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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Syrsuro" data-source="post: 4924768" data-attributes="member: 58162">I agree that firelance's approach has merit, it just happens that I am trying to see what can be done entirely 'behind the screen', i.e. without making any changes to the character rules, only to what the DM controls. This does make some things much harder. And yes, this will make controllers extremely powerful (although, in a way, that is also reminiscent of 'old school'). It just happens that in my own group there currentlly is no controller (as a primary role - there are a couple of secondary role controllers). On the other hand, what it does do is make attacks that target multiple opponents (by anyone) proportionally more powerful. My hope is that this can be manaaged.  And there you have it. By redefining the 'encounter' in an 'encounter area' with multiple engagements but no resting you are swinging the 'action economy' in one way while by decreasing the hit points and increasing the body count you are potentially swinging the 'action economy' the other way. Or more precisely, reducing the hit points also swings the effective action economy in favor of the players (in a very real sense an attack that targets multiple opponents can be seen as one pseudo-action per target) while increasing the body count swings it in the other way. In theory there is a point where those trends cancel out and the math still works. It is likely that that balance point is different for any given group of characters: the more their attacks hit multiple (reduced hit point) opponents, the more the math is unbalanced in the players favor; the larger the size of the individual engagements the more the action economy favors the monsters. The hard part is going to be finding that new balance. On the other hand, players in general seem to be able to handle quite a bit more than the default system wants to throw at them. I suspect that they could actually handle two or three 'encounters worth' of such weakened monsters without too much difficulty - the only resource they are likely to run short on is leader assisted healing (I also considered allowing one minor change to the system from the player's perspective and that was to allow second wind and only second wind to recharge between different engagements within an encounter area). That will be the real test: At present, I know about how many surges they will spend in a typical 'balanced' encounter. So one option may be to just defer the question of experience point parity until I see how it all balances out. At present, my plan is to do this to occasional encounters, not all encounters (which is part of why I want to do this entirely from 'behind the screen'). If I can make changes like this entirely from my perspective (especially if I can rationalize the 'no resting' with ingame logic) it increases the tools I have available to design with. If I have to change the players rules to make changes, it restricts what I can do and forces me to use this changed math all of the time.  Carl</blockquote>

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