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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3793426" data-attributes="member: 42582">Let's just stop there. You are making the following inference: because the players do not know, at time T, whether or not they will win or lose, it is therefore (objectively) a win/lose situation.This inference is unsound, for two reasons. First, the players might be ignorant. This is a relevant consideration, because the 4e designers have stressed that the new monster build rules will make it more difficult for the players to predict the character of an encounter.I note that you reject this first reason:I'm not sure why you are so confident about this - my own experience in playing RPGs leads me to a different view - but in any event it is of relevance only to the first of two reasons for the unsoundness of the inference above.The second, and more important reason, is this: it may be that the situation is only win/lose if the players choose poorly subsequent to time T. Or to put it conversely, as far as I can see the point of the 4e mechanics is to generate mechanical interest in the following manner:By making effective choices about the deployment of their resources, the players are able to bring it about that encounters are not ones in which their PCs have a significant chance of losing, and are not ones in which their PCs have to use their per-day abilities.It is thus simply false, in my view, that mechanical interest depends upon encounters being win/lose. Rather, it depends upon them being ones in which the players do not know what the outcome will be until they make their choices - but those choices, if made rationally, bring it about that the PCs win. Both I and Jackalope King have made this point several times. You appear to deny it. Hence my summary of your apparent denial.My point is: an encounter unfolds over time. The epistemic situation of the players is a changing one. Furthermore, the threat posed to them by the encounter is something that they, through their choices about resource deployment, are able to influence. From the fact that, in hindsight, the PCs had no chance of losing, it does not follow that, at any given time, the players know this. For example, the hindsight judgement may depend upon the knowledge that the players made tactically optimal choices. At the time at which the players are actually making those choices, they are unlikely to experience them as uninteresting, especially as they will not able to be fully confident of the tactical optimality of those choices until the end of the encounter.The equation suggested by "IOW" does not in fact obtain. An encounter can be one in which the players do not know, at the outset, whether or not it will result in resource attrition, and yet not be one which is, if properly played, a win/lose encounter. The interest is generated by the need for proper play. I believe many game players find the proper play of a game interesting.The claim "If I'm not facing a significant threat of death, then the depletion of my resources doesn't mean anything to me" is false.To give a parallel example: the claim "If I'm not facing a significant threat of divorce, then the effort I make in my marriage doesn't mean antyhing" is obviously false, for the obvious reason that the effort I am making in my marriage might be the reason why I am not facing a significant threat of divorce.Another example from a different field. I often have philosophical and legal discussions with my undergraduate students. With some students, whatever argument I put, good or bad, they will not be able to engage with it in an interesting fashion. Those discussions can be classed as "mechanically uninteresting" for me. On the other hand, some discussion actually require me to put my intellectual skills to work, and require me to deploy my best arguments in an intelligent way in order to defend my position. In such discussions I am typically still in no danger of "losing": very few undergraduate students have sufficient mastery of the discipline (be it philosophy or law) to be able to knock down the arguments that I am able to put up. But such discussions are not "mechanically uninteresting" - I find them very interesting, and indeed they're one of the best parts of my job, precisely because in order for me to defend my position I have to do some interesting thinking.Similarly, as I have been arguing for several posts now, if the decisions that the players have to make about the deployment of their resources make a significant difference to whether or not they experience the threat of death (or the threat of per-day resource depletion) then those decisions have mechanical interest even if, once those decisions have been successfully made it turns out that the PCs win is more-or-less inevitable. The interest arises because the players have to make choices on which their PC's fates hinge.It is, of course, crucial that those choices be genuine ones (in the sense that for the typical player there are a range of options to choose from, each of which is at least plausible). This requires good design. There's no reason to think that the 4e designers are incapable of this.I've tried pretty hard with a couple of 1000+-word posts. It's hard, because the game isn't released yet and I don't own SWSE. I've done my best to sketch something logical around what little bit of information is out there.I don't know what your gaming experience is, so I don't know where you're coming from here. Suffice it to say that I think the question in an encounter, of trading off healing versus damage infliction, is a tactically interesting one. It depends on a good sense of probabilities, a good sense of where you and your enemy are in terms of hit point reserves and damage capability, a good sense of where the party healer is and what s/he is able to do for you next round, and so on.If you're not persuaded by that, I will give another example drawn from RM. Warriors in RM (and HARP) have access to Adrenal Move skills. These are skills which (i) on a successful roll give a combat buff, (ii) suffer an increasing penalty to the roll each round to maintain the buff, and (iii) on a failed roll leave the character at a penalty to all actions which is proportionate to the number of rounds for which the Adrenal Move was sustained, and which reduces each round at a constant rate.As a result of these 3 features, there are a number of different ways in which to use Adrenal Moves. A fighter can go in and out, buffing for a round and then wearing a (relatively minor) penalty for the next round. Or s/he can sustain the Move. In the latter case, if the combat lasts long enough s/he might choose to come out of the Move at the point at which failure is getting quite likely, and the penalty is not enough to prevent effective defence - at this point going into full parry, effectively doing no more damage in the combat but having no serious danger of death. Or if the combat is one which is very hard for the party to win, s/he can just keep trying to sustain the Move until she fails, at which point s/he is hors de combat and not able to parry very well either.Having GMed RM games for over 15 years in which fighters have