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Day-Based & Encounter-Based: It's Not Balance, It's Playstyle
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<blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 5976880" data-attributes="member: 87792"><p>Out of curiosity, how is that a news article? Reads more like an op-ed to me.</p><p></p><p>Anyway, encounter-based play has been around since the very start of D&D - it was just called the turn back then. And lasted ten minutes (as opposed to requiring a five minute rest at the end to bandage and recover your breath in 4e). It was written into the Gygaxian rules just as it was in the 3e and 4e rules. And wandering monsters are quite literally encounters. So I have problems accepting the premise that oD&D and 1e didn't have encounters.</p><p></p><p>Also the adventuring day was the entire dungeon crawl - Mike Mornard has explicitely said that one purpose of wandering monsters was to prevent PCs from spending the night and recovering spells in the dungeon. Instead you had to schlep out and back to town.</p><p></p><p>So I find the premise that D&D didn't have encounters before WotC to be a flawed one. The only edition of D&D that didn't have literal mechanical encouragement for encounter based play was 2e - and even 2e had a lot of people using scene based play. It's simply the framing of encounters that's a problem. And that can be changed. Give the fighters and rogues "fatigue points" that come back after a few minutes rest and we've a simulationist measure that makes a lot more sense to me than the fighters being able to attack at peak strength for ever and that brings encounters in naturally in almost the way Gygax did, while allowing them to be ignored.</p><p></p><p>As for the proposed solution of all resources for all fights, resource management has been fairly central to D&D in all editions (yes, even 4th). And one of the goals of D&D Next is to <em>speed combat up</em>. A version of D&D in which wizards get to unleash all their spells in every scene either requires almost an entirely new wizard class or is a complete balance nightmare. It doesn't feel like any version of D&D, will be slow, and will more or less need new classes due to the different resource pools.</p><p></p><p>TL;DR: It seems to be a bad idea for many reasons. Giving the fighter and rogue fatigue points recoverable with a five minute rest would fix a lot of problems including most of the ones being talked about.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Neonchameleon, post: 5976880, member: 87792"] Out of curiosity, how is that a news article? Reads more like an op-ed to me. Anyway, encounter-based play has been around since the very start of D&D - it was just called the turn back then. And lasted ten minutes (as opposed to requiring a five minute rest at the end to bandage and recover your breath in 4e). It was written into the Gygaxian rules just as it was in the 3e and 4e rules. And wandering monsters are quite literally encounters. So I have problems accepting the premise that oD&D and 1e didn't have encounters. Also the adventuring day was the entire dungeon crawl - Mike Mornard has explicitely said that one purpose of wandering monsters was to prevent PCs from spending the night and recovering spells in the dungeon. Instead you had to schlep out and back to town. So I find the premise that D&D didn't have encounters before WotC to be a flawed one. The only edition of D&D that didn't have literal mechanical encouragement for encounter based play was 2e - and even 2e had a lot of people using scene based play. It's simply the framing of encounters that's a problem. And that can be changed. Give the fighters and rogues "fatigue points" that come back after a few minutes rest and we've a simulationist measure that makes a lot more sense to me than the fighters being able to attack at peak strength for ever and that brings encounters in naturally in almost the way Gygax did, while allowing them to be ignored. As for the proposed solution of all resources for all fights, resource management has been fairly central to D&D in all editions (yes, even 4th). And one of the goals of D&D Next is to [I]speed combat up[/I]. A version of D&D in which wizards get to unleash all their spells in every scene either requires almost an entirely new wizard class or is a complete balance nightmare. It doesn't feel like any version of D&D, will be slow, and will more or less need new classes due to the different resource pools. TL;DR: It seems to be a bad idea for many reasons. Giving the fighter and rogue fatigue points recoverable with a five minute rest would fix a lot of problems including most of the ones being talked about. [/QUOTE]
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