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From Terry Pratchett's Carpe Jugulum, a discussion between Esmeralda Weatherwax and Mightily-Praiseworthy-Are-Ye-Who-Exalteth-Om Oats: “And that’s what your holy men discuss, is it?” “Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example.”...

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You can if you use theatre of the mind and the fights are simple. "You come into a room where four orcs are sitting around a table playing some kind of dice game. They grab their axes and rush to attack!" I remember the designers talking about how they could have three fights on one of their...

I'm pretty sure Enterprise-D crew were allowed to bring families along for the ride (they even had kindergarten there), but I think TNG were pretty silent on whether or not they were just passengers or if they actually did work there as well.

To me it's also a matter of balancing an encounter without having to worry about the next four. I think you're confusing your terms here. In Draw Steel, the Power roll is the stand-in for the attack roll, and is 2d10+one of your stats – your class-relevant stats will usually start at 2 and go...

The thing about daily attrition to me is that it feels a lot like playing the boardgame Britannia. In Britannia, you play a series of peoples all invading England/Great Britain (well, except for the peoples who are there at the start of the game in 45 AD). So each player gets a list of which...

Abilities meant for use outside of combat can either be used at will or have some built-in limitation. For example, a Void Elementalist always has the ability A Beyonding Of Vision, which lets them see invisible things, detect illusions, and see and understand magic auras. That's just a thing...

I don't know, it seems to be working fine in Draw Steel. The only attrition there is to your recoveries, while your offensive power actually increases over the course of the day (because every previous Victory gives you one extra starting resource to work with, which can often be the difference...

Yeah but what I'm talking about is that you have one and only one fireball available at a time, but you'll have it in each room. Smaller tank, so you don't get this situation, but free refills.

That's not the read I'm getting. One group wants attrition of offensive power throughout the day*. You use a fireball on those 8 orcs – great, that made that encounter easy, but now you're down one fireball. You need to carefully ration when and how you use your magic (because it's mostly spells...

Wands of cure light wounds are on the random treasure tables in the 3.0 DMG. Further, once you become able to put any non-personal spell into a wand, its use becomes obvious (much like the wand of mage armor which lets the wizard and possibly even monk enjoy the fruits of that spell without...

No, because they are opposite experiences. One wants recovery to be difficult, with multiple encounters wearing the party down over the course of some time frame. The other wants recovery to be easy with PCs being at full offensive power in each encounter. I suppose you could get an Expert to...

Depends on what you mean by bloat. They don't, as a concept, contribute to the hp you have available within one encounter (except with Second Wind which for most people is an action to use). There's nothing that says you couldn't include healing surges in 3e except the work you'd need to rework...

I'd be careful about that kind of talk around Ms Weatherwax.

What I'm detecting in this thread is really two different schools of thought: Attrition is bad and we should refocus balance around one encounter and make it easier to restore full power (with the possible exception of attrition through hp reserve á la healing surges). Attrition is good and we...

I think Healing Surges are a genius bit of design as they allow for rapid post-battle recovery of hit points, although with a limit, while still limiting the hp available in any given encounter providing for at least potential sense of danger. One of the things I'm a little wary of in Draw...

You sort of need to have something along those lines to discourage excessive long resting (as discussed in another recent thread). Pathfinder can really mean two things, with both being created in response to things happening at Wizards. First, there was the Pathfinder Adventure Path. This was...

I think one of the culprits is that much of the playtest was done with the Caves of Chaos dungeon, which feature almost no interesting tactical situations (e.g. archers on balconies, fire pits into which to push foes) or monsters with interesting abilities. It's all pretty much just "charge in...

That is not true. The 3.5e DMG had about two pages about both ad hoc XP rewards and story-based awards, both for non-combat encounters and for achieving mission goals, and also discussed the need to adjust treasure rewards accordingly to make sure a big XP boost doesn't come without the...