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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7470179" data-attributes="member: 996">It could be as little as making balance achievable without reference to pacing.   D&D (to varying degrees, 5e the most decided & admitted among them) depends on a pacing of multiple 'encounters' between recharging critical (mostly spell) resources to make both class and encounter balance achievable.   (5e has been the most explicit about that pacing target, it was less critical in 4e which was better-balanced to begin with, and 3e; and it was not even exactly spelled out in earlier editions, at least, not in so many words, and with few guidelines. )That does limit the kinds of stories you can tell with D&D, to, broadly, three:   tireless heroes fighting toe-to-toe with numberless (but virtually harmless, since hp attrition could still swiftly end the 'day' were they even a teeny bit dangerous) enemies for protracted periods, mighty mages blowing away all opposition in moments, and teams of both sorts facing series after series of dangerous, discrete challenges bracketed by periods of rest, and averaging 6-8 such between 'longer' rests and 2 between shorter ones.   Of course, you prettymuch never see the first sort, because they'd be really tedious to slog through, but they'd be theoretically 'required' if you were going to occasionally have the second sort.   The last, of course, is the ideal norm 5e aims for. 13A's solution is solid enough, but it is also quite limiting to the way you tell stories, since the 1st, 5th, 9th, etc... battle in the party's story sees them at full strength once again, while the 4th, 8th, 12th, etc sees them on the ropes.  Seriously, it's kinda artificial.  Yes, the option of a 'campaign loss' does mean players can change things up by resting early, and the DM can, just like a 5e DM can change how long it takes to rest, change the underlying timing of full-heal-ups - but they're not terribly flexible solutions compared to just not resting balance on pacing, in the first place.An example of balance not resting on pacing - a bad one, because there's not a lot of balance to rest upon anything in the first place - would be the last ed of Gamma World.  It was almost entirely independent of pacing, virtually all resources simply re-set for each encounter.  So you could have 39 encounter and level through half your 10-level career in a day, or have one encounter week for years.  It'd've made no difference to how 'balanced' the characters (they didn't have classes) were, and only the slightest to how the challenges played out.So you were free to pace your GW game as you wished, no meaningful limitation I noticed.OTOH, the sheer, overwhelming, beer-and-pretzels goofiness of it certainly limited the stories you could tell...</blockquote>

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