humble minion said:
My single massive problem with per-encounter abilities (magic especially) is that it breaks horribly when non-combat abilities come into the picture. D&D's spell list is already enormously combat-focused, almost to the point of implausibility imho. Going to per-encounter magic would break this even further. How many times per day can a 3/encounter spell be used outside of an encounter environment? Any numerical answer to that question makes 'per-encounter' meaningless, but simply saying 'infinite' has massive implications for the implied setting. Take Wall of Stone as an example. It's damn useful outside of combat - a moderately industrious wizard could rebuild and reinforce an entire keep in an afternoon if he put his mind to it. A city might take a few months - and that's assuming there's only one guy doing it. Who'd be a builder under those circumstances? And what about Create Food and Water? Why would anyone bother to farm? Remove disease? There'd never be a plague again. And even thinking about how this would interact in a political setting with enchantments like Charm Person gives me a headache.
Of course, per encounter balancing means that there will be some changes needed to the spells. One simple fix that will solve quite a few of these problems is for any spell with a duration to continue to occupy its slot until its duration runs out, and to have few spells that create permanent effects instantaneously. Add in a restriction that a spellcaster can only maintain one of any spell of any kind, and that means that a wizard can only have one
wall of stone around at any one time - good for sealing a breach in a wall in an emergency, but no real threat to the construction industry. If you want to retain the flavor of permanent magic-constructed
walls of stone, you can tweak the spell in other ways: perhaps the caster must spend XP to make the
wall of stone permanent, or the ritual to make it permanent requires a 24-hour ceremony to complete.
As for
create food and water, perhaps the spell merely delays the onset of hunger and thirst (the spell will need renaming, though). A cleric who is keeping his companions alive despite the lack of food and water will need to continuously devote one of his spell slots to that (and in a per encounter system, it is likely that he will not have many spell slots). Incidentally, this is also a good way to control the number of active buffs - a spellcaster needs to maintain each buff in one of his spell slots, so that sets a natural limit on them.
A similar restriction for
charm person means that each spellcaster can have only one person charmed at a time.
Remove disease is trickier. I doubt it would create much gameplay problems if allowed on a per encounter basis. The real issue is how it would affect society as a whole. As noted, it would significantly reduce the impact of a plague scenario. If the DM is okay with that (i.e. he does not intend to run any plague-themed adventures), the effects can be ignored. Otherwise, it could be reduced in power, e.g. it simply grants the target an extra saving throw against disease, and each target can only be affected by the spell once per day. Alternatively, perhaps the spellcaster can only remove the disease by absorbing it himself - a sacrifice that most clerics may be unwilling to make unless they had access to higher level spells that could cure the disease completely (such as
heal).
