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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5968496" data-attributes="member: 2067">Because those things subvert encounters. Subverting encounters is what makes things Overpowered if encounters are your metric for balance.Sure, but then that wasn't a "balanced encounter" in 4e terms. It was just a non-encounter chatfest or maybe a skill challenge at best. You only need balance for things that are going to challenge the party, after all. No, it's actually just recognizing that D&D has always had daily resource management that has gone across encounters for very good psychological and game design reasons. I'm not telling you how you have to play, I'm telling you what the game's design has indicated for 30+ years. This is only relevant if you consider daily rescources automatically unbalanced. That isn't true. Days can be balanced. So by making a balanced encounter within a balanced day, you're just telescoping the balance. You can also build a balanced day out of balanced encounters, but encounter-based balance invalidates the use of certain daily resources that are an important psychological component to the game's brand identity and pacing, as I explained.It isn't objectively bad. Indeed, that chaos helps create an emotional response in the audience: excitement. It creates the sense of dread and anticipation that you get when gambling. It is what makes the die roll something cathartic. It may not be what you're looking for, and I absolutely believe that 5e should help those who want more...er...stability?...find it. But it is not automatically bad just because it's not your bag.Those encounters in an encounter-based system are no different from non-encounters, since there is no real effect beyond the encounter. Run from the terrasque or chat with the dryad, either way you've just not had an encounter. A daily-based system allows those threats to still consume some resource that you don't get back, so it's not a wash. They can be an important mechanical part of presenting an overall adventure, rather than just set dressing. It can MATTER, mechanically, in your characters' resources, that you had to run from the terrasque or that you chatted up the dryad.Your first sentence is false, though. Encounters are not automatically and exclusively the measure of balance. It might help if you dissociate the idea of "encounter" from the idea of a "scene." A game session consists of innumerable scenes. Shopping, traveling, talking, bantering, eating, drinking, carousing, even confronting...these scenes might influence character choices or options, but they have no mechanical impact. They are not a place where challenge is held. They are irrelevant for the purposes of balance. They are non-encounters. They may even have dice rolling ("Roll to see if I'm getting drunk!"), but they pose no immediate risk of failure. You don't have to roll dice to walk outside in a thunderstorm. You just do it. It has no mechanical impact. The dryad conversation might be interesting, but in an encounter-based system, it cannot truly matter for "balance." Running from the terrasque might be fun, but in an encounter-based system, it cannot truly matter for "balance" (that is, the PC's probably escape successfully and thus are fully recharged). An "encounter" is a specific type of scene in which there is a risk of failure and thus a mechanical impact (as D&D understands mechanical impacts, anyway). It is here that mechanics are most judiciously employed, to determine if the outcome of the encounter is success, or if it is failure. It's where the game part of the RPG is played. You DO need to roll dice to kill the goblins, or to convince the dryad to stop murdering foresters, or to save the villagers from the rampaging terrasque: there's something at stake if you fail, and success is not guaranteed. I'm specifically only talking about the mechanical nature of the encounter vs. the mechanical nature of the "adventuring day," because that is all that matters in the context of balance. Being able to walk outside in a thunderstorm can't usually be considered "unbalanced" (I guess if you're playing a game about agoraphobics maybe? But not usually in D&D anyway.). Being able to kill the terrasque with a cheap resource can be. In that context, if you remove all challenge from an encounter, you have effectively turned it into a non-encounter, and thus unbalanced the game, since you have not spent anything to remove that challenge. It bypasses threat. It is an "I Win Button." It invalidates difficulty. It dispenses with the "game", where balance matters. So these abilities -- these things that can turn encounters into non-encounters -- must be severely controlled, curbed, and tamed, so that they cannot render an encounter moot anymore. Because if you're playing an encounter-based game and you can render most of the encounters moot, you're suddenly playing a character who effectively removed most of the challenge from the game. It's only scene after scene, with nothing really at stake. Which is, ultimately, kind of dull. And at any rate, ultimately indistinguishable from playing with a Story Stick.</blockquote>

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