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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3754768" data-attributes="member: 30001">It's not more contrived, but then I don't see it as an either-or choice.  Up until when they actually meet the BBEG they don't know what their resource requirements are going to be.  In the standard dungeon crawling paradigm you don't actually *have the PCs wander" anywhere.I don't think there's enough information to say that in the 3E paradigm.  In many cases the "dungoen will come to the PCs" if they don't go to it.  If a kobold escapes, for instance, and warns the BBEG.  Then the fight is meaningful on two levels, whereas it's only in the case that the BBEG gets there within the hazily defined boundaries of "the encounter" that the 4E paradigm is of equal interest.The 4E paradigm seems to assume that DMs have stopped designing their adventures in ways where the bad guys react in a sentient fashion.  James Wyatt's quote counts the daily recharge period as a given, which I think is a consequence of rather superficial adventure design.  What 4E is attempting to do is remove the situation where the PCs have to recharge resources, thus removing the requirement from the DM that he plan for this contingency.In the 3E paradigm there are consequences to not managing daily resources - mainly that you don't achieve daily objectives.  The time requirements for encounter-based resources are much more narrow, and the situation where time is a factor become much more contrived.  Now I don't see why the "James Wyatt quote" calls out not achieving the daily objective as somehow being unfun, but getting killed is?  Because getting killed seems to be the only thing preserved on an increasingly short list of things that can happen to your character.I don't *have* as many things happen as a DM as you imply - I suspect some of this is a gaming style issue.  Any kind of perceived pattern to when things happen in my campaign will hurt the versimilitude.  BBEGs IMO should fight the PCs when it makes sense, and adding a pressure that certain battles won't be interesting unless that fight happens in a certain way seems like a negative to me.I think that's overstating it - it's nullified eventually no matter what - it can't go on forever.  What I'm saying is that significance is maintained longer in the 3E than in the 4E paradigm.  You skipped over the fact that the choice to rest and reset is a significant one when it isn't an "insta-boost".  Having to find someplace to camp and assess your safety against potentially intelligent foes makes the decision to camp non-trivial.  Spending 3 rounds standing around until everyone boosts is pretty trivial by comparison unless things are rigidly scripted.If you're wondering round-to-round whether or not to completely use up an encounter-level resource then I would consider that a tough fight, and hopefully addressed by my comments below.In order for fights to be meaningful they must be larger, that's the basic situation with the 4E paradigm.  In the 3E paradigm, you don't need to "string them together correctly" AFAICT.  The resource management combines with uncertainty about the future to create interesting strategic issues.  With an encounter-level "insta-boost", there's really no uncertainty about the future because your use of resources doesn't affect it.  (Except within the encounter itself, again, IMO, this is an implicit suggestion that an interesting 4E encounter has to be a potentially deadly one.)I don't understand how the 3E paradigm fails to support this.  The stated problem with the 3E paradigm was that it forced people to rest after the mook-encounters, but if you don't have those then how exactly does the existing system not mesh with the "one grand battle per day" practice?Again, I don't see the onus.  Example one:  PCs enter the fortress of Sauron - a bunch of mook encounters plus BBEG.  If they decide to retreat after mook encounter #1, then they'll have to face the consequences, which could reverberate for some time.  Example two:  PCs enter a forgotten tomb without intelligent adversaries.  In this case retreating after a mook encounter has no real consequence, unless there are unknown time issues.  But then it's probably not the case that a tomb designer designs his guardians/traps to be handled in such a way, and this is according to in-game versimilitude, not some arbitrary pacing forced on the PCs by the game system.?  I'm talking about easy from the perspective of the PCs.  I can't imagine someone using the term "easy" to describe a fight where they thought they were going to die.  IME players can pretty quickly and accurately assess their chances of survivial in most situations - IMO it's a consequence of the game rules (like hitpoints).Because, as I thought everyone with a "killer DM" phase under their belt would know, relying on the threat of death to make things interesting is going to result in a high fatality rate.  It's a similar argument to the standard argument that Gygax made against critical tables.  Unless you fudge pretty regularly (and I guess that's a big if), there's really no way to keep this going.  A perceptible chance of death, over time, results in a near certainty that someone will die.  Now granted, if there's resurrection or "redo" type magic, then maybe death is an issue the first or second time, but IME you just can't keep the con going indefinitely.IME, the transition from "killer DM" to DM happens when you realize that the thrill of risk is enhanced with uncertainty.  And *that* is the crux of my issue because instantly recharging resources removes a dimension of uncertainty.  There are still ways to add uncertainty to the 4E paradigm, but the list is at least shorter by 1.I don't mean to be presumptious about your DMing style (which I don't know about), these are just all of the possibilities that I can conceive of.  Either there *is* a real risk of death with every encounter, in which case the fatality rate will be high and new characters will be rolled up frequenty (talk about long-term resources), or the risk of death is mitigated by DM fudging, which IME is something the players catch onto in fairly short order.</blockquote>

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