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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 9457932" data-attributes="member: 6802765">My original claim was that: "I think campaign style is a confounding variable that heavily impacts whether unusually low or unusually high numbers of encounters actually lead to balance issues at a particular table." To wit, I'm explicitly focusing on balance issues at the table, rather than trying to examine the contributions of particular characters in comparison to hypothetical substitutes with different classes. Accordingly, I think consideration of player contributions is extremely pertinent because it impacts the salience of the abstract class balance analysis you're describing to the perception of balance at any given table.That doesn't mean that the player of the spellcaster is the one who necessarily came up with the plan on how to use the key spell in/for an upcoming encounter. Heck, depending on how the spell in question is used, the loss of the required spell slot might subsequently reduce the ability of the spellcasting character to contribute in the combat itself. (Similarly, in the 3.5 era there were debates over whether taking Teleport increased a caster's supremacy or instead reduced it by making them reserve spell slots to in order to play taxi.)I want to emphasize that I'm not trying to downplay the importance of class balance or deny martial/spellcaster imbalance. I'm only trying to defend my claim that campaign style impacts how the number of encounters per day can impact balance issues at the table. Here, I'm arguing that campaigns where much of the action takes place at the planning/strategic level are going to experience a different relationship of encounters-per-day to perceptions of intraparty balance than campaigns with a more responsive or tactical focus.I'm specifically thinking of situations like an encounter in a dense forest where it's easy to get LOS to one or two enemies at any given moment, but extremely hard to get LOS to all enemies simultaneously, particularly when each side is trying to use the plentiful cover to its own advantage. The attacking characters thus reliably have something to shoot at, but the spellcasters may need to take extra actions to set up optimal use of their best spells, or else rely on lesser abilities much sooner than Blue's analysis expected. Either way, average effectiveness per turn drops rapidly long before resource exhaustion.How often one has encounters in a dense forest (or other such constraints on optimally deploying spells, such as long-range or spread-out encounters) is, of course, going to vary with campaign style.</blockquote>

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