The [quantity] encounter workday

[violence in the media]

In my experience mid-heroic level 4E combat goes by pretty fast. A typical encounter takes about an 45 minutes to run if everyone's on the same page.

The problem is... few of my DMs have any pretensions of a workday. I have yet to have a workday with more than three encounters in it even though by the rules you're supposed to do 4-5.

I spun this off from the Dungeon Delve topic because I was curious how many people adhere to the encounter quantity paradigm? Personally, it seems arbitrary and nonsensical to balance the game around the idea that every party must get into four or five fights, ahem, encounters, a day. Some days are simply not going to be that busy. Not to mention that you can't really average it out, as seven or eight encounters tomorrow to balance your slack-ass one or two today will generally be fatal. Do we broaden the definition of encounter? Does the slack-jawed yokel you charmed for a ride through the city gates in the hay cart count? Is passing through the gates part of the same encounter? A different encounter? Is bypassing the Stone Sentinels with a Move Silently check, instead of Fireballs and a quarter of your hit points, cheating the encounter system?

Putting this in a modern context, the encounter quantity paradigm means that, on a day when I've scheduled an appointment to go to the dentist, that I also need to have my car break down, have someone try to mug me on the bus, and then unexpectedly have a midterm rescheduled for this evening. Now I know some of us have probably had days like this, but come on. Oh, and the game expects us to have days like this every day that we're actively on the "find a job" adventure.

Does this make sense to anyone? Is there a better way that we can do this? Do we really have to take on the bandit camp in discrete, level-appropriate chunks? We can't just trap them all in the festhall, burn it down, and shoot anyone that makes it out? We can't take the slow, methodical approach to tomb excavation instead of charging pell-mell through dusty, mummy-strewn corridors?

[tzor]

Putting this in a modern context, the encounter quantity paradigm means that, on a day when I've scheduled an appointment to go to the dentist, that I also need to have my car break down, have someone try to mug me on the bus, and then unexpectedly have a midterm rescheduled for this evening.

Congratulations! You have just discovered the secret to successful National Novel Writing Month writing as well as for the general secret to most modern scripts. You also have the reason why real life is ultimately boring because every day is not a multi-plot epsiode in and of itself.

Mind you I never tried to be that "plot intense" in terms of my gaming sessions, but at the same time, there is an expectation of maximizing the experience / learning curve and that means that players and DMs will seek to push the envelope if the players are really into leveling and the DM wants to overcome boredom.

[souran]

Yes, the encounters per day can seem a tad strange when you try and put it into an everyday context. However, your everyday does not represent what advenutrers are doing.


Compare the pacing to a movie though.

A lot of horror movies take place over a single night. Look at district 9, it has exactly 1 point that could be considered extended rest (when he sleeps in the burned hut). The hospital stay and the time spent in captivity is indeterminant but based on the alien reactions they cannot be more than a day or 2. So the whole movie happens over 4 days, 2 of which have just one extended encounter.

Again, the idea is to allow players to pack a good amount of action into a single day. If they have basically unlimited time or can expend every resource then rest then your adventure needs to have the encounters reflect this.

[RobbyPants]

I spun this off from the Dungeon Delve topic because I was curious how many people adhere to the encounter quantity paradigm? Personally, it seems arbitrary and nonsensical to balance the game around the idea that every party must get into four or five fights, ahem, encounters, a day. Some days are simply not going to be that busy. Not to mention that you can't really average it out, as seven or eight encounters tomorrow to balance your slack-ass one or two today will generally be fatal.

I haven't tried to adhere to the four-encounter-per-day rule, but there are ways to make up for light days without averaging out with seven fights the next day. If the DM throws four or so encounters at the PCs often enough, the players will learn to conserve their resources just in case. So, if they only run through one encounter in a day, they hopefully saved 3/4 of their resources for potential future fights.

Of course, this involves metagaming to make it work, but the X-encounters-per-day system is metagaming too.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The problem with a multiple-encounter workday is that the PCs can bail out at any time. When the alternative is to die it pretty much requires metagaming or railroading to keep the heroes going. I mean, look at this:

http://www.critical-hits.com/2009/06/30 ... eon-delve/

If the PCs had to tackle a seventh encounter do you think that they would have made their PCs participate in it or would they have tried to leave?

