In most D&D-esque systems, where some classes expend resources over multiple encounters and restock them when they rest, there's some common wisdom regarding how many encounters a party can face per day. Often this is spelled out by the game designers explicitly. Has Paizo made any comments about how many encounters they anticipate players having per day? If not, how many would you recommend?
I've repeatedly seen people on these forums claim that PF2 doesn't need such guidelines because there are ways to restore hp, etc, after every encounter so the resource drain of PF1 isn't really a thing, and I'd like to save time by responding to those claims in advance. To some extent, they seem to be valid. I tested the system by making a party of 4 characters (including a Champion) and running them through the first floor of the fortress in Age of Ashes, and thanks to some lucky dice rolls and regular use of Lay on Hands I was able to get through the whole thing without anyone dying and without having to rest for the night.
But the game didn't feel great. In 90% of the battles, my casters were on cantrip auto-attack, and contributing a lot less than the martials. I'd been anticipating using the druid as a healer, but in fact his healing spells only got used once in the final battle, where a character was at risk of dying. It was OK, because I was also playing the martial characters and that was fun, but if that had been a real game and I'd been playing a caster in it I'd have found it extremely boring, because of the large number of encounters per day. And even the martials were less fun to play than they would have been with more status effects and buffs flying around.
Conversely, if I played a campaign which had just one encounter per day and the casters were able to nova all their high level spell slots on each encounter, it seems like they'd be controlling the battles and it would feel bad to play a martial character.
Both of these extremes seem bad to me; bad enough that I wouldn't want to play in a game which regularly used them. But presumably, there must be some amount of content per day between those two extremes where the casters don't end up either controlling the game or relegated to cantrip duty in battle. What is that amount of content? Does it vary depending on the difficulty of the encounters, or the level of the party? How much tolerance is there in going over or under the amount, before the game becomes un-fun?
Isn't there a large discrepancy in the early levels between martials and casters? Even more so for fighters and other classes.
I almost think casters should have some additional lvl 1 slots to remedy that.
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Casters can always use their cantrips. They are surprisingly effective. And the have many other options, using skills, roleplaying, etc, because they game shouldn't be reduced to mere combat.
Casters in D&D variants have always been weak at low levels. In PF2 they are less weak than in many other game systems. Don't turn up your nose at cantrips, and don't just judge them on their ability to deal damage.
AFAIK there are no suggested guidelines for encounters per day. It all boils down to the story the DM has decided to lay out, and what he wants to see the players accomplish. With non-magical healing available to every character, regardless of his class, most parties will have options for healing between encounters, unless the DM really puts a timer under their nose.
And for those who think spellcasters don't have enough slots, don't foget scrolls & wands. There are ways to boost spells per day, maybe not at first level, where everything is far too expensive, but soon-ish.
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Casters can always use their cantrips. They are surprisingly effective. And they have many other options, using skills, roleplaying, etc, because they game shouldn't be reduced to mere combat.
Casters in D&D variants have always been weak at low levels. In PF2 they are less weak than in many other game systems. Don't turn up your nose at cantrips, and don't just judge them on their ability to deal damage.
AFAIK there are no suggested guidelines for encounters per day. It all boils down to the story the DM has decided to lay out, and what he wants to see the players accomplish. With non-magical healing available to every character, regardless of his class, most parties will have options for healing between encounters, unless the DM really puts a timer under their nose.
And for those who think spellcasters don't have enough slots, don't foget scrolls & wands. There are ways to boost spells per day, maybe not at first level, where everything is far too expensive, but soon-ish.
So what's the point of having slots per day at all? If, as you claim, the game is perfectly well balanced however many encounters you have per day, why not just say casters can't regain spells at all until they gain a level? That's effectively what a GM would be doing if "the story he decided to lay out" involved a lot of encounters in a day. Would you be happy playing a caster in a game with that rule?
Or flipping it around, what about just saying that casters regain all their slots with a ten minute rest? That's effectively what happens if the GM is running a "1 encounter per day" sort of game, which you claim is fine. Would you be happy playing a mundane character with a sword when the casters are dropping fireball after fireball in every combat and killing all the enemies far more efficiently than you?
Or are you saying that spells aren't really much more powerful than cantrips, so it doesn't really matter whether casters have spells available or not? Because if so, Paizo's own game design comments contradict you. I can't find the quote right now as I'm on my phone, but they explicitly designed cantrips to be backup options that were significantly worse than a martial character's attack or using a proper spell, but were at least able to achieve something.
