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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 3762860" data-attributes="member: 31454">Ah, but what you describe requires a pretty in-depth knowledge of your group that only really experienced DMs have (and my hat's off to you for managing it! Kudos!). You know their abilities and resources inside-and-out. Not every group has a DM like this.But what your'e doing is assuming attrition, which the current system assumes and indeed enforces. It works wonderfully for what you describe. Fantastically. But, as I've said, there are other styles it doesn't work for.Per-day resources mean that my players are more likely to make camp or find an inn than they are to head off to continue the adventure. Per-encounter resource management means that it is much easier to predict the heroes' abilities at any given point in the game. The paladin will always have one smite, the barbarian will be able to rage, and the wizard will have between one and three fireballs, as well as his magic bolt every round. Easy peasy. It also means that I can have a day with one encounter just as easily as I can have a day with ten and it won't change the in-party balance. Currently, if I run fewer than four encounters, the game tends to favor spellcasters. If I run more than four encounters, it means that the non-casters get more spotlight time.I wasn't intending them to be such. RC postulated that a per-encounter system means that encounters must, by default, be all-or-nothing to be meaningful. I provided a counterpoint whereby even cakewalk encounters have meaning. That's all.And your speculation does somewhat ignore what I said above: there's more at stake in an encounter than "how many points did the heroes spend to overcome it". There are in-character concerns and consequences. One of the first things I learned when I started running a game like Mutants & Masterminds, where a single healer will all but garuntee the group going in to every fight at full power, was that there were many more ways to challenge a group than just the "war of attrition". There's nothing wrong with a cakewalk or even a real meat-grinder that pushes the heroes to their limits, so long as it keeps the game fun and moving along in the right direction.And indeed, a per-encounter resource system means that the "sweet spot" for the DM to aim for to actually peg those real meat-grinder, edge-of-your-seat-will-we-make-it encounters is so, so, so much easier. I can pretty much eyeball how well the PCs will fare against a particular challenge in M&M with about +/- 10% accuracy (including those occassional lucky crits). If D&D allowed a more constant (or at least steady) pool of resources to the PCs, this would help me immensely in designing interesting encounters.</blockquote>

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