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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 3765185" data-attributes="member: 710">Combing per encounter and per day resources and At Will powers.Currently, a wizard that casts spells at all during any kind of encounter will notice that at some point, he is out of usable spells for the next encounter. It's not just that he is missing the most powerful ones, he is also missing the weaker ones. That's because all spells regain only once per day. So, the only way to ensure that your spells last till the moment you _really_ need them means that you don't cast any at all until that point. But if you don't cast spells, what are you doing at all during that encounter? Acid Flasks and Wands might do something, but do you really want to depend mostly on your alchemical/magical equipment? How effective is that actually at high level? Anyway, If you're happy with this solution, you probably don't really need a change. But let's say you are unhappy, and think about how you can address your perceived problems. Let's try mixing different "replenishments" for spells: Per Day, per Encounter and At Will abilities.Your most powerful spells are still limited per day. A 5th level wizard casts only one Fireball per day. But he can cast one scorching ray per encounter. And he can cast Magic Missile at will. So, in a typical encounter, you will probably get by fine without your most powerful spells. You throw off At Will powers and your Per Encounter spell and everything works fine.Only if the encounter is really tough, you will throw your precious daily resource. Then, and only then, you are forced to decide: Do I continue without that spell? Or should we get some rest now? Since you never know that the current encounter is the really tough one, you will probably usually try not to use your most powerful spell at the beginning of an encounter, only if either the encounter turns out be the tough one, or if you know beforehand.Sure, the guys that want to be on the real safe side will still want to use the most powerful first and then get some rest. But they would have done so before, too.If you design your adventure for such a system, you can make a pretty safe assumption that you can string a lot of encounters after each other without needing to fear that the group will rest somewhere between because spells have run out. You can put time constraints in your adventure without worrying that the realities of the game itself get in your way, or that some players have to restrain themselves too much. Interestingly, you can also put your toughest encounter at any point you like, making it also a lot easier to have an "all or nothing" fight in middle of your adventure - maybe the encounter where the forces of evil unleash an avatar of the demon lord Namem'ayn'otbes'poken to kill the adventurers, and the adventurers need to follow the trail of his summoning cultists back before the invisible dimensional portal to their secret lair closes...If he characters die, well, all is like in the "old" system. If the characters survive, they can immediately follow their attackers and are just short their most powerful spells...Note that every time I wrote "spells" might also refer to other rare resources, maybe hit points, action points, second wind or whatever else D&D 4 will have to offer as a "resource"...</blockquote>

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