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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 3958021" data-attributes="member: 710">Maybe, just maybe, they are actually willing to leave more things to DM interpretation then in the 3rd edition ruleset? I am not sure how much I am in favour of this, but I know that some people (including my favourite game design hero Monte Cook himself) think that 3rd edition sometimes seemed very focused on constraining the DMs decisions and replacing them with detailed rulings. At least to a certain point I think that's a good thing, because it avoids arbitrariness and promotes consistent play, so players know what to expect from the game world.But it also promotes extreme rules lawyering and leads to despising DM's decisions on the spot and in fact possibly arguing against them. Which rarely helps the game, since it puts tension between the player(s) and the DM. So, leaving some terms (even if as central as "encounter") weakly defined can promote people having an easier time to accept DM decisions. Instead of hard rulings, just a few guidelines are given. And sometimes, it also means that certain things that just seem "cool" or "interesting" of even "fair" are not allowed by the rules, and thus make the DM or the players feel uncomfortable.Example guidelines: 1) Being in combat also means being in an encounter. 2) If nothing meaningful (thinks like talking, counting gold pieces or discussing party strategy) happens within a few minutes, the encounter is probably over.3) Some encounters can take longer times, though, for example a complex negotiation that takes place over several days might be considered "one encounter". 5) Sometimes, encounters can be concurrent. If the encounters don't directly tie together, you might track use of abilities in the one encounter separately from the powers of the other. For example, the complex negotiation might take a few days. At one day, the party gets into an unrelated combat. Aside from the potential death of the characters, the outcome of the fight will not affect the outcome of the negotiation, so encounters already used in the negotiation are refreshed during the combat (and only for that purpose), and encounter powers spent during the combat do not affect the negotiation. On the other hand, if the concurrent encounters are strongly tied together (the combat is only done to help the negotiation, the negotiation fails and turns into a combat or vice versa, or characters run from one combat scene to the next without any pause), encounter powers might not refresh at all.</blockquote>

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