Dungeons & Dragons is a resource-based game. For most of its editions, you have a limited amount of resources, with hit points and spells being the main two resources you deplete.
However, if you look at its original presentation and then compare it to the current version, there are a few rather significant changes to how things are handled. Particularly concerning access to healing – in original Dungeons & Dragons, healing is very rare. A first level cleric can’t even cast spells, and a fifth level cleric could effectively only heal twice, each healing spell being the equivalent of one hit worth of damage.
Your ninth (name level) cleric? Three cure light wounds (1d6+1) and two cure serious wounds (2d6+2)!
That is not a lot of healing. So, hit points become the main determinant of how long a party can continue.
Conversely in 5E, characters have a lot of healing at their disposal. Even a first level cleric can heal twice, and you also have the effect of hit dice and short rests – capabilities that were not present in earlier forms of the game.
This then changes the balance of encounters. In OD&D, if an 8th level party encounters ten orcs, each time an orc hits a party member, that is part of their hit points that they’re likely not getting back. So, an encounter where the fighter gets hit only once still represents a significant loss of resources (and thus, non-trivial). But as characters won’t get hit that often, the party can still continue even while not on full hit points.
In 5E and most modern editions (since 3E, really), encounters are balanced around characters starting each encounter on full hit points – and often the front-line fighters will lose all of their hit points during an encounter and have to have magical healing to recover. With easy access to potions of healing and healing spells, this is quite doable.
The length of an adventuring day might remain the same, but its nature feels quite different – in one case, the hit point totals are slowly dropping; in the other, hit points go down and up wildly, but spells are expended regularly.
Of course, the offensive spell capabilities of the wizards and similar casters also play a role. When wizards have combat-ending spells like sleep and fireball, then when they’ve expended them and can cast nothing more, then it’s often time to end the expedition and return to recuperate.
Is one of these systems better? Honestly, it’s down to personal taste.
But, funnily enough, neither system is always good, especially when running a narrative-driven game which expects you to complete a task in a certain amount of time. There’s an old 2E adventure, Halls of the High King, which sees you racing against time to save the High King of the Moonshae Isles from danger. What happens when you run out of resources and need to rest? Oh, I guess you fail the adventure!
I like the adventure a lot, but that was something that occurred when we played it, many years ago. I eventually fudged my way through it, but run-as-written, my group would have failed because they ran out of resources.
D&D was written around a playstyle where you went into a dungeon, explored until your resources got low, then you left and rested. It wasn’t built around time-dependent storylines. When you try to use them, then the game doesn’t always work as expected. Of course, these strong narrative storylines have been the dominant form of published adventure since… well… the 1980s.
Nah, it’s not a purely modern occurrence.
My Monday night game is very much based around the old-school dungeon delving experience, and so – as I discussed yesterday – how much encounters deplete the heroes’ resources is very important. Last night’s session went for two hours in which there was a bunch of map exploration and four combats – and though we could have played for another hour, they were out of resources after two hours because of the difficulty of the encounters.
So, because I want each expedition into the dungeon to last one session, and it makes most sense for the party to retreat when they’re out of resources, then it looks like the difficulty level was set just a little too high. I’ll rework some encounter tables and see how things play out next time.
The challenge rating system is both quite inaccurate and surprisingly accurate. The composition of your party and their play styles can significantly affect matters, but the prediction of how tough the encounters would be for my group wasn’t that badly off. It’s a good starting point – it just doesn’t tell the entire story.
You can use dungeon adventures that aren’t time-limited as a way to gain a feel for the balances of the game. When running a time-dependent scenario, I do suggest going for easier encounters rather than more difficult ones – only put the ones that really might drain a party’s resources at the end of a section. That is, just before they’d rest anyway!