What if we embrace the concept of a "trick" or "surprise action" bonus with our "augment" or "gambit" system. In effect this action gets a surprise bonus because its not expected but easily disrupted if they have seen it (particularly this encounter but maybe a benefit for recurring villains is having the player come up with different "methods")
[MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] I think of this as implicit in many of the encounter and daily powers but we are adjusting the concept enough that having that element may need to be considered in a more explicit way.
Yeah, well, when I start to think about what makes a game simple and straightforward and leads to quick and satisfying play, then I think that its probably just as well to KISS and use encounter/daily powers, or at least ones with a resource cost. My initial design was that an 'encounter' power could be used once at no cost, and if you really wanted to use it again, then it would cost a point. Basically you can't SPAM, but you can repeat an especially effective tactic if its really critical to do so. This could represent slightly different variations of a "you can only pull this off once" trick, or just burning yourself out on one that is exhausting.
My basic idea was to replace daily with powers that simply ALWAYS require expenditure of a point, so they would only come up rarely (I had initially thought that 8 points would be a good starting number, but that's easy to tweak, remembering that they also serve as HS and AP).
Now, we subsequently thought about 'augments', so that might change the definition of 'power' slightly (IE a single power might have 0, 1, and 2 point variations for example). If I followed my existing design here, then an encounter augment would be 0 points the first time, and 1 point subsequently. Maybe Daily powers would be one point and then 2 subsequently? Or you just only get one shot. Its all tweakable. The exact costs could simply vary depending on the power, maybe some are just extraordinary and always cost 1 or 2 points.
This can all be combined with the idea of a practice/ritual that you use to prep from your larger list of powers every day, and that you can use to invoke some sort of 'utility version' of the power OO combat, or when the power isn't prepped, something like that.
This sort of a design seems like it would work well with a bunch of your martial controller concepts, like the bomb thrower/trap master pretty well.