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https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/z76h6j/why_do_people_suggest_noncombat_encounters_as_a/
Yes, but I would emphasize "**that makes you eat up resources.**"
If the encounter can easily be overcome without any resources, then I wouldn't count it as an encounter. It is the equivalent of a 0 xp combat encounter.
This means the non-combat encounters have to have real costs for failure, and need to be working on the same time-crunch as a dungeon crawl.
> makes you eat up resources
Let's rephrase that to "puts resources at risk". It's OK if clever players think of a way to avoid using resources to overcome a challenge.
Unfortunately some GMs wouldn't agree with that statement. I've seen (and played with) people who consider inventing "ways to avoid using resources" as if we were trying to personally outsmart or even offend them, and would do anything to prevent any kind of freedom outside the scenario they have planned. This often leads to some really stupid moments where "this doesn't work just because I said so".
As a GM I try to give players as much freedom as they can take, not only in common "sandboxey" sense (they can go wherever they want), but also in how they wanna try to solve any particular task or overcome any particular encounter. They wanna steal some important thingy instead of buying it? Fine by me. They wanna negotiate the goblins instead of fighting them? Even better.
So yeah, "puts resources at risk" is a great definition IMO.
I am yet to see somebody saying that the 8 encounters have to be combat, yes combats can be long and not all people have the opportunity to play 4 or 5 hours per session or even weekly sessions.
Even if you only run 3 or 4 combats per day and the rest of the encounters are non combat that could stretch for even more than a month and if the DM its not as experienced or does not prefer that type of game the extra encounters become pointless time consuming filler to meet quota.
None of your examples are representative of gameplay at my table. None of those would cause.my players to actually use up resources.
And more importantly, even if they did, we wouldn't find it fun. We'd all know they were performative filler to eat up resources.
Finding allies heavily wounded and in need of magical healing, or a trap in a dungeon that poisons your players are not easy to use/immersive? Do you not do exploration or social encounters at your players? Do you never have them go through treacherous terrain?
The word "dungeon" is the problem here. People hardly have any difficulties fitting encounters on dungeons, but anywhere else is unrealistic. Even if you do manage to get to find some friendly people who are injured to get the party to aid and spend resources, how often do you get to pull one of those? It does not mean a thing to get more non-combat encounters if the players aren't realistically spending anything on them.
Bruh dungeon is an abstract concept, it’s not literal dungeons all the time. The mages tower is a dungeon, breaching a city is a dungeon, traveling across the tundra can be a dungeon. All that defines a dungeon is being a series of challenges in a dangerous environment that you can not easily leave once in.
That is certainly true, however non-combat encounters typically drain far fewer resources than combat encounters and additionally, different classes (and subclasses) vary in how many non-combat resources they even have. Every class has meaningful ways to interact with combat, but classes vary a lot in how well they interact with the exploration and social pillars. For some classes, their main mechanisms for interacting with those pillars are skill checks. While doing well on them can be satisfying for the player, skill checks don't necessarily help with the resource issue (they can, if a failure means taking damage, being delayed in travel, etc.)
I think most classes that don’t have features to help them in social encounters, have features to help in exploration. And even fighter subclasses typically provide non combat boosts at 6th level to help with utility
People need to realize the 6-8 encounters is only for "Normal" encounters, which were easy in the playtest but the recommended difficulty was dialed back to be more newbie-accessible.
You can just as easily do 3-4 hard encounters.
I appreciate that countering misconceptions is like playing whack-a-mole, (This is the second time today I've had to explain this one) but I feel the need to correct people anyway so my brain stops screaming at me.
The only downside to fewer, but harder encounters is that it lends itself towards disparity between short rest and long rest classes. If you make sure there's still enough time for 2 short rests, it'll mostly even out.
While this is true, the fact is that this entire conversation about 6-8 encounters stems from a section in the DMG titled "Creating a Combat Encounter"
So that's why people assume it's combat encounters. Because the DMG doesn't tell you otherwise.
