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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7468744" data-attributes="member: 996">The only class theoretically disfavored by the 3-4 trans-deadly-encounter/2-3 short 'day' is the all-at-will Thief/Assassin.  Everyone else throws down 1/4-1/3rd their daily resources or all their short-rest resources in every fight and is maximally contributing.   I think it'd be more linear that than that, averaging around 6-8.   So you have the occasional 3-4 encounter day, 'balanced' by the equally-occasional 9-12 encounter day.  And, the very occasional single-encounter day, balanced, perhaps, by a series of several 10+ encounter days, rather than a single 11-15 encounter day.I do doubt that anyone actually runs encounters/day over a campaign in any kind of a normal distribution (or any other distribution) around the 6-8 encounter (7 mean, I suppose) 'day.'   Every indicator has always pointed towards 6-8 being closer to the upper limit, and single-encounter days not being at all unusual.   The other thing that helps with balancing daily-oriented classes is uncertainty.  You can't screw prepped casters as hard as you could in 3.5 (let alone the classic game), by giving them misinformation about the day's coming challenges (since they now cast spontaneously), but you can still use uncertainty about day length to box them into reserving some slots for encounters that never materialize.   It's just that using pacing to approximate class & encounter balance can crowd out using pacing for other 'story options' (like building drama, or creating epic sweep, or a sense of history, or foreshadowing, or character growth, or 'realism'/immersion, or what-have-you).  So it restricts story options in the sense that if you do want a campaign story arc that tends to involve episodic, single-encounter scenarios, then 'balancing' those single encounters will mean dialing them up beyond the usual encounter guidelines (which is fine, but it's no longer 'working'), and it will mean that a few classes may underperform  (most classes get slots as daily resources so will do just fine, thankyou).  And, if you're open about the intended pacing, players who don't want to play inferior characters for RP reasons can simply avoid them - heck, you could just cut them from the lists of available classes and be done with it, or you could be certain to drop powerful n/day items useable only by the PC who takes the 'wrong' class for the campaign, to put him back in the same league as everyone else. It may be a somewhat flexible straightjacket that you're able to work around with remarkable efficiency, but what you're describing is, indeed, still being limited by the attempt to impose class balance through pacing.  It's a more dynamic way of doing it than imposing balance every day with the 'just-right' mix of encounters & rests to give everyone a chance to shine every day, if not every encounter or every round.  Instead, balance is experienced over multiple adventuring days, some characters shine and others languish on some days, then swap on others.  A balance-of-imbalances, reflective of the classic game, actually, which aimed for such over the even wider period of a whole campaign. You may think it's unfair to characterize badly balanced classes as limiting your storytelling choices when using pacing to impose balance - I don't, but I do agree that you can keep quite a lot of options open if you impose that balance more dynamically.  But, it's even more unfair to mischaracterize the contrasting hypothetical alternative of balanced classes as 'sameness.'  Balance is not sameness, or equivalence, it's differences that are meaningful and remain viable.  It would be fair to say that building balance into the system limits class-design choices in the same sense that imposing balance through pacing limits storytelling choices.  (That is, not terribly fair - it's just the price you pay for trying to design or run a game in which everyone has a fair shot at having fun...) AFAIK, 1/encounter & 1/short rest were the same thing in 4e (it's just that a short rest was only 5 min, so you could usually assume one after every encounter).    I think 1/encounter mechanics could have their place in 5e, though.  I mean, literally, 1/encounter, as in re-setting when initiative is rolled instead of having anything to do with rests....</blockquote>

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