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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hejdun" data-source="post: 3758399" data-attributes="member: 839">Let's look at it this way.  According to the game design, an encounter with a CR of your level is supposed to drain 25% of the party's resources.  So after 4 of those, a party is supposed to be pretty much out of resources (spells, HP, etc) and will be forced to retreat and rest.  A battle lasts an average of what, maybe 5 rounds?  That's 30 seconds.  You're talking about as little as 2 minutes of combat wiping out the party's resources.How many encounters are there in a dungeon?  In a largish dungeon, there can easily be 15-20.  A dungeon is also dense, meaning that the party encounters them quickly.  So it's possible that a good party that manages resources wisely still runs out of resources in the first half hour.So if you don't like the paradigm of "Rest, hack hack hack, retreat, repeat" then there are a lot of things you can do:- Make the adventure take place in several different locations, each of which containing just enough encounters to challenge the party and also force some resource management.  If the party somehow knows that there will be 3 encounters at this location, the wizard has to choose which of the 3 encounters he's going to use his only fireball in.- Make time a resource.  If it's a dungeon, make sure that the party knows if they retreat and rest, the enemy has time to prepare for them.  When they reenter, the enemy has fled, or barred doors, or set traps, or prepared ambushes.  You know, things an intelligent enemy would do in a dynamic situation.  Then the party has to decide whether to use expendable resources to do more combat and force a more advantageous situation, or to pull back early and possibly waste resources the next day just fighting to get back where they were when they left.- Give the party a time limit.  Tell them straight out that they have 2 days to clear out the dungeon, or recover the artifact of x, or whatever.  Note that if you do this, you should make the goal possible.  Expecting the PCs to go through 20 CR-level encounters in 4 hours is ridiculous and unrealistic.  Forcing the PCs to do so just to "win" is bad DMing; it's setting the PCs up to fail.  The best possible situation is giving them a sufficient challenge and a time limit that forces them to use expendable resources in order to fulfill.  So make sure they have lots of expendable resources to use, and make sure the loot and/or reward is larger than normal to compensate for their use.If the party is just going dungeon crawling with infinite time, don't be surprised if they take it slow, particularly if you're a "play the dice as they lay" DM that isn't afraid to kill PCs.  The way the game is set up, using expandable resources is really a waste of money except in a rare few situations (i.e. given a time limit).  Expendable resources--wands, scrolls, and potions--are poor and expensive duplicates of what the party gets without cost just by resting.  Expendable resources in 3.x DnD are really rather poorly thought out.  They're far less effective than your normal spells (piss poor caster level and save DC) and very expensive for their utility.  They're really only good for all-or-nothing battles when you're out or spells and still need to fight, or to fulfill a function the party couldn't otherwise fulfill.  Given that it's widely known that the game is balanced to expect a party to have a set amount of money, it makes far more sense for a party to spend their money on permanent magic items and take it slow than to blow a ton of cash on potions and wands and blow through a dungeon like a tornado.It sounds like they're moving the 4.0 dynamic to be resources management on a micro level.  So instead of asking "Should I use my only fireball now?" it's "Should I fireball the orc horde, the enemy shaman, or the 3 big ogres?"  The intent is to force you to make tough choices, but frame it in a system that let's you fight on for more of the day instead of slinking back to camp after 4 encounters and 20 minutes.  It's making a system where the wizard actually has something useful to do rather than fire his crossbow (at a -3 attack, oh and you could hit your fighter in the back, but it's only 1d8 damage anyways).  I can't think of the number of times in 3.x when a spellcaster has literally done nothing because he had no options.  He had no spells to use (or didn't want to waste them), and couldn't possibly hit the enemy with his crossbow.  I'll tell you right now: that's not fun.  And DnD is ultimately a game, to be played for fun.So if 4th edition moves towards a system where a wizard always has something "useful" to do (i.e. he can always just zap an enemy for x damage) and the fighters have an in-combat resource to manage, I'll be very happy.  If they make it so that you can fight more encounters per day, I'll be very happy.  If they preserve a sense of decision making and careful management, even better.  I don't care if it's WoW inspired or not if it's fun and it works.  Presumably WoW is so popular because it's fun.  There are certainly worse things to take inspiration from (let's make DnD more like work!)</blockquote>

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