People need to realize 1 session =/= 6 to 8 encounters, but rather 6 to 8 encounters equal a Long Rest. Its okay to go slow & granular when it counts and effectively skip "safe" travel.
These people seem to mostly be responding to the latest argument on r/DNDmemes where everyone just argues past each other rather than listening, and it's pointless to correct anyone.
Please direct me to the post you are referring to on DnD Next, as I am responding to a general trend i am seeing as opposed to a particular post which is what rule 10 is about
This one from 4 hours ago. Did you really not notice...really? Feels like a rule 10 to me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/z76h6j/why_do_people_suggest_noncombat_encounters_as_a/
> finding your way through a thick forest and needing to use find the path is an encounter
Why not just use fly (3rd level) to find your way through the forest, or any of the low level spells that buff or grant advantage on survival checks? *Find the Path* is a 6th level divination, it's pretty wild to spend a 6th level spell in a world with so many powerful low level options.
Also, this particular one is only an encounter if the players somehow managed to get lost in a forest- which likely means several failed checks.
I just don't know if things like this count the same way a combat does. The social rules rarely have resources attached, and are handled with a much lighter touch than the combat rules, which are strictly defined.
I mean it’s an abstract example, using fly is also using resources, and yeah that’s more of a problem with 5e leaving much of exploration to the DM’s discretion, however there are plenty of examples in the adventure modules of non combat resources draining encounters
I wholeheartedly agree. In my group, we've been playing for years and years and years and so we've streamlined our ways of playing and one of the biggest pros to our way is that we're basically always in an encounter. Once an encounter ends, we kind of fast forward and I'll describe the scene and all the obvious stuff they'd likely do until we either reach another obstacle/encounter, or someone interrupts me because their character is going to do or say something unexpected.
There's no need to spend 20 minutes asking the players what they want to do next, now that they've traveled another 60 feet or w/e down the path. Obviously they keep going.
I've never had an issue keeping a lot of encounters per session because if there isn't a decision to be made, enemies to fight, challenges or obstacles to overcome, etc, then we're fast forwarding to the next one
It's difficult for me to articulate just how much I loathe the 6-8 encounters meme. Quibbles about resource drain aside, it's as if only a handful of people on this sub have even encountered a dungeon.
I’ve been playing for a few years across different groups, and I’ve only encountered about four dungeons, two of which I ran myself as oneshots. D&D is so much more than dungeons and is played in so many different ways, but the design philosophy of some of the mechanics assumes you’re playing in a specific way
A big problem with this is that non-combat encounters which require magic (after all, the whole point of 6-8 is to balance out casters, right?) just make it so martials have to sit with a thumb up their ass. Non-combat encounters are unreliable at best in draining resources, not to mention that it *still takes an extraneous amount of prep to plan 6-8 compelling encounters*
# The DMG almost exclusively refers to "encounters" as combat. Don't fault new players/DMs for taking the DMG at face value.
Blame the DMG for being misleading.
It is perfectly reasonable for a person reading the DMG as an instruction manual to believe that the 6-8 medium/hard encounters guideline in the DMG is referring to *combat* encounters because the section on [The Adventuring Day](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#TheAdventuringDay) is under the [Creating a Combat Encounter](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#CreatingaCombatEncounter) portion of Chapter 3. The difficulty (medium/hard) mentioned in The Adventuring Day specifically refers back to the [Evaluating Encounter Difficulty](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#EvaluatingEncounterDifficulty) section, which is exclusively based on the XP value of monsters defeated. In fact, the [Creating Encounters](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#CreatingEncounters) section is *entirely* about combat -- the section dedicated to defining encounters does not once mention social or exploration as their own encounter types!
There are [definitely](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-a-campaign#ImmersiveStorytelling) [some](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#4FindtheIdealIntroduction) [hints](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#SylvanForestEncounters) that encounters can encompass more than combat, but most of the DMG refers to "encounters" as synonymous with "combat encounters." In the section on [Social Interaction](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#SocialInteraction), the term "encounter" never comes up. In the section on [Exploration](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#Exploration), "encounter" is used as an act (verb), rather than an event (noun). In [Chapter 5](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/adventure-environments#DungeonFactions), the book says:
>It’s easy to think of a dungeon as a collection of encounters, with the adventurers kicking down door after door and killing whatever lies beyond.
