Why is it so important?

pemerton said:

Not of the particular point you made, namely, that the threat of mechanical significance (ie resource addition or depletion) is worse than the actuality of mechanical significance.

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Um......No. That is not a point that I made.

Raven Crowking said:

Win/lose encounters (in this case, those with the threat of mechanical significance, where anly loss of mechanical resources is perforce a significant one) make the problem worse, not better.

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Contextually, "the problem" referred to the 9-9:15 adventuring day.

How, exactly, do you turn this into "the threat of mechanical significance (ie resource addition or depletion) is worse than the actuality of mechanical significance"? Because, if you are going to do "a detaild analysis of the claims being made, and their plausibility" you had better start with the claims actually being made.

Patryn of Elvenshae said:

I disagree.

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I am answering a question about whether or not I believe the opposite of the point I have been making. I say, "obviously not or I'd not have been writing about this for so long", and that is what you quote to disagree with?!?

pemerton said:

I was asked to provide an example of a threshold of significance to which solely per-day resources are an obstacle.

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Yes, but that isn't what you did.

What you did was select three thresholds of significance to which per-day resources are not, in any general sense, an obstacle, and then demonstrated that if you work at it you can make running out of resources into a problem using those thresholds.

This is not the same thing.

If per-day resources are an obstacle to a ToS, you shouldn't have to contrive situations to make resources a problem.


RC

Raven Crowking said:

Yes, but that isn't what you did.

What you did was select three thresholds of significance to which per-day resources are not, in any general sense, an obstacle, and then demonstrated that if you work at it you can make running out of resources into a problem using those thresholds.

This is not the same thing.

If per-day resources are an obstacle to a ToS, you shouldn't have to contrive situations to make resources a problem.


RC

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If no actual obstacles were posted in pemerton's statements, then why did you feel compelled to post the work-arounds in you posted #1010 with the encounters providing you with the resources needed to overcome attrition and sally forth?

Or are these actually obstacles, but ones that "halfway competent DM"s can and should know how to get around anyway, making revising them unnecessary?

I'm going to add my personal hate-on here for being required as a DM to put certain items in treasure - which is what Raven Crowking suggests I do to work around the limitations of per-day resource management.

The system should work with no access to one-shot items. Period. Every class should be able to use their "core competency" roles/abilities, in every encounter, with minimal specific equipment. The fighter can, by and large, pick up any random sword and use his basic class features/abilities with it. Likewise the rogue (though he needs a somewhat more specific toolkit if he has to open locks).

Hence, the requirement that all classes work their resource management for their primary roles more or less the same.

It is perfectly possible, with little or no prep, to run an adventure that is fun, challenging, and has encounters than run the gamut from easy to OMGWFTBBQ, with every variation between, in a system with NO per-day resource management. Theoretically, in Shadowrun, ever encounter the PCs are fresh as daisies in; there is very little way to ablate the PCs' capabilities by throwing encounters at them. I did this, fr 7 years, in a running campaign that had anywhere from 2-12 PCs at any one session (SR is easier to deal with missing characters, I will admit), from my GM experience being very low (Essentially, SR was the first game I ever ran, and I had very little RPG experience in general to bring to the table; I had never played SR before running it) to "I don't have to crack a book to run this game, and my players don't have to crack one while I'm running, because I have internalized the system". (I'm nowhere near that level with D&D right now, incidentally; mostly because the rules are too complicated and too beholden to the sacred cows).

In short, resource management above the at-will level is unnecessary for game design, if the abilities are balanced.

Now, I'm not pushing for purely at-will resources in D&D - I believe there is a place for the per-encounter and per-day abilities in D&D. I believe that the "meat and potatoes" of any characters role should be at-will however; just as the fighter's attack is at-will. Then their "advanced" abilities, (say Stunning Fist for the monk, and yes, I know that's technically per-day right now) should be per-encounter, and finally the "big guns" (fireball, etc) should be per-day. I also believe that every class should have roughly comparable abilities to affect a combat when used with the same level of player skill (but not the same ability with different names) at each level. Balance at each level, balance for each class. Otherwise you're either waiting to get cool, or holding the coats of the characters who got cool.