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Despite your combattive tone, I'll answer.
It's up to the DM to decide how his story is going to run. If you're running an AP, a lot of that is done for you.
And yes, I'd be happy playing a caster in a game where there were some arbitrarily large number of encounters in a day. Because the players have some control over that too. They can decide to go back to town and rest. They can decide to camp out somewhere. Unless the DM is being particularly perverse, they have some input on how many encounters they're going to have in a given day.
If you want to houserule spellcasters regaining all their spellslots after a ten-minute rest, nobody's stopping you. But I think most spellcaster PCs know they need to economize their spells to some degree, because they can't count on there being only one or two encounters in a given day.
So to answer this question: it depends. It depends on so many factors. Chill a bit, dude, and maybe somebody else will chime in with a different opinion.
If every day you run into X amount of encounters that would start feeling surreal rather quickly. Most games I've been in tend to 1 or 2 encounters a day, even my time in age of ashes feels that way. It's your job as the GM to challenge your characters, find the right pace for them, and the story you are telling.
All I can say is I am in a PF1E AP and the suggested amount of combats per day never apply to our games. We normally are like 8+ in any dungeon.
PF2E is like this too for Extinction Curse. If players want to complete a dungeon in one run it would be like 8+ encounters.
We dont really find that fun because the Fighter/Monk would find it fun but a Wizard/Alchemist would be bored to tears.
Overall it is tough. As a player I like 3ish hard encounters a day.
No matter what I would dislike if there was X encounters a day, I feel you need variance.
Yeah you can say casters "have to conserve spells" but imo if you have so many battles a day that most your time is just using cantrips it isnt that fun.
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I think the limited resources of casters vs the near unlimited DPR of the martials should take into account treasure and gear. A wizard can double even triple their spell output with wands, staves, and especially scrolls. Granted they are still limited when compared to martials, but you cannot ignore the volume of non cantrips you can cast with scrolls the equivalence of magic arms/armor.
I think the limited resources of casters vs the near unlimited DPR of the martials should take into account treasure and gear. A wizard can double even triple their spell output with wands, staves, and especially scrolls. Granted they are still limited when compared to martials, but you cannot ignore the volume of non cantrips you can cast with scrolls the equivalence of magic arms/armor.
You are not wrong, however availibility often is a major problem. For example how often does your AP provide a ready-to-go weapon of striking+x or an armor+y versus a bunch of scrolls of fireball (lets say 6) at your maximum level, so you can clear that 8+ encounters dungeon without having to tap into your own spells much?
Age of Ashes, especially the first book, is a little bit of an outlier of encounter design. It skirts to the harder, higher level solo monsters, sometimes not even as solo monsters, or with encounters that can spill over on to each other, at least it worked that way at our table. The way our GM ran it, it is close to town and there is no immediate rush on "clearing it out," so much as carefully navigate it to accomplish a specific time sensitive goal before taking their time with the rest. It really is fine to let players go as far into it as they choose, and not try to push them to establish an artificial pace. If they "go the wrong way" early, you should be kind in having a reason for them to be able to fall back if necessary. The book gives you plenty of options for how to do that.
The GM really should take their party composition and player expectations into account when they are establishing a pace for their campaign.
Despite your combattive tone, I'll answer.
My apologies for the tone. I was writing on my phone and wasn't able to read through the post as much as I'd wanted. I've seen several rather toxic comments on these forums in response to questions like the one I asked, accusing the poster of Playing the Game Wrong because they dared to imply there are flaws with the system. I kind of got the impression you were one of those. Reviewing your post, I can see I was being unfair. Sorry.
It's up to the DM to decide how his story is going to run. If you're running an AP, a lot of that is done for you.
And yes, I'd be happy playing a caster in a game where there were some arbitrarily large number of encounters in a day. Because the players have some control over that too. They can decide to go back to town and rest. They can decide to camp out somewhere. Unless the DM is being particularly perverse, they have some input on how many encounters they're going to have in a given day.
