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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6038037" data-attributes="member: 2011">In real life, I don't know if the guy passing me on the street is a physicist, a serial killer, a hot dog vendor, or a Navy Seal. Clothing and physique give a little bit away, but for the most part, I have no idea who any given person is, or what they are capable of.The concept of PCs knowing the difference between a goblin cutter, a goblin hexer, a goblin blackblade, a goblin archer, and a goblin sharpshooter is illogical. At best, one should know that one has a bow and another has a rod.So, the DM really shouldn't hand a ton of info out that the PCs themselves cannot perceive. Race and a bit about racial abilities should probably be about it. Notorious creatures like Dragons should have more info, but then again, they should also have more inaccurate info."Everyone knows that Dragons lay their eggs on mountain tops."Well, some dragons might, but many wouldn't. The 4E designers introduced this bizarre concept that misinformation shouldn't be handed out and PCs should be encyclopedias of actual information, even though they are low level and inexperienced. All in the name of ease of play or some form of fun (if one equates fun to the DM telling the players what is going on a lot even if that info is stuff that the PCs really shouldn't know). As a player, I do not want the DM telling me the actual defense numbers of NPCs (which some DMs houserule into the game) or the fact that the Frost Goblin Hexer can put out a freezing zone that creates difficult terrain whereas a Glowmetal Hexer puts out one that lowers Will and grants concealment to the goblins. I want to discover this stuff by playing the encounter, not by being told about it ahead of time.So with regard to the OP's original question, a party of 5 first level PCs should be walking out into a nasty world where they have very little in the way of experience. That same party of 5 PCs have 5 Dailies and 5 Action Points, and they regain 1 Action Point every 2 encounters after the first. So, they should be using an average of 1/2 to 1 Daily per encounter and about 2 Action Points per encounter (nearly every encounter). By doing this, they will shorten the length of earlier encounters, use up slightly fewer healing surges per encounter, giving them more encounters per adventuring day and resulting in them having fewer unused resources at the end of the day. The real limiting factor for PCs is Healing Surges, not Dailies and Action Points. As the PCs acquire more Dailies per day, the players should multiply the number used by encounter by the number that they have. So, 1 to 2 Dailies used per encounter once the PCs have 2 Dailies per day.The way to handle the fact that higher level PCs have been around the block a bit is by the very fact that they have more Dailies and special abilities per day. They have more resources, can spend more per encounter, and this is how the game handles the fact that the PCs are becoming more badass and more experienced. The PCs shouldn't just suddenly out of the blue have information about these high level Devils that 6 months ago when they were low level, they didn't know. Instead, they have more abilities to handle thse high level Devils that they didn't have earlier in their careers.The one exception to not handing out too much information is minions. Very few things in the game are as annoying as a player dropping a Daily or an Encounter power on minions when the player didn't know that they were minions (or worse yet, dropping it on a single minion).There are two ways to handle this:1) Let your players know ahead of time that you will not be giving them neon signs pointing out the minions, so that the players need to figure out if there are any minions in an encounter before they start pulling out Dailies.2) Let your players know early in each Minion Encounter that there are minions there. Some DMs even put the neon signs on minion's foreheads by telling the players exactly which foes are minions right away, either directly by stating it outright, or nearly as directly by giving big clues.I prefer #1, but some DMs do not want to force the players to figure it out. My take is that until PCs actually fight with minions, they really do not know that these are mooks that have a hard time not walking into a mace to the face.</blockquote>

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