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I won't be buying copy-protected material. I'll accept digitally signed/watermarked. But I won't buy a heavy-DRM book. I own a couple I got free from a promotion a while back, and I can't read them becaus eI can't activate any device any more.

One-use codes make me very nervous; either they can be invisibly stolen if they are not tamper-evident, or they "damage" the value of the book to a retailer if they are tamper-evident, as the tampered book will lose value to many (not all) customers. And, of course, the effect on the secondary...

QFT - and furthermore, truer words were never spoken

You think 6-second rounds are bad? Try GURPS 1 second rounds (also found in other SJ products such as Car Wars). OTOH, I don't find 6 second rounds to be terribly cramped - I've both fenced and wrested in high school, so I am more than aware of how much you can do in 6 seconds...

Do you believe that the player of a wizard with access to Meteor Swarm will demand that the party rest once he expends it, even if he still has all of his Fireballs available? I would say not. Switching to a primarily encounter-based resource managements system means, in part, that the wizard...

Then what are you doing?

3rd ed is explicitly balanced around the 4-encounters/adventuring day paradigm in character design. (That's not my opinion, that's the designers statements in the DMGs and other places). The problem with this is that the players do not always have enough information to make an informed decision...

My other complaint with primarily per-day-based resource expenditure is that you can, as aplayer, end up paying the price (holding back resources for the next fight) without gaining the benefit (being able to use it in the next fight) if the next fight comes after they have a chance to rest...

Given that I have personal experience with a system in which all abilities are essentially at will, and that I find it easier to challenge players in it than in D&D; I would expect per-encounter abilities to make the DMs life easier, and not so much resolve the question of the 9:00-9:15...

That may be part of the misunderstanding. I'm discussing game design, not game mechanics. Mechanics are part of game design, to be sure, but not the alpha and omega of it.

Thank you for articulating one of the things I've been trying to get at - characters != players. And I still maintain the test of a GMs skill is not in killing the characters, it's not killing the characters. Anyone can achieve TPK with little effort. It's challenging the players that the GM...

I would like to point out here that it is almost always easier to kill a party than not; so reducing average lethality is on balance a Good Thing.

I made a decision each round. (The decisions was to stay in melee with the necromancer). In WHFRP Wounds are a much more "granular" resource than HP are in D&D - you typically start with 1 or 2, and top out around 6 or 7 (at the time - I haven't read the last 2 incarnations of the WHFRP...

You didn't quote the second part of my message

In this particular case, it took several rounds of poor dice to do my character in. I could have, in retrospect, probably have "played dead" (maybe not though), but it wasn't an appropriate response from the character. IMHO, there's a difference between save-or-die (been there, done that), and...

Oddly enough - I had very close to this happen to me in a WHFRP session - lost a character despite doing everything right because I couldn't roll above a 15 or so on percentile dice. Got killed by a necromancer that I only needed to hit once to disrupt his spell. (The rest of the party was being...

I misspoke myself. I should have said - I don't like pure-random game systems. I want a certain amount of uncertainly in my games; but I don't like when the random noise drowns out deliberate action. So I want dice, but the results of the dice alone should not dictate success or failure by...

I don't have children yet. At any rate, I've never liked Chutes & Ladders for exactly that reason. I don't care for pure-random mechanics in games, certainly not in RPGs. I know, in reality, crap happens. In a story, crap happens, in the end, for a reason. Even in a Tom Clancy novel (the king...

Really? Through no fault of their own, other than bad dice, the PCs expended more resources than the adventure designer was expecting, and cannot stand up to the final encounter. The adventure designer expected the PCs to be at, say, 50%% of effectiveness, and the previous encounters attritted...

Then you would have no problems with a storyline that resulted in TPK because the party used their resources inappropriately because of poor luck and there is no story-appropriate point for them to rest? IE, the targets made improbably lucky saves, or the damage/healing spells ended up...