Ki points should be per-encounter.
But I really really want to kill the “adventuring day” dead. I think a lot of players would have significantly more fun if it wasn’t the core of DND.
The “adventuring day” is a relic of times when your entire campaign was exploring a megadungeon and you ran from one encounter to another, back to back, all night long. But barely anybody runs their game like that these days and the rules just never caught up with reality. Some people suggest having a constant time pressure on the party limiting long rests, and while it can work, it also puts a straitjacket on your story pacing where balance flies out the window if you ever let up on the pressure. “Guys, the apocalypse is merely hours away” quickly gets old when it’s been that way for months.
Well, that and 99% of the rules involve fighting or exploring. Anything the rulebooks have to say on social interaction boils down to “well, you just talk to the DM, and sometimes they might have you roll a d20, just figure something out”. D&D isn’t really so much a role-playing game as it is a weird dungeon-crawling boardgame with some role-play elements. Sadly, people are allergic to trying new systems so instead they’ll just try to bodge the one big-name king of TTRPGs, D&D, into doing things it was never built for, forever leaving them wondering why driving in screws with a hammer isn’t as fun as they expected.
Widely believed? First I’ve ever heard of it. Do people not short rest or just run through all their resources in the first two rounds of combat?
Yes, the modern style of play is 1-3 encounters per day with 0-1 short rests. No more dungeons, go nova on every encounter
This blew my fucking mind when I learned this.
Nothing about the game’s precarious balance works well if you don’t follow the adventuring day.
I push my players to the limit before they can take a long rest. If you blow your spell slots on stupid shit, you’re probably going to wipe later. If you take five days to find the lost children, they’ll be long eaten.
“Do you want to play a game that’s not a resource management game at its core?” “No we like DND”
I need to stop playing DND.
Back when I played D&D I followed the adventuring day except for during overland travel. The key thing is that not all encounters are combat. A riddle door, a trap, and a stubborn NPC are all encounters and the game is designed for you to include those too. I see kids these days saying 7 combats in a day is too much and I’m like “I agree, you don’t understand the adventuring day”. Instead of trying to learn, kids these days just ignore everything except combat and then complain combat is too slow
Yes, that’s true the advice is 6-8 medium “encounters” which aren’t usually fights. But D&D is kind of bad at codifying costs of non-combat encounters. It doesn’t have progress clocks so trade-offs like “let’s go around the gorge instead of using Fly” aren’t mechanically represented very well. It has shit for social rules so it’s hard to do a social encounter that taxes resources. It can be done, of course, but the rules aren’t really helping much.
I think some people also confuse “per day” with “per session”. I’ve had multiple people tell me there’s no way they can do six combats in a three hour session, and I’m like what are you even talking about. One in-game day can go many sessions. Some people even give their players a long rest at the start of the session automatically!
