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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 5939503" data-attributes="member: 6669048">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 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.</blockquote>

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