Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 3781310" data-attributes="member: 5143">No, but you need to examine it beyond the individual encounters.  It will cause nearly no change in the individual encounters.  It will change the campaign paradigm, however.  Say we rate encounters in percentage of resources used up.  The players know that the sum of all the encounters are designed to add up to 100% in order to test them, or below that in order to be safe.  The sum of encounters will never add up to more than 100% if their DM knows the D&D system well enough unless he is purposefully killing them.  It is likely to be somewhere between 1 and 4 encounters each day or some of the encounters with be "insignificant".  In the 4th encounter, PCs can let loose with everything they have.Now, you could have a string of encounters in the per encounter model that added up to 500% and not need to worry about killing the players as long as each of them wasn't over 80%.  The players might have 1 encounter or 20 encounters before they will find a place to rest.  If they have some per day resources, they need to be VERY careful as to when they use them since they don't know how long until they get them back.No, generally one big encounter uses 60-80% or so of a party's resources.  Almost never ALL of it.  You reach a point where you HAVE resources left, they just aren't powerful enough resources to get you through even the easiest battle.  A 14th level party who is reduced to only 1st through 3rd level spells is on their last legs and probably can't survive even an average difficulty battle.The party doesn't continue because another battle using up even 25% of their resources could kill them.I believe the crux of the disagreement is that you believe players will not find an encounter that uses up ONLY their per encounter abilities as "significant" or "big".  I believe you can have a "big" encounter that uses up none of the per day abilities of a party that has a combination of per encounter and per day.I think that most players in the new system will see their at will abilities as their standard attacks, their per encounter abilities as their resources and their per day abilities as their last ditch options when all hope is lost.So encounters are rated as: Easy(didn't have to use any per encounter abilities), Average(used some per encounter powers, but not all), Hard(used almost all per encounter abilities, got close to the point where they might have had to use per day abilities), Overwhelming (had to use per day abilities or they would have died).I think that most people see numbers coming off their character sheet and a limit where they won't have any numbers any more and they know that the closer they get to that limit the more danger they are in.  So, if you have 5 per encounter abilities and you use one each round and you are in round 5 of the encounter and you are now faced with the choice of asking yourself "Have I done enough damage to the enemy that I can finish them off with my weak (at will) abilities or do I have to bring out the big guns in order to win this?"It's very similar to the reason the LAST encounter in the series of 4 encounters per day is the most exciting one.  It's the one where you get to see "Are the resources we have left going to hold up against this combat or not?  Maybe, maybe not."It's a matter of knowing those numbers are coming off more than knowing they won't come back that makes people feel an encounter is hard, IMHO.  The players I know will be saying "Wow, I almost ran out of Power Words(or whatever they'll call per encounter resources) that combat, I almost had to use my Super Fireball, which I needed to save for the BBEG at the end.  Glad we got out of that one when we did."I just showed you above how per day cannot have more than a certain number of encounters in a row.  That is something per encounter can do that per day cannot.</blockquote>

Verification