I find this was a really well thought article. Spike pointed that it might not be that different that the RAW rules, but I find the last part, the expectation part to be crucial.
Maybe its because I am new to the game and those tips are probably well known (although, internally known since I havent seen them around). Hope my players realize the difficulty of an encounter and I do a decent job describing with those tips, since I dont want to keep recalibrating encounters as they misjudge situations / I explained poorly.
Thanks again, congratulations. Time to read the 5e encounter system is broken article again... even if I dont like the "cure" that is presented
Thanks for the kind words! And after designing my CR2.0 system, while I still personally prefer the "short-rest-over-long-rest" framework embraced by my former article, I don't think that will points are necessary anymore, and I think that there are ways for DMs to design adventuring days in a way that will naturally push players to expend resources as-needed.
Is the resource-attrition game still not a way that many groups play? Sure. But I don't think it's as necessarily insurmountable as I used to believe.
I think there's a lot of good insight here, but I'm failing to see how this is much different than the RAW encounter design method; it seems to produce the same outcomes just with a different mathematical process. Am I missing a component?
TL;DR: DMs routinely overestimate how difficult a "Medium" or "Hard" encounter is, and will often pump up the danger of a "Deadly" encounter without understanding how far they can go before triggering a death spiral or completely exhausting their players' resources.
Using my proposed method, you can (hypothetically) reliably create the exact type of adventuring day you want, which is something that 5e doesn't do. The missing insights in RAW are (1) how many Easy encounters or Hard encounters you need to fill up an adventuring day (the DMG just says "6-8 encounters" without specifying), and (2) how far you can push a single encounter or a single sequence of encounters before you need to let the PCs take a short rest. My goal in writing this article was to fill in those insights, and to further explore the implications they have for the remainder of 5e combat design theory (e.g., solo boss-monster battles).
Well, the do give us a guideline for how much adjusted XP worth of encounters a PC should have in an adventuring day (https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/building-combat-encounters#TheAdventuringDay), so we do have some guidelines (though not stated as clearly). There aren't good guidelines for how far to push an encounter, that's true, though I find that proscribed XP budgets tend to err in the PCs favor anyway; RAW Deadly encounters never approach an Impossible difficulty in your system. IME the party's attitude toward resting and resources also has a big impact (which touches on the expectations portion of your article), but that's more game management than mathematics; does your group push until they hit a certain resource depletion threshold, or do they try to rest after each encounter (which I have found is a VERY common approach)?
Again, I think there's a lot of insight here, and it's an interesting approach to dissecting combat encounters. But I'm not seeing much that is actionable for a GM in all of this . . . yet. But I'm curious to see how you expand on the concepts presented here and how they can be applied in the future parts of this series.
This is actually really helpful! I've added this section to the "How to Build an Adventuring Day"—do you think it helps?
"Notably, players are naturally risk-averse, and will therefore always attempt to take a short rest whenever doing so is reasonably possible. An “adventuring sequence", therefore, is a “series of encounters in which taking a short rest is not an option.”
For example, an adventuring sequence might be defined by:
A lack of time (e.g., because the party is racing to rescue a prisoner before their execution);
A lack of space (e.g., because the adventuring sequence involves multiple waves of monsters in the same area); or
A lack of safety (e.g., because the party cannot remain in place without being discovered or attacked).
Imagine a quest that promises the PCs a substantial reward if they defeat the monsters in the quest-giver’s house at any point within the next week. If there are monsters in the kitchen, monsters in the living room, and monsters in the foyer, you might think that the act of clearing out the house always constitutes a single adventuring sequence—and you’d be wrong.
If the monsters in the kitchen and living room patrol the foyer once every fifteen minutes (and vice-versa), it’s true that we’ve compressed our encounters into a single adventuring sequence. But if the monsters in the kitchen never leave the kitchen, the monsters in the living room never leave the living room, and the monsters in the foyer never leave the foyer, you don’t have one adventuring sequence—you have three.
Short rests naturally expand to fill any narrative beat without tension or stakes. If, after killing the monsters in the kitchen, there’s no danger to remaining in the kitchen and no reason to leave it, your PCs will take a short rest almost every time. Good combat design, therefore, naturally incorporates narrative tension in order to ensure that the party takes short rests only when they’re supposed to."
Hi Dragna, I've written a post that uses the outlook on combat as outlined in this article. Maybe you'll find it interesting. All best! https://teigills.substack.com/p/exploring-a-first-principle-approach
Thanks for sharing! Interesting stuff. Glad to see more folks taking a theory-first approach to D&D game design.
