[edition neutral] No more dailies?

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Hmm, sort of like how PHB3 does Power Points, but with Encounters instead of At-Wills?

Sure... stipulating that I have not read PHB3 and only part of PHB2 and therefore have no idea what you're talking about

 

[Dausuul]

As a caster player from away back, I have very seldom "gone nova." I've had enough experience under tough DMs that I never want to leave myself vulnerable that way; I try to make sure I always have something in reserve - if nothing else, a teleportation spell to get me and my surviving buddies the hell out of Dodge.

But "going nova" is by no means a prerequisite for the 15-minute workday. The same considerations that make me reluctant to burn through my spell-power also make me eager to rest and top up. The more spell-power you expend in a day, the closer you are to running empty when you get ambushed that night.

(I do this a lot less in 4E, incidentally; the existence of at-will and encounter powers gives me a buffer that I can tap without depleting my daily resources. But pre-4E, the 15-minute workday was certainly a concern.)

 

[I'm A Banana]

In 4e, that's not quite true. The Healing Surge mechanic limits your total daily healing. Also, you can't use a very cheap resource (like a wand of cure light wounds) to obviate out-of-combat healing resources above 7th level or so.

That's true. Healing surges and milestones both serve to keep you to extended rests.

I think the reason I forgot all about healing surges is because I've never played or DM'd a 4e game where running out of healing surges was ever a concern for any characters. I think this may be a function of combat length/grind and session pacing than anything inherent to the concept, though.

At least a lot of us don't want a return to 1st ed AD&D play of the sort Dannyalcatraz is describing upthread. Rather than hoarding resources in that operational sort of way, maybe RW has it right - we want powers that become better when you use them later rather than earlier in the adventure. And this has to be correlated with the difficulty of the challenges being faced - if the later challenges are easy, but the powers better, than what should be dramatic becomes mundane. The conclusion to an adventure should be challenging enough that only last-ditch, edge-of-your-seat pulling-out-all-the-stops abilities are up to the task.

I don't think the kind of paranoid hoarding is a good idea, necessarily, but I do think that the slow depletion of resources plays into the rising tension in any adventure. Healing Surges kind of work this way in 4e, ideally, and HP has worked this way from Day 1 in D&D always.

I think the "limit breaks" that are edge-of-your-seat, last-ditch effort stuff are a slightly different beast, but go hand-in-hand: as you accrue more losses, you get closer and closer to one big effect that can turn the tables. It's a Get Out Of Jail Free card, a Reset button, a little PC bonus: if you're loosing, you use it, and can pull victory from the jaws of defeat.

I'm not sure it's an either-or choice, and both things are feelings that encounter-based design struggles with when looked at in the adventure as a whole.

So... turn dailies into encounters (with appropriate adjustments to damage), and let people spend action points to turn them back into dailies, or even dailies++.

Rebalance distribution of action points to maintain roughly the same power curve.

Salt and pepper to taste.

Keen idea. I'm reminded of Page 42's stunt sytem, too: there's limited damage, and normal damage, and VERY limited damage...

 

[Fanaelialae]

IME, 4e doesn't have significant nova issues provided the players are aware of at least the possibility of further encounters before an extended rest. Whether this is achieved through multiple encounters in a single day or by redefining the requirements for an extended rest is a matter of taste. Obviously, if you declare that a given encounter will be the only or last one for that day, the players won't feel much need to hold back.

(Intelligent) use of dailies conserves surges. If the PCs hoard their dailies, they should ideally be entering the final encounter of the "day" with a shortage of surges (meaning that they will be forced to nova just to survive, as their capacity to recover hp is somewhere between limited and nonexistent). My group tends towards being a bit more miserly with dailies than not, so I've seen this a number of times. On the plus side, each time it occurs we are reminded why using at least one daily (as a party) each fight is generally a good idea.

All that said, I like the idea of empowering milestones. I could see an adventure design format whereby the difficulty of encounters escalates significantly throughout. Milestones could grant scaling buffs to mitigate that difficulty. A party which insisted on always resting wouldn't get those buffs, and would have an easy time initially but would find things increasingly difficult the farther they progressed. The milestone collecting party, on the other hand, would perceive a fairly steady level of challenge. As I see it, the goal would be to make the "boss battle/climax" very challenging for a party with full nova and no milestones, but only fairly challenging for a depleted party with the full milestone buff.