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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3756652" data-attributes="member: 4937">Which is fine with me, but I'd like to point out that whether or not RC missed your point, it doesn't really matter because it doesn't really impact the problem I (and presumably RC) has with the 'per encounter' system.  In the case that none of the per day resources are significant (not even hit points? healing? you highest level spell/most powerful manuever? teleport? raise dead?), that is to say that none of them have an important impact on your ability to win the next encounter, then for all practical purposes this is equivalent to a strict 'per encounter' system.  As I've already discussed, such a system would involve no real resource management at all, and such a system would therefore even more strongly encourage everything to be riding on one big encounter than the current system.  Granted, as I've already mentoined, you'd have less 'unease' because the imaginary rest period is more plausible, but there are other issues.  I haven't really discussed what is wrong with that yet, but lets do so now.When resource management goes away as a skill (operational level as opposed to tactical level planning), then in order for any encounter to be 'interesting' it must involve considerable risk of tactical failure in and of itself.  What that means is that every 'interesting' encounter involves the possibility of player/party death.  Now, there isn't necessarily anything wrong with every fight being a 'real fight', but what it will tend to do is increase character fragility.  In other words, with every fight being a real fight that stretches character resources to the utmost, the margin of error is small and there is a serious risk that plain bad luck will decide the encounter.  One of the things that is true of 3rd edition play that wasn't true of 1st edition play is that characters don't get less brittle as they increase in level the way that they did in 1st edition.  In 1st, high level characters got hard to kill because they were relatively sheltered from bad luck.  Thier saves would get absolutely better and better (which is very different than merely relatively better), they would get more and more hit points relative to the amount of damage caused by blows from monsters, and so forth.  In 4e, it sounds like this problem is going to be even more extreme, and I still think that its going to lead to an even more extreme emphasis on the 'one big encounter' than you find even in 3rd.  Anyway, if that is your preferred way of play (and it seem's to be for example hong's) then I'm fine with that you will probably be fine with 4e.  My point is simply that 4e seems to be trying to fix problems I don't have, and seems to be designed to not support a style of play I have been using for 20 years or more.  Before I finish, let me head off one annoying potential counter argument, and that is that I've not defined 'interesting' correctly, and that interesting is determined by adventure design and whether it advances the story and the player goals.  The reason that this is annoying is that AFAIK, I'm the first one that brought up that line of argument in this thread so clearly I'm not unaware of that.  But, in the context which I first brought this up I was point out how the real fix to the problem was changes in adventure design, not changes in the mechanics and that as such, if you fixed the real problem then you didn't have the problem regardless of the mechanics you used, and conversely if you didn't fix the real problem (bad adventure design/DMing) then it wouldn't matter what mechanics you'd use.  Now, I have people on the other side of this argument suggesting, "Oh, yeah.  Well it doesn't matter if the mechanics don't fix the problem, you can just use better adventure design."  Well, duh, that's been my point all along.</blockquote>

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