Oh, the warring against 4e had a lot to do with how it balanced abilities - that it dared to balance classes at all - because there's just this established base that thrives on such imbalances, and doesn't want to let go of them. Though, ultimately, that still doesn't prove much, since the failure of the line at that point had more to do with business & communications issues.
AD&D wasn't balanced within a given day, like 5e theoretically is balanced around a 6-8 encounter/2-3 short rest day. Rather, the theoretical balance was realized over the course of many levels, at least from 1st through name level, if not well into the teens. Some classes leveled at very different rates from others, races & classes had hard level limits, and some classes started strong and became irrelevant later, while others started weak & fragile, and became very powerful. At the end of the campaign, if you'd all played the same character throughout, the joys & pains of the above might theoretically have evened out and 'balanced' as a whole.
It was prettymuch nonsense. But in 1e, at least, I think EGG did make the point, at least obliquiely, a number of times, that it was intended.
It shows a middle-of-the-road version of it, relative to traditional all-daily-focus D&D, anyway. 4e did have significant daily resources to manage, healing surges, item dailies, daily attack powers, as well as encounter resource (encounter attack powers, racial powers). The big difference between 4e & other versions of D&D was that the classes had about the same mix of encounter & daily resources, so the game wasn't much distorted by long or short 'days' - a robust, relativley simple solution to a 'problem' still treated by many as insoluble. FWIW.
A better example of encounter-based play would be the superficially similar version of Gamma World out at the same time. It did not have daily powers or surges. Instead, every resource was managed within the encounter, and recharged between encounters. That's 'origin' powers, artifacts (which could burn out after an encounter), mutations (which could change randomly), even (sorta) ammunition - and, of course, hps. Between encounters you just plain go all your hp back.
It did play differently, indeed. Pacing was irrelevant, in GW games, I'd often find we weren't even thinking about days spent doing things or travel times or the like, just wandering around the wasteland, encountering stuff.
Very beer & pretzels. Fun for it's own sake, not too serious.
Traditoinal D&D was that other extreme: all about managing the day and resources that take at least a day to re-gain. Much more serious, challenge-oriented, fun is an emergent property.
Not really much need to go into explaning that paradigm, the hard part is usually getting any acknowledgement that there are other paradigms.
4e was arguably and attempt at that. It was between the two extremes - it even /tried/ to encentivize longer days with milestone-recharging resources, like action points (and, earlier, item-daily limits).
You could get by without worrying too much about daily resources - you'd 'burn out' faster, in all likelihood, and you'd be less effective, overall, but you could do it and the game was still playable.
You could pay careful attention to such resources and push through a grueling day to 'win' a time-restricted scenario, the individual battles might have to be a little less interesting a litle more systematic in approach, and you might opt into skill challenges to avoid or reduce the difficulty of some of them if you could engineer such opportunities.
You could play some 'day's one way, some the others, scenarious and pacing could be varied from table to table, or within a single encounter, and class balance wouldn't suffer.
Agreed!
