Combats per day

[Gallant Armor]

This subject came up in a recent session where one player kept wanting to continue a game day until they had exhausted their per day resources even though others were advocating resting to restore spells and other abilities. This game day went for a few sessions and around 12 combats, mostly smaller encounters but a few bigger ones.

So my question is, what do you prefer as a player or as a GM? I.e. an approximate number/day, to go until casters are scraping the bottom of the barrel, rest once X% of per day abilities have been used, wait for a natural break in the story, start every session rested, etc.

[Chess Pwn]

well, if the casters refuse to go then the 1 guy is running in solo.
If the casters refuse to go and the GM wanted a longer day then there'd need to be something setup to cause the casters to not want to wait for a day.
But in the end the casters just refuse to go and there's not much to do about that. And when they do you get the 15 minute adventure day. And it makes classes that have at will abilities less cool because doing something 3 times per day is effectively all day as you only do either 3 times.

[Torbyne]

"you ran out of spells? Well too bad, 'cause i haven't run out of swords!! CHARGE!"

"... We're going to need another meat shield!"

Granted, most classes have daily resources pools. Some dont and some have so many resources that they dont need to worry about them. But that doesnt do you a lot of good when the party as a whole has hard caps on what abilities it can access. What does Sword McRockhuge intend to do without any bardic or clerical support in the next combat? other than having two 3/4 BAB classes without any combat boosts trying to set up a flank for him that is?

If its what you want for the story than set up a timeline for the party to achieve goals or else X occurs. i wouldnt set the timeline too strict though as they may not realize just what they need to slog through to stay on track or a few bad rolls can set them back a day or too.

[*Thelith]

It really depends on the level of the group. At level 1 you really can't handle more than 1 or 2 encounters per day because you have no resources left. At level 10 casters have a ton of spells, healing is done with wands or some other renewable/plentiful resource so you have plenty of ability to do many more encounters at 10 than level 1. And obviously if your group is steamrolling over kobolds they can have 10x the encounters of 1 big demon.
If casters are out of 75% or more of their spells they will not want to continue..

[PK the Dragon]

I find 3-4 decent encounters is doable at level 1, with more if the enemies are particularly weak or the rest of the party is heavy on martials that don't have as many resource limits. By level 2, once wands are buyable, the problems start falling off, and adventure days can easily include 10+ encounters by level 5-10 range, depending on the difficulty of course.

I don't particularly care how long players adventure, but the more they adventure the better for them in general, because enemies WILL react, events in the world at large will progress, etc. This will often have pretty small effect in the short run unless the players decide to wait a week before finishing a dungeon, but against organized foes when to go back is going to be a pretty big decision. And in the long term, a party that achieves their goals fairly efficiently is going to be able to do more to influence world events quicker than a party that sticks to a 15 minute adventure day. And to be honest, neither outcomes are that bad, one is just more proactive opportunities, the other is more reactive opportunities.

[Athaleon]

It's like asking how long a ladder should be. The only good answer is "it depends".

If a GM is throwing random encounter after random encounter at a party simply in order to use up their daily resources, that's usually metagaming (not to mention it makes a session monotonous). Then again, if the party decides to attack a castle full of soldiers, with no attempt at subterfuge, no good escape route, and no clear objective, then they can reasonably expect to fight a dozen encounters in an hour; that's just a consequence of a poor (or desperate) decision.

The best way to discourage the 15-minute adventuring day is probably to put a time limit on an objective: Either a "hard" one (e.g. the evil cult will conduct their ritual on the winter solstice in three days' time) or a "soft" one (e.g. following an unsuccessful raid on the castle, the soldiers will pull reinforcements from the city garrison and/or call up militia, post more sentries, and seal up any possible points of infiltration).

Low levels can be incredibly swingy based on what side the dice rolls happened to favor. Even a martial class can be KO'ed in one good non-critical hit at that level, so a party can breeze through four encounters or be left hurting after just one, all things besides the rolls being equal. All results are swingy in general when you're rolling d20s and adding small numbers to them, whether it's to hit in combat or rolling Diplomacy to avoid a fight. So that just has to be played by ear.