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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 3479660" data-attributes="member: 22882">My problem is with the whole "wear the heroes down" paradigm.  It's the same thing that boggles my mind when I hear talk about "going nova."Where, other than D&D itself, does this come from?  What source material - literary, cinematic, ANYTHING - supports it?  What makes it the least bit interesting to play?My experience of D&D, other RPGs and other media is that it's NOT interesting to play.  It produces a lot of ultimately pointless encounters that characters mow through easily, dribbling spells and hp a bit at a time, with maybe one or two or MAYBE three interesting encounters along the way.Henry - your concern seems to be that characters will 'use their strongest power in every encounter,' that this doesn't happen currently, and that this calls to mind supers or wuxia rather than, um, D&D itself, I guess, or most MMORPGS, or Jack Vance's Dying Earth.To me, this splits into two separate arguments: the gameplay argument (that limited resources make for interesting choices) and the flavor argument (that per encounter does a poor job of emulating the source material).  I'll address each in turn.In terms of mechanics, choosing to cast fireball on the first turn of the first encounter, or saving it for later and sticking with a dart or magic missile, seems like a pretty limited scope of 'interesting choices.'  Why attempt to create interesting choices using resource management, rather than by providing multiple compelling courses of action?  If you have multiple viable actions, the interesting choice becomes which one do you use - not do you do something interesting or save it for later.  In this case, the real resource is opportunity cost, as with the previous discussion of reserve feats.If you choose to cast fireball when you could have, say, waited and cast counterspell (sorry, dispel magic), and the latter is actually a viable option - that's an interesting choice.  It gets even more interesting if you could make a legitimate case for casting haste on a fighter, for summoning a monster, or for charming an enemy.  If you choose to hit the orc with your longspear while you wait for an important foe  to show up so you can fireball him... where is the interesting choice?  Where is the gameplay?That leaves out the whole argument about adventure design, the standard of four encounters per day, and class balance.  Per day mechanics vary depending on the nature of the campaign to a much greater degree than most other mechanics, and that makes designing balanced adventures with differing styles much more difficult, if not impossible.In terms of flavor, where is the literary or cinematic inspiration for the 'limited daily use of powers' as seen in D&D?  I don't see it in Tolkien or Howard.  I don't see it in Fritz Leiber or Sussanah Clarke or Glenn Cook.  Frankly, I don't see it anywhere but in Jack Vance and in some, but not all, books based on D&D itself.  I don't see it in fantasy films, either.That's not to say magic isn't limited in other writings.  It is limited in a variety of ways: it fatigues the user, or causes him to go mad, or requires rare and expensive reagents, or must be done at a specific time and place, or is dangerous and prone to backfiring, or is constrained by the actions of other powers, or simply takes a great deal of time.  Not all of those are gameable (constrained by other powers and dangerous and prone to backfiring both seem to turn players off from a game, for example), but none of them justify a 'per day' limitation, either.</blockquote>

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