I'll confess: in the time between when I got the original 5th Edition core rulebooks and when I got the 2024 ones, I didn't really spend much time reading the DMG.
There was guidance in the 2014 DMG about encounter-building and the "adventuring day," with suggestions on how much xp's worth of monsters a party might fight by level. But I was so frustrated with the far-too-conservative encounter-building rules (where you more or less had to throw harder-than-deadly encounters at a party to challenge them) that I kind of bounced off of it.
I've been running a fairly large dungeon (the party seems to think they're near the end of it, but they're really hitting the halfway point - I did have an NPC explicitly tell them not to try to clear the whole thing in a day, so they're sucking on fumes and hoping to fight the final boss soon while I know they've got four encounters to go before the 2-part boss fight - it's cool though, as this will become a cool moment where I can have them realize that the boss wants them to keep pushing through).
This was the first adventure I built using the 2024 DMG's encounter-building rules. But one thing that is missing from the 2024 DMG that is honestly a big oversight is that "adventuring day" guidance.
D&D, of course, the way a lot of people play it these days, is less the slow dungeon crawl that it used to be. My introduction to the game was the many Acquisitions Incorporated games at various PAX conventions, having been a fan of Penny Arcane already. Because of the one-shot nature of these games, though, they were basically all built around a single big fight, which Chris Perkins would have to get the party into within their couple-hour session and then, I think, probably often had to fudge monsters' HP in order to make sure they were out in time.
This structure is fun, but often fights like this can feel too easy, because if the party has all of its resources to burn, they can "nova" and take down your cool monsters before you get to do their cool things.
But if we want to pace things out so that the party can't always just nova down what you throw at them, what is the right number of encounters?
Now, again, my dungeon is designed to have no ticking clock - the party can venture forth and retreat with few consequences. I'd initially intended for there to be minor (as in, trivial-difficulty, like 11,800 xp when a low-difficulty encounter for this party has a 27,000 xp budget) combat encounters (and probably an opportunity to treat them as social encounters) in previously-cleared rooms if the party needs to retreat to rest, but I'm almost wondering if I shouldn't even do that, because of both the time it takes to run these encounters and the quite-significant drain on their resources.
As I talked about in a previous post, the new encounter-building guidance is significantly deadlier than earlier systems (I'd say most of my DM'ing career I was using the Xanathar's system). But not only are encounters of all difficulties quite tougher than before, but I also think we need to consider pacing.
Perhaps foolishly, I built the current dungeon using the Flee, Mortals! guidance for daily encounters, which uses a system of "encounter points" of which you have 6 or 8 (depending on how tough you want the day to be) and each difficulty of encounter is worth a certain number of points: 1 for easy, 2 for standard, 4 for hard, and 8 for extreme. So, if you want a hard encounter, you'll have a smaller budget for lead-up encounters.
Where I think I erred was that I built this dungeon using that system for its "encounters per day" but using the 2024 DMG's system for actually building encounters.
To give an example, my party just fought an encounter using the Star-Spawn of Cthulhu from Tome of Beasts along with five Skeletal Knights from Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. The Star-Spawn (oddly a fiend rather than an aberration,) is CR 15, worth 13,000 xp (just under half of our total budget). The Skeletal Knights are CR 7, worth 2900 xp apiece, so they add up to 14,500, meaning that our total expended budget was 27,500 - barely above the target xp total (and I have a party decked with powerful magic items).
But let me take a look at what this would be if we had used the FM! encounter-building rules. It was budgeted for 6 17th-level players, and is meant to be an easy difficulty fight. That means that with each player adding 7 to the total CR budget, it should have been a total CR of 42. Our actual total was 50, so an 8-CR difference, which is not nothing.
Now, there are other factors at play: one thing that is always kind of a question is how to let the party strategize around how much they have ahead of themselves. Blowing a big spell on an early combat encounter can feel like you're losing something you wanted for the big boss, but if it means clearing out (or crowd-controlling) a bunch of enemies that might have taken significant chunks of HP out of the party, it might be worth it. (Actually, two of the skeletal knights were basically taken out of the fight with the old classic, Turn Undead.) However, because the players don't actually know how many encounters they're going to have, they need to kind of guess at how much they can afford to let out of the tank.
And I wonder if there's a way to telegraph that. The dungeon they're in is one of the departments within Duskmantle, the guildhall of House Dimir, which is Ravnica's super-secretive, kind of "dark conspiracy guild." And thus, deception and misdirection are kind of central to what is going on here. I've been building up the "Analysis Leadership Council Conference Room" as the likely final boss room, but in fact, there's not even going to be a fight there, and instead the room will have a secret spatial anomaly that signals where the dungeon gets well and truly weird (they literally noclip out of reality and have to navigate the Backrooms, like from the internet memes - though in fairness, they're only sort of in reality in the first place, as I invented a Feywild-like "Mirror Quarter" where I placed Duskmantle, which doesn't have a canonical location - I think my players might be surprised to find out how much of their Ravnica I've fully invented myself).
There is always kind of a tension in D&D - optimally, every time you have a combat encounter, you retreat for the day and take a long rest. But that both feels weird stakes-wise and forces a DM to make every fight insane. And yet, especially for a deadly dungeon, if you don't make a dungeon fairly short, you want to give your players the opportunity to retreat and rest before taking on the next chunk of it.
I think I learned a lot about adventure design playing in Curse of Strahd (which we never finished - our party actually never even went into Castle Ravenloft, even though I think the adventure is designed to allow the party to make multiple trips into it). Where that campaign ultimately perished at the hands of adult scheduling and pandemic-induced logistical problems, we had made a few forays into the Amber Temple, the adventure's second-biggest dungeon, and one meant to be almost as deadly an ominous as Castle Ravenloft.
Even as we encountered groups of three Flameskulls (each casting Fireball, and here my paladin had a -2 to Dexterity. At least she had Aura of Protection) and other nasty monsters, we found that it was best to take the dungeon in chunks (and thankfully succeeded on the checks required to know we could permanently destroy Flameskulls if we doused their remains with Holy Water - because those things are there, I think, to make it tough to keep coming back). I suspect that, unless the party is really sneaky, you're unlikely to be able to clear that dungeon in a single day (even if the Lich there is non-hostile).
So, to try to wrangle some thesis here, it's clear that we want to find some balance where players feel they can retreat and rest, but also that they shouldn't do it after every single fight or expenditure of resources.
I think D&D's earlier, more survival-based gameplay might have helped to facilitate this. If you had to spend your gold to buy rations, and really tracked how much you were eating each day, you would still have that incentive to rest up to regain HP and spell slots and the like, but you'd also have the pressure to get what you could done in a day, because that was also a dwindling resource.
But I think modern players, or at least mine, are not generally excited to do such bookkeeping (we did hold pretty strictly to this in a similarly abortive Tomb of Annihilation campaign during its tier 1 jungle exploration segment,) but that leaves us with questions about what we can use to achieve this balance.
More than this concern, though, is that we should try to figure out what we actually expect a party to face between long rests.
Again, I'm starting to feel like a High difficulty encounter (which for my players now would be a budget of 70,200 xp) should probably be "the one fight you have that day," and even Moderate encounters should be quite limited, with maybe 2. Can we then have four low-difficulty encounters? Well, my party is still standing, but feeling a bit pressed after two low encounters and one moderate (they talked their way out of another moderate encounter).
And hey, maybe it's fine. Maybe this is where my players need to learn to manage their resources better. And maybe I need to put the fear of god into them.
Still, it would be good to kind of find that sweet spot of just how many things a party should fight between long rests.
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