Expectations on recommended number of encounters per day?

[Malkyn]

Ah. Too late to the party to be seen. Oh well. Someone link her to the above post next time she brings this up somewhere else (which she probably will, have noticed she'll reference past threads she considers to have gone unanswered).

[John Lynch 106]

Captain Morgan wrote:

I think a big problem with giving a recommended number of encounters is I don't see how it could remain the same as you level up and the size of your resource pools swell. The new new heightening paradigm offsets this a little, but you still taking more focus points, slots, reagents, and so on. And you wind up collecting more usage per day items as well. Then you have skill feats like Ward Medic and Continual Recovery that mean characters are going to be getting patched up faster and faster.

That being said, if I were gonna try to come up with a guideline, I probably wouldn't try to frame it in the number of encounters but an XP budget. You'll probably burn a lot more resources in a severe encounter or two than several low difficulty encounters.

Enemies are meant to become harder to take into account the greater resources.

Given the lack of guidelines I'll be starting with an assumption of 4 moderate fights a day (as you roughly encounter 12 moderate encounters between levels) and adjust as needed from there.

[Zapp]

Strill wrote:

Zapp wrote:

Strill wrote:

5E has an accurate formula for how many encounters, and what difficulties to use to accomplish this. Pathfinder 2E evidently does not, or the devs don't want to tell us what it is.

Except it's wildly inaccurate, a direct obstacle to the telling of many fantasy storylines, widely ignored by scenario writers, and still not accomplishing any of its goals by a long shot.

Other than that, you're completely correct.

It may well be an obstacle to storytelling, but every single game balance decision was predicated on it, so it's still necessary to know if you want to work around it and produce an interesting campaign.

Ehm... no...?

[Zapp]

Strill wrote:

Then you're playing a different game. D&D is fundamentally a game of resource management. If you're ignoring the resource management, then you're basically homebrewing your own system.

D&D pretends to be a game of resource management, but doesn't lift a single finger to actually enforce this or to make it any more challenging than the players like.