I suppose that the fact that the players (almost) always can theoretically choose to rest and regain spells and accept whatever narrative cost is associated with that does make it a bit less bad than the extreme example I gave of "no regaining spells until you level up". But I still think some guidance for the GM is needed. If I'm making an adventure where the PCs have to go through the Dungeon of Twenty Encounters to rescue the Princess Macguffin, and Baron Evil is going to give them a time limit to get through before he kills her, then how long should that time limit be so rescuing the princess will be a reasonable challenge for the party, rather than being a cakewalk or nearly impossible? If I'm working out how much worse things get every time the PCs take a nap while the Demon Spawn of Arach-Nacha is still alive, how many days should I say it takes before the Spawn sends its army of kobolds to attack the local town? (That latter one is something that I actually had to decide in my campaign some years ago. In the end, the PCs rested twice and arrived just in time to see the attack starting, which was what I'd been hoping.)
If you want to houserule spellcasters regaining all their spellslots after a ten-minute rest, nobody's stopping you. But I think most spellcaster PCs know they need to economize their spells to some degree, because they can't count on there being only one or two encounters in a given day.
But doesn't that depend on the campaign? I mean I've played in games (in other systems) where there would be only a single encounter per month. I've played in other games (again, in other systems) where an entire book's worth of adventures would take place in one day.
If I tried to run the former game in PF2, the players would quickly figure that out and stop bothering to economise their spells. The reason they "know" they can't count on there just being one encounter per day is because it's common wisdom for GMs and module writers that a good adventure will at least sometimes include multiple encounters on a single day, in order to discourage casters from spending all their slots on a single encounter.
It seems to me that you've demonstrated by your own words that there is an expected number (or more accurately, range of numbers) of encounters per day, and that "always just 1 encounter" isn't within that expectation.
I think the limited resources of casters vs the near unlimited DPR of the martials should take into account treasure and gear. A wizard can double even triple their spell output with wands, staves, and especially scrolls. Granted they are still limited when compared to martials, but you cannot ignore the volume of non cantrips you can cast with scrolls the equivalence of magic arms/armor.
That seems to just be shifting the balance question to a different part of the game. How much should a wizard be spending on consumables, compared to advancing their gear. Would it be reasonable for me to say "This is a fast paced campaign with very little time for resting and lots of fighting; the wizard can expect to cast virtually all his magic from scrolls and to spend most of his gold on buying more of them"? My instinct is that that would be unreasonable and cause balance problems. The wizard wouldn't be able to improve his other gear and would fall behind where the game's maths expects him to be, and the designers seem to consider that a serious problem. But I don't know. The game doesn't tell me. It's possible that what I described is intended to be an option for how to run the game.
Age of Ashes, especially the first book, is a little bit of an outlier of encounter design.
Good to know. It was the first book, so that makes sense. Is there a more representative adventure you would recommend, if I wanted to examine one to see how Paizo is balancing things?
The GM really should take their party composition and player expectations into account when they are establishing a pace for their campaign.
I agree too. But it would be useful to have some idea of what would be considered "normal", especially when you're learning a new system and don't yet know what will be fun for your players' party composition. The GM can look at the party and say "OK, I've got a bunch of spellcasters, so they'll probably be expending daily resources on even easier encounters and will be wanting to rest more often than normal. I'd better make resting easier than I normally would to keep things fun." But that's no help if the GM doesn't know what that normal level would actually be.
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In summary, I just don't understand why you would build some classes around the idea of resources draining over the course of a day, and others around the idea of resources draining over the course of an encounter and then coming back when you take a rest, if you're intending your system to have tightly balanced maths, and to remain balanced no matter how many encounters the group has in a given day. It seems like that would inherently cause balance problems, and at least as far as my own playstyle is concerned, my playtesting seems to have confirmed that.
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it's common wisdom for GMs and module writers that a good adventure will at least sometimes include multiple encounters on a single day, in order to discourage casters from spending all their slots on a single encounter.
I can only speak for myself, but caster spell resources do not play into my design when I am running the game. The story circumstances determine how many encounters would occur in a day. Outside, in a very rural area, there may be less than one per day. In an enclosed terrain like a dungeon crawl, there might be 20 (or more) encounters in a day. I would advise my players to never assume a "normal" number of encounters in a day. There is no "normal."
I just don't understand why you would build some classes around the idea of resources draining over the course of a day, and others around the idea of resources draining over the course of an encounter and then coming back when you take a rest, if you're intending your system to have tightly balanced maths, and to remain balanced no matter how many encounters the group has in a given day. It seems like that would inherently cause balance problems, and at least as far as my own playstyle is concerned, my playtesting seems to have confirmed that.
