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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6846012" data-attributes="member: 42582">Sounds fair. Do you find it to be "brutal" (to borrow [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION]'s description)?Your other post, about gamism and encounter frequency/difficulty, is interesting. Can you elaborate on "statistical power"? Do you mean that, in the 2 encounters - short rest - 2 enconters - short rest - etc model, there is not enough scope for skilled vs poor play to reveal itself?I tend to think that the whole idea of gamist play within a GM-set quest structure (like "save the world" or "rescue the princess") is a bit fraught, because the "weight" of the story and the constraints it establishes limit player choices too much. And as I type that, I'm thinking maybe that's what you meant, and why you suggested optional encounters that let a party test its mettle. Whereas the constrained model is what makes the gamism turn into bickering/rules-lawyering while trying to succeed at the tests that (given the story) there is no choice but to tackle.My gut feeling is that, for fairly traditional D&D-style play (where eg combat tends to be the ultimate form of conflict, and is typically to the death), there has to be a readiness to risk TPK if the gamism is going to be real. But risking TPK becomes hard with some of those story stakes.And another rough intuition: if the gamist part of play becomes too much like a crossword or suduko (ie seeing how the available resources can be properly distributed across a roughly pre-given set of encounters) then some of what is distinctive about RPGing has been lost.I think this is part of why 4e shifted so much of the gamist/resource-management element of play to taking place within the encounter, which itself is strongly encouraged and supported (via movement, terrain, transform-on-bloodied, etc rules and techniques) to generate a somewhat unpredictable but engaging space for resource expenditure choices. It's a bit like condensing a classic dungeon exploration (open-ended, though within some broadly foreseeable constraints) into a single combat.The challenge for 5e seems to be that (like the more classic game) it is intended to operate across rather than within encounters; but its more 4e-like focus on balance (across asymmetric resource suites) makes the classic open-endedness a problem for play; and its default mode of play seems to be the 3E-ish "adventure path", which makes it tricky to allow the players to truly express choices about engaging encounters.</blockquote>

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