The combat encounter is sort of the heart of D&D. While the game is ostensibly built on three pillars - combat, exploration, and social - it is the former of those three that gets the most mechanical heft. Some classes have next to nothing outside of combat abilities, beyond the simple universality of ability checks.
Combat in D&D is also fun - though perhaps not as fun to watch unless you have some really gifted DMs and players (Critical Role, fantastic though the players are, usually drags the most in its combat segments).
The thing is, the dirty truth about D&D is that it's not built for climactic combat encounters. Yes, there are legendary monsters that can serve as major bosses. But outside of the early levels, when resources are extremely tight, it can be very hard to run a one-shot with a major villain that doesn't wind up being something of a rout - the players have their highest-level spells and a full bank of Action Surges, Focus Points, and the like to unload at the start of the encounter.
Certainly, boss monsters can do this too - your first turn in any fight with a dragon is probably going to be their devastating breath attack - but as a DM, you'll only rarely feel like you get many turns with a boss, even if they're a major villain.
No, D&D, to my mind, is built more around having many small fights while exploring a dungeon environment. I had this realization while playing in Curse of Strahd as my Great Weapon Master Aasimar Paladin (actually, I don't think I had the feat yet because I wanted to max her Strength first - she started at 18, so was able to get it maxed at 4 and then pick up the feat at 8 - which I'd do differently with the new rules and also just generally if I understood the power of that feat).
I believe it was at the Wizards of Wine, the winery that provides Barovia with its deeply-needed alcohol. The winery is beset by Blights - little corrupted plant creatures that are spawned by vampiric corruption in the region - something that Barovia, as you might guess, is more or less ground zero for.
The Winery (or at least something in its vicinity) is besieged by Blights after the players arrive, forcing them to fight room-to-room against these monsters.
Ultimately, though, what this means is that there are a lot of small fights against CR 1/4 or 1/2 monsters, all at a level where such a thing is a pretty trivial monster to deal with (I think we were level 5 or 6?) Each fight had us facing only like two of these things, and so in some of them, we didn't even take any damage.
But the effect is that each time some damage is taken, or a player expends a resource like a spell slot to deal with the encounter more quickly and efficiently, their power for the rest of the fights is diminished.
After five or six such fights, the cumulative losses - very small in each individual encounter - started to add up to something that felt pretty scary.
Given that this was a campaign where we finished the Death House introduction by somewhat easily killing the Shambling Mound at level 2 - a CR 4 or 5 monster that we are meant to flee instead - it felt like this series of fights against a whole bunch of little blights captured the desperation and fear that a horror campaign is supposed to evoke.
In the 2024 DMG, the formula for building a combat encounter has you determine an XP budget for each player, based on their level and the difficulty of the encounter you want. For example, at level 1, each player has a budget of 50 xp for a low-difficulty encounter, so if you have four people in your party and want an easy encounter, you should aim to have a total XP of all the monsters present of 200.
Needle Blights, which I think were the main things we were fighting, are CR 1/4, worth 50 XP. Thus, for a four-person party (we were more often five or six) these would theoretically be an easy encounter for us at level 1 if there were one of these per party member. But we were level 5 or so, and facing only two at a time - an utterly trivial fight.
And yet it works.
The difference, though, is that the number of encounters expected per day is a little skewed. Strangely, I don't believe the new DMG actually tells you how many encounters you can expect in a day. The old one had "the adventuring day," which usually skewed a little higher than I tend to see people run in D&D, likely thinking more along the lines of dungeon-crawling adventures that have, at least at my table, largely given way to more narrative-based adventures, where monster fights must be climactic set pieces, and not the equivalent of "trash mobs" to borrow WoW parlance.
Indeed, I'll often have an entire session go by without anyone fighting anything, simply to get through the story beats and breadcrumbs that lead up to a dangerous, monster-fighting scenario.
But, with a game of attrition like D&D, these minor combats can slowly drain characters' resources in a manner that makes future combats more harrowing. In fact, MCDM's Draw Steel, meant to appeal to people who enjoy D&D combat, has an entirely different resource system in order to make the flow of combat build, giving you more resources, not fewer, when you reach the final boss of an adventure.
So, D&D works maybe a bit better when you have more, smaller fights. Classically, you might have a dungeon crawl in which the party comes across a lone Manticore, for example, that they can either fight or navigate around. This kind of single-monster encounter, if it's not tuned to be a big boss with legendary actions, is the sort of thing that can reward clever resource management or roleplay.
But here's the problem:
If your two Needle Blight encounter ends with the blights missing on every attack and dying to cantrips and a Barbarian who decides to conserve their Rages for now... what have you accomplished? The players can feel satisfied that they made it through a fight without expending any resources, but you're also left with what is probably a significant chunk of time out of your game session having a fight where nothing really happened.
It's not strictly true: the blights' being dead means that that room is now safe and secure, and there are fewer blights to encounter in the future. The overall "HP of the dungeon" has been lowered.
But consider wilderness encounters. It's rare that you have a particularly deadly encounter while traveling across the wilderness. And given that these are almost exclusively a once- or twice-a-day occurrence, the resource drain winds up being somewhat meaningless.
On the other hand, these sorts of fights to give players an opportunity to feel cool - they can unload on a couple Ankhegs or Chimeras that have nothing to do with the plot. But it does take up time that you might otherwise be using for your story.
Players don't really have a clear telegraph for whether a fight will be easy or difficult unless you're using monsters they're familiar with. If I'm playing and we're fighting two rank-and-file goblins, I'll understand that we're not in a deadly fight. But if my DM pulls out a couple of "Gloam Harbingers" that I've never heard of and are from some third party monster book and possibly even a re-skinned version of such monsters, I really won't know whether this is the encounter to blow my single 4th level spell slot (my Wizard is level 7, though probably going to hit 8 relatively soon) or if I need to take my time and stick to cantrips and maybe a 2nd level spell like Nathair's Mischief (one of my go-to spells on that character) while I wait for a much scarier fight with a Gloam Reaver or some such nonsense.
