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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5905001" data-attributes="member: 2067">That's encounter-based design thinking, that is! Yeah, a fireball might end the encounter early. But the encounter isn't self-contained. It is part of a broader day's worth of challenges. The game doesn't stop after that encounter -- it goes onto the next one, where the fireball has already been spent, and therefore cannot be used again, and so if the wizard wants to contribute to this one, he's gotta pull out a crossbow or whack a few orcs with a staff or rely on his Background or Theme abilities or use Magic Missile (which is balanced for at-will use). And the fighter deals with most of them in a blaze of steely glory. Part of the great flexibility you gain with adventure-based design is that you don't need to worry quite as much about effects that end encounters early or avoid them entirely. It's fine to go up to the orc standing guard and Charm him with a single spell, because you don't gain your resources back until after you deal with ALL the orcs. So if you think about the individual encounter, any trade off of frequency for power is going to look very powerful (which is part of why 4e standardized this across the classes). But if you look at the entire adventure, and balance and pace your game around that, it's a more viable balance, since it forces you to continue even after you've nova'd.There's a LOT of ways to address this, but the simplest is to say that when the PC's fully recharge, the adventure does, too. If the party rests for a night, the goblins use that night to call in reinforcements. By the time the party wakes up, hey presto, there's just as many goblins as there were when they first came in. This works more believably with slightly longer timescales, but if your using an "adventuring day" instead of an "adventuring week", verisimilitude probably isn't THAT important to ya. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> You reduce it proportionally. With each party member making 5 checks to win their part of the adventure, you get a wizard who only has to cast 1 spell to win their part of the adventure. It responds quite well to maths. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />That's actually the same mechanic, just front-loaded instead of back-loaded.Which is fine. I like tension-building mechanics more than nova mechanics personally. But it doesn't really evoke the classic D&D wizard to me. A vancian wizard prepares spells at the beginning of the day and then parses them out as he goes.</blockquote>

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