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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5714842" data-attributes="member: 2067">Before the invention of CR and Monster Level, there was only XP. Which meant that if you encountered some enemies that didn't give you much XP (4 kobolds for a level 4 party or something), those were the quick 1-3 roll encounters. Things that the Fighter could handle pretty much independently. An encounter with 20 Orcs or something could get huge, but with low monster (and PC!) HP, and few effective choices of action, even those combats likely took less time on average than the 45 minutes we spend today on them.It's still possible for a 3e or 4e party to encounter a handful of low-level critters, but the design emphasizes meeting critters of around your level. In 3e, those can still be swingy two-roll affairs (largely thanks to Save-or-Die at higher levels), but in 4e, they almost never are.In early D&D, the significance of these 1-3 roll encounters wasn't that they would kill you right then and there, but that they would kill you through slow attrition over time, or at least that they would drain your party's resources for when the major combat (or whatever) happened. These resources included HP that came back agonizingly slowly, carefully rationed spells, and even consumable magic items that one relied on luck (or a beneficent DM) to drop. By the time 3e rolled around, healing was functionally easier, invalidating a lot of this style of play (though preserving it in some instances, such as when a DM kept Wands of Cure Wounds away from the group). 4e invalidates it even further with the "extended rest takes care of everything" mechanic. D&D has lost this "long-term resource management" aspect over time. Thus, encounters with a few bandits or a minor trap are seen as pointless speedbumps. Despite their legacy in the game, they have no reason to exist in a game with little or no long term resource management. If everything's OK after an extended rest, you must put all the challenge the party will face in the adventure between the extended rests. You can't stretch it out with minor 1-3 roll encounters, since the effects are largely pointless after a night's rest.Well, that makes the combat quick, but that doesn't preserve the LTRM aspect. For THAT, you need to do something like <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-fan-creations-house-rules/312893-healing-surges-nod-towards-simulation.html" target="_blank">reduce the rate at which healing surges come back</a>, or something similar. In that case, if the handful of bandits force the players to spend a few surges, it's weakening them for later.Of course, the effect is slightly reduced when you can't even usually spend all your surges in a single combat, anyway, and so a reduction in healing surges isn't always felt in a given encounter the way less HP or fewer spells is felt. And all of this is a symptom of a tight focus on the encounter -- to the exclusion of the focus on the broader adventure. Resources return quickly so that you can have more encounters, rather than being hard to recover so that you can have a more challenging adventure.</blockquote>

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