Quote from: S'mon;1053025The recent 6 fight session had PCs .ca 6th-7th level, but I have gm'd 5e pcs up through 20th and not seen a general problem. There are occasional sloggy fights like one with a bunch of 57 hp  ogres. But not the systemic issues I see with 4e.

I'm not going argue that following the standard encounter pacing works.

It's the mono/two encounter days that the system can't handle.

And I would consider 5 rounds of fighting for the one combat you do that night handling things poorly.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1053036I'm not going argue that following the standard encounter pacing works.

It's the mono/two encounter days that the system can't handle.

And I would consider 5 rounds of fighting for the one combat you do that night handling things poorly.

Except the system can very easily handle several combats per "day".

And we did in one section of the adventure about 8 combat encounters due to it being an enemy stronghold.

Try again please.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1053036I'm not going argue that following the standard encounter pacing works.

It's the mono/two encounter days that the system can't handle.

And I would consider 5 rounds of fighting for the one combat you do that night handling things poorly.

I'm not sure what you mean about the 5 round fight - too long?

I noticed a problem with 1 fight days and lack of attrition so I went over to 1 week long rests. That works great IME.

Quote from: Omega;1053062Except the system can very easily handle several combats per "day".

And we did in one section of the adventure about 8 combat encounters due to it being an enemy stronghold.

Try again please.

Maybe Rhedyn meant that 1-2 encounters heavily favor classes with more short-rest mechanics that can "nova" more often vs. Classes that save long rest options for later?

Not sure though, I haven't experienced many issues with the 1-10 levels

Rhedyn will have to explain, as I am not figuring out his comments myself either. 5e can handle quite a bit of combat per day, in fact, a bit much in my estimation, with RAW full heal per Long Rest. The comments about party needing long rest after surviving two combats, but combats should not take longer than 5 rounds... strange. Not from actual play I've seen and done.

A sort of "nova 15 minute day" carry over from 3e? How? And why?

Quote from: S'mon;1053091I noticed a problem with 1 fight days and lack of attrition so I went over to 1 week long rests. That works great IME.

Extractly. The system requires attrition, which IMHO, is boring. Previous systems handle mono encounter days better (and not ending too early in 5 rounds).

For a group that may go dungeon crawling one day and then fight a dragon on a mountain the next day, our group can't really switch between 1 day long rest and 1 week long rest to fit the narrative. But neither of those would help a boss fight when we are fully rested work better.

I'm running ToA right now and often they'll only have 1 encounter per day during their jungle exploration.  I just ramp up the difficulty to Deadly+ and that usually solves things.  Encounters become Combat as a Puzzle at that point but that's fine.  Sometimes it's a nice change from Fantasy Fucking Vietnam.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1053106Extractly. The system requires attrition, which IMHO, is boring. Previous systems handle mono encounter days better (and not ending too early in 5 rounds).

For a group that may go dungeon crawling one day and then fight a dragon on a mountain the next day, our group can't really switch between 1 day long rest and 1 week long rest to fit the narrative. But neither of those would help a boss fight when we are fully rested work better.

That's what we've found as well. You can play RAW and the party destroys solos and random monsters with ease while in travel mode. Or you can house rule long rest 1/week and a traditional dungeon-crawl becomes screwy. The recovery/attrition ratio is so deeply embedded in 5E that it's just not very flexible. The attritional nature of D&D has often made combat a bit of a slog. But 5E dialed it up to 11.

Why not use the built in Turn mechanic to tweak things?  If you are in Wilderness Turns you long rest 1/week or only at a point of light or something.  In Dungeon Turns you long rest in 8 hours.  I suspect that Short Rests were changed to 1 hour because 1 hour = Short Rest = 1 Dungeon Turn = 1 Wandering Monster roll.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1053106For a group that may go dungeon crawling one day and then fight a dragon on a mountain the next day, our group can't really switch between 1 day long rest and 1 week long rest to fit the narrative.

I find one week long rest works perfect for both, though for the dungeon crawl it's important to keep short rests at one hour.

For dragon fight: group rests a week, goes up mountain & fights dragon, rests a week.
For dungeon crawl: group goes down dungeon, has 4-8 fights in a day (with 1-3 short rests), then leaves the dungeon & rests a week.

1 week rest also means I can obey Gygax's enjoinder to progress real time & game time at the same rate. I can look at the real world date & see what the date is in-game. Eg it's 16th of month 8 2018 IRL so it's 16th of month 8 4448 in my Wilderlands game.

