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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5951031" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't hate that. I actually quite like it. It makes PC design much easier, and as a GM it helps me a lot with encounter balance.I agree with all these descriptions of encounter powers (though I'm with Raith5 and bert1000 in being on the "like" rather than the "dislike" side).While the occasional process-simulation rationale (tricks up the sleeve, fatigue, etc) can be made to work from time to time, I don't think it's worth the effort. Encounter powers are a metagame tool, a player resource of the sort bert1000 describes. As Herreman captures well with reference to some particularly obvious cases, they are like delimited Fate Points. The Warlord is always urging his/her friends onward - once or twice per encounter, the player can spend a resource (Inspiring Word) and have that urging have a mechanical effect. The Elf is always shooting or attacking with great accuracy - once per encounter, the player can spend a resource to give that fact about the elf mechanical expression.I think the comparison to hit points, and "the round", the turn sequence and the action economy within it also makes sense. These are all metagame devices for allocating and rationing resources among the participants in the game.What I think is most distinctive about encounter powers, compared to hit points, is that they bring the metagame into the "active" rather than the "passive" part of the game - and therefore are not well-suited to those who think that every player decision should correspond to a PC decision. (Because the player's decision to use an encounter power doesn't correspond to any decision by the PC, who is always/I] trying to be inspiring, accurate, etc.)In the same way that it is incumbent on those who like metagame mechanics to recognise that not everyone shares their preferences, so I think it is helpful for those who equate "roleplaying" with "every player decision correlates to a PC decision" to recognise that this is only one, rather narrow, conception of roleplaying within the broader sphere of RPGs. In particular, on this account many contemporary RPGs - HeroWars/Quest, Burning Wheel, etc - come out as undermining roleplaying, which would be odd given that these systems are well known for being some of the most story-intensive RPGs out there.For an approach to play which sees "roleplaying" as "players using their PCs to engage the fictional situations set up by the GM, so that we all get to see what sort of interesting story falls out", then player metagame resources on the active side can be very helpful for roleplaying.This is true. But I think it also has to be recognised that not all underlying "core" mechanics can support the full range of approaches to play. The use, in the playtest, of spell durations that don't fit nicely within an encounter context (10 minutes is probably at the outer limit, and 1 hour is right out) don't bode especially well.The fighter's "action surge" ability suggests to me that they will be taking more of an Essentials route and making metagame abilities generic Fate Point sort of stuff (in Essentials, "do extra damage"; for the playtest fighter, "have an extra action") rather than the more interesting and delimited powers seen in the rest of 4e.Another comment on this, from a different angle: if they are going to have options, they need to be prepared to talk much more frankly than is the tradition in D&D rulebooks about the sort of game experience those options are meant to provide. The 4e rulebooks suffer from being too coy about the role that encounter powers actually play within the game.This makes encounter powers more like 4e psionics. It facilitates treating encounter powers in a process simulationist way (you used up all your stamina/power points). It can produce problems, though: it reduces the tactical variety that delimited encounter powers produce, and it makes it more important to get the balance right, so that the single best power doesn't just become the default spamming option.For the reasons I just gave, I'm not sure that a psionics-style system is actually the best way to achieve the goal of giving all players interesting resource management options, and of making sure that encounters are tactically engaging.On the retraining point, here is what I said in the campaign document I circulated to my players at the start of our 4e campaign:The rules for retraining, swapping in new powers, background feats etc, don’t have to be interpreted as literally meaning that your PC has forgotten how to do things or suddenly learned something new. Feel free to treat this as just emphasising a different aspect of your PC that was always there, but hadn’t yet come up in the course of play.I seem to remember that OGL Conan has something similar, where you can spend a Fate Point to have your PC "recollect" a foreign language that they speak that hasn't come up yet in play. And I think I've read that Mutants & Masterminds has a somewhat similar system for allowing a hero to manifest a hitherto-unseen super power.Again, this stuff is all best seen as happening at the metagame level, not the ingame level. And the rules should just be overt about this.This is just bad adventure design and bad GMing.It is of the essence of running a situation/encounter oriented game that new scenes are framed having regard (i) to the established fiction of the game, and (ii) to stuff that the players will find interesting, and want to engage via their PCs. If the GM has already got a preset list of encounters, so that the scenes framed (i) won't reflect the prior established fiction (eg that an enemy escaped), and (ii) won't necessarily engag the players with situations that they find interesting, and want to throw their PCs into, then we have a classic railroad.There are plenty of encounter/situation focused RPGs that give good GMing advice on how to avoid this sort of railroading (HeroQuest revised, Burning Wheel, Maelstrom Storytelling, etc). It's a pity that the 4e DMGs mostly failed on this score.</blockquote>

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