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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5622774" data-attributes="member: 55271">Unfortunately, this is very difficult to balance without being able to tightly control the exact number of encounters a group will experience between extended rests (or whatever other mechanic you use for allowing limited use effects to recharge).You can already see this in pre-4E D&D: Here most fighters basically have "do damage as often as you want" as the only ability you need to balance, but whether or not this is balanced varies widely depending on how many encounters you experience per day. One? The fighter might as well stay home. Twenty? Now the fighter is essential.Add special, at-will abilities to the fighter and now you're balancing from two directions.I don't find this to be universally true. We certainly haven't found any value in 4E's dissociated mechanics, but there are plenty of other games where understanding how they're supposed to be played has allowed out group to enjoy them. (Whereas if we had approached them as traditional RPGs we wouldn't have.)Actually, what you're clearly demonstrating is that -- contrary to Imaro's claim -- there's nothing inherently dissociated about recharge mechanics. But you're muddying that issue by insisting on some sort of partisanship in your antics.Alternatively: He used the horn in Gondor because there was help to be summoned. He didn't use it in Moria because there was no help to be summoned.Ultimately, this kind of "let's pretend this narrative is literally a game session" is of virtually no use whatsoever.There's really no evidence of that to be found in the rulebooks or the design diaries. 4E's goal appears to have been to create a balanced system for handling predictable strings of encounters.More generally, you've got two very confused Venn diagrams going on here.First, narrative control mechanics are almost always dissociated mechanics. But not all dissociated mechanics are narrative control mechanics.Second, some genre-emulation mechanics may be dissociated mechanics. But the relationship is tangential at best.4E has a lot of dissociated mechanics. But it doesn't have much in the way of genre-emulation mechanics or narrative control mechanics.</blockquote>

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