Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 3764879" data-attributes="member: 31454">This "shine" your hypothosize is interesting, but it's not once I've ever seen, to be honest. I've been running and playing in the same group for over a year now in what is probably the purest attrition-less game I can think of offhand (M&M) and there's been no "loss of fun". I also ran a group through a two-year D&D campaign and played with the same group in a year-and-a-half game. I'll let you know if I do note any loss of shine (shinelessness? deshiniosity? double-plus un-shine? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />)Could you possibly link to that? I'm approaching exam block crunch-time and admittedly haven't managed to read through the whole thread. I'd be interested in what you have to say.And I'm not arguing that it's my preference. In fact, I believe I was quite clear on that. My appologies if I wasn't.This would be the first fundamental disconnect, then. Your actions are the single most fundamental resource a character has access to. The per-day time-frame is easy to escape, even in D&D (rope trick, the mansion/house spells, teleport, plane shift, etc. etc.), and in my experience, roughly on par (if maybe slightly more difficult) with running away from a fight.Deciding how to spend your action is probably the most essential bit of resource management in the game. Sure, you get more next turn, but combat is fluid enough that a fireball on turn two might not be anywhere near as effective as it would've been on turn 1 (maybe your melee guy is now in the way, or the enemy scattered).And your question of "whether" to use a resource is also answered by what we heard about 4E so far: you only have a limited number of uses per encounter and per day of certain abilities. So if you can only pitch 1 fireball in a fight, the decision still remains of when you're going to do it in the fight.I tend to balance adventures based on how it impacts the PCs, and how the world around them is reacting. For instance, in a modern supers game, the average gang-land boss isn't going to bring a bunch of big-wig supervillains on a robbery, so if this mobster is in a heist and the PCs swoop in to stop him, he's pretty much relying on mooks with guns. I build encounters that make sense in light of what the group knows about the world. Against mooks, they can probably expect an easy fight. If, on the other hand, it's a team of supervillains doing the heist, it'll probably be much tougher. The characters are a part of the world, and the world will react appropriately to their actions.You said it yourself. The CR system predicts 4/day. Yes, you can increase the EL of an encounter and it becomes a 2-encounter day, but what if I wanted it to still be a 4-encounter day? Or if the PCs are feeling particularly daring, a 10-encounter day? Or what if I just want to have a string of tiny fights? And the way that resources are spread, any deviation from the predicted 4/day (adjusted for difficulty) tends to favor one group over another, and risk overwhelming the PCs.EDIT FOR CLARITY: What I mean by "Yes, you can increase the EL of an encounter and it becomes a 2-encounter day, but what if I wanted it to still be a 4-encounter day?" is "What if I want to have 4 tougher-than-average encounters in a day?"Why would I design an adversary for the PCs who wasn't tough enough? This is something of a straw-man. It doesn't make sense that I would intentionally create what should be a difficult fight with a weak foe.That's fine. I like to add more to my games in terms of character development and worldbuilding. The rules should always facilitate that and shouldn't get in the way.Don't think of it as engineering pacing. Think of it as the artificial pacing built into your system not inhibiting your game. Under the current system, if the players think it would be more fun to storm the dungeon after they stumble upon it while clearing out a goblin camp, they may be forced to decide that, nah, they'd better rest first. Under a per-encounter system, they might be tired and a little hurt, but there's no artificial "But the wizard already wasted his fireball!" I'm not going to beat them over the head with a bat and make them go in. I've played in and run games where the players literally did nothing but interact with one another and NPCs, with no dice rolled, and it was a blast, so please don't think I'm someone who scripts out, to the second, everything that happens in a game. I rarely enter an arc I'm asked to run with an end in mind. I have a few moments I think would be cool, and try to work them in around what the players seem interested in.So getting back to the original point, how does a per-encounter system better enable this? Because at the end of a long, brutal mission, if the PCs were to discover something that really spurs them on, a hook that they absolutely want to pursue right now, how lame is it for one of them to pipe up and say, "Yeah, I know saving the princess has been your dream and all, but can we wait a day? I don't have any fireballs left."I do when I play in True20. The spellcasting system is essentially unlimited use, but you risk fatigue every time you use it. If you fail once, you're fatigued and suffer minor penalties. Fail again or by a wider margin, and you're exhausted, suffering heavier penalties. Or if you fail by a very wide margin or a third time, and you're unconscious. I'm adapting them as an option for my own modified d20 system for people who want a grittier style of play where attrition is more of a factor. I also use the rules as actual rules for sleep and resting, so characters who want to go four days without sleep need to make saves to avoid becoming fatigued. Works pretty well, all things considered.</blockquote>

Verification