"Per Encounter"-Ability: Hopefully not in the rules

[Ranger REG]

Is there an example otherwise? "Can we pick a fight... I'm low on hit points and need to use a per encounter ability."

You don't need to pick a fight or start up a combat encounter in order to heal.

"Why don't you teleport to the top of the tower?"
"I'm sorry, I can only do that once per encounter."
"But we've been standing here ten minutes, and you just did that twice on the way in!"
"Yes, but those were separate encounters."

Dude, don't make me question the competence of your DM.

That's just nonsense. Per day means the choice to allocate your resources, per encounter does not (instead, the GM allocates them for you).

Sorry that we're denying you the choice to save up for possible future encounters later in the day.

So, shall we be very lawful and stick to the "four encounters per day" limit? I'm guessing five encounters would be too much to handle for your players.

 

[Anthtriel]

I'm seriouly impressed pawsplay. You not only managed to ignore every single post in this thread, including the opening post, you also managed to ignore half of the post you responded to. In all the years I have written in forums, that never happened to me. Not that extremely. Fortunately, the ENWorld mods do their jobs very well, so I won't be too aggressive, but if you manage to ignore the entire point of this thread: "Per encounter means recharge after x minutes" again, then I will assume your reading competence is too bad to discuss anything with you.

"This isn't the same encounter."
"This is so too the same encounter."

Doesn't matter, it only matters whether they had x minutes of rest or not. I specifically pointed that out and you just ignored it. That doesn't give you much credibility.

Also, whether the GM throws longer encounters or shorter encounters changes how many relative resources are available.

Sure. But the DM (and the designers) always knows how many rescources the player have available to them. With "per day", it's anyone's guess if they are half dead and without spells, or whether they just nova through it.

Is there an example otherwise? "Can we pick a fight... I'm low on hit points and need to use a per encounter ability."

Great then, if you rested x minutes you can use it without a fight.

That's just nonsense. Per day means the choice to allocate your resources, per encounter does not (instead, the GM allocates them for you).

Per day is problematic for play if you often have just one encounter per day. In that case, you just nova through it, which means you only use your two most powerful abilities at best, and then rest for the rest of the day. You can also get in the situation where you don't have any rescources anymore and the Wizard is forced to shoot with his crossbow the whole encounter, effectively doing nothing. Both of these situations are pretty bad, so you cannot effectively diverge from 4 encounters per day. Per encounter ensures that the system holds up no matter how many fights you have in one day.
Granted, if you have the same rescources for (nearly) every fight, the system hinges on ability balance, so that not every fight plays out the same. We'll see if Wizards can deliever.

 

[Someone]

You not only managed to ignore every single post in this thread, including the opening post, you also managed to ignore half of the post you responded to. In all the years I have written in forums, that never happened to me.

You lucky bastard!!

 

[Cbas_10]

I'm not a fan of "per encounter" abilities. Then again, I am not a huge fan of the current "X number of spells per day" as a caster, either (however, it's the system we have and not yet taken my time to houserule and modify). I don't care for the arbitrary and videogamey (yes, I'm including vancian spellcasting) "recharge when the combat is over" or the "cast all the spells in your allotment without any worries...and then suddenly have none, as if a switch is turned off." The presence of these abilities don't bother me....just the artificial limitations on how often they can be used bothers me. Why can a character only use so many spells? Why does an ability only make itself available once in a given fight?

Here are my ideas for spells per day or per-encounter abilities:

• Based upon Constitution (or some other mechanic that actually is derived from the character instead of an arbitrary rule), characters would have X number of "points" to spend. Each maneuver or ability would cost one or more of these points.

• Using more than the "allowed" points would be possible, but at a penalty for the character. This could be a Fatigued/Exhausted Conditions type of thing (penalties to Strength, Dexterity, and movement) or could be represented as exhaustion via non-lethal damage (i.e. risking passing out in combat if you take too much damage and are too "spent" from doing these extra maneuvers) or could be hits to the Constitution score (probably only in the cases of BIG or powerful abilities...who knows; these are rambling thoughts at this point)

• These points would return at some sort of rate when characters are not exerting themselves. Walking, eating, riding horses down the trail...whatever is not making you break a sweat like fighting, climbing, riding a horse at full speed, etc. In most cases, these points would effectively all return before the next encounter. Unless you are running an encounter-after-encounter gauntlet. However, this would solve the debate of "when is an encounter over for purposes of getting my abilities refreshed?"

Thus, any maneuver, special ability, spell, or whatever would have, in its description heading, 2 additional entries: Fatigue Cost (or whatever we'd like to call these "points") and Fatigue Penalty (do you take Str/Dex/Move penalties, non-lethal damage, or Con damage?). It requires basically only an extra amount of bookkeeping relative to tracking your hit points. Sure, there are two extra tidbits to know for each spell/ability, but it would replace the need to know how many you can cast per day/encounter and more rationally explains why you can only do things so many times in a given time period.

Wow...already house ruling 4e? Okay....it is a bit soon for that. But my thoughts on house rules for my own 3.5 game seemed to apply to this Per-Encounter discussion.

Afterthought: then if we go for this system in regards to spell-casters, there is a totally new topic to be tackled...spellbooks or other ways to determine how many different spells a character knows. But that is for a different topic...

 

[Anthtriel]

All kinds of point-based system have the problem that you need to balance very carefully, or you end up with characters who do the same thing over and over again. It's certainly more realistic, but I don't think it would work with D&D's ever expanding ability lists. Sooner or later you have an overpowered ability, and in point-based systems, those are kind of dangerous.

