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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 6372859">Why not just toughen up the potentially harder encounter to burn those resources?Personally, I think this is a terrible way to essentially cheat the players and cheapen their experience.  It feels more like antagonistic DMing to me.  If the players are going to potentially fight for their lives, I will be darn sure to make it a life-risking fight at their full capabilities.  Unless there is some over-arching reason that resources should be burnt before the "big fight", I really just don't see the point.  Defeating the players with a moderately difficult fight because they were worn out and at half strength isn't an achievement.  I just defeated an essentially helpless opponent, pretty soon I'll move on to stealing candy from babies and kicking puppies.  It just seems dirty and dishonorable.  I'd rather my players fight for their life with everything they've got than lose their lives because they ran out of special stuff mid-fight and the wizard had to run in and hit things with his staff for 1d2 and then take it in the face 'cause he's not armored, or worse, just sit out from the fight because he can't do anything useful.Granted 5E has added some ways to get around this such as at-will spells and that certainly helps.  Some of those spells are even quite powerful, which is great.Still, it feels underhanded to burn player resources for no other reason than to burn player resources with the intent of kicking them while they're down.  I can see some good reasons why player resources should not be able to be recovered quickly in certain situations, but then the "final fight" should be fought with the intention of fighting resource-starved players, not tuned for fully-rested, battle-ready players.Worse, what to resource-low players do?  They stop adventuring and rest.  So now the DM is faced with an distasteful choice, either A: let the players rest and recover their resources, negating the purpose of the "easy" encounter, or B: don't let the players rest and keep burning their resources, potentially making the "tough" upcoming fight even harder.  On top of this, it is often very transparent to the players what's going on and that can lead to frustration.  Being herded towards a clearly touch fight while being forced to burn precious resources does not fun make.  Lets take a classic example, the Fellowship's travel through the Mines of Moria:First, they are attacked by The Watcher in the Water.  Not a lot of resources burnt here.They take a rest anyway while Gandalf figures out which way to go.Once he does, they arrive a the Tomb of Balin, where there is a BIG FIGHT.--Arguably, the party is now low on resources.They escape, being unable to stop and recover as they flee the mines.The Balrog shows up, BUM BUM BUM!--They don't actually fight it.  Gandalf pulls a plot device.They escape the mines and the sunlight-feating orcs don't follow them far, allowing them to rest their weary bodies.Burning resources is fine when you intend to throw a fight-that's-not-a-fight at them (ala the Balrog).  But if you were to say, make them fight orcs the whole way along and then have to fight the Balrog too?  That's basically asking for a TPK, heck, it's basically a planned TPK and I don't think that sits really well at any table.Burning resources is fine when you're got a party-on-the-run, because at the end you're not expecting them to fight the Dark Knight, but to arrive in Sleepy Hollow and get a full rest, only to find out that the town is the Dark Knight's home!3.X was easy to run "quick" encounters in.  But I felt the point of these was not really to burn resources, but to keep the party on the move.  Provide a constant feeling of the need to move forward, either by hook (pointy swords) or by crook (plot items).  4E was a pain to run quick encounters in, I had to do quite a lot of prep-work, and then do a lot of revamping the monsters in order to achieve quick fights.  But the goal was still the same.  I didn't want people doing "basic attack, basic attack, basic attack" for the rest of the night.  I wanted them to feel like moving forward was the necessary thing to do.Anyway I apologize if I rambled a bit or if I missed the point, but while I understand some situations call for burning resources to achieve a certain feeling to the adventure, I don't like the idea of burning them so that I can kick my party's butt with a big-bad while they're running on empty.</blockquote>

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