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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7701667" data-attributes="member: 42582">Right. These are points I've made upthread.4e largely (not completely) decouples encounter balance from the pacing/balancing of the "adventuring day". This is part of what makes its encounter building guidelines useful.It is also yet another respect in which it is closer to classic D&D than some of the post-AD&D versions. Because, as I expained upthread, AD&D also decouples, to a significant extent, encounter balance from pacing.In 4e, the decouping takes this form: at any given time you can look at the state of the PCs (surges left, dailies left, etc) and if the answer is "not completely depleted" then you can throw another encounter at them and it might be tough, and even perhaps frustrating, but it probably won't result in a TPK. 4e is very forgiving and flexible in this way. But you do have to have regard to the encounter building guidelines in doing this - if the party is down to one surge each and you throw a level +4 at them then you probably are setting things up for a TPK.In AD&D, the decoupling takes the form I described already: the same dungeon set-up might be workable for both a 3rd level and a 6th level party. But the pacing required to make it work will be different: the 6th level PCs might be able to take on 10 bugbears all at once, but the 3rd level PCs might need to find a way to split it up into a sequence of smaller, hence less threatening, confrontations. Because the scaling of everything but monster hit points is so mild in AD&D, you don't really need encounter building guidelines to make this work. Rather, you need to have rules or table conventions that allow the players, via their PCs, to exercise the appropriate control over pacing. (What is sometimes, in my view misleadlingly, called "combat as war".)I think it's telling that in the 2nd ed era, as AD&D moved from an approach where the players control pacing to an approach where the GM is assumed to control pacing, it likewise moved to a much greater encouragement of GM fudging as the tool for handling encounter balancing. (Eg rather than allow the story to be "trivialised" by letting the PCs beat the bugbears one-by-one, we have a dramatic confrontatin between the PCs and a wave of bugbears, but the GM manipulates the dice rolls so that the PCs win.)In both 3E and 5e, there is a need for encounter-building guidelines (because of the scaling) and a need for the GM to control pacing (because of the daily resource paradigm), which create all sorts of pressures on the GM's role that I personally am glad not to have to deal with.PCs will run out of surges, but at paragon and even moreso at epic there are workarounds for this. (At heroic it's more serious; I remember running a 7th level encounter for mostly surgeless 10th level PCs and it was a non-trivial challenge, with the sorcerer having to hold the front line because the fighter was too weak to do so.)As for dailies, I find my players tend to ration them, because they can get a lot of depth just out of their encounters and they aren't sure what will be up next. That's not to say they don't use them when need demands it - or, if the daily is somewhat boutique, when the circumstances for its optimal use arise - but they aren't what they start with.In a daily resource paradigm I don't really like the effect of this, because it tends to mean a hording of fun abilities rather than use of them. (In case it's not clear: by "hording" I mean a sort of limit-case of "rationing".) But in 4e, because of encounter powers being the bread-and-butter, I find it works better. The hording isn't total, because the players know that even if they're out of dailies they're not completley resourceless.</blockquote>

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