Your experiences about encounters per day

[noce]

I always read in forums that four encounters per day are expected, and it seems like everyone always run four encounters per day.

Except, in my experience this is not the case.
I must admit that games I play in often involve a lot of intrigue, investigation, politics, social interaction and moral dilemmas. In such campaigns many days are spent within a city, so often times we don't have encounters at all for two or more sessions, that in game terms could translate in more than a week without rolling initiative.

Obviously, even in our games there are quests, dungeons, exploration and so on.
If we have to go from point A to point B, we could fight a random encounter per day, it's very unlikely we're going to fight two.
This is also because of our behaviour: for example, if we are attacked by orc explorers in the plains we move inside the forest to avoid being noticed, there we could fight a couple of wolves, but that's it.

The fact is, in a dungeon I expect many encounters being likely, but if there were four encouters even in normal days passed traveling or in a city, it would be both unrealistic and boring.
Come on, how many wolves are there in the forest and how little exciting is it to tear them apart four times per day? It would just slow down the real game and the main story.

What's your experience about this? How many encounters are there in your games? And is there a difference in number of encounters you fight in regular days and in dangerous days?

Last question: how do you think number of expected encounters impacts game balance and player experience?
For example, with few encounters we do not have the 15 minutes days problem. Also, every encounter is of much higher CR than normal (for example CR 7 against two LVL 4 characters, CR 8 against a LVL 4 party).

[sleepyphoenixx]

4 encounters per day are the expected average, not a hard rule. That doesn't mean you have to cram 4 encounters into every resting period.
It also expects a certain degree of challenge, so if your encounters are more difficult you obviously need less.

Encounters also aren't limited to combat, pretty much anything that might make you use some of your daily resources qualifies.

It's a somewhat useful guideline when you're not sure how hard you can push your players, but the high variance in strength and staying power between different party compositions ensures it will never be more than a stopgap until you get enough DM experience to forget about it.

[Troacctid]

Fewer encounters means harder encounters. More encounters means easier encounters.

[Fizban]

Four encounters comes from each encounter at EL=Party level being expected to take 20% of your resources: thus, you can fight four without running out and being killed. The DMG does not actually endorse 4/day as any sort of hard rule, but actually accounting for the range of difficulties and encounter chances would take effort, nuance, and a willingness to actually play out fights that don't have a high chance of failure. But it's easy to use as some sort of perfect expected amount for arguments that generally don't hold up once you actually get to a real game.

[Gorthawar]

The campaign I'm playing in rarely has more than one or two encounters a day. However, they tend to be all out life or death type affairs a lot of the time.

In the game I DM myself however I tend to use it as a guideline on a regular basis. It's helpful to understand how far the party can roughly proceed into a dungeon before they have to rest and allows me to prepare accordingly.

It is however highly dependant on the party composition/ encounter selection as well.

[Twurps]

In our current campaign, where things are under very little time pressure (just hit lvl14, 5 years of ingame time has past), we have 1 or 2 combat encounters a day on some days (travelling/exploring) and equally many sessions without any combat, filled with downtime/crafting, political intrigue, planning, shopping, etc. I think only a handfull of times did we ever have 4 or 5 encounters in a day, where the party got stuck in a situation they had to fight themselves out of, with little opportunity to rest and/or extract themselves from the situation. In all other cases, my party would avoid combat after 1 or 2 serious encounters.

I like it that way.
IC: Why would you risk your life going into an encounter ill prepared, wounded, low on spells and ammo, etc. When you can just walk away and come back when you're better prepared. Sometimes there's a good reason. But not every day.
OOC: Gametime is limited. I like to spend it on more challenging encounters, rather than 'autopilot' through 4 relatively uneventful encounters every day.

[Mordante]

Combat is just one of the many aspects of the game. There are so many more things to do. Political intrigue, shopping, social interactions, etcetera. Some of these can be just as deadly as combat. Disrespect the local authority and you can lose you head.

Sometimes combat can even be boring it takes too long especially at higher level. Combat is a means and not a goal.

[Biggus]

In dungeon-type adventures I find four encounters a day works out about right, in other types it's generally less. Most groups I've played in have a fairly kick-in-the-door style, but as you say unless you're travelling in a particularly dangerous area you're just not going to get that many encounters in a day (or not ones which are worth XP past low levels, anyway).

I also tend to pitch encounters slightly higher than recommended because I find it's more fun that way, but only about 1CR higher than what represents a "challenging" encounter for the group. In my current group this is actually 2-3CRs higher than it theoretically should be, but that's because they're moderately optimized (at least compared to the horribly unoptimized benchmark PCs) and so can punch above their weight by a level or two.

