The Adventuring Day

Post/Author/DateTimePost
#1

Daganev

Jul 21, 2014 0:54:43

I need some help understanding the adventuring day.  It says that 2 Hard encounters worth of XP per day.


What are the ways to break that up (reasonably) for fights, and how much damage is each class doing during that day?

 

Is the fighter rogue , cleric and wizard pretty much putting out the same amount of overall damage in different ways, or are some classes obviously not built for killing things?

#2

DM_HEEGZ

Jul 21, 2014 6:50:11

we've got up to level 3 with all five pregen characters. the basic classes seem pretty well balanced with regards to power and damage output. the cleric does the least damage of the four. usually the two fighters have burned their action surge and second wind by about the time the wiz and cleric are almost down to cantrips only, depending on how much they've been using spell slots. usually my wizard runs out of spells before the cleric, but i can get back one slot during a short rest... also, the rogue has the most longevity for damage as he can almost always get in a sneak attack if one of the fighers (or dwarf cleric) is in melee with a foe.

 

i haven't totalled up damage for a day, but if you are fairly conservative with consumable action use I have seen our group do 5-10 encounters without a long rest, and can usually get 5 in without a short rest depending on how well we roll and the enemy types. Last night we had a big boss fight for our second encounter and we are going to keep exploring tonight without even taking a short rest. The previous boss fight left us completely empty of spells. The randomness of dice rolls definitely played a factor in the difference between the two fights.

 

[edit]

In regards to the 2 hard per day and XP... I think we have done several average encounters followed by a very hard one, sometimes with room to spare for another encounter. I think what Mearls posted a week or two ago about encounter building is pretty accurate. We've been playing the starter set adventure as published, so I don't have any experience making my own encounters yet.

#3

iserith

Jul 21, 2014 9:19:18

Daganev wrote:
#4

alienux

Jul 21, 2014 10:17:17

I don't know of that being mentioned in the basic rules, but MM posted it here:

 

http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20140707

#5

iserith

Jul 21, 2014 10:46:46

In that case, it's simple: For a given adventure location populated by monsters and threats, think about how many days it could take, on average, to "clear" it. Let's go with 3 days, since 3 is a good number to work with. We'll also do this for a 1st-level party of 4 PCs. Using the chart in the L&L article, this means that your adventure location will contain 150 x 4 x 2 x 3 = 3600 XP worth of monsters and threats. So just choose monsters with appropriate CRs for the party level and "buy" them with your XP budget, sprinkling them wherever you like in the adventure location. Some of these monsters and threats may be static and others dynamic. For the latter type, consider adding them to a random encounter chart for the adventure location.

 

When the PCs choose to explore this location, they will encounter monsters sometimes individually, sometimes in groups, and other times in overwhelming numbers depending on the situation as it unfolds. This will make each individual encounter vary in terms of its difficulty and strategic efforts by the PCs can make it easier or harder.

#6

Lawolf

Jul 21, 2014 11:19:09

Exp per encounter works as follows

 

Hard = 1/2 daily exp budget

Difficult  = 1/3 daily exp budget 

Moderate = 1/6 daily exp budget

(Reply to #3)

Daganev

iserith wrote:
(Reply to #6)

Daganev

Lawolf wrote:
#9

JohnLynch

Jul 22, 2014 0:51:17

Lawolf wrote:
(Reply to #9)

Daganev

JohnLynch wrote:
#11

JohnLynch

Jul 22, 2014 5:31:45

That's potentially out of date information from an unfinished resource. I'd take those guidelines with a heavy dose of salt.

(Reply to #11)

GilbertMDH

JohnLynch wrote:
#13

alienux

Jul 22, 2014 9:37:42

JohnLynch wrote:
#14

JohnLynch

Jul 22, 2014 16:17:57

alienux wrote:
#15

Cennedi

Jul 22, 2014 16:36:20

Daganev wrote:
#16

zgrose

Jul 22, 2014 16:43:50

I think CR will be a better measure of encounters/day than XP.

For a first level group, a CR 2 encounter might be able all they want to deal with that day.

But they could probably do nearly limitless 1/4 CR encounters.

 

My rule of thumb at the moment is 3-4 fights where the ( (# of monsters * CR) = (avg PC level) ) is probably going to make them want to recover spells.

 

 

#17

Rastapopoulos

Jul 22, 2014 18:29:03

 

An adventuring day is anything from 0 encounters to 200 encounters.

 

An adventuring day can have 0 weapon attacks or 20,000.

 

There's literally no way to codify the story part of RPGs. And it is the story that will dictate what happens in one adventuring day, both from the DM side (what's happening in the world around the players) and the players' own decisions in regards to what to do.

#18

iserith

Jul 22, 2014 18:55:03

Story is a byproduct of playing the game. The game's rules provide the structure for the creation of that story. This includes, in the case of D&D 5e, encounter building tools (CR and XP) and the concept of an adventuring day and all that entails.

#19

Daganev

Jul 24, 2014 5:29:48

So thanks to some helpful people over at RPG.stackexchange I have numbers for first level characters.

Things got more complicated at 5th level because we weren't sure how to calculate AOE damage properly.

 

So the "Damage per adventure day" (DPAD) for level one appears to be as follows:

 

4 encounters, of 4 rounds each, fighting goblins (infinite)

 

Wizard does 140 DPAD, assuming sleep counts as damage and you are fighting goblins.

Cleric does 104 DPAD, as a melee fighter, using the sacred flame cantrip they only do 68 DPAD.

Fighter does 160 DPAD, as a two weapon fighter.

Rogue does 170 DPAD, assuming the fighter is always adjacent to the target.

 

However, 300 XP worth of goblins is only 42 hp.  If you give goblins the average hp of CR 1/4 thats 78 HP.

So as long as the cleric isn't always casting sacred flame, they all do enough damage to take out the threats assigned to them for the day, which is good news.

 

It might be interesting to see what the numbers look like if you include healing somehow.

 

As a note, at level 5 the numbers are like this:

Fighter 260 DPAD

Rogue 270 DPAD

Cleric 180 DPAD

Wizard 540 DPAD (Using 4e DPR King 2.0 numbers to figure out AOE)

 

At level 10, the wizard goes up to like 1400, and everyone else is about even at about 400 or something like that.

 

#20

Daganev

Jul 24, 2014 7:48:38

At level 11 vs Dex 18 AC 17...

 

#21

Lawolf

Jul 24, 2014 7:52:27

Dex 18 seems like a lot for that level. Many high level monsters we have seen don't even have a Dex bonus and proficiency on Dex saves seems rare on monsters. I'd calculate at a +3 bonus instead (still pretty generous IMHO).