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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4064833" data-attributes="member: 710">But the question is: What do players do when their resources are depleted? That's inevitable. You can't get through an encounter for free. Fighter and Rogue lose hit points, Spellcasters lose spells. But the encounters where you don't lose a lot of resources are, well, cakewalks. They are okay sometimes (you don't want to forget that your're a powerful hero, right?)But you can't take this away either. You don't want to go from 1st level to 20th level in 2 days. You must find a middle ground between going forever and going too short. 3e assumed that an "average" encounter costs 25 % resources. (EL = PL). Unfortunately, unless the resource cost are very badly distributed, this means no one really feels challenged. No one gets near death or is out of spells. Several of these encounters in a row don't make the game much more interesting. The basic idea was sound from a mathematical point of view, but it isn't from a gamer psychology point of view.The interesting encounters are those where a character gets close to death, where spell casters struggle to choose the right spell at the right time. In 3.x, these are the EL = PL +4 (or higher) encounters. Unfortunately, these encounters also mean that most resources are expended for the day, and it's time for rest.Per encounter abilities allow you to deplete loads of your resources, but if you don't die, you can recover and go on. Remaining per day powers are then needed to stop people from going on forever. There is still stuff that forces you to rest...If it's a problem, why shouldn't it be designed away? And if I don't want to build my adventures around the 15 minute work-day (either creating artifical incentives to avoid them, or creating encounters counting on it, but with little middle ground), they definitely are.</blockquote>

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