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<blockquote data-quote="McBard" data-source="post: 3481794" data-attributes="member: 14934">Agreed--and good to hear. Now, on to a sharing an idea regarding&nbsp; the &quot;per encounter&quot; versus &quot;per day&quot; mechanic discussion. In revamping 3.5 magic for my campaign, I found it to be a personal, game design break-through to shift many of the powerful, restricted time-use abilities to a &quot;per class level&quot; mechanic. As artificial as a level-based character system is to many people (and I'm not meaning to enter into that debate here), it does cleanly express a character's growth in power.I think you might consider inserting a per class level limition on your exotic spells (rather than merely a per day). What's ironic about the clunkiness of per day limitations is that it is because the game mechanic itself is embedded in the game world that you get the weirdness of having to rest for a night (game world event) in order to regain a daily ability (game mechanic event).A per level limitation, by definition, scales itself to every particular gaming group (whereas, as strange as it sounds, a &quot;campaign day&quot; does not mean the same thing from one gaming group to another). Granted, how long in real time it takes to go from one level to the next might vary according to group (how often they play, DM style etc.), but how many XP it takes to go from one level to the next does not.While the game design philosophy du jour seems to be per encounter scaling, even it starts to show its flaws when applied to &quot;epic&quot; or &quot;exotic&quot; abilities--which you realize, of course, as evinced by the very attractive mechanic of simple and complex spells.Bottom line point: per encounter scaling (game mechanic events) would seem to work well for short scale abilities (e.g. simple, complex spells); but it strikes me that per day scaling (a game world event) for exotic/epic abilities would better be replaced by per class level scaling (a game mecanic event).Oh, love the spell card flipping and turning thingy.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="McBard, post: 3481794, member: 14934"] Agreed--and good to hear. Now, on to a sharing an idea regarding the "per encounter" versus "per day" mechanic discussion. In revamping 3.5 magic for my campaign, I found it to be a personal, game design break-through to shift many of the powerful, restricted time-use abilities to a "per class level" mechanic. As artificial as a level-based character system is to many people (and I'm not meaning to enter into that debate here), it does cleanly express a character's growth in power. I think you might consider inserting a per class level limition on your [b]exotic[/b] spells (rather than merely a per day). What's ironic about the clunkiness of per day limitations is that it is [i]because[/i] the game mechanic itself is embedded in the game world that you get the weirdness of having to rest for a night (game world event) in order to regain a daily ability (game mechanic event). A per level limitation, by definition, scales itself to every particular gaming group (whereas, as strange as it sounds, a "campaign day" does not mean the same thing from one gaming group to another). Granted, how long in real time it takes to go from one level to the next might vary according to group (how often they play, DM style etc.), but how many XP it takes to go from one level to the next does not. While the game design philosophy du jour seems to be per encounter scaling, even it starts to show its flaws when applied to "epic" or "exotic" abilities--which you realize, of course, as evinced by the very attractive mechanic of simple and complex spells. Bottom line point: per encounter scaling (game mechanic events) would seem to work well for short scale abilities (e.g. simple, complex spells); but it strikes me that per day scaling (a game [i]world[/i] event) for exotic/epic abilities would better be replaced by per class level scaling (a game mecanic event). Oh, love the spell card flipping and turning thingy. [/QUOTE]

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