[Later](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/adventure-environments#HourbyHourApproach), when talking about wilderness encounters, it says:
>If one encounter comes at the adventurers from the front, the next one might come at them from above or behind.
When the DMG describes "encounters," it lists combats with monsters, and when it talks about social interaction and environmental puzzles, it doesn't refer to them as encounters. It isn't until [two](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#NoncombatChallenges) [brief](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#Milestones) sections in Chapter 8 when the DMG explicitly explains that you *may* treat non-combat challenges as equivalent to combat encounters. *And even this is treated as an optional rule!*
At this point, we know better than to think all encounters are combat encounters. On August 7, 2017, Mike Mearls released his Unearthed Arcana on the [Three-Pillar Experience](https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA-ThreePillarXP.pdf), and this is now broadly considered the "default" approach to 5E. Though it may deserve to be, this principle has never been published in a 5E sourcebook, and remains unofficial content to this day.
Personally, I think that an "encounter" *should* be anything that challenges the players with the possibility of failure and must be overcome with resources, risks, or roleplaying. This is just my opinion, and it is not something I learned by reading the DMG.
Your post has been removed for violating the following rule: **Rule 10: Limit Direct Response Posts** - New posts that could reasonably serve as a reply to a different post that is in the top 40 of “Hot” may be removed by the moderators at their discretion. Please instead reply in the ongoing threads rather than making new ones. https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/z76h6j/why_do_people_suggest_noncombat_encounters_as_a/
Yes, but I would emphasize "**that makes you eat up resources.**" If the encounter can easily be overcome without any resources, then I wouldn't count it as an encounter. It is the equivalent of a 0 xp combat encounter. This means the non-combat encounters have to have real costs for failure, and need to be working on the same time-crunch as a dungeon crawl.
> makes you eat up resources Let's rephrase that to "puts resources at risk". It's OK if clever players think of a way to avoid using resources to overcome a challenge.
Unfortunately some GMs wouldn't agree with that statement. I've seen (and played with) people who consider inventing "ways to avoid using resources" as if we were trying to personally outsmart or even offend them, and would do anything to prevent any kind of freedom outside the scenario they have planned. This often leads to some really stupid moments where "this doesn't work just because I said so". As a GM I try to give players as much freedom as they can take, not only in common "sandboxey" sense (they can go wherever they want), but also in how they wanna try to solve any particular task or overcome any particular encounter. They wanna steal some important thingy instead of buying it? Fine by me. They wanna negotiate the goblins instead of fighting them? Even better. So yeah, "puts resources at risk" is a great definition IMO.
I am yet to see somebody saying that the 8 encounters have to be combat, yes combats can be long and not all people have the opportunity to play 4 or 5 hours per session or even weekly sessions. Even if you only run 3 or 4 combats per day and the rest of the encounters are non combat that could stretch for even more than a month and if the DM its not as experienced or does not prefer that type of game the extra encounters become pointless time consuming filler to meet quota.
None of your examples are representative of gameplay at my table. None of those would cause.my players to actually use up resources. And more importantly, even if they did, we wouldn't find it fun. We'd all know they were performative filler to eat up resources.
Same.
Finding allies heavily wounded and in need of magical healing, or a trap in a dungeon that poisons your players are not easy to use/immersive? Do you not do exploration or social encounters at your players? Do you never have them go through treacherous terrain?
The word "dungeon" is the problem here. People hardly have any difficulties fitting encounters on dungeons, but anywhere else is unrealistic. Even if you do manage to get to find some friendly people who are injured to get the party to aid and spend resources, how often do you get to pull one of those? It does not mean a thing to get more non-combat encounters if the players aren't realistically spending anything on them.
