GordonHalfman

They are presumably trying the balance hostile areas so that a competent player doesn't need to backtrack before running out of health. I'm not sure what else they can do? If healing spells are added but are rest restricted (as they obviously must be) then how does that avoid the "problem"? If the fights are going badly then eventually you'll run out of spells and then be forced to backtrack or reload in just the same way.

If we want the game to have varied and interesting and powerful spells, then there has to be a way to limit them, between encounters as well as within them. We can't have the player summoning a demon and stopping time in every fight. I have an open mind on there being better ways to limit spell casting than D&D, it definitely has it's problems. (The main one in my view being that the player is ridiculously powerful when fully stocked.) But there is a logical problem here. If casting a spell in one fight means the player doesn't get to cast it in subsequent fights (for whatever reason), then the decision to cast the spell has to be based on a prediction about what future fights will be like, which he is often unable to know without meta-gaming. This is something Josh seems to find unacceptable. So... what now?

Actually thinking about it another game that tries to mostly eliminate resource management is Age of Decadence. However it only really works because the game is made of fairly small number of set piece encounters, it's not a dungeon crawler at all. (And in fact in spite of that they have had significant issues balancing encounters, partly because they have to make every encounter deadly in order for it to be meaningful.)

No. I haven't though a tremendous amount about healing points, but that brings up an interesting parallel resource management behavior in RPGs. I've seen (and talked to) innumerable gamers who say they end games with inventories full of consumables: potions, wands, scrolls, etc. The most commonly cited reason they give is that they don't know when is/isn't a good time to use them. Also, because they often have no idea when they might get more, they don't want to run out. It's sort of the inverse problem of rest spamming. Yes that's where I was going with that. You seem to worry a lot about this "prescience" problem, and I really don't think it's that big a deal. (People really did enjoy those games after all.) And to repeat myself a bit, I'm only aware of 2 serious attempts to solve the problem completely, those being Dark Souls and Dragon Age. Dark Souls is the most hardcore solution possible, with rigid controls on healing, resting and saving. This worked for them but it's risky as hell if your gameplay balance isn't tight as a drum. Dragon Age on the other hand went the other way, the party was fully restored after every fight. It made weaker fights meaningless, encounters as a whole became repetitive and completely lacking in tension unless there was a genuine risk of a total party wipe. Is this the direction you favour?

No. The punishment is that they do poorly in combat. Assuming they survive the combat and have learned that they used poor tactics (or strategy), why does the player need to be punished again? This is pretty much the sequence of how this goes down from a player's perspective: * Player selects a number of spells for any number of reasons, thoughtful or thoughtless. * Player enters combat with enemies that are poorly matched to his or her spells. * The player realizes that a different group of spells would be better for these monsters. * The fight is rough, but the player survives. * The player decides to switch his or her spells to something more appropriate. If the fight is hard, they already suffered for the choices they made. When the fight is over and the player has made a decision to switch spells, why should he or she be punished again? Do you just disagree with the whole concept of managing resources across fights then? I'm curious as to what your stance is on healing potions.

The player doesn't have to walk back to the campsite. He can choose to struggle on and try to win with limited resources, or reload and try the dungeon again from the start. Reloading is after all was is supposed to happen when you screw up and end up in a bad situation. (Unless we just want to make the whole game a walk-over, in name of eliminating tedium.) It's true that both the resting and reloading systems in D&D games introduce a "user adjustable challenge" element, but it's hard to worry about that too much, in principle it's true of any game that allows for save scumming. In any case Josh should clarify what his proposed solution to this "problem" is. I can think of only a few: 1. As in Demon Souls/Dark Souls, saving only allowed at certain points. All non-boss monsters re-spawn when resting. Works brilliantly if the underlying game-play is good enough, difficult to give an in game explanation for unless the world logic supports it. 2. Eliminate trash mobs altogether, resource management would not be an issue since there would only be a small number of tailored boss encounters, which the player can be fully stocked for. (I suspect this would have some pacing problems in practice, particularly for large dungeons that PE is meant to feature.) 3. Eliminate resource conservation between fights but keep trash mobs. The dragon age solution. (It absolutely sucked.) 4. Impose time limits of some kind.