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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kraydak" data-source="post: 4094507" data-attributes="member: 12306">3e is (loosely) based on 4 encounters/day, and gives the players plenty of ability to nova.  This means that if you throw a very difficult or a very easy encounter at the PCs, they can adjust their effective power level to deal with the danger.  4e is fairly strictly based on 1 encounter/1 encounter (yes, that sounds silly).  You always have all of your powers available, so you cannot nova.  Without the ability to adjust one's resource expenditure rate, you lose the ability to handle more difficult encounters.  This is not a surprise.In 3e, you might sweat an easy encounter *because* you want to conserve resources, and handle a very difficult encounter later on because you did so.  In 4e, an easy encounter rapidly becomes an utter cake-walk as the (free) per-encounter abilities come to dominate, while very hard encounter rapidly become impossible as per-day abilities become negligible.  While the underlying math behind xp/monster vs. CR is the same (modulo an exponential transform), the accuracy of the xp/monster *has* to be better than CR's accuracy (which means less monster crunch design flexibility in the end, sorry 4e lovers) because PC adaptability took a nose-dive.I'm not saying 4e's design decision here was bad, but the Playtest report is not unexpected.</blockquote>