D&D 4E D&D4E: Resource Management between Encounters

[blargney the second]

the "15-minute adventuring day" thing

I can't wait for this to be written out of the game. I had a very frustrating experience with it just the other night.

 

[ptolemy18]

I can't wait for this to be written out of the game. I had a very frustrating experience with it just the other night.

It's just a fluke of players exploiting the rules... or rather, it's something that it's capable to exploit the rules to do. From a *flavor* perspective, I think "x number of spells per day" is perfectly acceptable. And I am a real flavor-lover, so I don't think that the rules should necessarily trump flavor...

But oh well, I'll see what they do to replace it. Personally, if I had to choose an alternative to Vancian magic, I'd like to see more spells which cause temporary hit points and ability damage to the caster. Basically, I hope that the rules still support the tactic of "I must save up this power for the right moment because I can't use it that many times!!"

In short: I like the strategy of SAVING your powers for the right occasion, of carefully guarding your precious store of power points or mana or spells or whatever, rather than simply entering every combat with approximately the same amount of stuff and then choosing how to use it and which bad guy to attack. That's what I think of when I think of "resource management"... the idea of *limited* resources. I want players to have an encouragement to not just "blow their wad" in every combat, guns blazing, using all their powers. While I'm using gross slang, call it the "anal-retentive" school of power design if you must... but I love it.

 

[hong]

This may very well be the biggest argument between players and DMs in 4E: "The encounter is over!" "No it's not! As you wipe off your swords from the last battle, you hear something moving towards you down the dark corridor!"

Sounds good to me. "You have 5 rounds to finish this fight, or their buddies will join in." Strategically applied spike damage FTW.

 

[The Little Raven]

It's just a fluke of players exploiting the rules... or rather, it's something that it's capable to exploit the rules to do. From a *flavor* perspective, I think "x number of spells per day" is perfectly acceptable. And I am a real flavor-lover, so I don't think that the rules should necessarily trump flavor...

It's not always that the players are exploiting something. Sometimes, it's simply that the dice determine that they use more resources than they should, and realize that another fight of a similar nature will be a TPK, and rest. With per-encounter balancing, this is far less of a problem.

 

[Anthtriel]

Unlimited healing per day is one of the things that is carefully avoided in 3E, and that I was very unsure about when I used it for my positive energy Warlock variant.
But it worked out rather well, and looking back, I don't know anymore why it shouldn't. Turned out even Cleric players didn't mind having an unlimited healing machine around, giving them more spells to shine themselves, instead of having to heal the party during, but especially after, combat.

It's just a fluke of players exploiting the rules... or rather, it's something that it's capable to exploit the rules to do. From a *flavor* perspective, I think "x number of spells per day" is perfectly acceptable. And I am a real flavor-lover, so I don't think that the rules should necessarily trump flavor...

How so? If I were an adventurer, I'd make damn sure that I wouldn't come to a potentially deadly fight with much less than all of my resources available to me.

And how many did you see "Oh, damn, I used my ability four times already, and it's still just 9:00! Oh well, gotta sit around and wait for 24 hours." in fiction?
Now I'm perfectly fine with abilities that take resting to "recharge", but I strongly disagree it should take eight hours of sleeping (or eight hours of staring into space, if you are a Warforged).

 

[Irda Ranger]

This may very well be the biggest argument between players and DMs in 4E: "The encounter is over!" "No it's not! As you wipe off your swords from the last battle, you hear something moving towards you down the dark corridor!"

The easiest way to handle this is to explicitly say that you need five minutes of rest to regain your powers. If you can rest for five minutes - new encounter. I like the five minute marker because its not long at all in the course of a day, but waaay longer than any fight lasts.

 

[Li Shenron]

It's just a fluke of players exploiting the rules...or rather, it's something that it's capable to exploit the rules to do.

Exactly. And that's why I joked about the same players now exploiting the new system by skipping sleep to continuously kill monsters and grab Xp, thanks for not having to rest

Of course, they might still need to rest at some point, it depends whether healing is at-will or not.

From a *flavor* perspective, I think "x number of spells per day" is perfectly acceptable. And I am a real flavor-lover, so I don't think that the rules should necessarily trump flavor...

But oh well, I'll see what they do to replace it. Personally, if I had to choose an alternative to Vancian magic, I'd like to see more spells which cause temporary hit points and ability damage to the caster. Basically, I hope that the rules still support the tactic of "I must save up this power for the right moment because I can't use it that many times!!"

In short: I like the strategy of SAVING your powers for the right occasion, of carefully guarding your precious store of power points or mana or spells or whatever, rather than simply entering every combat with approximately the same amount of stuff and then choosing how to use it and which bad guy to attack. That's what I think of when I think of "resource management"... the idea of *limited* resources. I want players to have an encouragement to not just "blow their wad" in every combat, guns blazing, using all their powers. While I'm using gross slang, call it the "anal-retentive" school of power design if you must... but I love it.

I totally agree on every account.

 

[Cadfan]

Its worth noting that a lot of the possible problems with per encounter abilities have been addressed in Tome of Battle.

An encounter was defined as ending (in that book at least, it could change) when a character had one full minute to rest.

The verisimilitude issues of having a martial ability that's usable per encounter were handled by giving the characters ways to refresh their abilities in combat.

The ability to heal with per encounter abilities was handled by either making them once per encounter (one feat does this), or making them function only when below half hit points, or making them only function as part of an attack against a genuine enemy. Different healing abilities functioned in different ways.

So while we don't know exactly how this will be handled in 4e, we know the designers have thought about it and come up with ideas before.

 

[Fifth Element]

Maybe they'll redefine the idea of "encounters" so that rather than being a single room, an encounter might be a complex of rooms or an entire dungeon level.

Generally, the term "per encounter" is just shorthand to refer to abilities that you have to rest a certain amount of time before you can use them again, say 5 minutes as indicated above. This makes them effectively per encounter, but not literally.

 

[ptolemy18]

Sounds good to me. "You have 5 rounds to finish this fight, or their buddies will join in."

Sounds like good encounter design, yep.

Since hit point and spell stinginess might not be quite as big a deal as in previous editions, I hope 4E still has rules for stuff like exhaustion and food and water (and on a side note, I hope they still have spells to make up for the latter two, even if they're higher level).