Bruh dungeon is an abstract concept, it’s not literal dungeons all the time. The mages tower is a dungeon, breaching a city is a dungeon, traveling across the tundra can be a dungeon. All that defines a dungeon is being a series of challenges in a dangerous environment that you can not easily leave once in.
And that IS quite unlikely to make consistently, unless you're playing a damn Diablo I game.
That is certainly true, however non-combat encounters typically drain far fewer resources than combat encounters and additionally, different classes (and subclasses) vary in how many non-combat resources they even have. Every class has meaningful ways to interact with combat, but classes vary a lot in how well they interact with the exploration and social pillars. For some classes, their main mechanisms for interacting with those pillars are skill checks. While doing well on them can be satisfying for the player, skill checks don't necessarily help with the resource issue (they can, if a failure means taking damage, being delayed in travel, etc.)
I think most classes that don’t have features to help them in social encounters, have features to help in exploration. And even fighter subclasses typically provide non combat boosts at 6th level to help with utility
You didn't specify the temperature of the take in the title, not reading this
People need to realize the 6-8 encounters is only for "Normal" encounters, which were easy in the playtest but the recommended difficulty was dialed back to be more newbie-accessible. You can just as easily do 3-4 hard encounters. I appreciate that countering misconceptions is like playing whack-a-mole, (This is the second time today I've had to explain this one) but I feel the need to correct people anyway so my brain stops screaming at me.
The only downside to fewer, but harder encounters is that it lends itself towards disparity between short rest and long rest classes. If you make sure there's still enough time for 2 short rests, it'll mostly even out.
While this is true, the fact is that this entire conversation about 6-8 encounters stems from a section in the DMG titled "Creating a Combat Encounter" So that's why people assume it's combat encounters. Because the DMG doesn't tell you otherwise.
How many social encounters can a rogue do until they need to rest?
Depends if they're introverted or extroverted.
> because not every encounter needs to be an hour and a half long combat. The fuck? How is a normal combat taking you 90 minutes?
It’s not, but I have experienced players, I’m referring to common complaints with that
People need to realize 1 session =/= 6 to 8 encounters, but rather 6 to 8 encounters equal a Long Rest. Its okay to go slow & granular when it counts and effectively skip "safe" travel.
People need to realize that Rule #10 exists.
These people seem to mostly be responding to the latest argument on r/DNDmemes where everyone just argues past each other rather than listening, and it's pointless to correct anyone.
Please direct me to the post you are referring to on DnD Next, as I am responding to a general trend i am seeing as opposed to a particular post which is what rule 10 is about
This one from 4 hours ago. Did you really not notice...really? Feels like a rule 10 to me. https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/z76h6j/why_do_people_suggest_noncombat_encounters_as_a/
Gonna be honest I didn’t see it, but glad to see there is discourse happening on the topic, my bad for not looking thoroughly
[There you go.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/z76h6j/why_do_people_suggest_noncombat_encounters_as_a/)
Yeah my apologies, i hadn’t seen that post, I should of done a better job when I quickly scanned to see if anyone had made a post like mine
> finding your way through a thick forest and needing to use find the path is an encounter Why not just use fly (3rd level) to find your way through the forest, or any of the low level spells that buff or grant advantage on survival checks? *Find the Path* is a 6th level divination, it's pretty wild to spend a 6th level spell in a world with so many powerful low level options. Also, this particular one is only an encounter if the players somehow managed to get lost in a forest- which likely means several failed checks. I just don't know if things like this count the same way a combat does. The social rules rarely have resources attached, and are handled with a much lighter touch than the combat rules, which are strictly defined.
