ryryguy
First Post
I know that there are some who really dislike the way you can spend unlimited surges after a short rest, to heal up to maximum before every encounter. For the most part, this distaste may stem from the feeling that is unrealistic, too "gamey" or "cartoony".
I'm not going to address that particular issue.
But, if you leave that aside and just embrace the "gameyness"... there is something really cool in how power resource management, healing resource management, and encounters interact. This was not obvious to me until after I had played a few sessions. (Maybe it was immediately obvious to others.)
In short, the PCs should almost always start every encounter with a minimum baseline of resources and capacity. This makes encounter balance/difficulty a lot more solid.
To elaborate a bit, you have encounter powers plus hit points in one resource "bucket", and daily powers plus healing surges in another. At the end of the adventuring day, with daily powers and healing surges exhausted, you can still face the next encounter with a full encounter resource bucket.
(So yeah, if your surges are exhausted and you don't have any to spend to heal up between encounters, this is not strictly true... but when you get to that point it's a pretty strong clue to stop for the day, and in practice players almost certainly will do so... My point is that you could use up your final healing surges between encounters but still have a full encounter bucket.)
The nice, nonobvious (to me) aspect of this is that you can try to balance an average, level-equivalent encounter against the encounter resource bucket alone. In theory, the party should have a good chance to handle that encounter with just those encounter resources alone. Not all the time - we are rolling dice, after all, and lacking any additional surges and/or dailies to fall back on, the party will be much closer to the edge. Most times it would be a wise choice for the party not to take that risk and to rest up instead.
But, as a DM/designer, that provides a very helpful benchmark. You generally don't have to worry that a trap or an artillery monster is going to one-hit a poor PC at the start of the encounter because he isn't fully healed up coming through the door. You don't have to try to take only 1/4 or 1/6th of the party hit points (plus available healing hit points) in each of the 4 or 6 encounters for the day. You can go ahead and try to take nearly all of the party hit points in each and every encounter. As a result the encounters seem more tense and dramatic; PC's drop (temporarily) a lot more often.
Anyway, as I said maybe this is not news to many people. But to me, it was like a light bulb went on when I grasped this.
I'm not going to address that particular issue.
But, if you leave that aside and just embrace the "gameyness"... there is something really cool in how power resource management, healing resource management, and encounters interact. This was not obvious to me until after I had played a few sessions. (Maybe it was immediately obvious to others.)
In short, the PCs should almost always start every encounter with a minimum baseline of resources and capacity. This makes encounter balance/difficulty a lot more solid.
To elaborate a bit, you have encounter powers plus hit points in one resource "bucket", and daily powers plus healing surges in another. At the end of the adventuring day, with daily powers and healing surges exhausted, you can still face the next encounter with a full encounter resource bucket.
(So yeah, if your surges are exhausted and you don't have any to spend to heal up between encounters, this is not strictly true... but when you get to that point it's a pretty strong clue to stop for the day, and in practice players almost certainly will do so... My point is that you could use up your final healing surges between encounters but still have a full encounter bucket.)
The nice, nonobvious (to me) aspect of this is that you can try to balance an average, level-equivalent encounter against the encounter resource bucket alone. In theory, the party should have a good chance to handle that encounter with just those encounter resources alone. Not all the time - we are rolling dice, after all, and lacking any additional surges and/or dailies to fall back on, the party will be much closer to the edge. Most times it would be a wise choice for the party not to take that risk and to rest up instead.
But, as a DM/designer, that provides a very helpful benchmark. You generally don't have to worry that a trap or an artillery monster is going to one-hit a poor PC at the start of the encounter because he isn't fully healed up coming through the door. You don't have to try to take only 1/4 or 1/6th of the party hit points (plus available healing hit points) in each of the 4 or 6 encounters for the day. You can go ahead and try to take nearly all of the party hit points in each and every encounter. As a result the encounters seem more tense and dramatic; PC's drop (temporarily) a lot more often.
Anyway, as I said maybe this is not news to many people. But to me, it was like a light bulb went on when I grasped this.
