When I (or Henry, or others) say that I don't want the next edition to be balanced exclusively on the per encounter basis, most people seem to automatically assume that I am defending the spells per day design. This is not necessarily the case. What I seek is a design where spells (or at least some spells/abilities) are limited in their use on a longer-term basis. Whether this means per day or per month (say per full moon) or per fatigue, or whatever is another matter - I would be fine with any of those, so long as the PCs cannot simply zoom from encounter to encounter and remain at the same strength, or at least a system that preserves the rule-codified existence some of the more powerful magical effects so that I can use them in my devious plots against my PCs, muhahahaha.
Heck, I would be fine if all Wizard spells were castable at will (with significant rebalancing, of course), but the most powerful ones simply had very, very long casting times (e.g. one day to cast the GATE spell, one month to cast X...). Essentially, casting time would be the balancing factor for spells. Indeed, the more I think about this the more viable this sounds. It still does not solve the issue of resources not diminishing accross multiple encounters, but IMO it avoids all the other pitfalls of per encounter balancing.
Everyone else gets different kinds of limitations like "your top tier of spells takes longer to cast" (you want tactics and resource management decisions, how bout the choice between firing off a magic dart for 4 rounds vs the other's needing to cover you long enough to get off the big boom?) or "you are fatigued afterwards" or "if you cast the same spell so many times before resting it loses effectiveness from "burn in" (as in Diane Duane's books)" Or they just have lower power spells than before. Lots'a options, lots'a fun....
