Per-Encounter Powers

[DerekSTheRed]

If I was writing a monster lair/fortress/city in pre-4E, I would think about it in terms of monster's point of view. I would design the lair/fortress/city in such a way as the monsters thought would best be defended. For example of this, the City of the Spider Queen listed rally points for the other Drow defenders to assemble before tracking down the PCs after an alarm was raised. I then let the PCs assault the lair/fortress/city. Smart PCs would recon and plan out their assault. This planning would be par of the fun as the PCs debated strategy.

In 4E, this would be designed differently. In the modules I played it would end up being pretty linear. This is because each encounter needed to be a challenge and once you spent all that time creating a challenging encounter, you wanted the players to experience it. One could mitigate this linearness somewhat. For instance, in Assault on Nightwrym Fortress, the PCs had to get three MacGuffins which they could do in any order. They still ended up going through the exact same three encounters though.

 

[FireLance]

This is because each encounter needed to be a challenge and once you spent all that time creating a challenging encounter, you wanted the players to experience it.

I would nuance my experience slightly. Any time you spend a lot of effort on planning an encounter, you want the players to experience it, and your adventure design tends to become more linear as a result.

The effort could be in trying to ensure that it is challenging, true, but the effort could also have been in designing an NPC (including chossing class or classes, levels in each class, skills, feats and spells, where relevant), or modifying a monster by adding class levels or templates or both.

 

[Herschel]

...The reason the entire design of adventures shift is because there is no real loss of resources from one encounter to the next in encounter-based design. You get all your encounter powers back and you can spend a healing surge or two to get back to full HP. After that 5 minute rest, you are back exactly to the point you were before the fight started. This means that the encounter itself has no real lasting impact on the game day.

D&D 4e did have some daily resources. Daily powers, obviously. There was also healing surges and, before the rules update, magic item power uses. Other than expending those, the party was back to complete and full strength after each encounter.

You've obviously never played 4E if you think that's back at "full strength". Daily Powers are your big knockers, tide-swingers and devastating effects. When a Wizard rolls out his Daily Powers you know it's arrived and if you run in to trouble later you feel not having it. What Encounter Powers do is alleviate the "all-or-nothing" nature of the game.

 

[Abstruse]

You've obviously never played 4E if you think that's back at "full strength". Daily Powers are your big knockers, tide-swingers and devastating effects. When a Wizard rolls out his Daily Powers you know it's arrived and if you run in to trouble later you feel not having it. What Encounter Powers do is alleviate the "all-or-nothing" nature of the game.

I played a lot of 4e and that's exactly why I don't like encounter-based design. In my experience, players will hold onto their daily powers until the "last fight of the day" unless they're thoroughly in the weeds. If you follow the standard 5 encounter design that a lot of adventures had, the first 4 encounters are pretty much the same unless you take pains to vary the monsters and their abilities and the terrain. The players, in those first four encounters, are going to stick almost exclusively to at-will and encounter powers, slowly using up healing surges but thanks to boosts from Leader classes rarely if ever more than half of them. They'll use action points, but always make sure they have one going into the last encounter. Which means at the end of every encounter, they'll have the exact same powers they had walking into it, they'll have maybe 1 or 2 fewer healing surges (typically only the defender or maybe a melee striker), and rarely 1 fewer action points (since they'll typically only use one if they're about to milestone and get it back anyway).

Now with that kind of gameplay. You can force that style of "set encounter" gameplay in any edition of D&D and I've noticed I use it a lot in my current Pathfinder game. However, I can also do a more organic "there are X number of this monster and Y number of this monster etc. and player actions will determine how many of what they encounter when" design. I can't do that in 4e because, as I said, players wipe smaller encounters with no effort at all and get in deep trouble with more overwhelming encounters.

I want a system where I as DM have the freedom to decide what sort of adventure I design. I want to be able to both create an episodic game with set encounters and an organic sandbox style game. If the system decides that for me by giving characters a lot of encounter-based resources, then it shoehorns me into writing those sort of games.

 

[slobo777]

I played a lot of 4e and that's exactly why I don't like encounter-based design. In my experience, players will hold onto their daily powers until the "last fight of the day" unless they're thoroughly in the weeds.

Not my experience. Often, play styles with these kinds of difference emerge dynamically in groups. It's all down to personal preferences, whether players are cautious types trying to maximise advantages, whether DM wants to set a particular kind of challenge etc.

I play 4E a lot, and simply don't have the same experience with Encounter powers. In fact I find Dailies to be the big problem for my group, because they don't like playing the "resource game" side of D&D. They appear to want the story and the drama, but without tracking stuff. I'm hoping that a faster play (without 4E's overlong combats) will reduce that feeling, because part of the problem is needing to track resources over several sessions. But without encounter powers across all classes, I think 4E at least would be unplayable. If 5E goes for strict Dailies on all special features, and players chafe at it, or aim for 15-minute work days, I might look into some customisation (maybe a re-charge rate) . . .

 

[Herschel]

I played a lot of 4e and that's exactly why I don't like encounter-based design. In my experience, players will hold onto their daily powers until the "last fight of the day" unless they're thoroughly in the weeds. If you follow the standard 5 encounter design that a lot of adventures had, the first 4 encounters are pretty much the same unless you take pains to vary the monsters and their abilities and the terrain. The players, in those first four encounters, are going to stick almost exclusively to at-will and encounter powers, slowly using up healing surges but thanks to boosts from Leader classes rarely if ever more than half of them. They'll use action points, but always make sure they have one going into the last encounter.

