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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Danzauker" data-source="post: 5153022" data-attributes="member: 1929">I used to plan things sorta the way some people wrote in this thread.It was long before I heard of the "narrativism/gamism" dichotomy. BTW, for what is worth, I was quite wary of encounter based powers when I first heard them in Bo9S, before realizing they were just putting another piece in the puzzle.Before 4e I was just thinking in Days and Weeks. Now if I equate the game to a TV series, I have Scenes, Episodes and Plots to handle my resource and plan for.I think the trick is trying to handle resources on all these three levels.The 4E game is already balanced on Encounter/Scene level, we know it by now. If scenes follow close, you don't have the luxury of a short rest, the action flows, you don't get back encounter powers.The Episode equates to the old fashioned Day. Some people here in the trhead call it Dungeon or Adventure. I used to relate it more to a "dungeon level", or Game Session, or Delve. Anyway it lasted until the heroes got back to their base town, their safe camp, or whatever, and they could have the luxury of an extended rest.In the economy of actions, if I as a DM rule that there is no way to have a good undisturbed night of rest, characters don't get back their daily resources. In wilderness adventuring it beans that if they botch the skill challenge I almost always put to get to the place, they can not have an extended rest. Maybe they don't find a safe place and must stay awake. Or they get off-road and must hurry through the night. Or the camp is not comfortable. Anyway, that's the price of failure.For city based/investigation encounters, I usually have the characters "use" up a daily or lose a healing surge if they fail skill challenges. The rationale is the same: encounters/scenes are part of the same day/episode. If a combat encounter goes wrong, you lose valuable daily resources, and so should be for non combat encounters.The Plot level roughly corresponded to what in old edition was the "Week". I always found silly that some classes had powers that recharged by week. I used to change it so that characters had to go through something even more extensive than a night of sleep to get those back. Paladins, for example, had to go to their temple and meditate or pass though a ritual to get back their Cure Disease power, and such. In 4E I use this level basically only for level advancement and retraining.Basically, one of the great innovations of 4E is, if used well, the complete relativism of time to the story. Just as an encounter begins when the DM says "roll for initiative" and ends when he says "ok, loot the bodies", so he can (and should) be able to say when a "day" starts and ends.It requires some suspension of belief and cooperation on parts of the players, but, well, RPG is a collective game.</blockquote>

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