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<blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 5941027" data-attributes="member: 6669048">I played a lot of 4e and that's exactly why I don't like encounter-based design. In my experience, players will hold onto their daily powers until the &quot;last fight of the day&quot; unless they're thoroughly in the weeds. If you follow the standard 5 encounter design that a lot of adventures had, the first 4 encounters are pretty much the same unless you take pains to vary the monsters and their abilities and the terrain. The players, in those first four encounters, are going to stick almost exclusively to at-will and encounter powers, slowly using up healing surges but thanks to boosts from Leader classes rarely if ever more than half of them. They'll use action points, but always make sure they have one going into the last encounter. Which means at the end of every encounter, they'll have the exact same powers they had walking into it, they'll have maybe 1 or 2 fewer healing surges (typically only the defender or maybe a melee striker), and rarely 1 fewer action points (since they'll typically only use one if they're about to milestone and get it back anyway).Now with that kind of gameplay. You can force that style of &quot;set encounter&quot; gameplay in any edition of D&amp;D and I've noticed I use it a lot in my current Pathfinder game. However, I can also do a more organic &quot;there are X number of this monster and Y number of this monster etc. and player actions will determine how many of what they encounter when&quot; design. I can't do that in 4e because, as I said, players wipe smaller encounters with no effort at all and get in deep trouble with more overwhelming encounters. I want a system where I as DM have the freedom to decide what sort of adventure I design. I want to be able to both create an episodic game with set encounters and an organic sandbox style game. If the system decides that for me by giving characters a lot of encounter-based resources, then it shoehorns me into writing those sort of games.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Abstruse, post: 5941027, member: 6669048"] I played a lot of 4e and that's exactly why I don't like encounter-based design. In my experience, players will hold onto their daily powers until the "last fight of the day" unless they're thoroughly in the weeds. If you follow the standard 5 encounter design that a lot of adventures had, the first 4 encounters are pretty much the same unless you take pains to vary the monsters and their abilities and the terrain. The players, in those first four encounters, are going to stick almost exclusively to at-will and encounter powers, slowly using up healing surges but thanks to boosts from Leader classes rarely if ever more than half of them. They'll use action points, but always make sure they have one going into the last encounter. Which means at the end of every encounter, they'll have the exact same powers they had walking into it, they'll have maybe 1 or 2 fewer healing surges (typically only the defender or maybe a melee striker), and rarely 1 fewer action points (since they'll typically only use one if they're about to milestone and get it back anyway). Now with that kind of gameplay. You can force that style of "set encounter" gameplay in any edition of D&D and I've noticed I use it a lot in my current Pathfinder game. However, I can also do a more organic "there are X number of this monster and Y number of this monster etc. and player actions will determine how many of what they encounter when" design. I can't do that in 4e because, as I said, players wipe smaller encounters with no effort at all and get in deep trouble with more overwhelming encounters. I want a system where I as DM have the freedom to decide what sort of adventure I design. I want to be able to both create an episodic game with set encounters and an organic sandbox style game. If the system decides that for me by giving characters a lot of encounter-based resources, then it shoehorns me into writing those sort of games. [/QUOTE]

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