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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KesselZero" data-source="post: 5855562" data-attributes="member: 6689976">Regarding the discussion between Encounter XP budgets and Adventure XP budgets, I have to chime in that this is a very 4e distinction. In 4e, if I had one 1,000-XP encounter for a party of five first-level characters, they'd have a very tough time with it. But if I threw ten seperate 100-XP encounters at them, they would wipe them up without breaking a sweat. Why? Encounter powers, encounter healing, and short rests. My experience of 4e has been that anything less than a well-balanced encounter is basically a meaningless cakewalk, because it costs the PCs nothing in resources-- at the end of an easy encounter plus short rest, they have exactly the same resources as at the beginning, with a few more XP. Maybe one or two characters has to spend a healing surge, or maybe not. Imagine your 4e PCs taking on two guards outside the door to the citadel. All they have to do is throw down all their encounter powers on the two poor guards then take a five-minute breather. Aside from concerns about making noise and having an alarm raised, this is basically free XP for them. I think what Mearls is talking about is a system where you can choose to wage a war of attrition against your PCs, where healing and big powers aren't as easy to come by, so those ten 100-XP encounters would actually use up PC resources to approximately the same extent that one 1,000-XP encounter would. This also means that traps would return to being more meaningful scattered throughout a dungeon as opposed to parts of a set-piece encounter. I strongly support the design ideology that Mearls lays out in the article, and I really hope that 5e follows this in its basic game. I also think such a game would be much more attractive to new players. On Saturday night I spent a few hours helping four brand-new players through 4e character creation. All we did was race, class, and at-will powers, and it still took a long time since I had to explain every little quirky rule that came up. We barely had time for a very simple "test combat" before bedtime. I just kept wishing for a simpler system so I could have helped them make characters and run through a whole adventure in a couple hours. I can't help but believe that that would be a play experience much more likely to hook them into the game.</blockquote>

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