Similarly, for the second failed encounter, even if it didn't have a time limit and they all barely got through, do you think that they would've agreed to do a third one if it was a real game?

[violence in the media]

Right, they're meta-gaming concepts. To be clear, I'm not trying to adhere to the 4 encounter day, I'm wondering why 4 encounters was settled upon in the first place. Moreover, why it was decided to be necessary for balance purposes. From a player perspective, it doesn't matter from my time perspective if the game session includes four encounters on one game day or four game days. From a rational standpoint, no one's going to meet any dangerous situation at less than full strength if they can avoid doing so. From a story standpoint, there is only so much contrivance that people will accept before calling bullshit.

As far as "what adventurers are doing" as a justification, it's not like Beowulf swam the North Sea, fought Grendel, his mother, and the Dragon all on the same day. Hercules didn't slay the lion at breakfast, haul ass to go kill the hydra before lunch, then charm the magic pants off of Hippolyta at dinner.

As a small aside, I love horror movies. However, I still recognize that the premises for many of them are incalculably stupid, even if the movie itself winds up being entertaining.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I don't really use encounters. When conflict is resolved through violence in my games, the party and antagonists both have opportunities to pick and choose their battles. If the PCs are attacking a group, they might pick them off a few at a time if they use good tactics, but I'm usually not going to try to contrive a plot that gives them a set amount of challenges of a specific power level every day. I favor enemies who the PCs can either fight large numbers of reliably or fight small groups of with difficulty. A level 8 adventure I'm contemplating here may very well pit a group of 3 PCs that includes a Warmage against several groups of level 4 Tome Warriors and a batch of Huge Air Elementals in one day.

[Lago PARANOIA]

My DMs generally compensate for a multi-encounter workday by just upping the challenges of workdays that do happen.

This works, to a degree. Unfortunately, this approach is poorly suited for both low-level 3E and 4E; in the former it'll probably just end up with your party getting quickly iced. In the latter it'll probably just end up with your party getting slowly ground down and then smoked like a sausage.

The DM I'm in of a game that's reached 8th level has started upping the challenge of individual encounters again, expecting to blow all of our resources on the first encounter. I have to say that it has worked rather well.

[K]

The encounter system exists because people have per day abilities. Sometimes encounters are too hard and you can only go one a day, and sometimes players get suck dice and crap out after two encounters, but the "four encounter day" is a direct result of the fact that people run out of spells or daily powers or potions or whatever.

[RobbyPants]

That, and it was assumed to be "balancing" in that some classes had daily resources and others didn't.

[Doom]

The N-encounters a day thing is an artifact of when DnD4.0 had a 'no healing without spending a healing surge, or at least a daily' paradigm. Of course, folks complained because this paradigm meant that healing potions actually cost a surge, so WoTC got rid of it (complaining isn't fun, after all).

Now that power creep has introduced a few easy ways to get true healing without using healing surges, 'encounters a day' is meaningless, as effectively infinite healing is possible at a fairly low level. I would imagine, if WoTC had a clue, they'll at some point reconfigure their definitions of what constitutes a 'balanced' encounter in light of the power creep, as well as how much should constitute a work day.

[MartinHarper]

Of course, folks complained because this paradigm meant that healing potions actually cost a surge, so WoTC got rid of it (complaining isn't fun, after all).

Healing potions don't cost a surge any more?

[Doom]

No, they got rid of the paradigm that healing should cost a surge or some finite resource, by introducing at-will abilities that heal without costing surges.

[Mask_De_H]

Wouldn't this just be better served with a set of per-session abilities and some refreshing at-will/Winds of Fate abilities? If you remove the concept of per-encounter powers and just go off of a more sensible metagame timeframe things would be alright, right?

Fantasy Craft does this and I find it clever.

[Bill Bisco: Isometric Imp]

If we have per session abilities, now my players will want to end the session, and then start another session to get their per session abiliites back.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Meaning that you don't have to bother generating more than a single encounter's worth of challenge a day? I guess it's good if you want to play in multiple games during a single real-time day.

[NineInchNall]

Ugh. That turns into DBZ style fights that last over multiple episodes. Everyone uses up the per-session abilities as quickly as possible, then calls an end to the session immediately.