D&D 4E 'Advanced' 4E

Having read through the DDXP stuff, other guy's 4E mini-games and played a few of my own my (main) worries about 4E has come down to 2, related, things.
Like the 3E fighter once your /enc and /day powers are gone there is really nothing to do than do your main at will, at will, at will, ad nauseam in combat. I am not thinking about outside of combat with utility powers, social rules and such stuff. This seems especially likely with things like trip being a power. Also the increased length (in rounds) of combat means each encounter has more per will usages than a 3E fighter's hack/hack/hacks.
Related to this is the small number of powers per level that a character has available to pick from, meaning characters of the same class will be very similar. I know that 'good' players will use more of their character concept to decide on their powers chosen, but min/maxers will end up similar. Hopefully splat books will massively increase the number available at each level- not much good until they are all out though!

So, although I haven't played or seen all the rules, my tweaking nature has lead me to thinking of house rules. Yes I know, it is too early really for that (and I won't use any until after a 'module' play test with my group, at least) but I can't help myself
What I am thinking of is (along with using 3rd party and home built at will powers to increae the list), say, doubling the number of at will powers a character can know. Now this will not change the 'per round power' of a character but it will: a) Increase a characters flexibility and therefore power over an encounter/day/module/campaign and b) Give the characters more diverse things to do outside the use of /e and /d (however the worry about this is, without an extensive list of pwers for each class, is that each class will have exactly the same at will powers i.e. all 4 of the only 4 available for that class at first level).

Thoughts?

Edit: I called the thread advanced as there will be a lot more things for the players to keep track of...missed that, sorry

mach1.9pants said:

Having read through the DDXP stuff, other guy's 4E mini-games and played a few of my own my (main) worries about 4E has come down to 2, related, things.
Like the 3E fighter once your /enc and /day powers are gone there is really nothing to do than do your main at will, at will, at will, ad nauseam in combat.

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People keep saying this, and I keep not seeing it.

Lets look at the example characters.

Fighter: One at will power that deals damage when adjacent to multiple foes. Another which deals damage and pushes foes about. This means that even when he hasn't got any flashy per encounter or at will powers left, he can still push enemies into groups then cleave them. Plus, there's lots of room for synergy with the abilities of other characters.

Wizard: One area of effect attack, one attack that's powerful versus specific foes. Both are situational, so there's plenty of reason to vary between the two as targets become available. If the fighter helps bunch up enemies, this is especially nice.

Paladin: Can switch between defense (granting himself temp hp) and offense (doing more damage per hit). While they'll probably mostly go for more damage, in fights where things aren't going so well this will be a harder choice.

Ranger: One attack for high accuracy, one attack that lets you step away from an adjacent enemy before you fire (or just travel further than normal that round). High accuracy will undoubtedly be the default, but running away will be a lot more important in certain situations.

Cleric: You can shoot a ray that improves the accuracy of your allies' attacks against the target, or a ray that lets you grant an ally a new save (!!), or you can fight in melee. Seems fair enough to me.

Warlock: This one can attack Reflex for high damage, Will to defend itself, and Fortitude to slow her opponent. The usefulness of each attack varies depending on the saves of the target, and somewhat upon the situation. This is probably the character that most spams attacks, since the debuffs aren't that enormous once battle is joined.

Even the Rogue powers previewed had two very different At Will abilities. Deft Strike lets you spring attack or charge especially far, and Piercing Strike is especially accurate. It gives you the option of hitting then running, or of hitting with particular power.

So... It looks to ME that each character has a good selection of options. Each character has a power that they will undoubtedly spam in fights where they're not in real danger, and where they only care about maximizing damage. But a lot of them have powers to help them out when things get bad, or which help them work with their allies to do more damage overall.

I don't think things will be all that bad.

And for the record, each martial character has more diversity of choice at level 1 than most 3e martial characters have at level 10.

Also, just because Trip 'em and bash 'em style trip is an encounter power does not mean that there's not a lot more options amongst the basic attack types, probably as many, or almost as many as there were in 3rd.

Fitz

Let's also forget that your choices won't just be based on your powers. Weapons may have encounter powers now (not sure if they've kept that though). Magic items will also provide some encounter based effects.

And let us not forget skills!! Fighter types seem to get more skills, so they can do more things on the battle, liking climbing a wall on jumping on a guy, using intimidate to demoralize an enemy, etc.

Don't forget that you will be getting a larger selection of powers as you level up. So having to few powers to choose from may just be cause for concern at earlier levels. I agree with Cadfan though. It looks to me that even with so few options it still leads to a lot of diversity of choice, especially when you consider power synergy's between characters.

I understand your concern about players just using an endless stream of at-will abilities once the "cool" stuff is gone. I'm worried about it too. However, we have no idea how many 1st level at-will powers there will be to pick from for any class. Sure, most characters will only have 2 at-wills to use at first, but there could be a wide range to pick from. I'm hoping there will be anyway. I can't imagine that the two preview builds shown in the Sneak Attack article are all that's available for the rogue, and by extension, I can't believe that there would only be two builds for each class. There's at least four 1st level at-will powers for the rogue (the two shown, and the two mentioned). Hopefully there are more, and hopefully it won't be a choice of something like Careful Attack against three lame powers.

Not to mention that, if your in-class powers aren't doing it for variety, you can get powers from other classes.

breschau said:

I understand your concern about players just using an endless stream of at-will abilities once the "cool" stuff is gone. I'm worried about it too. However, we have no idea how many 1st level at-will powers there will be to pick from for any class. Sure, most characters will only have 2 at-wills to use at first, but there could be a wide range to pick from. I'm hoping there will be anyway. I can't imagine that the two preview builds shown in the Sneak Attack article are all that's available for the rogue, and by extension, I can't believe that there would only be two builds for each class. There's at least four 1st level at-will powers for the rogue (the two shown, and the two mentioned). Hopefully there are more, and hopefully it won't be a choice of something like Careful Attack against three lame powers.

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Careful Attack, as seen at the play-test, was an old version of the power. All that the devs said was that it would be fixed by the release, so I'm not what the fix is exactly. If I was to guess, I would say that Careful Attack takes a standard and a minor action to use.

tombowings said:

Careful Attack, as seen at the play-test, was an old version of the power. All that the devs said was that it would be fixed by the release, so I'm not what the fix is exactly. If I was to guess, I would say that Careful Attack takes a standard and a minor action to use.

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<crosses fingers>

I hope it's something like that. It makes sense.

Careful attack is just 1d10 damage now. No +4.