Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 3785643" data-attributes="member: 21673">It doesn't matter if the character can expend all of his per-encounter resources if his per-encounter resources under 4e are 1/4 of his per-day resources under 3.5. For a number of different reasons its likely to be closer to 1/3 or so. Will that assuage your worries, about 'nova', Raven?In general, 4e seems to be 'disabling' the ability to borrow resources, either forward or back in time. Classes do this by limiting power at one end or the other of the power curve (usually giving up power at lower level for extra power at higher levels). In encounters, this leads to most of a character's power being available at all times, but not being able to 'save' power forward. Currently, encounter design has to assume that characters can optionally save power from previous encounters, or borrow power from following encounters. Its another example of the unpredictability of party power level. In this case the most predictable encounter is the first one in a day - as an adventure designer you can assume that the party is at 100% (though because of the variability introduced by the skills system and by the multiclassing system you can't know what every party's 100% power level is. After that first encounter for the day you cannot predict what the party's power level is. After the first encounter of the adventure, you can't even predict what the first encounter of the day is without heavy railroading.80% of a character's power being in per-encounter/at-will abilities is an answer to the question "what is the party's power level for this specific encounter?" The answer is "somewhere between 80% and 100% of the party's maximum power".The more I think about 4ed design, the more I see what the fundamentals of 4ed are going to be, and the more I like them. The goal is predictability of design. No matter where you look, no matter what segment of play you're examining, the goal is to cut off the far right and left of the bell curve, and flatten the top of the curve to spread it out. The opposing goal is to prevent everything from looking and playing the same - this is a balancing act; and will require some compromise.The problem with this is the people who cannot prep before running for whatever reason, and have to use commercial-off-the-shelf modules with no editing whatsoever. If you have time to prep, of course it's trivial to design your own adventures etc to target your own party and its tactics, etc. In a COTS module, the module designer cannot know the capabilities of the party being run through the adventure. In that case the predictability of party design is a big gain. And at the same time, if the GM is running a COTS module, the party has no insight into the designers' thinking or design theory, and cannot 'budget' their power. And you don't get to say that's not a viable way to play; the designers have to support the no-prep game style, or people fall away because they don't have time to prep and play both. Adventure design has to be decoupled from party design; and the way the designers have chosen to do this is to make party capability at every 'level' of design theory (from character design to advancement to monster placement etc) the 'curve' of variability has been cut off at both ends and flattened. Characters will all be MUCH closer in power level to each other at each level and each encounter. This is for the benefit of adventure designers primarily, not for players.</blockquote>

Verification