The potential for this sort of behavior has existed in every version of D&D, and it has been particularly obvious in digital versions. It's how I played the old SSI gold box D&D video games. Fight, rest. Fight, rest. Fight, rest. Interrupted? Restore save game. But if there had been a dungeon master at the "table," so to speak, that would have/should have been /impossible/, because that is literally the very /definition/ of dungeon mastery. You have a dungeon. You are its master. Act like it.
Gold Box games for the win! I still remember those games with such fond nostalgia. I can even play them for a little bit every few years before it wears off. That's quality.
I remember them a bit differently however. In my experience you always
wanted to rest after every encounter you could, but you quite frequently weren't able to. From the beginning of Pool of Radiance, when you went into the slums you had to be careful, because until you cleared out a humanoid race's lair, there was a good chance you would get ambushed by them on your way out. But if you turned around and ran back to the inn after every battle you'd never get far enough to clear anything out, and you'd be risking those encounters every time you went in. By Pools of Darkness (which I've never finished) you still had dungeon ambushes happening all the time--and you were just as scared of them. You looked for every opportunity to rest, but when you actually were able to rest after a single encounter you counted it as a rare reprieve, because you'd usually not have that luxury.
Granted, I avoided reloading between encounters as much as possible (though I always reloaded on PC death/stoning/energy drain--I'm not hard core enough to accept the permanent loss that created). Even with my occasional reloading, I still got the feel that novaing was an extraordinarily bad idea in the games unless you really had to.
Since those games were some of my foundational D&D experiences, that philosophy has stuck with me for my entire D&Ding experience. I'm the caster (when I am) that
hates to have to blow too many resources on any fight (I even try to be conservative in boss fights) because I'm afraid the party will get ambushed on the way out of the dungeon--despite the fact that my DM never runs it that way. I wish he did. I just can't enjoy D&D as a story. Personal preference. Almost every other RPG I play I like to play as a story. Something about D&D makes it better for me as a world exploration with adventuring opportunities available. I think players who started D&D with a different experience are probably going to be coming at it from an entirely different angle. I've had times when the rest of the party was expecting my caster to go full force (and they tend to do that with their own). It's very probable that that was their introduction to the game, and it was 3e, where I think the situation was the strongest.
Interestingly in those computer games because you didn't have options for scry & die and other tricks, caster dominance wasn't really a problem. You
wanted as many casters as you could effectively use--which meant cheesy dual-classing in the later games--but you would get wiped out with a party of all casters. Their novaing ability was balanced with the fact that the 5MWD was rarely an option, and they were squishy and it mattered.
I'm hoping to recapture that feel with 5e, even with the classes being less split between daily spell-casters vs. simple fighters.
The game was set in the World of Greyhawk: the PCs lived in the Imperial Palace in Rauxes (the Great Kingdom), and the castle was many hundreds of miles away in the Howling Hills (north of Iuz). So each day would begin with a teleportation by the PCs to get to the castle. Then they would have to break the wards so they could fly in over the walls. Then they would explore whatever bit of it they could until they were running low on spells. Then they would fly back outside and teleport home.
Each PC was a caster - either full magic-user or warrior/mage - and so this sort of nova-ing didn't create any particular intraparty imbalances. The actual exploration was sometimes interesting but often a bit tedious (much as I imagine ToH might be), and I probably wouldn't run a scenario like that again. But I don't understand why it was, per se, bad GMing.
So in my planar campaign, I had a wonderful idea for an adventure. There was a world that was essentially a giant swamp, loaded with dinosaurs, giant beasts, and the occasional dragons and savage humanoids. The plan was for the party to trek through the endless wilderness looking for a reclusive sage with information they needed. Pure hack 'n slash survival marathon for that part of the adventure.
Unfortunately they were about 14th level (I started the campaign at a fairly high-level, and it was the first 3e campaign I had DMed). Rather than having to rest each night in the dangerous swamp with the constant threat of (randomly rolled) encounters, after having traveled through the wilds all day with the constant threat of random encounters (which was part of the point the experience was trying to give them--for me as a player I would love such a survival trek), the party's wizard simply spent an hour studying the immediate area at the end of the day, used plane shift + teleport to take the party back to one of the other party member's nice cottage near the Elysium gate-town in the Outlands, where they spent the night in warm beds. The next morning, plane shift in to the plane (showing up at a random destination), cast a teleport spell to travel right back to the location carefully studied the night before, and then repeated. The mage wasn't a 14th level caster, but he had the planeshifter prestige class (Manual of the Planes), and may have had their amulet of the planes by that point. So it costs them a few 5th level spell slots per day to totally avoid the entire point of the experience.
Of course, I let them do it. I hate punishing creative solutions.
I'm hoping 5e will help me avoid such scenarios. So far so good.
