sixteen.

[JoeJ]

Those numbers don't look right to me. For example, at level 12, the daily budget for four PCs is 48,00 XP, the Easy threshold is 4000 XP, and the Medium threshold is 8000 XP. A typical Easy encounter will be 4000-7999 XP, call it 6000 XP on average, so you should have about eight Easy encounters per long rest--not 11.5 of them. At level 3, there should be about ten and a half Easy encounters per day, not sixteen.

I was using the threshold for each encounter difficulty. At level 12 you've got 11,500 divided by 1,000, or 11.5 encounters. At level 3 it's 1,200 divided by 75, which is 16.

[Rukelnikov]

I can't agree with this at all. Sure, in dangerous, climactic combats, it's sometimes win-or-die. But for most significant combats, the question is whether or not the PCs will achieve their goals, rather than whether they survive. The orc guardsmen are no threat to the PCs... but can the PCs prevent them from raising the alarm? The kidnappers are no threat to the PCs... but can the PCs stop them from killing the victim? The enemy has dispatched a spoiling force to slow the PCs and their army... the PCs' forces can easily crush the enemy detachment, but can they do so fast enough to catch up to the main enemy force? It can even be as simple as opportunity cost: sure, the PCs weren't in any real danger themselves, but by taking the time to move against one foe, another is left unchecked.

I was talking about traveling encounters, not all in general.