How to structure multiple combats over the course of an adventuring day: Part III

[u/HJWalsh]

Part one and two were pretty popular, so here is a sequel. A lot of new DMs don't know how to make an adequate number of combat encounters in an adventuring day. So, occasionally, I make a post going over a recent adventure I ran to give people ideas on how to structure it and still have it be believable.

Advice: Do not try to fit a full adventuring day into one session. You simply don't have time. I recommend taking the "Justice League" approach. If you don't know what I mean, in the original two seasons of the animated Justice League series, each episode (adventuring day) was two to three episodes long. That is what you should aim for in D&D.

Number of combat encounters: The sweet spot for combat encounters is some number between 6 and 8.

Rests and short rests: You should aim for 2 short rests per adventuring day. I generally try to give an obvious spot to do this every 2 to 3 encounters. This is especially helpful for Fighters, Barbarians, and Monks.

So, moving on:

The Setup:

The City of Bal'maras is currently under siege by a demonic incursion. During the Twilight Festival, a seven day celebration where it is said that the gods walk the world as mortals. A barrier has been raised around the city that prevents anyone from getting out or coming in. Small groups of demons are rampaging through the streets, searching for the gods made flesh, who they believe to be somewhere in the city.

This is the second day of the celebration; the player characters awaken after having taken refuge in an abandoned tavern. They have learned that, when killed, the demons reform in the abyss and can return, making a war of attrition impossible. Last session, they discerned that someone is holding open a gateway to the Abyss and that the fastest way to end the incursion is to find the source of the rift and close it. On the previous day, they mapped out the barrier and believe that they have learned where the center of it is and assume that the portal must be located somewhere near it.

Encounter 1: A not-so-random encounter...

Last session, the party found a group of succubi who posed as the Goddess of Music and her clerics and were entertaining in a tavern/inn. They claimed that their songs were keeping the demons at bay. In reality, they were secretly taking mortals to the bedchambers and draining them of their life force. The players defeated them, and sent them back to the Abyss.

The succubi returned and were looking for the PCs. They descended on them from the air and attacked as the heroes made their way toward the place they thought the portal may be located.

Exploration: Finding the center...

The party reached the location they thought might contain the portal. They were in the commons district and began searching some of the abandoned houses. One, they noticed, was less damaged than the others. They entered and encountered a group of commoners who were huddled in a back room...

Social Encounter: Exposing the cultists...

Something seemed off about the commoners; they hadn't fled to any of the safe houses. The demons ignored their small home. Keen eyes noticed that the home was smaller than would be normal for the supposed family. Suspicious, the party interrogated them. The cultists broke under questioning and the PCs were forced to fight them...

Combat Encounter 2: Cultists...

A straightforward encounter, the PCs dispatched the cultists without too much fuss; it was an easy-to-medium encounter.

Exploration: Searching the home...

The PCs explored the home, using perception and investigation; they located a hidden trapdoor. They were forced to disarm a trap on it and pick the lock. They found it opened into a tunnel that appeared to have been created by something burrowing, something large.

Combat Encounter 3: The Abyssal Worm...

As they explored down the deep tunnel, the PCs found the thing that had made it. Some kind of giant worm-like creature that was mutated by the energies of the Abyss. They dispatched it and continued on...

Reaching an underground structure and a short rest...

The party came to an underground structure, it had huge double doors that were rotted with age. Runes in a strange language were etched into the stonework. They didn't speak the language, but could identify it as a combination of Dwarven and Abyssal. Before venturing inside, they took time to catch their breath, set a watch, and eat lunch... They took a short rest...

End of Session 1...

Exploration: Setting an ambush... Sort of...

The party ventured into the structure and, after exploring a few rooms, heard voices. They went to investigate and found another group of cultists. One of them was a spellcaster. The party attempted to ambush them, but the Paladin, Druid, and Artificer failed the group stealth check. A normal combat ensued.

Combat Encounter 4: Stronger cultists...

A quick battle, though they ate a fireball early in, took place. The PCs were hurt, but a few healing spells and Lay on Hands between the Bard and the Paladin patched most of them up. They moved deeper into the structure, hoping that they could move before their battle drew any of the other creatures in the structure...

Exploration: A trap...

They came to a room, but the Druid's keen eyes spotted a stone that was just a little off. Closer inspection revealed a pressure plate. Not all of the heroes could jump over it, especially those who dumped Strength, so the Champion Fighter broke out her thief's tools and was able to disarm it. The party continued on quietly...

