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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3795200" data-attributes="member: 30001">I think I see what you're saying here.  It reminds me of one thing I said earlier:  if I was suddenly transported into a DnD world as a 20th level fighter, I think I would find a fight with a goblin to be extremely fascinating.  Partly because of a lack of familiarity, perhaps not being able to see the dice, and just the sights, sounds, and whatever that would all be unique and interesting.  If WotC can create such an experience with 4E then I'm sold, but I would consider it highly improbable that they would make such a leap.But that aside, your analogy speaks more for what I'd call, maybe, "aesthetic pleasure" or something.  I don't need to win or lose in order to enjoy playing music for instance.  I don't need to win or lose this conversation to enjoy having it as another example.  Maybe there's some way of making DnD combat aesthetically pleasing by itself, like I allude to in my first paragraph.  I'm not familiar with a game or game system that has ever done this, though I haven't played many outside of DnD.  Those games that I've played that have focus on aethetically pleasing elements have, IME, avoided combat altogether.I've seen wordsmith-type DMs try to salvage a boring combat encounter by lots of flavor text - "that lone wolverine is really scary and you 10th level PCs should be shaking in your boots" kind of thing.  What you describe AFAICT is interesting in the abstract, I'm not that much of a hack-and-slasher that I would/do pass up chances to add other elements to the game other than win/loss.  The bottom line though is that based on my (perhaps limited, mortal that I am) experience, there's no real advantage to a per-encounter resource situation that enhances any of those things, they're all possible in the 3E system.One thing I will acknowledge is that any given "dimension of interest" of an encounter has the chance to interfere with the other dimensions.  Resource management can interfere with the story (or vice versa).  Then again death can interfere with the story.  Pretty much anything can beside the story.  So, a thousand posts later, I'm starting to make a short list of things that I think that the per-encounter side of this argument could acknowledge and get us closer to agreeing to disagree.  One is that the per-encounter resource game will be more dangerous - although from your arguments above we're some ways from that.  The other is that per-encounter reduces the "dimensions of interest" of encounters by one, in order to facilitate story-based play.  Maybe we're close to agreeing on that? Was the "archer with the tokens for various combat actions" one of the examples you mean here?On that topic, I've posted links from two blogs, one from a WotC designer and one from a former one, and both seem to recognize and appreciate the inherent benefits of retaining some per-day resource management in the game.  My guess is that 4E will include this as well, and the increase in per-encounter resources for certain classes will get us the best of both worlds.  My guess is that this debate about "per-encounter" resources is largely an excercise in logic because I really don't think 4E is going to go this direction.  Wyatt indicated in his blog that "early versions of 4E" had gone this route, but the implication was that it was found to be undesireable.</blockquote>

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