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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3792794" data-attributes="member: 30001">Ok, these two cover the "you die, or they die" situation.  I think we all agree that a per-encounter situation has this dimension to it.This is sort of a "tree falls in the forest does it make a sound" situation.  Why does it matter what resources a PC has when he's not fighting someone?  It only matters if the encounter isn't over.  Once it's "over", by definition, all those resources are back.The premise here is insufficient IMO to establish your conclusion.  I get two meteor strikes per day and I use one against a kobold.  I'm down to one meteor strike but I don't think you'd call the kobold encounter significant.  AFAICT you're making an unstated assumption here.Why would it be?  If I'm not facing a significant threat of death, then the depletion of my resources doesn't mean anything to me.  If running out of resources means a significant chance of death, and you're running out of resources, then the logical conclusion is that you *are* facing a significant chance of death.  It seems paradoxical to me to be otherwise.It's significant only when not having them means you're going to die.  Implicit in all of this reasoning is a significant chance of death at the per-encounter level.  Without that, it's like a character with two fireballs, AC 1000, and 1000 hitpoints fighting 30 goblins.  That's a situation where there's no significant chance of death and yet I'm probably going to use a fireball which is a 50% expenditure of my top resources.  It's not an interesting encounter if my fireballs are going to reset themselves at the end of the encounter.The DMs complaining about nova-ing are actually implicitly recognizing that it works.  The "sledgehammer to the skull" analogy carries with it an implication AFAICT that is not true.  Nova-ing makes a lot of sense, and is a sensible tactic, that's why players keep doing it over and over.  In fact, in a medieval fantasy game a "sledgehammer to the skull" is probably pretty effective too <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />They are careful, and least in the experience of those of us advocating for them.  There is an important issue of wizards nova-ing in the per-day situation, only because of the mismatch between wizards and fighters - not because of the existence of the per-day paradigm.The reason that players are careful IME is that a day is a far longer, and more significant period of time to have to think about than a minute.  A player's ability to forsee their resource needs, when an encounter is over, for the next 60 seconds, is far more accurate than it is to forecast it over a period of time hundreds of times as long.  Without the uncertainty that the day-long time period provides, most of the uncertainty is going to come down to "is this encounter going to kill me", which has been one of my points from the beginning and seems to be at the core of every description of a per-encounter paradigm, often implicitly.</blockquote>

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