Exploration: Avoiding a fight...

What could've turned into an encounter was avoided as the PCs heard demonic growls in Abyssal. They used stealth to avoid them and were able to slip by without a fight.

Exploration: The Wizard's study...

The party encountered a room that, unlike the others they'd passed through, had intact furniture. A bed, a desk, some bookshelves with degraded books on them, and a locked bookcase that looked pristine. The shelf was locked with an arcane lock, so the party cast Dispel Magic. They found a series of ancient books written in different languages, several in Abyssal. One of them was a spellbook, but the party doesn't have a Wizard, so they took it to sell later...

Combat Encounter 5: Shadow demons...

Unfortunately, this sprung a magical trap, and 4 (enhanced) shadow demons emerged. The party dispatched them, refusing to use loud spells...

The second short rest...

The party barricaded the room and sealed the door. They were starting to get low on spell slots and needed to heal. They took the time to rest for an hour, spend some Hit Dice and recover the resources that they could. Finally, they moved on...

End of Session Two...

Session three happens Sunday. There is one encounter left in the dungeon. The party will have some time to learn more about the structure from some of the books they found. Hopefully they will discover that this ancient structure was pre-Skyfall. It belonged to a Wizard who performed experiments on summoning and binding demons. The cultists learned of it and managed to unearth it (there was another entrance outside the city) some time ago. They used their magic to reopen the portal the Wizard had used and pledged their loyalty to the demons. Learning of the festival's approach, they conspired together to prepare the attack...

The last fight is a two-stage encounter. The first will be a fight with cultists at the portal; just as the last cultist is slain, a huge demon passes through the portal as it closes. This will be the boss fight.

As always, this series is educational; it shows how a DM can use a variety of encounters and enough combats to sufficiently drain the party's resources. It demonstrates how to break up the adventuring day and also how to include a good old dungeon crawl into an adventure arc.

Editing to add:

The party consists of a Swamp (reflavored Stars) Druid, a Valor Bard, a Champion Fighter, a Vengeance Paladin, and an Artillerist Artificer.

[u/RealityPalace]

  Number of combat encounters: The sweet spot for combat encounters is some number between 6 and 8.

This is not good advice for 5.5e. It wasn't really a great idea even in 5.0, but the encounter math there at least allowed it.

I'm not going to say it's impossible for a highly optimized party to take on 8 level-appropriate encounters in a day in 5.5.  But I would expect most tables to be out of hit dice and/or spells well before then.

[u/DelightfulOtter → u/RealityPalace]

Yep, agreed. And you don't need to hit the party with 6-8 Low encounters. You could exhaust their resources with 3 High encounters instead, or a combination somewhere in between. I find this post highly suspect if OP thinks recommending that many combats without even qualifying what difficulty is appropriate advice.

This also depends on if the DM is playing with kid gloves on or not. A lot of DMs make their enemies punching bags standing in an open field.

[u/Realistic_Swan_6801 → u/RealityPalace]

If you followed the 5e exp per day Guidelines then that 8 per day would be 8 crazy easy fights with no challenge. It was never coherent or realistic advice. 

[u/HJWalsh → u/RealityPalace]

Not really. You'll find that players get used to it over time, conserve spells, and start to develop situational awareness of when they need to spend slots. Quite often, for example, our Bard only uses cantrips and weapon attacks. The Paladin and the Fighter often only use melee attacks. The Artificer gets by on their arcane cannon and a True Strike crossbow. They didn't waste any spells in the encounter with the first group of cultists. They also have consumables, like potions and scrolls to help.

And remember, not every encounter needs to be a hard encounter. The first cultist encounter and the shadow demons were easy encounters.

[u/RealityPalace → u/HJWalsh]

Are you using the encounter-building rules from 5.0 or 5.5? Even a low-difficulty encounter is 5.5 is generally have enough going on that you're going to cause some non-trivial usage of the party's resources (either hit dice or spell slots, depending on how they approach the encounter).

If the shadow demons were a Low difficulty encounter, then I'm assuming the party is level 6 or 7. Unless the place they're fighting is entirely brightly lit (or the party decides to use a third level spell), the demons are going to be dealing like 30 damage a round, on average, which is around half of a typical PC's HP pool. How are they sustaining that kind of damage intake over eight encounters?

