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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5907249" data-attributes="member: 42582">My concern with this is that it makes a certain minimum number of encounters between recharges crucial to balance.In 4e (at least without Essentials classes) that is not the case. There is no class that is especially good at nova-ing.I run some scenarios and encounters that are reactive, and some that are not. As to how they might recharge between forays, that is variable. The game doesn't depend on resolving this one way or another - if the PCs rest up and return, and the encounter hasn't recharged, the encounter is now easier - but this doesn't effect the effectiveness of the PCs relative to one another.Of course easy encounters whittled down by attrition can have pacing implications that I, as GM, might want to manage. But on your adventure-based paradigm, the GM has to worry not only about pacing, but about intra-party balance.That is my concern. (I appreciate that some Essentials classes also have this issue in 4e. Thankfully I'm not GMing for any of them, however, and so don't have to worry about it!)My worry about this is something different.The closest that D&D has every had to a system in which a rogue can convince a king with 5 Diplomacy checks, and succeed at that task even if there are some failed checks in the meantime, is the skill challenge. Which almost certainly will not be part of D&Dnext.I have grave doubts about the likelihood of D&Dnext incorporating a skill resolution system that makes having 10 goes, only 5 of which need to succeed, as effective as having a single auto-successful go (via a spell). Any such system that I can conceive of would have to have as much metagaming to it as skill challenges, and therefore would not be suitable for inclusion.Without metagamed pacing and resolution management of a skill challenge variety, having the rogue use 10 checks on the king will require actually playing out 10 checks, some of which fail and have the king send the rogue away, and then involve the rogue coming back later to keep at it, etc. And as with suggestions on other threads, that to get past the guards at a door the rogue might poison their lunch rather than just fight them, I express extreme scepticism. I will eat my hat if, in 5e play, letting the rogue cultivate a friendship over weeks or months (requiring 10 checks, and also setting the adventure reset time at weeks or months) will be as common or viable in play as letting the wizard do it with a single spell. Game systems that do make this sort of thing viable, such as 4e (to an extent, via skill challenges), Burning Wheel and HeroWars/Quest do so precisely by incorporating scene framing and resolution techniques of the sort that make 4e so widely unpopular.</blockquote>

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