covaithe
Explorer
Ok, that sounds pretty good. I'll point out again, though, that the PHB retraining only allows you to retrain one power, OR one feat, OR one skill. Basically, you get to retrain one thing total, instead of up to three things.
That said, I think with the slow nature of PbP that we could change it to allowing one change in each of the three categories every level.
Huh, I totally missed that. I thought it already allowed changing all three. And I agree that given the slow pace of PbP we change it to allow all three.
For #4, would you say that has to get a nod of approval from the judges, or can people just go ahead with it?
On reflection, I think that it should need judge approval. That is, the resulting character sheet would need to be approved as if it were a level up, and the character couldn't be awarded XP until the approvals were in. I started to type up a list of conditions like "If they're on adventure, then they just need DM's approval. If they're between adventures, they need judge approval, except on sundays when the wind is from the southeast", but screw it; it's more work to think about and make rules to cover all the permutations than it would be simply to check over the changes.
If this seems like it's adding too much to the judge workload, then we could just say that you only get to do option 4 when you're leveling up to level 2.
I think changing classes would be OK, but only in rare cases where the new class exactly fits the kind of character the player was trying to create earlier, probably through multiclassing. In any case, if class changes were allowed, I think it would need special judge approval, and only be allowed very, very rarely.
I'm very reluctant to put the judges (and myself) in the position of having to say no to someone based only on a personal feeling of whether or not the change is thematically appropriate. Also, what happens when the judges disagree? Do we have some kind of voting mechanism? Is it a full-on proposal?
Actually, come to think of it, there's no reason you couldn't make a proposal to allow a one-time class or race change for yourself, or any other change for that matter. I could make a proposal right now that Quagmire be immediately advanced to level 25. I expect it would get voted down rather quickly, but the mechanism exists.