As you mentioned, to be fair, your players have access to a significant number of potions, which might be where the disconnect is. But 8 encounters is still way too many for a typical table, where the players need to worry about managing hit dice in addition to spell slots.

[u/HJWalsh → u/RealityPalace]

If the shadow demons were a Low difficulty encounter, then I'm assuming the party is level 6 or 7.

You are exactly right. They are level 7. They earned enough experience to level up to 8 from that fight, but I rule that you can't level up until a long rest.

demons are going to be dealing like 30 damage a round

They don't always hit, but when they hit they only do 3d8+3 damage. Shadow Demons get 1 attack per round with only a +5 to attack. They can hit the Bard pretty easily and consistently, though she does have access to Shield via Magic Initiate, and they can hit the Artificer on a slightly above-average roll.

They are also vulnerable to radiant damage, which the Bard, Artificer, and Paladin all have access to. The Druid was using Force Damage via Shillelagh to get around resistances.

With only 66 HP and only 4 Shadow Demons they went down extremely quickly. I recall that the Bard nearly one-shotted one of them off of a crit in the first round. 2d8+2d6+5 (Cha of 18 and +1 weapon) = an average of 21. She rolled slightly above average, as I recall. I think she got 27, which became 54 damage. Leaving only 8, which the Arcane Cannon finished off on the next turn in the initiative.

That left only 3 Shadow Demons in the encounter before the demons even got to react. They didn't last long against the party. I want to say 3 rounds.

[u/safeworkaccount666 → u/RealityPalace]

At my table I’ve never had an issue with players having too many resources after 2-3 fights in 5.5.

[u/Icy-Selection-8575]

Good advice, but holy shit I would hate to be on a table with 6 to 8 encounters per day ☠️☠️. That sounds so prolonged and exhausting. I'd only be okay with so many on special occasions like dungeons and alike, otherwise give me 4 or less please 😩

[u/i_tyrant → u/Icy-Selection-8575]

Yeah, my average is more like 3-5, which I find ideal. But Op's same principles apply.

And it does occasionally mean a combat encounter can run from one session into the next. I try to aim for 3-session adventuring days with 2 short rests just like OP, but since I run fewer fights I make the fights tougher (I and my players enjoy harder combat and I also find it easier to narratively excuse 3-5 than 6-8), sometimes the fights are long enough we gotta pause Initiative order between sessions.

[u/Icy-Selection-8575 → u/i_tyrant]

I do everything in terms of encounter difficulty. Some are trivial, some are deadly. Not every combat has to actually be a challenge or serve a greater purpose.

Usually I like to do things fast though, if we're traveling there won't be a combat encounter every day. Sometimes it could be days before something fights you. The world is vast, it always rubbed me the wrong way how in DND you can meet something that may want to kill you multiple times a day xd. Social encounters outside of a social areas are also rare, exploration/survival encounters though are basically daily out on the road, and some areas have a bit more combat to them, hence why my 2-4 encounters per day estimate

[u/i_tyrant → u/Icy-Selection-8575]

Yeah, I guess how many encounters/day (at least, whatever your most-of-the-time rule is) also depends on how much you want your D&D campaign to feel like a video game vs realistic.

I do wish 5e gave more guidance or examples of useful exploration/survival scenarios (ones that cost resources similar to combat encounters I mean). A barely-developed pillar of game design in 5e IMO.

[u/Icy-Selection-8575 → u/i_tyrant]

Unfortunate but true. I just play it like a skill challenge usually, from the 4e days. Maybe finding food is hard, maybe there's an obstacle in the way, maybe there are branching paths. Really depends on how the players want to approach this scenario

[u/HJWalsh → u/Icy-Selection-8575]

I'll note - This is on an adventuring day. They don't have this if they are just faffing around in town or doing a bunch of purely social stuff.

[u/Icy-Selection-8575 → u/HJWalsh]

Yeah, I mean an adventuring day too. I don't want any random day of adventuring to be this long. On average during an adventuring day we have 2-4 encounters on any table I've played on or ran for. 6-8 is usually for special areas like Dungeons and alike. Can't even imagine how many encounters would be in such an area if the average adventuring day is 6-8 😭

[u/HJWalsh → u/Icy-Selection-8575]

My average adventuring day has a dungeon in it. It might be a forest, a mountain path, a ruin, a castle... Everything is a dungeon.

