Retraining Class Features

[Appleseeth]

I'm not sure if there has been a thread on this or not in the past, but oh well.

One of the players in my group is currently playing a warlock with the fey pact. However, once he saw the dark pact he went crazy, and now he wants to have a dark pact warlock, and wants to change his race as well, to Genasi. He's one of those players that wants to switch characters every time a new book comes out, in this case the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide, but it'll happen again in a few months when Martial Power comes out. So, basically my question is this: Do you guys see any problem with retraining class features, instead of skill/power/feat when a player gains a level. Sometimes it has to do with my friend I just described, but sometimes you just choose the wrong ability for what kind of character you want to be.

The other part of this is that we're planning on taking our current campaign from 1-30 for the first time, and there will be quite a few books coming out in the meantime, which will have options my other players may want, but can't because of decisions they made at 1st level. Otherwise I don't like them making up new characters because they're "tired" of the old one, as it breaks continuity and character attachment. So I think this option would be best, as long as there isn't anything broken with it.

On a stranger note, doesn't it seem silly that a cleric in 4e could essentially retrain his/her deity every level, and along with it their channel divinity feat? But no other class with a choice feature can do that.

 

[Stalker0]

This is one of those things I think is a great idea....as long as you and your player work it in game to your satisfaction.

Have the retraining be a part of the story. Have him go through some dark corruption or something that changes his body and binds his soul to a dark entity, etc.

 

[Rakor]

One option for this sort of problem is to make the party much larger but only have some of them adventure at any time so that players can switch characters or make new characters while maintaining a bit more continuity.

For example:

We were the Crimson Reds, feared adventuring company. We had a base where everyone lived, there were maybe a dozen of us but generally only 5 were in any given adventuring party. The rest where either resting, doing downtimey things or dealing with personal business. It was helpful though because if I got tired of playing my rogue and really wanted to try a warblade then next time we have some downtime the rogue takes some time off and the warblade heads out.

We found it to work really well because of the five of us two of us were really into trying new characters and everybody wanted to do it occasionally.

 

[Turtlejay]

I agree with Stalker0, there are in-game flavor ways to do it, and I don't see a problem. Just don't:

Penalize him for it.

Not allow other players the same courtesy.

Jay

 

[Exen Trik]

The only other issue that I see is if you retrain a class feature you might end up with many power and feat selections that are now suboptimal or even invalid. Letting a number of other things be retrained at the same time is a good idea, within reasonable limits.

I wouldn't try to establish a method for this though, it works best as pure Rule 0.