Edit: While I originally went to 1 week long rest to better handle wilderness adventures, it's even better for traditional Gygaxian dungeon crawling. It means that my PC groups delving Stonehell have been launching expeditions down there for months both IRL and in-game - although checking my notes I remember I did do a 6 month time jump to match game & real dates up perfectly rather than be 6 months out; the first expedition was in September 2017, which was M3 4447 in my Wilderlands, whereas it's now M8 2018/M8 4448. So 11 real months vs 17 game months.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1052829Man, I feel like trash fights take too long in 5e while at the same time the system can't really handle two combats per long rest.

LOLwut?

It can definitely handle a lot more than 2 combats per long rest.  We're running through Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan right now in 5e, and we've almost cleared an entire level on a single long rest we had prior to entering the dungeon. We did pull off one short rest, but it wasn't a great short rest as some of us took damage from the poison air during the rest.

[Edit - I see what you mean now, you think it doesn't work well if your intent is 1-2 encounters per long rest. Ah, OK. Well we've had those as well. Two really tough encounters worked fine. Legendary creatures with lairs that have lair actions are really splendid.]

Easiest fix is not to lengthen the time rate of Short & Long Rests but to remove full HP healing after a Long Rest entirely. That way Hit Dice becomes the mechanism to heal, and eventually has attrition due to the "only 1/2 HD regain per Long Rest (round down, min. 1 HD)" limit. Then it becomes an issue of hoarding as much of your max Hit Dice to the juicy adventuring parts.

Quote from: TJS;1052823Yep.  

And 4E fights should never take place in an empty room.  You need to put in a big pit of lava you can push people into and some archers on a ledge, possibly a big cauldron of something hot, like in the conan movie that you can push over and wipe out some mooks, mark where the tables are so you can ram people against them, have reinforcements arrive halfway through the fight, have a third faction arrive 2 rounds in and just take on everyone, have the PCs trying to rescue a prisoner while the enemy are trying to move them away etc.

4E works well for a big Indiana Jones style set piece.

Yup, exactly. 4ed is fun like that. It would've been a good idea to tell people that ahead of time instead of tell people to engage in a boring grindfest (Keep on the Shadowfell). Of course big fancy set pieces can be fun in any edition, but only 4ed NEEDS them to function.

Quote from: Rhedyn;1052829Man, I feel like trash fights take too long in 5e while at the same time the system can't really handle two combats per long rest.

Agreed completely. 3.5ed and 5ed run into the same problems, just not to the extent that 4ed does.

The best way to hack around them in 5ed is to use some the alternate long rest rules that make it a lot harder to get a long rest so that it's easier to pack in more combats per long rest.

In that vein I wonder how 4ed would be if you put in incredibly punitive rest rules so that a long rest requires a HUGE amount of downtime so that you'd normally play a couple of sessions per long rest so that attrition finally rears its head.

At least in 3e you could just fight one CR = APL+5 encounter and not need the trash fights.

I feel like 5e expects you to be a little worn before you ever see the boss.

Quote from: Opaopajr;1053186Easiest fix is not to lengthen the time rate of Short & Long Rests but to remove full HP healing after a Long Rest entirely. That way Hit Dice becomes the mechanism to heal, and eventually has attrition due to the "only 1/2 HD regain per Long Rest (round down, min. 1 HD)" limit. Then it becomes an issue of hoarding as much of your max Hit Dice to the juicy adventuring parts.

This is what I do, along with being a little harsher with the exhaustion mechanics, and tying both the hit dice and exhaustion into the death saves and environmental factors.  I've had a lot of good results producing the same feel of the AD&D resource drain, in adventures set up similarly.  That was my intent when I selected those modifications.  

Or rather, a fully rested party feels like they can take on anything, not quite to 4E or upper level 3E extent, but still potent "fantasy superheroes".  As they take damage and need to use hit dice or otherwise hit those exhaustion/death saves, they very rapidly start to feel the pressure.  If they get in too deep or make too many mistakes, it can get to the point where everyone feels like an AD&D low-level game would be easier.

One of my measuring sticks for achieving this kind of feel is to what extent the party hoards consumable magic items.  I've got mostly those types of players that will save them for a rainy day.  When an adventure is chewing up consumable items as fast as they find them, I know I've hit the balance that I want.  When I make them so desperate that they decide it is a good idea for the wizard to use that scroll that was intended to go into the spell book, I know I've got them really sweating.  

Last session, I had some unambiguous feedback in our sandbox, though the players didn't realize it.  The players picked a course of action because several of them agreed that, "We need to scout this area, before we picked a target.  We can't afford to tangle with a group of local monsters on our way to or from the targets, even if we can find a place to rest out in the wild."