Combats

[Demonic Spoon]

So I have a bit of a weird question.


It seems like D&D is generally balanced towards a series of individual combats in one day, say 5-6 unique encounters...Just by how many powerful items are balanced by only functioning once or twice per day, how the primary disadvantage of certain casters like wizards is their limited number of daily spells...Most obvious of these is the psychoactive skins in the Magic Item Compendium.

However, my group generally does things differently... All of the DMs I've had (all in the same group) generally only have one or two individual combats per session, max (though these combats are generally quite drawn-out).

So I was curious: how do you folks normally handle that? Do you normally have a smaller number of epic combats in a single session, a more drawn-out series of smaller combats, or a mixture of both?

Just curious.

[Zaq]

Nothing says that one session = one in-game day. In my current group, we usually go two or three sessions per in-game day, even though we have around four to six encounters per in-game day.

That said, in the very same group, we did go through a rather long period where we wouldn't have more than one or two encounters per in-game day. There was something of a fluff reason for it (it was a big and mostly empty desert, so the GM didn't feel that it made sense for us to be tripping over monsters every five feet . . . and we were bigger and scarier than a lot of the monsters on the random table, so they ran from us, sometimes without us noticing), but it was still a weirdly different paradigm.

Honestly, that's why I like dungeons. They're compact, so you have a reason other than a pure gentlemen's agreement for having the party run into an appropriate number of level-appropriate encounters per in-game day. In most other environments, if you want to have monsters (or worse, humanoid enemies) running into you every ten minutes, you need a compelling reason why they aren't tripping over each other and why this area is worth exploring. (Sure, if you're doing military recon or something, it makes sense, but I'm a big fan of the "explore this nifty uncharted territory!" style of adventure, so yeah.)

[Tvtyrant]

I have had DMs run 10-12 encounters a "day" and have the day last several sessions, and the opposite where it would be a single encounter followed by rest. The usual 4 in the guide doesn't actually come up much, probably because 4 somewhat difficult encounters aren't as exciting as 1 big one or as grueling as 10 smaller ones.

[KillianHawkeye]

In my experience, the number of encounters per in-game day tends to be based on the environment. For wilderness encounters during overland travel, one or maybe two a day tends to be sufficient. For dungeons or something like an enemy encampment (or similar heavily patrolled regions), we usually run several more encounters per day for as long as the PCs and/or enemies don't decide to retreat.

As a DM, I like to run at least one combat per game session just so people don't get too bored, but as previously noted, sessions != days.

[Aharon]

I tend to run 2 encounters per session, which, dependent on context, is anywhere between in-game hours and in-game months. Obviously, if the players get to use all their ressources, I crank up the EL to compensate.

I would prefer more battles/session, but they don't play out very fast, for a multitude of reasons (i.e. only about a session/month => players forget rules in between sessions and need longer to look them up again.)

[Bang!]

I haven't played D&D in a while, but my group is the kind where wizard players are basically happy to plink with crossbows, toss torches at stuff, sick their familiars at enemies and do all sorts of things that are blantantly bad tactics, but which stretch out the spells/day until long after they're needed.

Our sessions were typically structured to include about a week of game time: a day or two establishing a story for a dungeon and advancing plot (0-2 brief encounters), a day grinding through the dungeon (4-6 brief encounters) and a day or two resolving dungeon and plot stuff (0-2 brief encounters), usually with a longer encounter (2+ rounds) tossed in somewhere.

I'm kind of curious how a mechanic like Spycraft's abilities/session would act in D&D. Just to cut out the in-game breaks and spell selections that seem to take half the RL time of D&D in certain groups.

[Captainspork]

As people have said, it really depends on the goals of the session. When I have a party in a dungeon, I tend to have several small encounters, with at least one drawn-out fight (usually at the end). This is due to the fact that most of my dungeons are goal-oriented, and require the party to accomplish some sort of task, as opposed to just exploration. When characters (casters, for example) or items throw that out of balance a bit, I tend to up the difficulty of the "smaller" encounters, or throw in a mid-level encounter (mini-boss type I guess), and force those characters to choose where to blow their limited spells or charges. In my experience, I think it helps to rebalance things a bit:smallsmile:.

[LordBlades]

In my group we do things as it would logically be appropriate for the in-game situation.

If we're ambushing a single guy adn manage to catch him unprepared we'll have a single fight. If we're clearing a dungeon or the like, we'll have more fights. Longest number of fights I can recall without rest was about 9, when our castle got invaded by a raiding party of demons, and we had to clean it all up before resting.