It's a tough balancing act: you don't want to tell your players "there will be five combat encounters in this adventuring day," especially if you don't necessarily control that (the dungeon that my players are on the cusp of entering is designed to be theoretically beatable in a single adventuring day, but it would be a very drawn-out and difficult one - but there's no ticking clock on it, so the party can retreat and take long rests in the middle of it if they choose to, getting some much lower-difficulty random encounters in previously-cleared rooms). But you run into this issue of how much you want to fake out your players - do you have them fight something early in the day that they blow their resources on and then leave them gasping at fumes? How do you communicate that they shouldn't do that, and furthermore, do you communicate that, or make that the challenge of the adventure?
Ideally, a final boss fight ends with everyone gasping, their HP below half, their highest-level spell slots all expended, and having won by the skin of their teeth and some clever plays. You'll almost never accomplish this if you throw the party at a big boss monster immediately after a long rest. But you don't want to land your party in a TPK because of ill-informed decisions they made three sessions ago.
The real thing, here, is that you have to ask what kind of game you're running. As a DM, I have few qualms about killing a PC (especially if it's at higher levels where resurrection magic is available). I've never TPK'd a party, and I think in most cases, unless the party does something really dumb, that's an error on the DM's part more than the players (and even if they do something dumb, you have to ask if that's because of a grave miscommunication on the DM's part).
And yet, for the stakes of a game, there has to be some risk of a TPK. That's the balance. A more by-the-book and perhaps more "game-y" D&D campaign is an unforgiving one - where the DM will not change their monsters' behavior based on the remaining survival capabilities of a party. I'll confess that my inclination sometimes skews too favorable to the party (such as a fight where I nerfed a homebrewed monster mid-fight because I feared it was too powerful - it did have a lot of incapacitation effects, though, which are not really fun to be affected by). But there's an example in which my DM futzed things on the party's behalf:
In my Wildemount game, the final boss we fought before hitting level 5 was a corrupted druid with a couple of giant toad minions. The toads rolled really well and, despite having something like an AC of 11 or 12, we rolled really poorly against them. It is a fight in which literally every player had expended every resource by the end of it - all our spell slots, action surges, Lay on Hands charges - everything. And when the final foe went down, my Wizard and one of our Paladins were unconscious. My Wizard rolled three successful death saves in a row, so I was fine. But the Paladin rolled a natural 1 on her first save, and then, after all the enemies were down, rolled another failure.
Rules as written, she was fully dead.
Now, there were some choices to be made: I think it could have been dramatic for that character to die in that moment. Consider the climactic fight against the Uruk-Hai in Fellowship of the Ring. Aragorn solos like twenty orcs and then has his one-on-one fight with the Uruk-hai commander, where he's clearly down to like a quarter of his hit points (Aragorn is, however, starting that campaign at level 17 or something, so he's still basically ok). Boromir (maybe level 6 or 7), however, has been on death saves for that entire final duel, and he's not rolling high. That whole fight is a real mixed bag - they kill most of the Uruks, but Merry and Pippin are kidnapped, Frodo and Sam flee the battle (smart, given that they are like level 3 at best at this point). It's a big climax, perhaps not as flashy as the Balrog (Gandalf is level 18 or 19, and hits level 20 when he beats the Balrog and comes back as Gandalf the White,) so it feels earned that Boromir would die here (and I don't know, the player rerolls as Gollum, going a way different direction).
But, it was still early in the story of our campaign, only just hitting tier 2. And the paladin had not really had a chance to explore much of her own story in that campaign. So, my DM made the call - yes, technically while still in initiative, that character should have died. But retroactively, he decided instead that initiative had ended when the final monster died, and thus the conscious characters had an opportunity to do a Medicine check to stabilize her, which succeeded.
These are the stakes, basically - not necessarily the death, but the burden on you as the DM to adjudicate whether you want to have that death really land when it does come around.
Depending on your encounter balancing, you can easily have a four-encounter adventuring day in which the players aren't really in any danger of getting killed.
It's also a matter of level. The real distinction between a low-level character and a high-level character, as I see it, is flexibility. At level 1, your pure spellcasters only have 2 spell slots (actually, half-casters do too now) so a Cleric casting Cure Wounds is going to be a full half of their healing for the entire day. There's basically no room for this lengthy attrition - one fight against a group of goblins or skeletons or bandits can leave you with nothing left in the tank, even if you play very well and carefully. A high-level party can kind of adjust their resource expenditure - you might notice that the monsters you're fighting are rolling 10s and 11s to hit, meaning they must have less than a +10 to hit in the first place, and thus you can probably risk killing them slowly given they're not likely to deal much damage.
In other words, at lower levels - tier 1, broadly - the difference between a trivial encounter and a challenging one is far narrower, so you can't really afford to have a long slog of minor encounters, even as this becomes, I'd argue, mandatory at higher levels.
Of course, the irony is that at higher levels, it's far easier to skip encounters entirely. Have a bunch of earth-bound foes, like a bunch of giants? Well, your Storm Sorcerer will just freaking fly over them if they're level 18 or higher (excited and nervous for when two of my Ravnica party will be totally out of reach of non-flying monsters without ranged attacks. At least the Barbarian with the artifact sword that lets him fly has to get into melee with foes to fight them.)
So, at the points where you really need attrition fights to challenge your player, you're going to have to contrive to get them not to skip them, or at least expend a resource to do so.
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