How many "Encounter" powers can you use outside an "Encounter"?

[Sadrik]

1. Can you use them freely?
2. Or after a five minute catch your breath?
2. Or no you cannot?

Probably 1.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

Encounter spells likely won't qualify to be used outside of combat. Likely, initiative has to be rolled in order to use At Will, Encounter or Daily Powers. Now for Rituals, that's likely a different story...

Powers seem to operate purely off of combat (i.e. offensive spells) as a prerequisite in order to use from the playtests. May be slightly diff. in the full release, but that's my opinion. Even so, once again, this prevents Wizards from using At Will/Encounter/Daily offensive spells against peasants (for the more "notorious" of players who want to exploit the rules).

 

[Hella_Tellah]

The quick start handout from DDXP tells us that encounter powers require five minutes' rest to use again. You can use them outside combat, but you'll need to rest between uses. Think of it as Vancian spell-casting with a shorter downtime.

 

[Sashi]

The rules explicitly state that encounter powers recharge after a "short rest"

Then the "short rest" duration is not explicitly stated ("from 1-5 minutes").

So the rules explicitly allow you to use an encounter power every 5 minutes.

As a DM I would probably allow encounter powers to be used outside of combat as often and for often as they were plot relevant, with a rest required after a certain amount of use (say 1minute of Telekinesis to shift boulders around, then 5 minutes of resting, if you don't rest then you're TK is used up for the next encounter).

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

I don't know, I have a very strong feeling that the majority of the utility-type spells will in fact be Rituals, and not Spells/Prayers/Exploits.

 

[small pumpkin man]

Encounter spells likely won't qualify to be used outside of combat. Likely, initiative has to be rolled in order to use At Will, Encounter or Daily Powers. Now for Rituals, that's likely a different story...

There've been enough explanations around to show this really isn't the case from ToB and Saga even before we had an actual explanation, but it's turned into a meme anyway.

As already explained in this thread, per encounter powers require 5 minutes of rest to get back.

Powers seem to operate purely off of combat (i.e. offensive spells) as a prerequisite in order to use from the playtests. May be slightly diff. in the full release, but that's my opinion. Even so, once again, this prevents Wizards from using At Will/Encounter/Daily offensive spells against peasants (for the more "notorious" of players who want to exploit the rules).

Actually, there are two types of powers (not including rituals) attack and utility, we've mostly seen attack because first level characters don't have utility powers, but there was one in the rogue preview and several in the scanned Wizard pages.

And it's not "exploiting" the rules to fireball peasants.

 

[DamnedChoir]

Doing things outside of dungeons and combat with orcs is what some people refer to as 'roleplaying'.

Yes, even burning villages down.

Since when is anything but dungeon crawling against the rules?

 

[GnomeWorks]

I think that the "short rest" concept between uses of a per-encounter ability is the way to go. It doesn't make any sense for you to have to be in combat or have rolled initiative to use them, and since you recover them (after using them in combat) after a short rest, requiring the same sort of rest in a non-combat situation seems to make sense.

 

[Bayonet_Chris]

Encounter

Encounter powers are all attacks of some sort, are they not? When you're in a situation to use one, does that not make it an encounter by definition?

 

[WhatGravitas]

Encounter spells likely won't qualify to be used outside of combat. Likely, initiative has to be rolled in order to use At Will, Encounter or Daily Powers. Now for Rituals, that's likely a different story...

Powers seem to operate purely off of combat (i.e. offensive spells) as a prerequisite in order to use from the playtests. May be slightly diff. in the full release, but that's my opinion. Even so, once again, this prevents Wizards from using At Will/Encounter/Daily offensive spells against peasants (for the more "notorious" of players who want to exploit the rules).

Well, we haven't seen anything to support this.

It rather looks like At-Will powers can be truly used at-will, while encounter powers need a short rest (5 minute break) after each use to be usable again. And daily powers are... well, available after each 6 hour resting.

And the hand-out said nothing about unusable powers outside combat, but stated that the 5 min/6 hour rests refresh your encounter/daily powers. Nothing else. And using Occam's Razor, I conclude that it's meant to be general, not only for combat.

Cheers, LT.