Tradition, variety and verisimilitude. D&D 4e tried to fix the balance issue by giving everyone once-per-day powers and once-per-encounter powers, and a lot of people complained it made the classes too samey and that it didn't make sense for Fighters to have abilities they could only use once before needing to rest for eight hours.
In most cases the balance issue doesn't matter much, because:
Everyone has finite Hit Points, which means everyone has a daily limit and will want to rest.
The party will be a mix of different kinds of PC, so between them they should be able to handle both long days and shorter, more intense, days.
Usually the party can self-balance by deciding when they need to rest, and the GM can decide if they're resting too soon and punish them for it.
The downside is, it's not some perfectly balanced boardgame where we can say what's a fair challenge for any given party. So we tend to use vague or generous time limits. Instead of "you have four days to get past these twenty encounters and defeat Baron Evil or the princess will die," we say, "Princess Macguffin is being interrogated in a torture chamber and we don't know how long she can hold out, so you'd better hurry (but not so much that you get killed)."
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"X is more an art than a science" is a polite way of saying "we don't understand this well enough to do it well reliably" or perhaps "we're doing this on gut feeling, but when your gut is tuned well, the results are pretty".
This certainly goes for adventure pacing. It's tricky. There isn't one true standard or default assumption. This is because of a couple of reasons:
- Not all groups are equally skillful or efficient. The adventure pacing that's good for one group may be too hard or too easy for another group.
- Not all groups enjoy the same pacing. One group gathers every other week on a Tuesday to play for about three hours in the evening, and they want to have the story move forward and one interesting fight. It would be hard to do that if you had to have 4 fights per day on average, because then it would take four sessions to get through one day. Which makes it hard to move the story forward. Another group likes to gather for a weekend and play for eight hours straight both days and wants to feel like they ran the gauntlet and came out on top. One encounter per day doesn't do it for them.
- Not all parties match all adventures. One party may be highly efficient martials using Continual Recovery and Lay On Hands to efficiently heal up in between encounters and during encounters they hit hard enough that enemies don't have long to hurt them. This party can do two encounters per hour for eight hours straight. But if they have to do three encounters without breaks in between they have a hard time. Another group relies on an angelic sorcerer and an oracle for spike Heals in combat and can do those three combats in a row without getting nervous, but doesn't have the efficient out of combat healing to easily do the sixteen encounters in a day that the other party was capable of. These two parties are going to react differently to (1) a dungeon where the golems and mindless undead all stay in their room (2) the hobgoblin fortress where all forces converge on the PCs when the alarm is raised. And official APs can't assume which party people choose to build.
I hope those three things give an example of why a generic answer to "what is the right pacing" answer isn't possible. But that doesn't mean you can't have good pacing for your group. But you need to figure out (1) how you play (2) how you want to play.
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There are a couple of broad approaches I've seen to timing, all of which can work for some groups.
The Adventure Waits For The Group / The PCs Are Always Just On Time
For some reason the PCs always end up bursting onto the scene at the most dramatic possible moment. You don't confront the princess two days before she eats the dragon, or two days after; but just on the exact moment that the frying pan is already sizzling and she's about to make her superpower omelette. While the adventure may be presented to the players as if things are urgent, in reality they're never going to get there early or late.
Note that for this to work well, it's best if the players aren't too keenly aware that they have all the time they want. It's more fun if they think time matters and they got there not a second too soon. Among veteran players, this may require some deliberate suspension of disbelief (deep inside we know the urgency is fake, but it's more fun to play our characters as if the urgency is real).
Note also that this is more or less the default way pacing is done in Paizo's APs. It's not the most satisfying approach because you often get jarring inconsistencies - the adventure sounds really urgent, like every minute counts. However, there are just too damn many fights for the PCs to accomplish in the apparent time. So at some point you need to pause and rest. And the next day, the sky still hasn't fallen. What's more, when you get such a "bad thing is imminent, but you gotta fight through nine patrols to get there" thing, there often isn't an obvious natural breakpoint to rest for the night. Overall this may be a necessary evil though, when writing an adventure for a broad audience running the gamut from beginner to veterans with deep system mastery and efficient teamwork.
Beat the Clock
The adventure has a set timeline and the PCs have to be fast enough to stay on it, otherwise bad things happen. If they're early, they can maybe accrue some advantages. This is often what players think is going on, and it fulfills a fantasy of "see if we can beat AP X". Whenever someone asks "but how is this adventure supposed to pace officially" they're thinking in this direction. Quite a few groups starting out say "we wanna play the game using standard settings first before experimenting", but ironically, the standard setting is the "Adventure Waits For Group" described above, not the Beat the Clock model.