I find this was a really well thought article. Spike pointed that it might not be that different that the RAW rules, but I find the last part, the expectation part to be crucial.
Maybe its because I am new to the game and those tips are probably well known (although, internally known since I havent seen them around). Hope my players realize the difficulty of an encounter and I do a decent job describing with those tips, since I dont want to keep recalibrating encounters as they misjudge situations / I explained poorly.
Thanks again, congratulations. Time to read the 5e encounter system is broken article again... even if I dont like the "cure" that is presented
Thanks for the kind words! And after designing my CR2.0 system, while I still personally prefer the "short-rest-over-long-rest" framework embraced by my former article, I don't think that will points are necessary anymore, and I think that there are ways for DMs to design adventuring days in a way that will naturally push players to expend resources as-needed.
Is the resource-attrition game still not a way that many groups play? Sure. But I don't think it's as necessarily insurmountable as I used to believe.
I think there's a lot of good insight here, but I'm failing to see how this is much different than the RAW encounter design method; it seems to produce the same outcomes just with a different mathematical process. Am I missing a component?
Thank you for reading! The main reasons why the RAW method fails are summed up here: https://dragnacarta.substack.com/p/what-5es-encounter-difficulties-get .
TL;DR: DMs routinely overestimate how difficult a "Medium" or "Hard" encounter is, and will often pump up the danger of a "Deadly" encounter without understanding how far they can go before triggering a death spiral or completely exhausting their players' resources.
Using my proposed method, you can (hypothetically) reliably create the exact type of adventuring day you want, which is something that 5e doesn't do. The missing insights in RAW are (1) how many Easy encounters or Hard encounters you need to fill up an adventuring day (the DMG just says "6-8 encounters" without specifying), and (2) how far you can push a single encounter or a single sequence of encounters before you need to let the PCs take a short rest. My goal in writing this article was to fill in those insights, and to further explore the implications they have for the remainder of 5e combat design theory (e.g., solo boss-monster battles).
Does that all sound reasonable?
Well, the do give us a guideline for how much adjusted XP worth of encounters a PC should have in an adventuring day (https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/building-combat-encounters#TheAdventuringDay), so we do have some guidelines (though not stated as clearly). There aren't good guidelines for how far to push an encounter, that's true, though I find that proscribed XP budgets tend to err in the PCs favor anyway; RAW Deadly encounters never approach an Impossible difficulty in your system. IME the party's attitude toward resting and resources also has a big impact (which touches on the expectations portion of your article), but that's more game management than mathematics; does your group push until they hit a certain resource depletion threshold, or do they try to rest after each encounter (which I have found is a VERY common approach)?
Again, I think there's a lot of insight here, and it's an interesting approach to dissecting combat encounters. But I'm not seeing much that is actionable for a GM in all of this . . . yet. But I'm curious to see how you expand on the concepts presented here and how they can be applied in the future parts of this series.
This is actually really helpful! I've added this section to the "How to Build an Adventuring Day"—do you think it helps?
"Notably, players are naturally risk-averse, and will therefore always attempt to take a short rest whenever doing so is reasonably possible. An “adventuring sequence", therefore, is a “series of encounters in which taking a short rest is not an option.”
For example, an adventuring sequence might be defined by:
A lack of time (e.g., because the party is racing to rescue a prisoner before their execution);
A lack of space (e.g., because the adventuring sequence involves multiple waves of monsters in the same area); or
A lack of safety (e.g., because the party cannot remain in place without being discovered or attacked).
Imagine a quest that promises the PCs a substantial reward if they defeat the monsters in the quest-giver’s house at any point within the next week. If there are monsters in the kitchen, monsters in the living room, and monsters in the foyer, you might think that the act of clearing out the house always constitutes a single adventuring sequence—and you’d be wrong.
If the monsters in the kitchen and living room patrol the foyer once every fifteen minutes (and vice-versa), it’s true that we’ve compressed our encounters into a single adventuring sequence. But if the monsters in the kitchen never leave the kitchen, the monsters in the living room never leave the living room, and the monsters in the foyer never leave the foyer, you don’t have one adventuring sequence—you have three.
Short rests naturally expand to fill any narrative beat without tension or stakes. If, after killing the monsters in the kitchen, there’s no danger to remaining in the kitchen and no reason to leave it, your PCs will take a short rest almost every time. Good combat design, therefore, naturally incorporates narrative tension in order to ensure that the party takes short rests only when they’re supposed to."