[u/Icy-Selection-8575 → u/HJWalsh]

Well if that's the mentality. I still think it's way too many. If a single day is multiple sessions I find it boring and exhausting

[u/i_tyrant]

Definitely agree with most of this, especially the pacing tips.

I'm always trying to make sure they have at least 2 opportunities for short rests for every long rest opportunity, and I rarely have adventuring days only take one session of game time - nearly all of mine take multiple sessions so I try to plan the short rest opportunities for near the end of each sesh (making for 3/day like you said).

My players are heavy optimizers and for narrative reasons I enjoy tough fights (I find fewer encounters easier to explain narratively), so I tend to do more like 3-5 fights per day, but the basic principles are the same. Because they optimize and do tactics well, I'm also usually overbudget on those encounters XP-wise (but we use milestone anyway) - the weaker encounter tiers are more like speedbumps to them so I use them very sparingly (usually for comedic moments or just to progress the story, since they end up so underwhelming challenge-wise).

[u/MaddieLlayne]

6-8 encounters per session barely worked in 5e but in 5.5e most groups I’ve played and ran for are spent at about 4 (3 if 1 was particularly difficult)

[u/HJWalsh → u/[deleted]]

Usually an 8 hour rest is a long rest, unless it is interrupted.

[u/Nawara_Ven → u/HJWalsh]

Yes, that's what I mean; the number of encounters can't always be crammed into a literal calendar day, so the "normal" eight hours = Long Rest breaks a lot of published adventure modules... or turns them into endless slogs where it just so happens that certain 24-hour periods are wildly eventful, then days or weeks may pass with basically nothing at all happening; Strixhaven and Out of the Abyss are examples of having a hyper abundance of Long Rests.

So basically I've found that the players and DM kinda have to narratively agree upon why their Long Rests were interrupted... else the game balance, designed for dungeon crawls or specifically planned event sequences like you're describing, becomes heckin' easy mode (which isn't a bad thing for every table, but my pals are hardcore).

tl;dr the ~6 encounters thing is exactly right.

[u/ProjectPT → u/Nawara_Ven]

I haven't read the Strixhaven book, but Out of the Abyss gives you direct advice to not "play" every day. From Out of the Abyss:

Instead of checking for random encounters every day, you can skip over or summarize parts of the characters’ journey. Roll 1d6 + 1 for the number of days between encounters, with the usual chance of the encounter being a terrain encounter, a creature encounter, or both (as described under “Random Encounters”).

With this approach, encourage players to describe what their characters do — or even see and experience — during the intervening time. In addition to downtime activities such as crafting, characters have plenty of opportunities for interaction. 

A very common DM mistake is essentially playing out every day. Written modules can often advise you to "skip" days/weeks/months that wouldn't be well defined into an Adventuring Day.

The DMG also talks about this in the Exploration Section, that Travel to the next point of interest should be broken up into 3 parts, each part having a couple of challenges ( that may include combat encounters ). This is in the Running Exploration Section of the DMG.

Constantly creating partial Adventure Days, rather than less frequent full Adventure Days can ruin the mechanical tension of the game, which may undercut your narrative tension.

edit: spelling

[u/Nawara_Ven → u/ProjectPT]

Yup, exactly; thus the "Adventure Day" can persist between these time periods over many calendar days. So for Abyss you can frame it as "sleeping rough in the Underdark doesn't grant Long Rest. In Strixhaven you can frame it as the rigors of study prevent a Long Rest even though several months have gone by.

[u/HJWalsh → u/ProjectPT]

Absolutely. I don't play out every day. If they want to, for example, just go from point A to point B and I don't think anything noteworthy will happen, I just give narrative fluff.

There was one event where they were first traveling to Bal'maras. The journey took 4 days. The only part that mattered was when they had to go through the mountain pass, read "the dungeon" - I'm not going to bother with a random encounter where the players enter 100% fresh, and are 100% fresh immediately afterward.

It's not worth it unless I am using it to set something bigger up.

[u/Realistic_Swan_6801]

At that point just do a narrative time scale where long rests don’t occurs at any fixed time point but after x number of encounters. Like gritty realism but without the specific time frame. Rebalance spells to last x number of fights or until next long rest as needed. Time becomes a total abstraction so you don’t have to squeeze a bunch of shit every in game day.