Beat the Clock feels realistic and has a certain appeal, but it's hard to write, because you have to account for more ways for the adventure to unfold. What if the party is fast and gets to the BBEG's hideout a day early? Maybe the climax in your adventure is a set piece fight in the ritual chamber where the players try to fight their way through the praetorian guard to stop the mass sacrifice that will summon the demon lord. But what if they get there two days early and the ritual isn't ready to start yet? Or what if they get there a day later and the "unstoppable" demon lord has already been summoned?
I said hard to write - not impossible. And it can be very rewarding when the stakes are much more real - you can fail and arrive too late. But setting a standard ("a normal party should be able to get there in five days, so set the countdown for 5*24=120 hours") requires insight into how long a normal party will take. And how likely it is that they get there early or late. Suppose you use random weather tables and there's a sea voyage involved, there may be a 30% chance that the party won't arrive on time just through bad luck.
Also, it really requires you to plan for failure as an option, if the party arrives too late. APs generally don't do this, not seriously.
Party In Control Of Pacing
Not all campaigns are APs like Paizo's. And even in those APs, there are often stretches where the villains aren't all that actively machinating. The pace is basically set by the PCs, and if they go in an entirely different direction for a month, that's fine too. If they're exploring a dungeon mostly populated by guardian constructs and undead who have no drive to go outside or band together against the intruders, the party can easily set the pace. Likewise, a party that's just having fun traipsing around the country might run into a wandering monster but after that they can just decide to make camp. After all, they already beat the alpha predator in the area, so there's not likely to be another encounter if they rest right here.
One Day Adventures
A bit of a blend between the three options given above, a lot of PFS/SFS scenarios use this model. The amount of time in between encounters is fairly loose and usually enough for the PCs to heal up mostly or fully. But because Villains On The Move of some kind, there is a push to get the adventure done in one day. Combine this with an external constraint ("this adventure should take 4-5 hours to run") and you dial in to about 2-4 encounters in a typical scenario. Perhaps it's because we've been kinda trained against those expectations, but I find that it's usually doable to pace my use of spells and other daily powers to have a satisfying amount of them available in every encounter.
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The examples above are not an exhaustive list of pacing strategies either. And none of them are The Official One Way. Pacing is intended to make the game fun for your group, not to make them measure up to the ideals of some abstract theoretical group.
Personally I like to mix them a bit, too. I think in practice I use a lot of The Adventure Waits, but with the knowing suspension of disbelief of the group. If players can just say "well, we're going to do as much as we can but when we're running out, we pause" they're still enjoying the urgent feeling of Just On Time without forcing their characters to to breaking point. So the amount of encounters per day will vary a bit between 2-6 depending on how things go. Obviously hard encounters burn through the party's stock harder than easier ones so they end the day sooner too. I think this works especially well on players that have been "trained" by PFS where you "have to" do about 2-5 encounters in a day, that those players find it natural to do the same in APs. If doing multiple encounters feels natural, you don't try to nova on the first encounter and rest. But you also know that you gotta call it quits at some point.
As a GM, it's also good to speed up and slow down sometimes. If the party is used to having to do around four encounters but with breaks in between, then sometimes a few easier encounters but quickly after another can be refreshing. Likewise, if the party is usually reacting to enemies they run into, it can be nice if sometimes they know exactly where the enemy is and they can go to it next day with exactly the right preparation.
Well seems like the general consensus is "it depends" which I 100% agree with. PF2E basically the more martials you have the easier longer adventuring days are. Also some groups are just more efficient in general.
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Well seems like the general consensus is "it depends" which I 100% agree with. PF2E basically the more martials you have the easier longer adventuring days are. Also some groups are just more efficient in general.
You'd think so, but even that isn't necessarily true. Martials can go longer on a 1 encounter per hour basis. But if encounters start snowballing into each other you need a caster to do some burst healing or throw up a wall spell to buy time against the reinforcements.
I'd say just make sure there's variation. At some point in the campaign you have 10 relatively easy encounters in a row but without even a minute break, at some other point you have one severe or extreme encounter but then the adventuring day is over. This way different abilities need to be used and different characters or aspects of a character will shine.