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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 3811308" data-attributes="member: 21673">I'd be more worried about per-encounter resource balancing if, even if 3.5, most non-spellcasting abilities weren't essentially at-will. The game already has to deal with such things as Flurry of Blows, Whirlwind attack, and so so being at-will. It is only with organic spellcasting that this model is broken; and even so, if you cannot guarantee that there will be more than one encounter, spellcasting can be per-encounter ANYWAY.That's been my stance from the beginning, and I think it's been at least one other person's stance. The only encounter guaranteed to happen is the one that is being run now. There is nothing the DM can do mechanically to prevent the 9-9:15 adventuring day. He can do so by storyline (wandering monsters, no place to rest, etc), but short of obviously railroading, he cannot prevent the party from retreating; at least not every time they want to retreat. So what, short of killing the player or the party, can the DM do when the spellcasting players go nova in each encounter, and then say "we're done, time to rest?" Say the party has been fighting their way through the defenses and minions of the Ultimate Villain, and are approaching his Throne Room. When the adventure was laid down, the adventure designer was anticipating the party would still have a decent supply of per-day abilities left; but though either bad judgement or bad luck, the prior fights ended up requiring more per-day resources than the designer anticipated. The party is at the door of the Throne Room; and they're not in a state to fight the opponent. The previous fights, individually, only sapped a little more than expected from the party, but the chain of them tacken together put the party in an unwinnable fight at the end. Do you kill the party, or do you let them wait 8 hours in front of the door to the throne room? And if you did structure the adventure such that they would have a chance to rest before the final fight, what was the point, operationally, of the previous encounters? (Ignore, for the moment, that they may have been required by story - we're doing a purely mechanical anaysis here). Either they were set up to attrit resources, in which case allowing the party to catch a breather invalidates them, or they were not, in which case the party could have used more spell resources in the previous fights.Contrariwise, all of the previous encounters were bypassed by player cunning and guile, and adventure design assumed that only a handful of the "warm-up" encounters would be bypassed this way (the players got lucky). They arrive at the Throne Room able to kick ass and chew bubblegum. The Ultimate Villain ecounter is set such that the party was expected to be nearly out of bubblegum. It's a walkover or the DM has to adjust the encounter "on the fly".Every encounter in the current system is a DM balancing act; since the designer can only dimly grasp what resources the party will have available to them at any point in the adventure. He can guess, he can attempt to force the pace, but in the end, rate of organic resource expenditure in purely in the hands of the players.Hit points, by the way, are a per-day resource that is not in the same boat. Firstly, the DM determines the rate at which hit points are expended, and can very easily fudge the expenditure of them (unlike spells, the loss of hitpoints is almost entirely controlled on the far side fo the screen). Secondly, everyone uses the same basic mechanic to control expenditure and recovery - so it's already balanced (more or less) across all the parties. (side guess - there will be no d4 hit die for PC classes, or there will be some other mechanic to prevent the wizard from having rather less than half of the fighter's hit points or from it mattering - dying from one hit because the fighter screwed up is Not Fun). And from a metagame POV, it's easier to put in a few extra healing potions than it is to explain why the party can rest at story-inappropriate times.And that's the choice - at some point with the artillery being almost exclusively per-day, you end up having to either kill the party or allow them to rest at story-inappropriate times. Yes, experienced DMs and players can mitigate this to a lesser or greater extent; but D&D has to cater to the inexperienced DMs and players. It is better for the game and hobby that the design of D&D be such that, if the characters are at 80% after expending all their per-day resources, the balance-point for an encounter be "party is at 90% of resources". If they are low, it's a slightly harder fight, if they are high and choose to expend daily resources, it's a slightly easier fight. but you don't have to guess where the party (particularly the spellcasters) are on their power curve.Right now, the various classes are all playing different games WRT operational-level play. This brings everyone into the same game.</blockquote>

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