Then again ... psions worked liked this, and apparently it worked. But then again, they were balanced against having a very small amount of powers. Does anyone have play experience with high level psions?

 

[McBard]

...by 'per encounter' I wouldn't be surprised if they meant 1/X minutes.

In Saga SW, a Jedi's "per encounter" force abilities reset after 1 minute's rest (this is the baseline way to reset—there are a couple of other ways during combat to reset them, as well).

The Saga rulebook (as far as I remember) never uses the term "per encounter", so I doubt 4e's will either. We'll see.

 

[pawsplay]

Fortunately, the ENWorld mods do their jobs very well, so I won't be too aggressive, but if you manage to ignore the entire point of this thread: "Per encounter means recharge after x minutes" again, then I will assume your reading competence is too bad to discuss anything with you.

First of all, threads don't have a point. It's difficult enough for one person to have a solid theme. A few dozen posters arguing at cross purposes can hardly be said to have a "point."

Second, if your're arguing that "per encounter" means "recharge after x minutes," then you're essentially arguing that per encounter does not work, and per unit of time does. There are games that define things in terms of "per encounter."

Third, my reading competence is high enough to have gotten me into graduate school. I also have a number of well-regarded game reviews posted on RPGnet. Plus, you have no business assessing my reading competence. You're just being rude.

Fourth, the post of mine you responded to was a response to a comment about "per day" encounters, specifically, NOT "per five minutes." Thank you for displaying your excellent reading comprehension and for reading the thread carefully.

 

[pawsplay]

Fortunately, the ENWorld mods do their jobs very well, so I won't be too aggressive, but if you manage to ignore the entire point of this thread: "Per encounter means recharge after x minutes" again, then I will assume your reading competence is too bad to discuss anything with you.

Anthriel, this is me calling you out:

Except for the problem of tracking it, that is. Which is a gigantic problem.
Plus, "per x amount of time" is really gamey and doesn't always make a lot of sense. A Paladin in a dark prison can count the days by concentrating on when his "Smite Evil" recharges.

You are arguing two contradictory positions. Perhaps you can clarify what you really mean.

 

[Anthtriel]

So as it turned out, you actually have fine reading competence (I suppose), you just didn't bother to read, with the same result. Very well then, let me sum up:

Any part of the example in the original post

I realized that flavorwise, "per encounter ability" should actually be named "ability that takes two minutes of rest to recover", as opposed to "per day ability", which would be "ability that takes eight hours of rest to recover". "Per encounter" is, apart from the name, really not more 'gamey' than "Per day", it is actually a refinement.

Recharge after every two minutes would be horrible, I agree. That's why I made it a point (only in the example though, I think), to make it two minutes of actual rest. That's extremely easy to track of, even easier than per day.

I disagree, I believe there should be an actual benefit for resting (a relatively small amount of time). Look at the example for details. (Well granted, it probably comes off as "taking a nap", though I rather think of "catching breath")

You misunderstand. It's not "each ability refreshes two minutes after it's used". It's "all abilities refresh after you spend two uninterrupted minutes resting". The only "timekeeping" needed is the length of the rest period.

Per encounter makes more sense, since it is just a matter of resting, not using some daily allowance of power. But if they were different in ability, like the per encounter smiter were 15th level and the per day smiter 5th, then it would make sense that the lower level guy would need more rest.

I won't say I don't have some reservations about them, but I do want to look at your example. It seems to me that this is where it's very important that "per encounter" is shorthand for "short rest".

Doesn't matter, it only matters whether they had x minutes of rest or not. I specifically pointed that out and you just ignored it. That doesn't give you much credibility.

And keep in mind that "per encounter" for the purpose of this thread means "ability that refreshes after x minutes of rest", not "ability that refreshes when the DM says so" (which would be inferior, I agree).

There is one thing in this thread that you just have "to get", to understand. That there could be a text that read "Recharge after x minutes of resting" which would be different from "Recharge after x minutes". If you don't bother to read through the thread, then it's possible to confuse the two and wonder what everyone is talking about, especially as some apparently confused people have posted here, and beyond my example I haven't been very clear (in part because it's impossible not to get it after you read the example). I also acknowledge that I can be pretty unintelligible at times, and my English is nowhere near as good as I would like it to be.

"The point of the thread", i.e. "the point I wanted to make" or "the reason why I wrote all that" is to create an awareness that "per encounter" is very misunderstood, and implies rules that are very different from the rules actually employed. Saga doesn't ever actually say "per encounter", if I'm not mistaken. It's a horrible name, that's why I don't want it in the 4E rules (hence the thread title).

Of course, objectively, the "point of this thread" is that some people in the ENworld forums don't bother to read other posts, not even if they find apparently odd discrepancies. Posting without reading other posts, especially the opening post, is pretty much the worst thing you can do in a forum. That behauvior turns meaningful, linear discussions into a chaotic mess.
Someone who posts without reading others somehow believes others care about his opinion when he doesn't care what they think, or whether he contributed in any meaningful way, or just rehashed what has been discussed dozens of times before.

Well, the good thing is, I can start my ignore list. Should save me some time.

 

[Piratecat]

Anthriel -- heck, no, let's make it everyone to avoid confusion. Next person to insult someone gets a suspension of at least two weeks. Being snotty, supercilious and rude is just as bad as directly calling someone names. Please stop.

If you find that you can't respond in this thread without breaking that rule, it might be best to move on to a different thread.