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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7838489" data-attributes="member: 996">If there's a codified rate of recovery independent of the imagined events and environments the PCs experience, then the DM has a free hand in imagining those things.  If there's not, then those events/environments/other factors become tools he needs to use to force PCs into the prescribed pacing in which the game isn't broken. (Or revel in the brokenness, your choice.)Either way, there's a metagame consideration, in the 'codified rate' case, it's a metagame consideration that makes balance more robust, in the more usual case, it's a metagame consideration that distorts the DM's world/story, the PC's behaviors - or distorts the balance/playability of the game.It's fine, in theory, if it averaged out.But that'd mean a single-encounter day calls for an 11-15 encounter day to 'balance it out' - and that may not be entirely tenable.  So, instead, you'd 'need' say, five 7-encounter days.  Yep. Which is beneficial in a cooperative game that features radically different resource mixes among the players, because it retains a semblance of balance among them, and avoids perverse incentives, allowing everyone to at least try to contribute to 'win' the game (succeed as a party).But, comes at the price of limiting range of challenges faced, somewhat - though it frees up the DM to use whatever in-fiction pacing is called for.  So it's a give/take balancing act, either way.  As long as you have significantly different quantity/power of resource & different recovery rates among the PCs.  The problem is that there's metagame factors 'contaminating' that decision, the only question is how perverse and obvious they are.  In the 13A style codified recharge, pacing moves independently, so the metagame consideration is to conserve (budget) to fit the 4-encounter cadence, and go all-out at the climax of the story, which, though metagame and obvious, is not perverse.  In the D&D-style recharge, the metagame impetus is towards the 5MWD to maximize the likelihood of success for the party, but which also maximized the disparity in contribution favoring daily-recharge classes over short-recharge & at-will, so there's a perverse, if not always obvious, incentive for the latter to push for longer days, so that their contributions matter (part of the objective of a cooperative game is that everyone contribute to success - 'pull their own weight'), but in doing so, they actually make the party overall less effective (hurting the main objective - the collective success of the party). It's easy enough to cope with either - just adopt a more 'story' oriented approach in the former, and just gravitate to class-Tier 1 options in the latter.</blockquote>

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