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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aberzanzorax" data-source="post: 5910713" data-attributes="member: 64209">Many of the concerns of balance and flavor etc seem to be on the encounter level. It's my contention that this is a somewhat boring level on which to focus in terms of storytelling. The encounter level is a fragment of the game, and I'd like to see more of a focus on the whole of an experience rather than a collection of fragments piled together.  [MENTION=10021]kamikaze[/MENTION]-midget has several excellent posts on Adventure design over Encounter design. I'd personally like to see more of this from WotC for 5e.  In the past, dailies (including vancian magic and 1/day magic item use) were not balanced if the DM "allowed" the 15 minute adventuring day. I'll certainly concede that. I actually dislike dailies for that reason, and I think that classes who have them (wizard, cleric, druid, etc) are unbalanced when allowed to have a 15 min adventuring day.  But how do you design for the adventure when the pcs define the timing?  In my opinion there's something that D&D has always needed rules for, and has never (to my knowledge) had rules for. I want rules for pacing and downtime. This breaks down into two things:1. During the adventure2. Outside the adventure I want rules for enemy "recharges" or perhaps rules within players that encourage pushing forward rather than resting. I liked the action points in 4e that could be accrued, and think that might help people from resting (especially if more than one could be used in an encounter). I'd like to see strong guidelines of how many encounters should occur per day. I'd like to see rules for enemy powerups if players attack and flee. Basically, and quite simply, if there are daily abilities, I want rules that help define the day and its penalties and benefits for pcs and the enemy. Outside the adventure, I'd like to see rules for activity. If the wizard is making scrolls or magic items, what is the rogue doing? What's the fighter doing? Perhaps rules of "pickpocket per day/week" with an income for downtime would be appropriate? I think that level based incomes could be acheivable, especially if they were lower than the wealth per level guidelines and lower than what can be done via adventuring.   Which brings me to penalties/costs. What stops players from simply saying "we take a year off of adventuring to make money"? This falls under the same heading as "we take a nap after each encounter". At low levels I don't see this as much of a problem...so I wonder if there might not be some daily recharge cost/upkeep of magic items? I see this as a rate of return issue. Maybe the simplest and least "rod" versus "carrot" method is to charge players an amount every day to maintain the quality of their magic items? 1 encounter and then resting would lead to an actual loss of money. 2 encounters might break even at maintenance level, and more would encourage greater and greater profit.  I'm not sure I like the actual flavor of that limitation, and perhaps you all could come up with a much better mechanic. However, I'm a huge fan of the idea that players have a built up cost that accrues over time and is offset by doing more and more awesome things...and stretching themselves to the limit.</blockquote>

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