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DnD’s adventuring day is unrealistic for a lot of reasons, but the fact that it takes so much real-world time to get through is my biggest problem with it.
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Pacing D and D 5e is difficult because D
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and D 5e's pacing is fundamentally about
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resource attrition, but the rules also
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make it incredibly difficult for dungeon
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masters to meaningfully deplete the
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party's resources in a timely fashion.
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The game is built expecting that you'll
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have six to eight encounters of roughly
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medium difficulty between long rest so
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that players will have to burn through
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their limited resources and keep those
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encounters challenging. The way that
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most people play is with many fewer
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encounters between long rest. So, the
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players are free to go nova in basically
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every combat encounter, which makes it
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incredibly difficult for the DM to
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challenge them. That is not the player's
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fault. That's a fundamental issue in the
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system itself. It's not a small group of
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players having this problem either. It's
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the vast majority of players, and the
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higher level you get, the harder it
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gets. Again, D&D expects six to eight
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combat. A combat encounter is expected
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to last roughly three rounds, which we
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can see from the 2014 monster building
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rules. But think about how long a combat
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encounter takes at the table. Like
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combat in Dn D 5e is kind of slow. A
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really well-trained group with a good
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dungeon master can get through combat
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pretty quickly, but as soon as you've
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got like spell effects on the table and
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complicated, interesting monsters,
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everything slows down. So, a typical
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combat encounter frequently takes groups
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of one to two hours to run. And that's
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for three rounds of combat. If it takes
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two hours to get through three rounds of
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combat, and we're supposed to have six
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to eight encounters a day, let's just
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say six encounters, 2 hours per
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encounter, that is 12 hours of play time
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between long rest. That's simply
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unreasonable. That is not how people
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want to play the game. So, to fix D and
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D's pacing, like we we really do need to
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fix the way that combat is designed to
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work. Combat needs to run faster, have
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more turns in the same time frame, and
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deplete more resources so that we can
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get through combats more quickly, and
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spend those resources more quickly. Or
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they need to just change the balance
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assumption of the game and reduce the
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number of expected encounters.
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