NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7175626" data-attributes="member: 996">Certainly the most care-free if you mostly just threw together encounters using the guidelines. I heard rumors that it was originally expected to be 6-8, as in 5e, but that in practice it turned out being far fewer - though, personally, I've had 9+ encounter days.    I like using an odd number, say 3 or 5, since, when you hit a milestone and get an action point, it's kinda fun to actually use it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> But, it really doesn't matter much:  class balance won't go all wonky if you have much shorter or longer days, because there's a rough parity in daily resources.  And while encounter balance is impacted by an early nova or a lack of dailies late in the day, it's not thrown completely out of whack - PCs don't have so much of their effectiveness locked up in daily uses as in other editions, and there's milestone benefits to help in later encounters, even if a lot of daily resources get used early. The main limiter is surges.   At Paragon, magic rings start to pop up, and they pretty consistently have a power or property that works better after you've reached a milestone.  You'll also have more magic items, which, post-Essentials, means lots more item dailies, maybe a whole lot more.  (Pre-E, there was a limit on the number of item dailies you could use, and one more opened up with each milestone - the limit when up at Paragon and Epic).  Other than that, PC's pick up one more daily at 20th, and continue accumulating utilities. So there's not really a huge increase in daily resources as you level, like there is in other editions.  OTOH, at higher tiers there are more tricks - rituals, mostly, starting with Rope Trick at 12th - that might let you take a rest prettymuch when you want to.  And, IMHO/X, it often becomes less plausible for the kinds of threats that challenge paragon and epic characters to just line up in abundance like heroic threats might. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  (Though, by the same token, enemies might engineer concerted attacks from different quarters to wear down the great heroes before making a bid to defeat them once and for all.)  FWIW. In 5e, encounters/day (ie 'time pressure') is a powerful tool if you want to impose some modicum of class balance, because classes have very different resources mixes, some with many daily slots and a wide variety of spells to cast with them, others with a short-rest-recharge trick or two and nothing much else but at-will DPR.  And, it's critical to making encounters present a challenge close to their guidelines.  A 'deadly' encounter that happens first thing that the party just unloads on could be trivialized, a modest encounter at the end of the day when they're tapped out could destroy them.  It shouldn't be controversial, though, such 'crystal clear guidance' was promised during the playtest.</blockquote>

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