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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7420226" data-attributes="member: 996">Classes are central to each of the examples you're using, though - D&D having always used classes, even at it's least-D&D-like.Another reason Gamma World makes a better example of encounter-balancing:  no classes to confuse the issue.   I played 4e for it's whole run, and still do infrequently, and have run it since 2010, regularly since 2012 (a campaign now at 25th level), so I've seen it play out in quite a range of ways.  The claim 4e is primarily or solely encounter-balanced is refuted, objectively, by the presence & signifcance of surges, daily attack powers, item dailies, and milestone-activated resources.  Surges do represent an upper limit to how many encounters you can endure without a long rest, so time-constrained scenarios do need to be approached and managed differently.  If it were entirely encounter balanced, such considerations would make no difference - as was the case in the corresponding ed of Gamma World.Daily powers in 4e could easily swing a combat, changing the whole character of it, multiple dailies could enable a party to punch above their weight class and take on enormously difficult encounters, including multiple encounters w/o a short rest (again, not considerations that'd come up in a purely-encounter-based design).  Groups under time pressure can horde dailies for an assumed 'boss fight,' but can end up blowing through surges faster as a result, and find themselves under pressure to use dailies less effectively later in the day as some of the group run out of surges and can't afford to grind it out with encounters & at-wills; groups under no time pressure can 'alpha strike' and take down encounters easily, or take on tougher than normal encounters, but doing so doesn't imbalance the classes, just shifts the balance of individual encounters - again, not a feature of a game that's primarily encounter-balanced.That said, I think the fair point is that 4e had much more robust balance within an encounter, just as it did among classes, relative to other editions.  Which is comparing it to extreme examples of attempting to set balance to a specific encounter:rest:time ratio, or even, as someone observed, above (or maybe in another thread, they're all runn'n together), over many levels or whole campaigns.  4e does have modestly robost balance within each encounter, and somewhat more robust balance among classes, and important resources to manage over a given day (without which encounter balance would be a lot more solid).  It's closer to the middle of the daily-balance|encounter-balance continuum, if such a thing is even a conceptually valid.   D&D, more generally, is over on the daily end.  Really, though, other systems aren't even on that spectrum, not tying anything to calendar days or timed rests.</blockquote>

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