I may be looking for something in a gaming system that you're not. That's fine. But what I'm looking for is what will allow the 6 teens in the basement with a brand new set of the core rules and no experience whatsoever in the game to sit down with paper, pencil, and dice, and have fun. Because without those 6 teens in a basement, the hobby dies. Complicated resource management is Not Fun to the inexperienced gamer.

Raven Crowking said:

Um......No. That is not a point that I made.

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Contextually, "the problem" referred to the 9-9:15 adventuring day.

How, exactly, do you turn this into "the threat of mechanical significance (ie resource addition or depletion) is worse than the actuality of mechanical significance"? Because, if you are going to do "a detaild analysis of the claims being made, and their plausibility" you had better start with the claims actually being made.

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In my post #874, I suggested that if it is the threat, but not the actuality, of mechanical significance (in your sense) that is at stake, then a mix of per-encounter and per-day resources might not (as you had concluded) fail to be a solution to the 15 minute adventuring day.

You replied, at post #886, that "Win/lose encounters (in this case, those with the threat of mechanical significance, where anly loss of mechanical resources is perforce a significant one) make the problem worse, not better."

I asked you why you think that the threat makes things worse than the actuality - which seemed to be the implication of your sentence in quotation marks above. Apparently I've misunderstood you - it seems that you do not draw any distinction between an encounter which threatens long term resource depletion, and one which actually produces long term resource depletion. As my examples have tried to demonstrate, and as other posters have asserted, (i) I think that distinction is crucial if per-encounter abilities are to change the dynamics of play for many groups, and (ii) I think the distinction is a real one, and therefore has a real chance of changing the dynamics of play for many groups, away from the 15 minute adventuring day

Raven Crowking said:

No encounter can generate the threat of long-term resource depletion, without long-term resource depletion being part of the mechanical setup of the game.

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That seems fairly obvious. I thought it was understood by all the participants in this conversation that what 4e will involve is a mix of per-day and per-encounter resources. I thought that you were contending that this will not solve the 15 minute problem, because an encounter in which long term (ie per day) resources are not consumed will be insignicant. I have suggested that the threat of such consumption may be sufficient to generate signficance of an interesting tactical sort, and have posted an imagined scenario (at #1001) which tries to show how this sort of tactical interest can be generated without it always being rational simply to (as you put it) "use whatever big guns you have" first.

Raven Crowking said:

If tactical significance can exist without per-day resources, surely encounters can be created that are tactically significant without requiring per-day resourced if they exist.

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Perhaps. The example I gave in post #1001 depended upon the game containing per-encounter resources. In core rules 3.5 the only way I could see to set up the same sort of tactical options would be for a spell-casting character, with the choice being "which spell to cast". And currently, as all spells are per-day, there is no way to set up those sorts of choices without actually depeleting long term resources.

Raven Crowking said:

* The treasure from each encounter includes scrolls, healing potions, etc., that effectively returns the party to status quo after each encounter.

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* The treasure from the leader fight includes scrolls, healing potions, etc., that effectively returns the party to status quo for mop up.

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That is one way to do it. Some players (and GMs) might prefer an approach to play where the further encounter (be it the mop up, or whatever else) can happen before the looting (and identifying of said loot), or even where there is no looting.

Raven Crowking said:

This is an example of poor encounter generation, if anything, that requires resources to exist that either do no inherently exist or are not supplied.

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Your point seems to be that "Given D&D as it is, this is poor encounter design." Sure, but another way of putting that point is "Given D&D as it is, this sequence of encounters can't really be run effectively." And another way of putting this is that "D&D as it is, with purely per-day resources, poses an obstacle to running certain sequences of enounters with certain (non-mechanical) thresholds of signficance." Which is what I set out to show. So I don't really see why you think I haven't shown it.

