Per-Encounter Powers

[Neonchameleon]

Yeah! Good riddance to "daily" powers, too!

Alas the wizard and cleric appear to be in 5e.

 

[Abstruse]

I'm afraid I'm marking this down as an example on the Fighters Can't Have Cool Stuff list. With Wizards on a daily recharge rate absolutely everything you say about a strong adventure applies to them. You're tied massively by wizard pacing already.

Oh, and Tucker's Kobolds? Do you really think they'd allow you to take a 5 minute rest in their territory? Unless you were forted up in a room and they were busy spiking the doors shut of course... Encounter powers (or rather the lack of them when you'd normally expect to have them) only make Tucker's Kobolds scarier.

Like I said, give some fighter themes an encounter-based power or two. "You can perform this action, but must take a short or long rest before you can perform it again." That's fine. The problem comes in when you give them to rogues and clerics and wizards and paladins and rangers and monks and so on and so forth. So everyone has a few of these abilities. That's when the design shifts from adventure day to encounter, and that's when you start having problems.

Fighters can and should have some interesting tricks and tactics they can use. Especially in the advanced tactical combat rules. In fact, I'll be unhappy if fighters don't have the ability to pick themes that give push/pull/slide/shift maneuvers when they do the advanced gridded combat rules. I like the fighter class and want it to be versatile and interesting. What I don't want, though, is for all classes to get those sort of get it back after a short rest abilities or for one class to get a bunch of them. It throws balance back to that encounter-based design.

And yes, Tucker's Kobolds was probably not the best example, at least as the story was presented. But imagine if the kobolds in Caves of Chaos had taken over a rather large section of the dungeon and defended it that way without increasing their numbers significantly. They'd be spread out and players would get chances to rest as they found spots the kobolds couldn't trap them. Those sort of guerrilla tactics aren't going to work in an encounter-based design because it's next to impossible to chip away at player resources in that sort of game. And it's a lot easier to build an encounter-based adventure in an adventure-day based system than vice versa.

 

[CM]

I, too, am pleased that 5e excludes things I dislike. Other peoples' preferences be damned.

(where/s the rolls-eyes smily?)

 

[ExploderWizard]

Encounter based resource management is the antithesis of emergent gameplay.

When designing an area of the gameworld that the players will potentially visit I make notes of what and who is where, and the general state of affairs. Before play begins in the area I don't know what the "encounters" are going to be exactly.

I might know that there are kobolds living in area 3 but these kobolds may or may turn out to be a self contained encounter.

Allocating resources based on some theoretical rest breaks that may or may not happen has the potential to either screw over the players or make things far too easy for them.

 

[keterys]

Allocating resources based on some theoretical rest breaks that may or may not happen has the potential to either screw over the players or make things far too easy for them.

Not allocating resources has a very similar effect.

For example, there are many older adventures that kinda fall apart if you have reinforcements come from anywhere they might come... or don't. Too hard, too easy. Sometimes murderously or boringly so.

Having some idea of what's 'in the vicinity' (aka, what could show up for a single combat, before the PCs have a time to catch their breath and pull out their healing salves) is helpful. No matter the rest of the dressing or prejudices associated with the exercise that leads you there.

I do think Firelance is onto something that there's a strange... funk... around the word "encounter".

...

Now, let's instead imagine that wizards get mana, and fighters get fatigue. Let's say a wizard can use mana to power any spell they've prepared that day, and fighters can spend fatigue to perform exploits that they pick up when they level.

Is it a problem if both mana and fatigue are restored by taking a rest?
How about if a fighter with no fatigue can burn hp in place of fatigue?

What if wizards have a small pool of mana - only enough to do one of their biggest spells, but they recover some mana every round?

There are _many_ ways to turn the game away from "You have 3 abilities that have 5 minute cooldowns" - which I think we've safely identified as a gameplay behavior that sufficient people are not interested in, while still avoiding "There is a hundredfold difference in capability between a rested party and one that is not, so the PCs will hoard and manage their daily resources to trivially obliterate what should be interesting combats, drag what could be cakewalks, and pervert the entire concept of resting to not match a sensible plot in any way."

Along the way, we can even fix the whole magic / martial disparity, and not just in a hypothetical "Well, if the day is 100 rounds long, the fighter really rocks for the last 80!"

 

[Siberys]

I seem to be holding the opposite opinion to most of the people here - I /hate/ daily resources, but love encounter resources.

Daily resources require a solid way to track them between sessions, which introduces a mess of tracking issues - issues I can deal with, but which I'd rather not have to. Encounter powers only require tracking over the short-term, though, and are thereby much easier to remember.

 

[Herschel]

Among the 4e crowd ,you will still get those that would advocate them. Im not one of them, but not because I dont like them.

