No I couldn't, not always at least, for instance when I want the PCs to face a monster/NPC that can curse them in battle before fleeing or being defeated, or to allow a PC to do something similar against a target with a hit-and-run tactic.
OK, so you want long term conditions - like petrification, disease and so on. That is something I would expect to (still) be there.
There are always concepts or tactics based on long-term effects.
So is this what you see as the player aim in the game? Long term tactical and strategic success? If so, how can they ever succeed based on their own merits without balance?
4e has the condition track for long term matters - you could do an excellent geas on the condition track.
True as far as it goes, but this is still one of many areas I wish the designers had expanded upon and made use of the (immense) potential they had sitting there before ditching the edition. What is there is very neat, but rather sparse.
Sure, but a duration of "encounter" might mean my spell lasted 2 minutes, or two hours depending on the length of the combat. Tracking units of time is hard. For instance, thisd post took me about 45 seconds to type, or was that one encounter?
The real world doesn't have encounters. Nor does it have hit points, levels, character classes, experience points or markets for "magic items" that defy all economic sense and logic. But D&D does, because it isn't real life and cannot possibly run by the same rules as the real world.
Time in the real world is postulated to be a measure of the number of "events" (on a subatomic level) occurring. What does that make time in a roleplaying game? A measure of the number of decisions made by the players (including the GM)? Or a measure of the challenges faced and overcome by the characters, maybe? If the latter,
voila - the "encounter".
And the main point of D&D compared to Chainmail is that it always had ambitions to be more than just a combat game.
If that is so, why didn't it come up with anything at all in that arena? Especially when other games did so - starting, I think, with MegaTraveller in the mid-80's.
Unfortunately, those were ambitions that the game started backpedaling away from in 3.5 and made worse in 4e in the name of combat balance. A poor trade.
How you can "backpedal" from no system at all I'm hard pressed to imagine, but that combat balance needs to be "traded" for better non-combat systems seems like a non-sequitur, to me.
Clearly, I'm not going to convince you on that any more than you're going to convince me that skill challenges as presented in D&D are the best non-combat support any version of D&D has had (particularly since SWSE's treatment of skill challenges is much better than 4e D&D's ever reached and even 3e's treatment of complex skill checks did a better job of describing how the math works). And at this point I don't really care about that. I want better story and fiction oriented durations for magic rather than metagame concepts like encounters or short rests.
SWSE is not D&D - plenty of non-D&D games have had better non-combat conflict/challenge resolution systems than D&D, but that wasn't the claim, as I read it. The claim was that no other edition
of D&D has had as good a non-combat conflict/challenge resolution system. Since no other edition of D&D has had such a system at all ("roll skill vs a DC" is not such a system - it's just part of such a system, with challenge/scene framing and XP assignment elements needed, at a minimum, in addition), I can't see how that is even a contentious statement.