Raven Crowking said:

All of your examples seem to be nothing more than "What if we want/need one more encounter, and our resources are depleted?"

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That's probably why I remarked at post #999 that "All of these examples might illustrate a more general point (I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think it's there): per-day is an obstacle to the dynamic evolution of the sequence of encounters over the course of play, if that dynamic evolution is to be guided by non-resource-management considerations."

Raven Crowking said:

the answer is almost always, "Design your encounters to include the possibility of gaining those needed resources." This is pretty simple, and has been done by many, many DMs for decades.

I don't know about you, but I have no difficulty with tactical excitement, thematic exploration, or enjoyable plot development using a system that involves per-day resource attrition. I have 27 years of experience that tells me, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that per-day resource attrition doesn't get in the way of any of these things, within the hands of an even halfway competent DM.

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And other posters have experienced the need to take acount of resource attrition in the design of their encounters, when what they are really interested in is not operational play but purely encounter-leve tactical excitement, or plot development, or thematic play, or even just plain-old buttkicking. They therefore have found this need to be a burden.

Nothing is going to be proved by assertions about what sort of play experience one prefers, or even by demonstrations that a certain set of mechanics can, in the right hands and wielded in the right manner, generate a certain sort of play experience. The question is whether D&D's attrition mechanics can, for some players in some situations, get in the way of other metagame goals. Given that we both agree that they put constraints on encounter design that have no connection to those non-operational metagame goals we seem to be in agreement on this fundamental point.

The question for the 4e designers is, "Is it worth ditching operational play as a major part of the play experience, so as to increase the scope for a wide variety of play involving other metagame priorities?" From the information that is coming out I believe that they have already answered the question in the affirmative. Will this change in direction (which merely continues a trend established in 3E) irreparably harm D&D as a game? I don't believe so. You seem to believe that it will. I'm not sure how that sort of disagreement can be resolved.

As to the problem of the 15-minute adventuring day, I still remain satisfied that I have provided examples which show that your prediction that it will recur with a mix of per-day and per-encounter resources is doubtful, because that prediction rests on a false premise, namely, that an encounter can be of mechanical interest only if it actually consumes per-day resources.

Raven Crowking said:

* No encounter can generate the threat of long-term resource depletion, without long-term resource depletion being part of the mechanical setup of the game.

* If tactical significance can exist without per-day resources, surely encounters can be created that are tactically significant without requiring per-day resourced if they exist.

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Exactly - encounters do not need to "generate the threat of long-term resource depletion" to be fun, challenging, and tactically significant. Therefore you don't need per-day resources.

(Weren't you arguing for primary per-day resource management. Or did I get turned around in the fog?

IanArgent said:

Exactly - encounters do not need to "generate the threat of long-term resource depletion" to be fun, challenging, and tactically significant. Therefore you don't need per-day resources.

(Weren't you arguing for primary per-day resource management. Or did I get turned around in the fog?

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No. He is saying that those things are not dependent on one another. in other words, with oer day resources, you get the added fun of worrying about longer term resource depletion. Yet you still have fun, challenging and tactically significant encounters. The per-encounter resource focus is not only unnecessary, it actually removes a fun, viable part of the game that has been there since the beginning and is a big part of what makes D&D, D&D.

Reynard said:

The per-encounter resource focus is not only unnecessary, it actually removes a fun, viable part of the game that has been there since the beginning and is a big part of what makes D&D, D&D.

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And I don't dispute your second clause. As I've said repeatedly, there is a clear trendline from 1st ed through 3E that reduces the importance, in D&D, of operational play.

But I do claim that by getting rid of the operational dynamics of the game, more room is openend up for alternative metagame priorities. The current overwhelming importance of per-day resources for spell-users, and therefore for a good chunk of party play, is an obstacle to the flexibility of encounter design that in many cases will better suit those alternative priorities.

There is a competition here - the rules cannot be all things to all playstyles. WoTC seems to have a fairly clear idea of the sort of playstyle it wants to support, and this is not operational play.