mearls said:
As far as Mearls bashing goes, I don't really care about it. There are some people who, if they bash on something I do, I listen to them. There are other people who can say whatever the heck they want. I simply don't care. It's the nature of the Internet that negative voices amplify and echo. At the end of the day, my job is to make really cool D&D books that make lots of money for Hasbro, distributors, and retailers, while making D&D more fun for as many people as possible.
There are times when complaining is a sign that a design is hitting its aims square in the bull's eye. If no one complained that Nine Swords was too anime or overpowered, that would've been a good sign that we screwed up.
I can see that with the Nine Swords book, since I got the impression that it was supposed to test what is essentially the equivalent of a spell-system for warrior-types (I don't actually have the book, so I am making this assumption on the few things I have read about it). However, in most cases a large dose of complaining surely cannot be taken as a good thing, although some complaining is inevitable with every product or design decision.
In this context, if possible, I would like to enquire a bit into the apparent desire to move the game into the direction of 'per encounter' balancing, which at least from the looks of things on these boards, grates a significant number of people in the wrong way. Many of us, myself included, simply do not see many advantages in balancing the game on a 'per encounter' basis and 'fear' (as much as you can fear something about a game) that the eventual 4th edition will be balanced in this manner.
If you find the time, could you please expound on the philosophy behind the shift of the game in this direction?
As of now, I can already foresee many problems with players trying to artificially join encounters together in order to maintain a duration on their ability, or alternatively cut encounters short just so that their ability refreshes. There is also the fact that per-encounter balancing does not limit characters on a greater timescale, so grinding the PCs down gradually, which can be an interesting part of some adventures, would be much less of an option. Of course, the lack of a standard and balancing for out of encounter ability use if they are balanced on a per encounter basis, also raises questions. The game also seems more interesting if some classes have a trade-off between peak power and staying power and per encounter balancing would seem to do away with this.
Some of the above problems could be avoided by using implicit rather than explicit per encounter balancing. That is, rather than abilities having a 'per encounter' duration, they could have a set time duration, say 5 minutes (or 2 minutes - the exact number would require playtesting), that is sufficient for the duration of almost all encounters and could in practice be treated as a 'per encounter' duration untill one of those situations arises where the encounter is very non-standard in terms of its duration. It would also take care of the out of encounter use of abilities and their duration. Also, rather than abilities being refreshed every encounter, more abilities could be usable at will or require a 'cooldown' period of varying magnitudes depending on the ability in question. This kind of implicit per encounter balancing would be much more palatable for me (and I dare guess many other people) than explicit per encounter balancing, though it still retains the problem that characters cannot be ground down gradually across multiple encounters (which can be great fun), does not allow for significant trade-offs between peak power and staying power and does not allow for abilities with more far reaching impacts than encounter resolution (I am thinking of things like wish spells, etc.). For these to be possible, at least some balancing out of the 'per encounter' system would have to be retained.
) and always seek to learn something from them. 
