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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3811380" data-attributes="member: 30001">I have never understood, though this is a long standing issue, how an encounter that poses no risk to a PC (of either resource loss or loss of life) is of any mechanical interest.  (I realize that an earlier example about your students attempted to show this, but I didn't quite get it.)Maybe try with this extreme example.  4 20th level characters against 4 standard kobolds.  The 20th level characters are at full power, and so they have a huge range of abilities to exercise.  There's no chance of PC death.  And we'll say there's no resource expenditure issues since it's the only encounter that day (and it probably doesn't even require that).  My question is:  how can you make this an encounter of "mechanical interest"?  If this is a bad example, then why?  What fundemental difference is there with any other encounter where PCs know they're going to win and know that there is no impact on their daily resources?Yes, because I make a lot of the word "required" here to mean "required to stay alive".  If that's not what you mean then I don't know what you're saying.  Any two things are similar and different so it would help for me to be more precise.  A game design/paradigm that produces an X% of PC death per encounter is going to mean (perhaps obviously) a certain frequency of character deaths, new characters joining the party, etc.  In these cases the difference of whether this death comes about from player choice or from dice rolling doesn't matter AFAICT.  When you say it's "different", I don't know in what relevant ways you mean that it's different.  Getting killed by an orc is different than being killed by an ogre, for example.I think this is where play-style really has a hidden influence on our opinions.  My players are far more likely to take resource attrition, and therefore all encounters, seriously because they know that the effects can actually kill them.  My informal assessment here is that many per-encounter folks don't kill PCs, and the players know this, and it diminishes the significance that less-than-deadly encounters have.  After all, the PCs want to get to the BBEG, the DM wants them to get there, and everything else really just becomes a formality and a nuisance.Recall, too, that encounters are interesting for reasons other than resource-management implications.  AFAICT this is actually one of the basic assumptions in support for per-encounter.  So all those story based and tactical issues that make per-encounter interesting are also available for per-day.  I can have rope bridges over lava, NPC captives with plot-relevant information, McGuffins needed to defeat the BBEG, and all the rest in a per-day situation as well, enhancing the meaning of an encounter which also has resource implications.  I know we sometimes remove all of these things because they're not unique to a given paradigm, but then it seems misleading to then remove attrition and say that the result is boring - of course, removing all elements of an encounter that are interesting results in a boring encounter.I really hope not - 3E combat takes too long as it is.  I don't know why exactly, but based on what I've seen on this board I'm not the only one.AFAICT, it is at the root of a statement than "resource management interferes with the game plot".  I don't know what everyone means when they say "plot".  When I say that, I mean two things - one is "the overall structure of likely events" and the other is "the story about what transpired in the game".  Resource management, and unanticipated situations in general, do not interfere with either one of these.</blockquote>

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