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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7839566" data-attributes="member: 18">Tony is talking about player-initiated recharge of abilities. Gygax wrote a fair bit about playing D&D back in the day, and was very much a hardcore dungeon crawl kind of guy, with the players expected to play hardball themselves and use stuff like 5MWD-type play (not called that back then of course) to their advantage. He'd expect you to find a way to rest before facing the big boss or the like.If all your abilities are tied, instead, to a DM-controlled level-up, that presents a very different mode of play. It is also necessarily less possible to be "skilled" at using abilities with per level stuff, because it is simply rationing, and thus the only real way to be "skilled" is to somehow know, beforehand, what you are facing, in some detail, and to plan resource usage, deviating as required by bad/good dice rolls and so on. There's no "Oh naughty word that was a tough encounter we need to find a way to rest and prepare for the next!", and if you blow most/all of your abilities you're just screwed, with no ability to execute a plan to regain those abilities. You can't even fight your way back out of the dungeon and recharge. Instead you're staring at the XP bar (as it were), which is your only guide.In a computer game with set encounters I think per level stuff could work really well and because you could know the encounters you could develop elaborate strategies and be quite skilled, but it's definitely not as Gygax intended, which featured a lot more going face-first (or 10ft pole first) into the unknown and finding ways to recover and prepare and so on.I actually think what people are really looking for here is to essentially remove casters, and make all magic be scrolls and potions. That avoids all the weirdness and awkwardness of linking stuff to level up and allows for greater tactical and strategic decision-making than level up based stuff.</blockquote>

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