Only thing I don't like so far: Power Replacement

[GnomeWorks]

How about a feat?

Never Forget Your Roots - Take this feat when you are given a chance to Replace a lower level power with a higher level one. You do not forget the lower level power. The higher level power is gained in addition to your current power, not in place of it. This feat may be taken multiple times.

I can't think of a time when you wouldn't want to take this.

Are the lower-level encounter powers that good? Not necessarily, but it gives you more options, and until 21st, they tend to deal more damage than your at-wills.

 

[Ziana]

I see what you guys are saying about improving on existing skills, which can sort of put it in an RP context; except often the new power is markedly different from the original.

However, I think LowSpine echoes my feelings well. By level 13, you're pretty experienced with the game. Having 10, or 12, playable power options available isn't going to be overwhelming (not counting at will/utility). Being limited to 8 for the majority of your gaming career up to level 30 to me seems very arbitrary.

Starting people out with 2 at-wills, 1 encounter, and 1 daily is great. People learn the basics in the first few levels. But as you approach epic levels, I think the player should have more & more options available in their bag of tricks, and their character should be powerful enough (no pun) to display numerous forms of skill and prowess in any encounter.

If every difficult encounter means you blow 4 encounters, a couple dailies, then it's at-wills for another half hour of playing, that seems to me that the game is cutting you short. Those at-wills, which are certainly useful, in my opinion should eventually become last-resorts which you only use at the end of a long, tiring battle in which you've exhausted all other resources: not something you turn to after the first few rounds.

Obviously I haven't, and few people at this point have, run a character from 1 to 30. In a year things might look different. But looking at the road ahead from the start line, it seems about halfway on things really start slowing down.

 

[IceFractal]

And given that encounters get longer as you get higher level (because HP scales faster than damage), it's not even as if having more encounter powers would make your at-wills useless. You'll still end up using them, just not for 90% of the fight.

Also, I find it strange that your number of at-will powers never goes up, especially since unlike encounter and daily powers, having more at-wills just makes you more versatile rather than more powerful. Versatility is a good thing (TM), and I feel 4E could use more of it.

 

[evizaer]

While we're at it, "leveling up" is a terrible way to model learning. No one advances in such a jagged fashion. Changes are gradual for big and important skills and nowhere near as modular as D&D makes it seem. Learning something new about history may completely change your view on your life, whereas in game "training" in history gives you a +5 to your skill check, but doesn't have much of a holistic effect.

EDIT: My point is that I'm willing to sacrifice "realism" for "a relatively balanced and fun gameplay experience."

 

[Lord Mhoram]

How about a feat?

Never Forget Your Roots - Take this feat when you are given a chance to Replace a lower level power with a higher level one. You do not forget the lower level power. The higher level power is gained in addition to your current power, not in place of it. This feat may be taken multiple times.


(If you want, you could limit how many times... a flat number like 3 or 4 times, or maybe base it off your Int bonus).

I'd go for that with one change. They share that "per encounter" or "per day" slot - sorta like wizard's spells. You get one or the other but not both. Dunno if that choice is made at the start of the day, or on the spot. Just sorta throwing the idea out.

So I get my highlevel power, and I keep my lower level one. I use the lower level one, and I can't use the higher level one.... or it turns into a spell point system - you have X encounter powers per encounter from a pool of Y options.

 

[toxicspirit]

Would it really be that bad to keep the Powers, but still maintain the overall limit on Daily and Encounter use (and of course the restriction on multiple usage of a single Power)? You would have more choices available, but still could only use the same amount of Powers at any one time as the system was designed to manage.

 

[ravenight]

I'm not actually sure the system would be worse if there was a separation between "powers known" and "powers per day". There are complications to doing this (like, what happens when you have an encounter utility power and someone else has a daily in that slot?), but they could be gotten around by limiting "encounter attack powers" and "daily attack powers" used. The RAW is a little bit simpler to track and deal with in combat, and makes combat a little faster by being fewer options, but the other way would also be cool.

On the other hand, it is hard to be against replacement for RP reasons and condone retraining. I think they make equal amounts of sense (as was said, it is easy to forget something you no longer practice). I think the RAW have some side benefits, too. Yes, it means there are fewer options for differentiation within a single character, but there is also less overlap between different characters of the same class (unless certain powers are clearly the best).

Ultimately, I think the power system might be better off if there was no scaling of hp or attack and defense pluses on equipment with level. New levels could give new options with more elaborate side effects and far-reaching bonuses, but the old powers wouldn't be surpassed purely for damage reasons, and you'd have a better scale of defenses, since weapons wouldn't need scaling pluses (just improving abilities) and the monsters' stats would go up just as the players' did.

 

[Falling Icicle]

It makes perfect sense, imho. My most recent math class was Calculus-related. I remember a lot of Calculus application stuff. Ask me about the old sin and cos from high school though? I draw an instant blank.

We don't remember everything as we get older, we remember what we've used most recently. Similarly, I remember quite well how to code in C# (recent) but can't recall even my most basic Spanish (which I took 2 years of in HS).

That's just it. The spells tha you suddenly forget are ones you have been using constantly throughout your adventuring career. You literally gain a level, go to sleep that night and wake up the next day unable to remember the spell you cast yesterday. To use your analogy, it would be like you forgetting sin and cos upon mastering calculus even though you've been using sin and cos every single day for the last 2 years. Or think of it as forgetting basic math because you have learned calculus.

Unfortunately, the system would start to break down if players could keep their powers. For one thing, their new encounter powers would be far more powerful than their old dailies, and eventually even your at-wills would outclass them (except for some spells, like sleep). Also, you'd have so many encounter and daily spells that you would probably never run out of them in a battle, so your at-wills would never get used. This is just one example of where believability is sacrificed for the sake of gameplay. While I think 4e makes those sacrifices far too eagerly sometimes, I admit they often need to be made.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

This sort of thing is of course easy to houserule. You could either let the player simply increase their total available powers, or you could limit their daily use of powers to 4 and 4, but let them pick from all the powers they know on the fly (without making them forget earlier ones). But it strikes me as a flawed design decision, arbitrarily limiting characters to 4 encounter and 4 daily powers total, all the way up to level 30. Especially when new support books come out introducing new powers and abilities, there seems little room to "fit them in", when players power slots are already so limited.

I do not think that it will pose any problems in my group, but I thought about this to.

Here is my taking: Whenever you retrain a power due to level advancement or multiclassing, you do not "forget" the old power.
If it is an At-Will power, you must choose at the beginning of each encounter (before anyone has acted) whether you want to use the old or the retrained one.

If it is an Encounter power, you must chose each encounter. (Depending on how stringent you want to do this: At the start of the encounter, or simply when you chose to use either the old or the new power. The latter grants more flexibility.)

If it is a daily power, you select after each extended rest (similar to a Wizard.)

What I recommend against is freely mixing and matching daily and encounter powers. This probably only hurts the dynamic quality of the encounter, since people just "spam" the same power until their encounter powers are "used up".

 

[erik_the_guy]

It works fine. Most encounters in my experience last only around 5 rounds, rarely much more. So having more encounter powers than actions in an encounter doesn't really help. It doesn't give you much more choice either, since the higher level ones tend to be better versions of the lower leveled ones.