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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6051504" data-attributes="member: 2067">For me, it works in two ways.First, it's got a narrative arc. The monsters start off powerful, but the PC's rally through healing and come out ahead. That's done over and over again.Second, it's well-balanced. Within that time-frame, the expected contributions of different party members are well calculated.However, it suffers two big problems that make it ultimately impossible for me to appreciate as a core game element.First, it's difficult to zoom out from the encounter level, because everything is balanced on the encounter metric. Traps, for instance, have this problem where what they do in 4e (and in 3e, which had some of the same ideas), is pointless. &quot;Oh no, I took some damage, gotta sleep and get it back!&quot; Because there aren't concrete resources outside of the encounter, it makes it difficult to do anything outside of the encounter framework, and PC's also lack meaningful and variegated contributions outside of an encounter. Second, it marginalizes alternative encounter resolutions. Because the game is focused on that rising-action narrative arc, and every PC ability is focused on that as well, it encourages you do solve every encounter via the metric of damage and healing. Those are tendencies -- there's exceptions to them, always -- but they're hard-coded into the system in a way that makes them difficult to entangle if you want to leave anything else intact.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 6051504, member: 2067"] For me, it works in two ways. First, it's got a narrative arc. The monsters start off powerful, but the PC's rally through healing and come out ahead. That's done over and over again. Second, it's well-balanced. Within that time-frame, the expected contributions of different party members are well calculated. However, it suffers two big problems that make it ultimately impossible for me to appreciate as a core game element. First, it's difficult to zoom out from the encounter level, because everything is balanced on the encounter metric. Traps, for instance, have this problem where what they do in 4e (and in 3e, which had some of the same ideas), is pointless. "Oh no, I took some damage, gotta sleep and get it back!" Because there aren't concrete resources outside of the encounter, it makes it difficult to do anything outside of the encounter framework, and PC's also lack meaningful and variegated contributions outside of an encounter. Second, it marginalizes alternative encounter resolutions. Because the game is focused on that rising-action narrative arc, and every PC ability is focused on that as well, it encourages you do solve every encounter via the metric of damage and healing. Those are tendencies -- there's exceptions to them, always -- but they're hard-coded into the system in a way that makes them difficult to entangle if you want to leave anything else intact. [/QUOTE]

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