[Xervous]

The real trick about expected encounters per day is that it’s the players’ expectations that matter. I’ve reached a point where my current players understand that efficient resource utilization allows them to do more things in a day, which is important because they like to squeeze in as many side quests as possible in between “the sage says come back in a week” or “the quintuple eclipse is coming in 6 months”. So long as they don’t botch scouting/research they have a good idea of what they’re getting themselves into at a site, and they tend to budget for extra unexpected stuff because they know I structure things to tempt their various greeds. There’s typically more things they want to do than they are capable of, including the surprise opportunities that pop up to tempt their resources. It’s not “we are going to fight X encounters”, it’s “I’m not sure if the prisoners are worth our time and effort. There might be a juicy target or a complication we have to engage later.”

Do they sometimes nova big things after tons of planning? Yeah, but that’s just the reward after so many days/weeks of hard work.

As for typical site based encounter quantity, they tend to push 5+ when it’s discretely broken up. Though all too many turn into rolling waves of reinforcements.

[Endarire]

Encounters per day will simply vary depending on your game, GM, players, and expectations. As GM, I've had mixed amounts of encounters per day and my groups have often decided they want to do X or stop after Y. I've also not been a fan of tight time limits.

Having played Baldur's Gate, very low level combat has normally been, "Kill something then take a nap." Higher level combat has been, "We're still fine after many fights and want to keep going before our buffs expire!" There's definitely a range!

[icefractal]

I'd note that days with no encounters don't change the balance. Take a campaign where you spend months on politics and investigation, but when you do fight it's a gauntlet of 6+ encounters that need to be cleared in one go - that campaign effectively has 6 fights/day, and thus favors higher-endurance classes.

That said, I agree that there are quite often less than four encounters a day. Many times it just doesn't make IC sense for there to be more, and we care about that more than potential balance.

And also ... "potential" balance, not guaranteed. When you optimize, classes don't necessarily have their typical stamina. Buff-stack casters who can go all day. Item-heavy martials who can go nova in 1-2 fights and then want to rest. It all depends on how you build it, and differences in individual optimization tend to make more difference than which classes the encounter rate theoretically favors. IME, sometimes you get better intra-party balance with one encounter a day, and other times it'd be best at a huge amount like 10+ (albeit we probably wouldn't do that because it seems too grindy), it all depends on the specifics. So there's no inherent benefit to four.

[Seward]

Living Greyhawk was designed around episodic adventures that assumed 3 combat encounters would take up a lot of the 4-6 hours devoted to finishing them (this was especially important at conventions, you assigned the GMs who were brisk about getting combats done to the more complex higher level encounters). In a one-round adventure you could be pretty sure you'd only likely get 3 difficult combat encounters (there might be a curbstomp encounter instead of a puzzle or roleplay encounter) and in many days they wouldn't all happen on one day. However it wasn't uncommon to start "in media res" and open with an encounter before any chance to know your party members, reset spells, even cast spells beyond what you can keep going all day, and some days it went downhill from there.

Two round adventures had more scope for variation, and would be more likely to have a "invade the stronghold and fight five hard encounters in a row" type situations. What they called "Core Specials" or "Battle Interactives" would tend to be heavy on the combat, cram a lot of encounters in, be run by only GMs with a track record of handling complex encounters and running fights swiftly and have an expectation that some parties would not complete it in time, that only parties who were ALSO good at managing battles briskly would really get through it. These adventures tended to have campaign-permanent events either at the regional or even campaign-wide scale, could cause permadeath to major NPCS/antagonists, have a city destroyed on a bad result, that sort of thing, with results mailed in to the author and results showing up in future adventures, or announced by the campaign staff.

Pathfinder Society was modeled on Living Greyhawk in many ways, except since you aren't murderhoboes meeting in taverns for adventures but an Indiana Jones-style combat-archaeologists you are far less likely to be jumped by old enemies in the first encounter, or have a campsite raided (travel was more often abstracted as "you get on a boat, now you are near the site"), but were more likely to have an adventure dependent on party efficiency of researching stuff in a library, or plot elements associated with doing damage to your organization (whispering campaigns, rescue missions for expeditions that went missing, assassination attempts during the annual party at the HQ, etc). Still 3 hard encounters per round, with a few adventures designed to break that schedule.

Both campaigns adapted published modules that completely broke those patterns.

Published modules (Adventure Paths in Pathfinder) usually fall to the 1-3 encounter scale when just wandering around but feature a hard target with a lot of rapid encounters, some of whom will support each other (and might come after you if you are forced to retreat or repeatedly raid, so guard campsites well).

