Tangent Thread: The Value of Encumbrance (or lack thereof)

[LordCdrMilitant]

In general, I can fit roughly 5 encounters in a session if things are moving smoothly. More if my players are on-top of things. By "adventuring day exp," I mean the adjusted exp in the table for each level. For example, 4 1st-level characters will have 1200 adjusted exp between them. If I give characters the baseline for hard encounters, 300exp, it's only 4 encounters. I could actually throw the baseline for a deadly encounter and a couple slightly-harder-than-hard encounters and bring the encounters to hit the "adventuring day exp" in the table to 3 encounters. Since you're constantly changing the exp using adjusted exp, they won't actually level up in an adventure following this method unless the entire adventure day is made of solo encounters, which would probably suck.

But I'm also saying that there's no need to force yourself to hit that maximum. One or two encounters a day is perfectly valid, though it'll swing things in favor of Nova/LR classes.

I'm also not claiming it's better to cram these encounters into a session but it isn't that hard to get 5 combat encounters in my 4-hour games. Combat doesn't really take more than 30mins-1hr at most.



For Encumbrance, I've looked at my players inventory and stuff is actually comical. Why are they carrying 55 pounds of foraged food, 15 pounds of skinned hide, 8 spider gland sacks, 5 pounds of Vinegar, and 8 pounds of apples? I don't really know. Apparently they value these items, too, since they will drop torches and stuff to keep carrying these and gold.

So if your players are metaphorical goblins like mine, they might enjoy "filling" their carrying capacity by picking up useless crap until they have to drop their arms/legs.

They recently got a donkey but they instantly forgot about it and they're deep within the adventure's Jungle. It'll be rough for them since they also just recently lost 2 party members who were the "strong men" if the group. The new characters should be strong people as well, though, so I think it's fine.

Why is there a quota of XP for an adventuring day? What does the adventuring day have to do with either XP gain rate or wealth gain rate/session and /adventure? I'm confused still. It matters for how stressed the party is in the encounters they have, but how many encounters per adventuring day isn't really a driver in how long it takes to level up and how much wealth you get per adventure.



Also, wow, how do you have 5 encounters in 4 hours? With 4 of us and the monsters to go, it takes like 30 minutes for every round of combat. So like a 5 hour session for us where there's a fight can easily just "be the session".

The most encounters I've had in a session was 5 encounters in a 9-and-a-half hour session from Noon to 9:30.


And that's kind of funny. 55 pounds of food. Why? Rations are like 2lb/day, so that's like a whole month of food they're carrying.