Right! In my view the salient measure is "XP per unit of real time", not "XP per unit of game time", at least until someone shows me why the passage of ingame time actually matters to anything.
This assumes that the real time required to earn those XP is constant (1 hour in your example). But that's not necessarily so. For instance, in 4e a party with 2 leaders, 2 defenders and a high-control low-damage wizard (say an illusionist type) may take forever to finish combats that a party with 1 defender, 1 lazy leader and 3 strikers (including a sorcerer for some crowd control) might breeze through
in real time.
Why? Because the damage per hit is lower, the players have to roll more dice to win. And because the defences are higher, and the damage mitigation greater, the GM also has to roll more dice per unit of damage dealt.
If the cleric makes things quicker in game time (more encounters per day) but slower in real time (encounters take longer, because the group has traded damage for mitigation) then I'm not sure that's a power up. It may serve better in a scenario in which ingame time is critical (eg rescue the maiden before she's sacrificed) but that's a particular sort of adventure. Generically, in D&D, there is no time pressure - just a dungeon to explore.
If the party has an essentially unconstrained power to choose to rest and regain hit points, then
hit points are not a limit (provided you don't run out of them in a given encounter, when presumably resting will not be feasible).
You're not telling me why this matters. Who cares how many XP they earn betwen recharges? More generally, who cares about the
ingame rate of level progression?
In my 4e campaign the PCs have earned, on average, a little over a level per ingame week. In someone else's campaign that may have been a level per ingame month. Does that mean the PCs in my game are overpowered? I don't think so. The passage of ingame time is just part of the fiction, like the colour of the gnome's shoes.
The relevant metric is "successes per unit of real time", not "successes per unit of ingame time". At least until ingame time itself is made into some sort of resource or contraint, like in a time sensitive scenario. But D&Dnext has no generic rule that makes the passage of ingame time significant.
Why? Unless there goal runs away while they're resting, they rest, regain resources and come back in and get it.
You're not showing me why the passage of ingame time, as a general rule,
matters in D&Dnext.
Well, if having greater endurance makes no more difference than the colour of the gnome's shoes, it shouldn't have to give up anything.
Is there any reason to think that it does make more difference than that? (NB. I'm talking here about out-of-combat healing. In-combat healing is a completely different matter, and significantly changes the play of combat. But people like @
Bedrockgames are not calling for incombat healing as far as I can see - which is, in any event, not a big part of the pre-3E D&D exerience.)
Suppose it does, what does the wizard get instead? The ability to rest at will (via Rope Trick, Teleport and the like).
What do the fighter and thief get? I'm not sure, but my general feeling about martial PCs in D&Dnext is that they're back to their pre-4e status, of ceding narrative control to the spellcasters.
Exactly!
In these scenarios then yes, a cleric who increases encounters per game day would be more powerful. But presumably in a scenario which involves getting info from slum-dwelling low-lifes a thief will be more powerful; or that involves infiltrating a castle, a bard or paladin will be more powerful. Unless the passage of time is built into the system as a generic cost or resource, I'm seeing this just as one of those "some classes suit some niche scenario" things, not as evidence of generic class power.
This is exactly what I've been saying since more than 100 posts ago. My only quibble with you is that there is no reason to think there is even an ingame advantage - why does it matter to the PCs that they do things quickly rather than slowly?
And if the PCs are wizards who can control when they rest, and hence can afford to deploy more spells per encounter without risking running out, they have both an ingame advantage and, if the GM doesn't change the challenge difficulty, an in-real-life-at-the-table advantage too!
Everything else being equal, though, that will slow the rate of PC level progression. Which may be an issue for some groups.
I was going to post this myself! If that's how XP are earned, then being able to do 5 combats per day rather than 4 is neither here nor there.
Hence why, unless the "combats per game day" is more explicitly built into the system, I don't think a cleric who increases the number of combats between refreshes is per se overpowered.
