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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3804723" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think that the sort of play you have just describe is the sort of play that 4e is deliberately trying to move away from.If the PCs cannot continue with the adventure, an obvious possibility is that the players do not have anything more to do that evening that is interesting - instead they have to play out a retreat, a camp, re-equipping, rememorise spells, possibly resolve some wandering monster encounters that may well be (from the point of view of the plot or theme of the game) largely meaningless.For a lot of people whose gaming time is limited, that is not how they want to spend their one evening a fortnight. The design challenge, if one wants to accomodate such players, then becomes one of delivering a game which is mechanically interesting, but is not prone to this sort of "bogging down" if play is poor. In my view that is a difficult design specification, and I have no idea if 4e will satisfy it. But I can see why the designers regard the introduction of per-encounter abilities as one of the steps - because it loads the mechanical challenges into the encounter, which is (presumably, if the GM is doing his or her part) relevant to plot and theme.There are still questions unanswered - what happens, for example, if a PC dies in an encounter? But operational designs also have to deal with this problem - but they introduce a whole lot of other issues as well, like the playing out of the retreat and the wandering monsters, which per-encounter abilities allow to be circumvented.Again, whether this shift in design priorities is a good or a bad thing is a different question. My point is that I think it is rational to believe that introducing per-encounter abilities into the mix will support such a shift.That is correct, assuming that the "victory conditions" are purely  military. As I've said in earlier posts, per-encounter design I think is more attractive when non-mechanical thresholds of significance are in play.</blockquote>

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