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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5944889" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks.I haven't played mid-to-high level 3E, but compared to Rolemaster or classic D&D 4e doesn't have nova-ing. The players of high level wizards in RM would make it a point of pride to maximise the amount of spell points they could spend in a single round! Classic D&D doesn't go quite that far, but you can spend all your best spells in a single combat and then have none less.Daily powers in 4e are important, but - at least in my experience - not quite that important. Hence the reduction in swinginess.Encounter powers tell me something about the campaign world too. For example, in my game the fighter's and ranger's encounter powers tell me that they are masters of the halberd and the greatbow respectively.It's a different sort of "something", but it's not nothing.I'm a little on the hardcore side here (probably similar in outlook to  [MENTION=27160]Balesir[/MENTION]). I think "flexibility" is hard to achieve, and tend to prefer reasonably focused design where all the pieces are pushing the same way.The playtest document, for example, has a 1 hour duration combat buff (Crusader's Strike). From the point of view of [-]exploration[/-]encounter-based play that's a nightmare, because instead of pushing the focus of play and engagement into the situation at hand, it pushes it towards timekeeping - and either GM fiat of this, or pedantic tracking of the amount of time required for every exploratory action the players declare for their PCs in the course of transition between encounters.Luke Crane, in the Burning Wheel Magic Burner (p 259), has some interesting stuff to say about durations:In the Burning Wheel core rules, I talk about time [ie spell durations] in terms of actions [= a heartbeat, about a second or so], minutes, hours, days, months and years. Makes sense, no? That's how time passes, right? True, but game time is very different than real time. What's important in real time is not the same as what's important in game time. Game time is factored in chunks of tests, conflicts, scenes, sessions, adventures and campaigns. . .  I favour these new durations, rather than the traditional time durations. Why? Because these durations are much easier to manage as an in-game resource than real time. Burning Wheel doesn't have very good time management rules, but it has excellent game resource management rules . . . What's an hour in the game? How much adventuring can you accomplish in an hour? How many tests? How many Duels of Wits? At best it's an arbitrary determination made by the GM. There are no rules for it. . . Sometimes that's cool, but other times, we need another set of limits to help us define magical effects.Now I would say that classic D&D did have time management rules - "the turn" as a unit of exploratory action, a rest and wandering monster cycle defined in terms of turns, etc. I'll leave it to others to judge whether or not these were excellent rules. My view is that they are clearly rules that push away from rather than towards encounter-based play.But once you drop them - say, in the spirit of "flexibility" (and I don't think the playtest had these sorts of rules) - then you end up with these durations that become subject to arbitrary GM determination. And that also pushes strongly away from encounter-based play, because the whole point of encounter-based play is that the GM frames the scenes but the players get to decide which player resources to bring to bear, and how. Whereas hour-long buffs encourage the players to haggle over the scene-framing ("Come on, all that stuff we did didn't take an hour, did it?") rather than to engage the scene itself.I think this is probably one thing that some people have in mind when they say that the playtest reminds them of 3E - it lacks the exploration rules of classic D&D. (Did 2nd ed have those rules? If not, then a comparison to 2nd ed might be just as apt.)</blockquote>

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