used these skills, I can say that the choices they give rise to make for interesting game play situations. One of my players - and the one who makes the most sophisticated use of these mechanics - did his honours in the mathematics of optimisation, and likes to build spreadsheet models for various categories of encounter in order to plan out his PC's tactics. Adrenal Moves aren't the only factor that he takes account of - RM has a lot of numerically complex and interacting mechanics, including the choice each round of the balance between attack and defence - but they are part of it.Given that the 4e designers are (overall) probably better game designers than Terry Amthor and Coleman Charlton, I'm sure they will be able to come up with suites of abilities at least as good.The truth of this sentence turns entirely on what those resources are. If, for example, the wizard's per-day resource is a Teleport spell, then it is not prudent to use that when facing a win/lose encounter unless (i) it is the start of the encounter and the players believe that by teleporting out their PCs will be able to subsequently return to the encounter better equipped for victory, or (ii) the party is losing the encounter and therefore need to escape. One of these things may often be the case, but I don't think one or the other will always be true.I have already canvassed a fighter's "second wind" in earlier posts. Again, it is not the sort of ability with which one would start an encounter.If the per-day resources are simply bigger badder attacks, then what you say is true. As I have said in earlier posts, and earlier in this post, it all depends on the design of the suites of abilities.This presupposes that it will always be prudent to lead with per day resources. I have contested that. But let's  return to the problem of the 9-9.15 adventuring day.Mechanically, I see the problem this way. To have a meaningful effect on an encounter, a wizard typically has to cast a spell of somewhere near his/her maximum spell level. A wizard does not have more than 4 to 8 such spells. Therefore, the first encounter of the day is either one in which the wizard goes nova, thus overshadowing the fighters in that encounter, or is one in which the wizard does nothing for one or more rounds. The 4e designers clearly take the view that the latter is an option that provides a poor play experience for the wizard's player - and I assume that the typical play experience bears this out, with the players of wizards opting to do something each round, and thus nova-ing.After 1 or 2 encounters, then, the wizard has nothing left to do. Thus the party rests. Furthermore, to make those encounters interesting in the face of the wizard's nova-ing, the GM ramps up the EL to somewhere above that of the party - and in these encounters, the overshadowing of the fighter by the wizard only increases.One solution to this state of affairs is the 1st ed one. The players of wizards are encouraged to hold back, not acting in many rounds, conserving their resources for when they are crucial. Wandering monsters and other constraints on resting support this solution. It is a solution which 3E has obviously abandoned and which 4e will not embrace.An alternative solution is to make all abilities at-will. In such a system, a wizard would use a wizard's blast every round just as a fighter swings his/her sword every round. This solution, in order to generate mechanically interesting challenges, has to go to win/lose encounters (and presumably this is how 3E is playing once one embraces the one-encounter-per-day paradigm). As an alternative, of course, it might look to other thresholds of signficance - and at this point a genuine at-will mechanic is preferable to a one-encounter-per-day mechanic, because the latter just imposes a pointless constraint on those other thresholds of significance.A variant of the at-will solution is one which throws per-encounter abilities into the mix. These are then able to generate the sort of mechanical interest that I described above in relation to Adrenal Moves in RM and HARP, but also do not get in the way of other thresholds of significance.4e seems to be going for a mix of this, plus per-day resources. As I've already acknowledged, if this model is to avoid the one-encounter-per-day problem, then it will be crucial that it not always be rational to lead with per-day resources. This is, as I have noted above, in part a question of design.But it is not only a question of design. Because the availability of a wide range of non-per-day resources means that a wider range of alternative thresholds of significance become viable, it also becomes possible to introduce a wider range of reasons, derived from those other thresholds of significance, as to why it may be rational to conserve per-day resources. For example, it is obvious that a party which conserves per-day resources may be better able to proceed with the adventure, if the adventure is one in which time matters. And the presence of non-per-day resources makes such adventures more viable, by giving the wizard player something to do other than conserve resources for the adventure climax. (My reply to Gizmo33, post #1117, elaborates on this.)Similarly, a party which conserves per-day resources may be better able to handle an encounter that comes unexpectedly, or turns out to be more difficult than was expected, or is one in which a player makes a mistaken choice which leads to the encounter really becoming a win/lose situation. These considerations all become important if the adventure is one in which the players cannot predict the likely number and sequence of encounters. And such an adventure becomes easier to design and to run when per-day resources are not the only resources to which a significant number of players have access. I do not dispute this. The question is, what is the decision in question? If the wizard player has to choose to do nothing, then in effect they are choosing to miss a turn now, in order to have the chance at a really exciting turn in the future. For various reasons relating both to actual play experience with 3E and the desired play experience of 4e - which reasons may be open to criticism but are not obviously absurd - the 4e designers have decided to build a set of mechanics in which this decision does not have to be made.We obviously disagree here, at least to an extent. I think the biggest cause of the problem is that players of wizards like to take a turn like everyone else, and therefore choose to cast spells that will actually make a difference (ie their big guns) and therefore run out of things to do.Do I think that a mix of per-day and per-encounter is the best solution? I don't have a view on that. It seems obvious to me that well-designed per-encounter abilities can produce mechanically interesting encounters without constraining the range of non-mechanical thresholds of signficance that get introduced. Adding in per-day abilities obviously has the risk of outcome that you see, namely, re-creating the one-encounter-per-day problem. But only if they are poorly designed. And I doubt that they will be, given the designers involved.</blockquote>

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