That's really........well, dumb, unless the DM designs very poor encounters in the most generic way possible. LFR with 2-3 combat encounters for public play are good at making trying to hold on to all your Dailies a really bad idea.

1. At Level 5, everyone has two Daily "attack" powers. In a party of five that's 10 at their disposal. With just decent encounter design (and play) even in a generic way you're going to burn through surges/healing faster than you should and be in a world of hurt late in the "day".

2. Any DM worth a bucket of spit isn't going to just run mook fight, skill challnge, mook fight, skill challenge, boss fight every "day". A DM with even an ounce of intellect will set up the first (or second, or whichever) fight to be the tough one or tease there's a boss coming while whitling the party down and letting them find out they're beat to tar and sitting on their Dailies still when the day is done. It's very trivial to make sitting on your Dailies a very bad idea.

3. It's really impractical for many classes/characters to hoard their dailies. Most of the good controller powers require sustaining actions. Rages and stances don't stack, etc. Save them and use only one or two of them? That's really bad resource management.

 

[Abstruse]

Not my experience. Often, play styles with these kinds of difference emerge dynamically in groups. It's all down to personal preferences, whether players are cautious types trying to maximise advantages, whether DM wants to set a particular kind of challenge etc.

I play 4E a lot, and simply don't have the same experience with Encounter powers. In fact I find Dailies to be the big problem for my group, because they don't like playing the "resource game" side of D&D. They appear to want the story and the drama, but without tracking stuff. I'm hoping that a faster play (without 4E's overlong combats) will reduce that feeling, because part of the problem is needing to track resources over several sessions. But without encounter powers across all classes, I think 4E at least would be unplayable. If 5E goes for strict Dailies on all special features, and players chafe at it, or aim for 15-minute work days, I might look into some customisation (maybe a re-charge rate) . . .

And that type of resource tracking has never been a problem for me and my groups. You take your character sheet and mark down your HP (or healing surges), you mark down what spells you've cast, you mark down how many X-per-day powers you've used (or daily powers), and that's about it. It's on your character sheet. Either put it in the folder I keep all the game-related stuff in (including my adventure notes and whatnot) or make sure you bring it with you next week. If you forget it, you're going to be SOL anyway since you forgot your character sheet so how are you going to play? If you run your character off a smartphone or tablet (which I discourage heavily as it is because I can't stand when my players pull up Angry Birds or Words with Friends waiting for their turn in combat), save the document before you close it.

 

[DerekSTheRed]

That's really........well, dumb, unless the DM designs very poor encounters in the most generic way possible. LFR with 2-3 combat encounters for public play are good at making trying to hold on to all your Dailies a really bad idea.

The LFR adventures I played are still pretty linear. I remember one where you had to assault a playhouse. If you went in through the front door your placement on the last battle was in the back of the audience facing the stage. If you went in the back door and successfully sneaked your way in, your placement on the last battle was from a side balcony where you had a tactical advantage. 4E did have ways of mitigating the linear play style, but it still encouraged the same encounters.

Whereas pre-4E allowed for more avenues of assault (including ones the DM didn't think of), 4E discouraged going any where your DM hadn't planned. If you let your 4E characters go off your planned encounters they would likely (although not definitely) ease their way through to the boss battle and lay down their dailies to make that one easy too. I wouldn't say 4E forces this play style, but it does heavily encourage it (which is pretty much the same thing as forcing it I admit).

I wouldn't necessarily say the encounter powers are the only game element at fault here. The encounter budget which can be pretty useful, can also be constraining sometimes. I just don't think 4E works well with a long multi (in game) day dungeon crawl like previous editions did. It does do well with the 3 or 4 encounter dungeon that everyone takes an extended rest afterwards (see Dungeon Delve source book). Pre-4E could do those too in addition to the deep dungeon delves.

 

[Herschel]

I've never had an issue with the PCs "going off the reservation" nor doing longer dungeon crawls. It's just like every other edition without the bag-o-heal items or trying to hole up in a disused lavatory avoiding the leopard for a week in the middle of a dungeon.

And yes, the LFR adventures are pretty linear due to the eonnature of random party composition in public play but even there they can mix it up a decent amount, let alone a home campaign where you know which characters will be at the table from week to week.

 

[slobo777]

And that type of resource tracking has never been a problem for me and my groups. You take your character sheet and mark down your HP (or healing surges), you mark down what spells you've cast, you mark down how many X-per-day powers you've used (or daily powers), and that's about it. It's on your character sheet. Either put it in the folder I keep all the game-related stuff in (including my adventure notes and whatnot) or make sure you bring it with you next week. If you forget it, you're going to be SOL anyway since you forgot your character sheet so how are you going to play? If you run your character off a smartphone or tablet (which I discourage heavily as it is because I can't stand when my players pull up Angry Birds or Words with Friends waiting for their turn in combat), save the document before you close it.

It's not really the mechanics of tracking that's the problem. It's having to worry about the resource management as a game thing - when to roll out or reserve the big plays. And this is worse "feel" (for want of a better word) for my group, in part because they have to judge that over several sessions. One player commented he felt his character was like a 1st-edition magic user at all times - constantly hoarding the one big power for the encounter where it would count, and concerned about it being a dud. I'm banking on this going away with faster play . . . (because the level 1 MU has the advantage that a day's game time is over in short order played at the pace of e.g. 2E)

Of course a game with no resources at all would be pretty static and dull . . .