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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4065202" data-attributes="member: 710">The problem with being "careful" is that I don't want to be that. Encounters that are "careful" are not satisfying in the long run, neither for me, nor for the players. Any encounter in which you challenge the PCs to an "enjoyable" level, the PCs lose hit points. If they see they lose enough hit points to make things dangerous, spellcasters automatically have an incentive to cast their daily-limited spells to make the encounter last shorter, or to heal the damage. If you don't, not only do the spellcaster get bored because they're not actualy doing anything, the fighter won't feel challenged either, because he doesn't take a lot of damage and still beats his enemies. This is putting "careful" to an extreme. Maybe it's the wrong kind of "careful". But it's a trap too easily fallen into, and to hard to escape in 3E. Per Encounter resources are the best solution here. You run out of hit points and spells during the encounter, and you really don't know if you have spend your resources well enough and have enough left to survive till the end. But if you survive, all is good and you recover. Per Day mechanics can now "intervene" to limit the recovery possibilities. Example Hit Points:Let's say you can heal 1/2 your hit points as a "Second Wind". That's the general name for this kind of healing. You can do this, say 8 times per day. But: You can only trigger it via special abilities that can only be used once per encounter. Let's say, in any given party, you probably don't have more than two "trigger powers". This means even in a very hard combat, you simply can't access more than 2 of your 8 Second Winds per day. If you survive it, you can patch up to full hit points. You still have reserves left (4 uses, 2 from the combat, and assuming 2 for full healing), and there is no reason for you to not risk a second encounter, because you still have all the resources per day you can use in a given encounter anyway. But after 2 such encounters, you'll probably give it a rest. If an encounter doesn't require you to blow through all these healing uses, you'll last longer...Tranposing this to spells is the hard part (for the moment). I am eager to see what 4E will brings us here.</blockquote>

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