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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8598336" data-attributes="member: 42582">Doesn't it depend what is meant by the word "require"?People can run their games however they like. But there is some self-evident mathematics here that has nothing to do with Jeremy Crawford granting or withholding permission!Rather than "encounters" - which builds in certain assumptions - I'll refer to events that occur during play, and that demand the expenditure of player-side resources that are single-use between recovery periods.There are two factors that impose a ceiling on the amount of such resources a player can expend per event: the number of events that will occur between recovery periods; and the amount of such resources the player has access to between recovery periods.If you reduce the number of events, you lift the ceiling. At the limit of one event, the ceiling per event is the same as the ceiling that follows from the amount of recovery-dependent resources the player has. (We could call this the nova limit.)In a game with asymmetric player-side resources suites, where different players have access to different bundles of recovery-dependent resources that are, in turn, dependent on different recovery periods, it's obvious that the nova limit will be different for different players, and that approaching those different nova limits will affect the intra-player dynamics of play.There are other factors at work too. For instance, one way of shaping player behaviour is to leave players uncertain as to how they are positioned relative to recover possibilities, and to hence leave them uncertain as to what their resource ceiling is, and how close they are to their nova limit. At least for some players, this may cause them to refrain from spending resources which, in retrospect, they could have spent without breaching the resource ceiling. The classic manifestation of this, in D&D, is the wizard PC who goes to sleep with high level spells not cast, which in retrospect could have been usefully cast but weren't because the player was saving them "just in case".What inter-relationship between these various considerations is "required" for a table to have a fun gameplay experience is probably highly variable. That the inter-relationships exist, though, is not. It's a basic consequence of the game design.Some personal reflections follow, s-blocked.[spoiler]I have had four periods of reasonably extensive experience of play with games that exhibit these factors: AD&D play, two Rolemaster campaigns that used slightly different approaches to establishing the capabilities of spell-users, and 4e D&D.In AD&D, from mid-to-high levels the ceiling for clerics and magic-users tended to be quite generous, even if play did not approach the nova-limit, and those players - the ones playing fighters and thieves - who had few or no recovery-dependent resources tended to decline in usefulness. The challenge in trying to extend the number of events between recoveries, so as to lower the spell-caster ceiling, was that the typical event was a combat that depleted hit points, and hit point recovery itself depended on a high caster ceiling.In my first long-running Rolemaster campaign a similar overall pattern emerged, although driven not by hit point recovery concerns but more by the general effectiveness of magical over non-magical solutions, and the capacity of mid-to-high level magic-users to use their abilities to dictate the recovery cycle. The result was that over time the game drifted to an all-casters one.In my second long-running RM campaign we dropped some of the effects that gave casters so much control over their own recovery cycle, and we dropped some of the effects that increased their power-point totals, and we strengthened some aspect of warrior builds including event-based recovery abilities (Adrenal Moves), and the upshot was a game in which, in many domains of activity, spell-casters had to approach their nova limit in order to be as effective as non-casters. The caster players tended to dictate the rest cycle (needing to get back their power points) but the non-caster players tended to set the parameters for what counts as effective action. Despite the resulting potential for intra-party tension it worked quite well, and the game included meaningful non-magic-using characters all the way up to its mid-20s level conclusion.In 4e D&D all the PCs are on more-or-less the same resource suite and cycle, and so have roughly the same nova limit, and so all concerns about resource and recovery could be approached by the players as a purely tactical issue with no intra-party conflicts resulting from different ceilings and different nova-limits, and by the GM (me) as a purely pacing-and-pressure issue with no intra-party balance concerns.The modest exceptions to uniformity - eg a character with once-per-encounter rather than once-per-milestone action points, who loses that advantage over the other PCs if many encounters also count as milestones; or slight variations between encounter and daily utility powers - have not caused any practical issues at our table.These days I prefer either a game that adopts the 4e approach - that is, uniform player-side recovery-dependent resources - or a game that doesn't have D&D-style recovery at all.[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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