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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 3825731" data-attributes="member: 18280">If a player wants to utilize the minimum amount of resources to reduce an opponent to a helpless condition in the minimum amount of time possible, and the reason players want to minimize their resource expenditure is because they percieve that they may be at greater risk at a later time without the less plentiful ("more expensive") resource, it follows that if they don't have to worry about being at greater risk at a later time, then they don't worry about minimizing their resource expenditure and only do whatever reduces an opponent as quickly as possible.If players also don't want to waste a turn, when they try something and nothing beneficial happens, they want to try whatever is most likely to work.  This is why there is usually a minimum theshold of effectiveness for resources.  Using the resource most likely to incapacitate the enemy is the easiest way to ensure that you do not waste a turn, and thus are not disappointed.It is also the easiest way to keep the combat short, and thereby minimize damage to themselves to avoid vulnerability.  Players tend to measure the cost to spend a resource in the hopes of ending a fight more quickly versus the cost of healing magic restoring later.  In other words, they want to minimize their costs while maximizing their benefit.  As a result of this, you'll hear players rationalize saving a charge on their wand of fireball when someone points out that, "This guy is only doing like 8 damage, and we've got a wand of cure light wounds anyway."  But there is a cost to using the wand of fireball because it is a non-renewing resource.  If the players could cast that fireball in every encounter, it would cost less than the wand of cure light wounds.  When players can use their offensive resources in every encounter, the cost of offensive resources is as low or lower than healing magic.If all of your offensive abilities reset between encounters, this is true.If I can rest and recover all spells, and I can do it without difficulty or worry between every encounter, then it is never less costly to recover from injury than to recover offensive resources.Moreover, within the context of a single round in a hit point system, I will never die because I used all of my offensive resources as a direct cause, but I will die because I lost all my hit points as a direct cause. Where resources are recoverable between encounters, failure to use a resource within a given encounter is far more likely to kill you than doing maximum damage every round, starting with highest damage potential to lowest.IOW, for it to be true that it is sometimes more acceptable to allow an enemy to injure you for three rounds rather than end the fight in one simply because the means to recover from those injuries is less costly than the means to end the fight in one round, there must first be a cost to ending the fight in one round.I am no longer reading pemerton's posts, so it would be difficult to know their contents.RC</blockquote>

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