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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7420575" data-attributes="member: 996">Games can be  like the proverbial stopped clock that's right twice per day, sure.  Instead of trying to fix one, you can make best use of it.    To be fair, 3e made some very significant changes that deviated from the DM-dominated/mediated dynamic in which the classic game was most nearly functional.  A major one was shifting magic items from arbitrary DM mcguffins to systematic player build resources - heck the 3.x functional mode of play pretty much was the build mera-game, so much had the emphasis shifted from DM to player - one particularly notorious example being wands, the make/buy pricing of which radically changed some dynamics, such as...  ... between-combat healing:  you could drain a wand and heal 275 hps in, coincidentally, 5 min.  And, as you leveled, the cost of one became increasingly trivial, so hps became a de-facto encounter resource in 3e.  4e pulled /back/ from that, by basing most healing (even potions) on a daily resource, surges, managed by the recipient, and virtually all non-surge healing on other daily resources, like utility powers.  4e also added in-combat second wind, also using daily surges, action points that re-carged on milestones, at-will powers, and yeah, encounter powers.  A first level character had one of them, to go with his two at-wills and one daily.  Not exactly 'most' of his abilities.But a much greater proportion of encounters to dailies than 3.5's amped up daily spell progression to it's more or less non-existent encounter ones.  D&D having always been an extreme case of daily-resource-management emphasis. 5e did not go all the way back to that extreme, but it did greatly increase daily spell resources, and give fewer classes encounter resources, at all.  I don't think that's exactly incoherent, even by Force definitions, it's just innately imbalancing outside of the theoretical pacing target.  That's limiting in a lot of ways, but, along with the many other DM -Empowerment measures the edition takes, does bring back the DM-led play dynamics of the classic game...That can mean a traditional dungeon-crawl, but we were able to do more than just that with those same dynamics back in the day. By the same token, D&D doesn't have a lock on the dungeon, even some story-now indy game could go into one, if that's where the players took it.  It just wouldn't /have/ to be the same kind of exercise in paranoia ... I suppose you can conveniently dismiss this opinion as purist-for-system, but what you can do with a system expands the better-balanced it is, because more of what it presents remains meaningful & viable.  It's true that, like the stopped clock an imbalanced game can do a few specific things relatively well, in that doing anything else turns non-viable.  You don't/need/ that to support a style, though.</blockquote>

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