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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2211254" data-attributes="member: 4937">The text seems to suggest that you have for a given level of ability a limit on 'hand size' (probably the size of your starting pool, or starting pool + 2 or something), and that at the end of the turn if the number of tokens exceeds this hand size, you must discard the extra ones.  So, someone mentioned how the Beserker was spending the tokens as fast as he could get them, and its probably only partially true that this was because they were scarce.  The other reason is that probably as a low level Beserker, he's not allowed to 'hold' more than one or two tokens at a time.  Presumably this mechanic could be used to allow the more powerful 'spells' to only be castable at higher levels, because low level characters could never build up enough of a pool. Another possible mechanic would be trading pool size for more tokens.  For instance, you could have a class that could buy a new token at the cost of shrinking his maximum hand size.  This would give a class with alot of endurance, but which would be reduced to only 'cantrips' (as it were) by the end of the encounter.  Another possible mechanic would be trading fatigue for pools of tokens.  That seems particularly suited to spell caster.  You run out of tokens, you buy a few more by (potentially?) making yourself winded, then fatigued, and latter exhausted.  This fits with the standard convention that spell casting is tiring, but without limiting the spell caster to only one 'pop' per day.  Or yet another mechanic would be to have a character the was fueled by success.  I could see the Executioner recovering tokens for dropping an opponent, for example.  Mooks beware.I think it interesting that the Hunter, if you think about it, could potentially be more powerful as a buffer than a front line fighter - spending his standard actions buying 'spells' (via tokens) - which he then casts onto other characters (often by giving away the tokens he bought) so that they can spend them to buff themselves in whatever fashion that class spends tokens, or buying AC for another character, or what have you.  And that I think is the key point.  Even if all this works - and I'm not convinced that it would be worth it at higher levels, though I can definately see the attraction at low levels - it won't necessarily change the feel of the games.  Essentially, Mearls has answered the question of how do you balance non-spellcasters with spellcasters at high levels without magic, with the answer, "By making everyone spellcasters."   That may in fact turn out to be the only good answer, but I guarantee that it wasn't the answer that everyone was expecting.For me, the most offputting thing is that much of the token expenditures seem to be ways that the player can declare the universe to be different by 'finding' something about the environment that wasn't there before.  This won't be offputting to everyone, and I can see the attraction of the consensual story telling to it, but it reminds me more of the Hollywood movies where the hero always finds the car keys in the get away vehical at the beginning of the chase scene, and always finds the alley in which the flower cart pulls out just behind him than it reminds me of the low gritty fantasy that is implied when people say 'low magic campaign'.  The system might be awesome for a Spycraft type game (or even for that matter a silly game like Paranoia or Toon), but I'm not sure it actually what I want in D&D.And I'm certainly not sure how the system handles itself as it gets more complicated.  I would be a darn sight happier to see the system pulled off in Heart of Nightfang Spire or an even higher level module.  That the system works for 4th level characters isn't surprising.  Low level spell-casters are easy to run.  They don't have that many options, and fighter types (even fighter types with a few 'fighter spells') work perfectly fine at low levels without a lot of magic (for one thing, they aren't facing alot of magic).  Claiming that the system worked for 2nd-4th level characters is not only not very impressive, it's down right insulting compared to what the system was touted as.</blockquote>

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