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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9209517" data-attributes="member: 6877472">That has been a long debate.  The premise of D&D is, at it's core, pretending to be people who take extreme risks in order to gain incredible rewards.The rules system itself rewards specialization.So one would assume that it makes just as much sense for the characters to optimize as their players in order to succeed.But then you have people who sniff and say "ugh, powergaming munchkins" with as much derision as possible if you actually follow this line of logic to it's conclusion, lol.----As for resource attrition itself, I've noticed something in playing 5e.  When the resources run low, the game pretty much grinds to a halt, whether you've had 2 encounters or 5.  The party looks beat up, the Cleric is low on spells, and even with a short rest, the group consensus is "maybe one more encounter".So the party looks for ways to rest/retreat, and if none are had, characters start dying.A lot of people wonder why are they pushing themselves to this extreme in the first place?  In the game I'm currently playing, we're slowly clearing out a mega-dungeon.  The party has mentioned wanting to tackle side objectives, or head to a major city in the hopes of converting our loot into magic items (lol).I keep resisting because, to my mind, leaving the dangerous individuals who haunt the dungeon alone will only lead to disaster- note that the DM nor the NPC's have ever mentioned we're on a clock, it just makes logical sense to me in game.  And that's the only reason why we keep going back, and as we get deeper in, our ability to tackle encounters starts dropping.  The past few sessions, we've had large setpiece battles that eat up a lot of time and resources (primarily because our damage dealers are not optimized) and we had two battles back to back (one with fiends and the other with derro) where I cast very few spells due to magic resistant foes, and by the end of it, even though my tank was still pretty full, everyone else was like "we need a long rest".So I started talking to the DM (we played 4e together) and I was like "what happened?  That Derro encounter was something we used to do back in the day, and be good for three to four more!".And our consensus is, 5e has two issues.  One, it's not well suited for large setpiece battles.  It basically wants you to ration out your resources over the course of a half dozen or so encounters, few of which are particularly difficult, somehow cramming a couple of 1 hour naps in there, which isn't very interesting, and somewhat verisimilitude warping to somehow take a siesta in the middle of enemy territory.Two, the whole reason D&D was a resource intensive game was, back in the day, the farther you could go into a dungeon or wherever, the better the rewards (and you also had to worry about weaker foes waiting for you to come out so they could ambush you)!  You got better loot and more xp as you fought more dangerous foes.But that's not really the case in 5e.  You get the same xp per adventuring day fighting a few tough battles vs. a lot of easy ones.  The gold and treasure you gain isn't a primary part of the game loop like it was back in AD&D.  The only reason you have to push yourselves has to be supplied, usually by the threat of "things will get worse if you don't".It's not like the old days where you hear about some long lost crypt in the middle of nowhere that's minding it's own business, and simply exists for you to explore it at your leisure, lol.5e has brought back the need for managing resources over long spans of adventuring time, but took away a big part of the reason why this was necessary to do so.</blockquote>

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