Its the whole "encounter" thinking. 4e was an encounter centric system, the problem I ad was that as a DM i found myself having to pre-design encounters. Im not fond of that, I much prefer that players define the terms of encounter through there choices and actions, not that encounters are built into campaign design (and please, dont give me the "Your doing it wrong" argument. Heard, absorbed it, utterly unconvinced by it).

The fact you're unconvinced by it doesn't mean it's not true. Heck, I build encounters on-the-fly all the time. I have a general layout of the area and who/what's around as well as goal(s) for the PCs and go from there. Certainly they will face Potential Enemy X if they go a certain way. The big, set battles are still pre-designed. This is no different than any other edition.

The 4E "rules" are great tools but if you allow yourself to be a slave to them and not look at how they're meant to be used then that's not their fault.

 

[Herschel]

I seem to be holding the opposite opinion to most of the people here - I /hate/ daily resources, but love encounter resources.

Daily resources require a solid way to track them between sessions, which introduces a mess of tracking issues - issues I can deal with, but which I'd rather not have to. Encounter powers only require tracking over the short-term, though, and are thereby much easier to remember.

I'm with you on the management side. Of course then the wizard players would explode in nerdrage when they no longer have heavy reality-changing spells and have to be more like Fighters and Rogues and rely on tactics and attrition .

 

[TwoSix]

Allocating resources based on some theoretical rest breaks that may or may not happen has the potential to either screw over the players or make things far too easy for them.

Wait, when does an old-school DM object to randomness screwing over a player or making things too easy? I thought the point of emergent gameplay was to help foster that sort of randomness.

There hasn't been an edition of D&D yet where attrition is not a factor. The balance has shifted from pre-3e, where attrition mattered a great deal, all the way to 4e, where it was a smaller concern (but still certainly applicable). The whole argument over encounter powers (or, powers that recharge after a small rest) is a question of what ratio of innate capability to resourced capability you want the PCs to have.

And considering how widely that pendulum swings between play styles, it's something that has to be addressed in core with a wide range of available options.

 

[Abstruse]

I seem to be holding the opposite opinion to most of the people here - I /hate/ daily resources, but love encounter resources.

Daily resources require a solid way to track them between sessions, which introduces a mess of tracking issues - issues I can deal with, but which I'd rather not have to. Encounter powers only require tracking over the short-term, though, and are thereby much easier to remember.

Except that it leads to encounter-based design, which I've spoken about a lot in this thread already and doing so again would just be repeating myself. Summary: Encounter-based design forces me as DM to make sure that every encounter in and of itself is challenging, eliminates the usefulness of small encounters like a couple of guards or a single enemy, and creates an artificial feel to design that forces each "room" of a dungeon to act independently of all others. If you want more detail, search the thread for my other posts.

Bookkeeping isn't an argument either because you'd have to keep track of that during a session anyway. You mark off the spell slots you've used during the day or mark down your current HP. Doesn't matter if you don't reference that resource for a few minutes or a week.

The fact you're unconvinced by it doesn't mean it's not true. Heck, I build encounters on-the-fly all the time. I have a general layout of the area and who/what's around as well as goal(s) for the PCs and go from there. Certainly they will face Potential Enemy X if they go a certain way. The big, set battles are still pre-designed. This is no different than any other edition.

The 4E "rules" are great tools but if you allow yourself to be a slave to them and not look at how they're meant to be used then that's not their fault.

The problem is that encounters-based resource management forces that sort of design structure on all adventures. Every encounter has to be a challenge and balanced individually against the party or it's either a waste of time because it's too easy or it's overwhelming in its difficulty.

True, an adventure-based design with daily resources will end up with an encounter-based design eventually, since each fight is going to be an encounter. But it doesn't force balance on each encounter. Again, let's go to guerrilla tactics and a single or pair of weak guards. They're not a challenge in an encounter-based design. The guerrilla tactics aren't going to be effective since they use up no real resources. Meanwhile, the weak guards are no challenge because no real resources are going to be used up. It also makes traps useless except in combat because, again, failure doesn't eat up any resources. If a trap wasn't included as part of a combat encounter, do you know what my 4e group did? Sent the defender charging right through and setting them all off, spending one of his 8-10 healing surges to fix the damage and that's it.

Shifting the design in that direction changes the core genre of the game. It goes from adventure or action/adventure to straight action. Again, this in and of itself isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't have the "feel" of D&D anymore. Especially considering the fact that you can take still make an encounter-based adventure using daily-refreshing resources pretty easily but it's damn near impossible to make an adventure-day-based adventure using encounter-refreshing resources.

For the people who want that style of play, there should be optional rules to accommodate them. But in no way, shape, or form should the game go back to encounter-based design as an overall system. One or two encounter abilities won't do it, but giving every class encounter abilities will make that shift. And if Next doesn't deliver that style of play quickly enough for you, you can always stick with 4e until it does.