Usually when doing more than 3x EL+3 encounters (assumes a 4-6 person party, 5 average, playing in level) you are in a situation where you are the aggressor (storming the castle) rather than in something reactive (endless waves of assassins popping out a few minutes after you dealt with the last batch), although convention type battle interactives did sometimes feature unprepared people in "go to a festival" type gear/spell mix trying to defend themselves and everybody around them from a bunch of gates spewing outsiders, usually though even those had some period where you could get the civilians who were alive to safety and prepare for the next assault, usually while some group (either higher or lower level adventurers depending on where the higher threat lay) is investigating the cause and must succeed to end it.

Note that 4 person parties were considered weak, for that 3xEL+2 would work better. You tried to have characters in 4 person parties either built unusually strong for combat or at least higher level. Although that can cause other problems. I distinctly remembered one party where my wizard was for reasons of build and higher level, well over half the party offense and got hit with a phantasmal killer in the opening round against an invisible flying caster (and the rest of the party had neither significant ranged attacks, ability to fly or even see invisible).

I took a moment to go through all my adventure records to stack every save bonus, reroll favor, anything I could think of because failing both saves would probably TPK the party. They'd handle the minions, but if I got taken out, they were screwed. After all that I failed the will save but made the fort save, and did my own offensive nova in return out of panic.




And also ... "potential" balance, not guaranteed. When you optimize, classes don't necessarily have their typical stamina. Buff-stack casters who can go all day. Item-heavy martials who can go nova in 1-2 fights and then want to rest. It all depends on how you build it, and differences in individual optimization tend to make more difference than which classes the encounter rate theoretically favors. IME, sometimes you get better intra-party balance with one encounter a day, and other times it'd be best at a huge amount like 10+ (albeit we probably wouldn't do that because it seems too grindy), it all depends on the specifics. So there's no inherent benefit to four.

In a campaign, it's possible to keep track of who in the party is good at long grinding days, who in the party is better in nova situations and who can switch-hit if they know what the day is likely to be like (usually tier 1 prepared casters). You can then design adventures where everybody gets the spotlight.

The thing is, I think people overrate how important build is or party composition is. Random characters of all types and mixed levels got tossed together in multiple adventures and usually did just fine in both LG and Pathfinder Society. However some of that is the players know that they can't count on any help from the GM or adventure and most don't want to suck and be a load on the party.

In organized play, the nova-types had to have a plan for a long day, that plan often involved consumables too expensive for routine use but busted out when they're tapped and need more oomph to contribute. The long haul characters also used consumables to up their game in things like a known dangerous encounter coming up, and usually would have an "oh crap" button or two to push to mini-nova once a day if the usual approaches aren't working. The switch hitters would rise or fall based on how well their spell selection worked, or, in the case of spont casters would tailor approach to the situation. No matter who you were you could not entirely count on getting key buffs, which lead to things like routine purchase of a single potion of fly for any melee type past level 5.

For example I had a Pathfinder character designed to use polymorph-type effects and buffs to be a light infantry in a "we're about to do a bunch of encounters at once" scenario, but had a blasting option for your average day to use when not buffed for when the party is jumped unprepared for a fight. The latter approach uses a lot more spell slots, but she could switch it up even mid fight if the primary approach just wasn't working.

She had trouble "playing up" at times, as she was adequate light infantry and adequate blaster but not amazing at either, just a decent contributor. When that happened her plan was to go mostly support actions, using her action economy to ensure whomever was effective in a current fight got their best opportunity to use their actions. (one tough long haul situation featured enemies actually immune to both of her primary blasting options and were too high AC to hit in melee mode. Fortunately the party had several character in their element and she was able to help by standing them up if prone, restoring weapons if disarmed, moving somebody out of full attack range etc)

[RandomPeasant]

That said, I agree that there are quite often less than four encounters a day. Many times it just doesn't make IC sense for there to be more, and we care about that more than potential balance.

People complain a lot about the 15-minute workday, but it really is how people would behave in a lot of situations. It can be fun to have some adventures that use ticking clocks or survival-focused setups to make budgeting daily resources extremely important, but if that happens every single adventure it becomes contrived relatively quickly.


And also ... "potential" balance, not guaranteed. When you optimize, classes don't necessarily have their typical stamina. Buff-stack casters who can go all day. Item-heavy martials who can go nova in 1-2 fights and then want to rest.

It can also be quite difficult to calibrate the number of encounters so that balance is achieved. Even if it's true that the Fighter-type wants lots of encounters and the Wizard-type wants few encounters, figuring out whether it's four or two or eight that strikes the appropriate balance can be very difficult. Especially since what the encounters are, and how well players handle them, and how the dice come up in an individual encounter can effect that balance (and the underlying goal, which is generally something more like satisfaction or spotlight time). It might be that the party Warblade beats up on a single encounter that was getting its challenge from saves he passed with moment of perfect mind and DR he ignored with mountain hammer. It may be that the party Warmage was the MVP in a long series of fights comprised of groups of weak enemies she could dispatch with fireball.