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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 3785823" data-attributes="member: 21673">Exactly. The COTS designer cannot know what resources the party has available. HE has to make reasonable assumptions based on the assumptions built into the system. The assumptions built into 3.5 make it impossible to know what resources a party has available for the current encounter. Not hard; impossible. The designer cannot know with any certainty what every party has available.Thus the decision in 4ed to make that much more predictable. You can see this reflected in the SWSE skills system, where the designer can know, with a high degree of certainty, that the party has the ability to make a skill check between 1/2 APL and 1/2 APL +10. (We have been told that the SWSE system is a reflection of 4ed design theory at that point in time - on the other hand it is not being ported as-is to 4ed). We can also see this in the statement that 80% of a character's resources will be available in any encounter via the statement that after a character's per-day abilities are expended they will still be at 80% of capacity. This is a "good thing", it means that when a designer makes an assumption of the party being at 90% when he designs an encounter, he can be within +/-10%.As long as encounters are the quantum of adventure design, the party's abilities must be balanced to a per-encounter paradigm. Otherwise game design suffers.</blockquote>