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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 3767423" data-attributes="member: 54877">Keeping in mind that anecdotal experiences are merely anecdotal experiences... I played the systems as designed, to the best of my ability.  I think my ability, while not perfect, is considerable here, since I come from the school of criticism that tries to take things on their own merits.  Then I also played those systems with house rules, seeking to aid that design, and also played them with considerable house rules in an attempt to bend the system to a different design.  In one case, Fantasy Hero, I played multiple editions this way.  With FH, you can set up a campaign to have "operational resources", or not, within the rules.  OTOH, i was usually the DM. So since I'm aware of these kind of things, I would have teased out the level of deadliness I wanted even if it were difficult to do so.I did see enough other people running games to suspect that the deadliness of a game has more to do with what the DM wants, than anything else. But to the larger question--of course a DM will compensate.  A DM always compensates, unless he wants the game to just happen.  If he can't figure things out himself, he will get help--from players, experiments, or nowadays, online.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Give deadliness an arbitrary scale, say 1-10, with 10 being the deadliest possible.  You can design a game with operational resources that is a 1.  You can do one that is a 10.  You can design a game with no operational resources that runs the whole range, too.  The first game will take some DMs and players a little longer to tease out, and there will be a subset of players and DMs that never get a full handle on it.  Until teased out, the games will have surprised in deadliness, or lack thereof.  Once teased out, these will diminish--whether through system mastery, DM compensation, house rules, whatever.  The second game, with no operational resources, will follow the same pattern, except that more people will figure things out, faster.Let me be clear.  If you changed nothing in 3E but switching per-day resources out for per-encounter resources, there would be a (temporary) shift to more deadliness, until people got used to the change--at least if the change was supported by official modules.  (If not so supported, the shift would probably be the other way, because we'd see more cakewalks until DMs adjusted to the idea that characters didn't run out of resources.)  Likewise, loss of an operational resource is one obvious thing that can be signficant short of death.  Taking these away could encourage a subset of DMs to become more deadly.  But that is a far cry from saying that per-encounter is inherently more deadly (or less deadly, for that matter).  It isn't.  It's like alcohol.  It brings out what is already there, misery or happiness--the deadly DMs will see their way clear to do that, and the less deadly DMs will see their way clear to do their things.Finally, I wouldn't be terribly happy with removing all operational resources, as I personally like them, and want that toy in my DM toolbox (when I'm setting deadliness and other things).  Obviously, there will still be some operational resources in 4E.  The effect of reducing operational resources in a new edition can in no way be tied to inherent increased (or decreased) deadliness until we see it in play.  It depends on the design choices.  When players are used to having 40 resources (e.g. mid-level Wizard spell slots) and then they switch to having a lot less, but some, we really don't know what that will do to the mindset.</blockquote>

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