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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 3770242" data-attributes="member: 31454">From what I've read and my experience with other per-encounter systems, I have a suspicion that most per-encounter abilities will probably wind up being focused so as to really make the focus of the game the fight right here and now.Wyatt's blog post summed it up well with the barbarian. As it is designed, it's essentially an ability that lets you be much stronger than normal (and in terms of balance as related to other classes, operate relatively on-par) for the duration of a given encounter. There's no real tactic to it... if it's a tough fight, you rage as a free action on the beginning of your first turn, no questions asked. The only thing you're really considering when you use a rage is will I need this later today more than I do now?And while the tactical side of trying to decide whether or not to save the rage for later is quite fun by itself, often it comes down to metagaming, pure and simple (note that I do not intend for this use of "metagaming" to be intended as an insult). When I use a rage, I'm betting that I know how my DM plans adventures well enough to know that this is one where I'll need to use it and that I won't regret that choice later. I'm wagering one use of Rage that this encounter needs it and that a subsequent encounter later that day won't.On the other hand, bringing it down to the focus of just this encounter means that on any given round, you're more likely to be making a tactical decision. "Do I spend my rage this round or should I wait until I'm closer to the BBEG?" "Should I use my Death From Above on this guy or save it for the other one?" "Is this really the best round to use my fireball?"I think that 4E, if it switches to a per-encounter system, will likely do something along these lines. Rather than having five fireballs for the day, you might only have one fireball during an encounter, so the decision of when to use it is always a tactical one. From what's been said several times in the design blogs, the designers don't want combat to become static and boring, where the wizard can just chuck fireballs from round 1 to round 5 and the fighter uses Death From Above on every goblin who crosses him. Instead, it'll be a matter of chosing when to expend a resource like that with full knowledge of your choice. You'll be able to survey the battlefield and have to assess who the best target is for what instead of being in one fight and having to guess at what's coming next. It makes things more tactical without making it into a guessing/gambling game. That "per-day" part sounds like it'll remain part of the system, but it won't be the focus.And if this is how it'll work, it should do nicely to bring casters and non-casters onto a more-level playing field. Number of encounters in a day no longer affects one group worse than the other, so I don't need to make sure I have enough encounters to keep the casters from "going nova". I can have just the number of encounters I need to make an adventure work, and the players have fewer artificial restrictions on their decisions.(As a disclaimer, sure the battlefield can change in ways you don't predict... high damage or an ambush might completely change what you thought the battlefield would look like, making your decision of when to use X a bad choice. But it's not something as out of your control as random encounters coming out of nowhere to bite you in the rear.)</blockquote>

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