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[firesnakearies]

Another fantastic analysis, as usual, Stalker0.

For myself, I feel very strongly compelled to simply give players more powers when I run the game. More actual power choices, and more power uses per period of time. Also, less reliance on extended rests to regain powers and surges. I'm working on a pretty comprehensive suite of house rules to address this issue.

My question is, how much does it break the game to just, say, double the amount of powers that PCs have? Ignoring the whole issue of "it's too complicated for new/casual players", just dealing with fundamental game balance.

How much do you think you'd need to beef up encounter levels to compensate for the fact that the PCs could use two or three times the number of powers that they have now?

What if you just denied them opportunities for extended rest? Would being forced to complete a large number of encounters in a row, by itself, make things challenging enough that having considerably more powers to use would not destroy the game's difficulty and sense of dramatic tension? Or would it be necessary to raise the actual encounter levels? (ie, by adding a couple of extra creatures to each fight, or the like)

I hate the whole "we fight once or twice and then camp out for the rest of the day" thing, especially when it's repeated over and over as a general adventuring modus operandi. I also hate the fact that classes have like 80-100 powers to choose from, but any given character is only ever going to have around 15-20 of them.

Personally, my inclination is to give the PCs a lot more flexibility and a lot more "juice" and stuff they can do, but just make the fights themselves a bit tougher and make resting a very rare opportunity.