Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 5350289" data-attributes="member: 710">With the release of the D&D Essentials we see a signficant change in the "resource" model for different player characters. Specifically, the loss of Daily Powers for martial classes.But how does this affect the game balance between classes, over the course of an "adventuring day". For me, a big topic during the time until D&D 4 was encounter balance and the "average adventuring day". A problem in 3E (and earlier editions) was that only a subset of classes had access to daily powers. These powers were strong (Scorcing Ray, Fireball, Heal, Destruction, Feeblemind) on their own or were considered important party "buffs" (Bull Strength, Death Ward, Haste, Mass Bear's Endurance, Polymorph). The ability of group to beat encounters above their encounter level primarly hinged on the availability of such spells. The "safe" way to play the game - absent of any other in-game-world time limits was to adventure for like 15 minute (exaggeration of course), burning through these powers and then (with  a safe reserve for emergency cases) find a safe spot and rest. This alone might not have been always satisfactory, but provided no direct balance issue.The balance issue was that these powers overshadowed the abilities of those that didn't have them, and in the 15 minute adventure day paradigm, the non-casters (actually not just non-casters. Warlocks were technically casters but they didn't have much daily resources) felt irrelevant. On the other hand, if you didn't use the 15 minute adventure day paradigm, you might end up with a lot of easy encounters where the people with access to such daily powers didn't contribute much.This wasn't satisfying for many.In the wake of the announcement of the 4E release WotC described the new balance "encounter based". This was, as we eventually found out, achieved by giving everyone access to encounter and daily resources. The daily resources for everyone were a significant change that removed the imbalances between classes in relation to the length of the adventuring day. It didn't remove the option for 15 minute adventure days, but even if you did that, everyone would get to shine by blowing through his dailies. And if you do want to go through encounters per day, you can even do that, and everyone can contribute equally and spend his daily resources strategically.But Essentials is changing this. Knights, Slayers and other martial classes no longer have access to daily powers. And this seems to be re-creating the pre-4E balance concerns. I personally do not like that. But I wonder if I am wrong? Maybe there is something "between the lines" that actually avoids this issue?To me, it looks the reality of D&D 4 "Essentials" is that the classes without daily powers get special abiltiies that make them stronger without using daily powers - but they can never go "over" that baseline. Classes with Daily powers are weaker than that baseline but can get higher when using Dailies. There is a certain degree of balance achieved, but only if we were to assume a certain standard number of encounters per day, e.g. if we assume a standard adventuring day length.But am I missing something? A thing to consider in my model is that I neglect healing, for example. The (at least theoreticaly) easy access to effectively limitless healing in 3E increased its balance problems and indirectly fueled the 15 minute adventure day. In 3E, Cure Light Wound Wands were cheap and easily obtainable. So a 3.x Fighter that went through a lot of easy encounter that typically would cost only some of his hit points but not all could fully recover after the fight. This means that a lot of lower level encounters felt unchallenging overall, since they never could amount to something harder. So harder encounters were needed to feel challenging, and this also required the daily resources.In 4E, healing is never infinite. You have only so many healing surges. Even if a single encounter deals only a quarter of your hit points, it automatically cost you one of your daily resources. So even when having long adventuring days, classes without daily powers are spending daily resources, and so in the end, everyone is equally taxed and challenged.If that actually works out... Well, I guess I might have to reconsider my "verdict" on Essentials (basically - nice to get some of the old guard back and to give new, lapsed and current players different options on complexity, bad for the balance of the game and the "purity" of its design).</blockquote>

Verification