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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 3800953" data-attributes="member: 31454">That is indeed a relatively accurate summary of the nova player's point of view.In my experience, this is the main cause of PC resting. Most players are paranoid about expending resources which they percieve as critically limited. For example, if you can only use one 5th level spell, most players will likely guard that jealously, just because they might need it later (which is a seperate issue). However, most players won't lead with their biggest attacks against a foe they believe is an average threat. Those are too valuable and scarce. Most PCs tend to lead with more mediocre (but plentiful) resources to gauge their opponent.For example, even if I have only one 5th level spell, I probably won't mind pitching out a 3rd level spell and see if that works. That is a less critically limited resource, so the players are less likely to be squeamish about spending one. The player will then wait to see how the enemy reacts (how injured he gets, whether or not he saves, what he does on his turn in reaction to the attack), and adjust accordingly for the next resource expenditure. So if the spell absolutely evaporates the enemy, then the wizard might just back off and let the fighter handle it. If it does an expected average damage, he might stick to it. Or if the enemy laughs it off and then charges, the wizard might switch things up and use a higher-level spell, knowing he'll need more resources to succeed.You may not have heard of the problem before. Indeed, I haven't ever heard it called by this name until just this past month. But I remember all too vividly my few games with old Gygaxian expert dungeoneers in a Rules Cyclopedia game where we staked the door if a PC so much as broke a nail to rest. It certainly existed in old-school games.Though honestly, exchanging annecdotes won't get us anywhere. We'd need more hard evidence, like a survey of casters to see which spells are cast first and more often. I can see that others upthread have similar experiences to mine, but a wider sample-size would be needed.We agree! Alert the media <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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