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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jaelommiss" data-source="post: 7525637" data-attributes="member: 6775925">I often play wizards. Sometimes I play clerics if I want to change things up. Right now I'm playing a multiclassed cleric/wizard. Managing resources is a core part of play for me.With my current DM fights will often vary radically in difficulty. Sometimes the entire fight is just mopping up with minimal HP loss and non-HP resource expenditure. Other times it will push us to the edge and demand everything we can toss at it. Random encounters form enough of our combat (>60%) that we often do not know what sort of challenges we will fight in a single adventuring day. Sometimes we finish the day after two encounters and rest without having expended much at all. Other days we get stretched over a dozen fights and have to adjust our strategy so that we can handle four encounters with no spell slots and less than half HP. My current approach is to conserve resources if using an at-will ability will only cost the party a few HP. This is especially true near the start of the day when everyone still has hit dice to spend. On occasion I will nova hard if I am in a position to abruptly stop an encounter (I like to show off sometimes) but this doesn't happen more than once or twice in a campaign, and it's usually the first couple of sessions when it does. Most of the time I do not start to expend serious resources until the third encounter. I might change this for extreme situations (our party of four level 3 PCs fighting a green hag and a flesh golem at once is a recent example), but even then I like to hold onto at least a small reserve when I can. Towards the end of the day I will look at how the party is doing overall on HP. I don't heal, but knowing who can take a hit and who can't is necessary to plan for fights. When the fighter is running on empty and the rogue hasn't been scratched that day, we'll prod the rogue to the front. If we withdraw and our adventuring day stops due to low HP and hit dice, any hit dice remaining on a back line character are wasted resources. Often I will try to hold onto a moderate resources (3rd level spell for a 9th level caster, for example) after I anticipate the end of the adventuring day. An unexpected end-day encounter or night ambush is not impossible. Being attacked while asleep and drained from a day of adventuring is incredibly dangerous due to autocrits, and having something to rapidly reshape those encounters is often enough to prevent a PC death. A spell like Hypnotic Pattern can lock down a fight pretty fast, but it is far more valuable when used to swing a fight in the party's favour than to simplify a fight the party is already winning.</blockquote>

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