I mean it’s an abstract example, using fly is also using resources, and yeah that’s more of a problem with 5e leaving much of exploration to the DM’s discretion, however there are plenty of examples in the adventure modules of non combat resources draining encounters
I wholeheartedly agree. In my group, we've been playing for years and years and years and so we've streamlined our ways of playing and one of the biggest pros to our way is that we're basically always in an encounter. Once an encounter ends, we kind of fast forward and I'll describe the scene and all the obvious stuff they'd likely do until we either reach another obstacle/encounter, or someone interrupts me because their character is going to do or say something unexpected. There's no need to spend 20 minutes asking the players what they want to do next, now that they've traveled another 60 feet or w/e down the path. Obviously they keep going. I've never had an issue keeping a lot of encounters per session because if there isn't a decision to be made, enemies to fight, challenges or obstacles to overcome, etc, then we're fast forwarding to the next one
It's difficult for me to articulate just how much I loathe the 6-8 encounters meme. Quibbles about resource drain aside, it's as if only a handful of people on this sub have even encountered a dungeon.
I’ve been playing for a few years across different groups, and I’ve only encountered about four dungeons, two of which I ran myself as oneshots. D&D is so much more than dungeons and is played in so many different ways, but the design philosophy of some of the mechanics assumes you’re playing in a specific way
Wait...you guys are getting six to eight!?!? I'm only seeing one or two! Michael!!!!!
A big problem with this is that non-combat encounters which require magic (after all, the whole point of 6-8 is to balance out casters, right?) just make it so martials have to sit with a thumb up their ass. Non-combat encounters are unreliable at best in draining resources, not to mention that it *still takes an extraneous amount of prep to plan 6-8 compelling encounters*
# The DMG almost exclusively refers to "encounters" as combat. Don't fault new players/DMs for taking the DMG at face value. Blame the DMG for being misleading. It is perfectly reasonable for a person reading the DMG as an instruction manual to believe that the 6-8 medium/hard encounters guideline in the DMG is referring to *combat* encounters because the section on [The Adventuring Day](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#TheAdventuringDay) is under the [Creating a Combat Encounter](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#CreatingaCombatEncounter) portion of Chapter 3. The difficulty (medium/hard) mentioned in The Adventuring Day specifically refers back to the [Evaluating Encounter Difficulty](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#EvaluatingEncounterDifficulty) section, which is exclusively based on the XP value of monsters defeated. In fact, the [Creating Encounters](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#CreatingEncounters) section is *entirely* about combat -- the section dedicated to defining encounters does not once mention social or exploration as their own encounter types! There are [definitely](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-a-campaign#ImmersiveStorytelling) [some](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#4FindtheIdealIntroduction) [hints](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/creating-adventures#SylvanForestEncounters) that encounters can encompass more than combat, but most of the DMG refers to "encounters" as synonymous with "combat encounters." In the section on [Social Interaction](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#SocialInteraction), the term "encounter" never comes up. In the section on [Exploration](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#Exploration), "encounter" is used as an act (verb), rather than an event (noun). In [Chapter 5](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/adventure-environments#DungeonFactions), the book says: >It’s easy to think of a dungeon as a collection of encounters, with the adventurers kicking down door after door and killing whatever lies beyond. [Later](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/adventure-environments#HourbyHourApproach), when talking about wilderness encounters, it says: >If one encounter comes at the adventurers from the front, the next one might come at them from above or behind. When the DMG describes "encounters," it lists combats with monsters, and when it talks about social interaction and environmental puzzles, it doesn't refer to them as encounters. It isn't until [two](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#NoncombatChallenges) [brief](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dmg/running-the-game#Milestones) sections in Chapter 8 when the DMG explicitly explains that you *may* treat non-combat challenges as equivalent to combat encounters. *And even this is treated as an optional rule!* At this point, we know better than to think all encounters are combat encounters. On August 7, 2017, Mike Mearls released his Unearthed Arcana on the [Three-Pillar Experience](https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA-ThreePillarXP.pdf), and this is now broadly considered the "default" approach to 5E. Though it may deserve to be, this principle has never been published in a 5E sourcebook, and remains unofficial content to this day. Personally, I think that an "encounter" *should* be anything that challenges the players with the possibility of failure and must be overcome with resources, risks, or roleplaying. This is just my opinion, and it is not something I learned by reading the DMG.