Someone mentioned just doing away with the limit on healing surges. That won't work. The problem is that the vast majority of encounters can be overcome without using dailies. Sure, you may use an AP, but those are reasonably renewable and while they are VERY useful you can certainly get by on one every other encounter. If you just get rid of HS then every encounter which isn't highly dangerous is just a joke. The players will simply bull their way through it and build their characters with a high number of healing powers so they can be sure of getting through pretty much every combat with SOME hit points. Take a short rest, get your HP back, heck you can take on LIMITLESS numbers of easy to moderate encounters and still be at top power.
So there MUST be a way besides dailies to cut into the party's resources. Very low level characters aside (where pretty much every combat is dangerous) this has to exist. It could be recast from the current HS system as I've suggested earlier in this thread, or by other similar means, but it has to exist.
Must?
Actually, nothing you stated here as a problem is a problem.
If the PCs are going through easy to moderate encounters with healing surges, the same applies. If you keep healing surges then every encounter which isn't highly dangerous is just a joke until the last easy to moderate of the day where Dailies will be pulled out. The only significant difference is that they go through 4 or 5 encounters, run out of healing surges, and rest up for the day.
No difference.
Removing healing surges means that the PCs could go through these types of encounters many more times. 20 relatively easy to moderate encounters per day instead of 4 or 5.
What is so desirable about limiting a day to 4 or 5 encounters?
The problem with magic in ALL previous editions of D&D was twofold. First of all there were far too many "plot buster" powers, and they were available at much too low a level. The game would have been vastly improved had these sorts of powers at the very least been higher level. And I mean stuff as basic as Charm Person. Imagine what someone who could do that in the real world could do? It should be something accessible only to a very powerful character because used AT ALL competently it is a very powerful ability. Instead of dropping plot busters all over the low level spell lists in earlier editions and then giving wizards/M.U.s/whatever a tiny number of daily-only powers they should have given them more powers that were a lot less plot busting at low level. Basically this is what 4e did.
What one person calls plot busting, a different person calls creativity. The PCs are heroes. They should have magical ways to be heroic. Slogging through every swamp and every encounter without being smart and sometimes cutting to the chase is boring. As a player, I play the game to come up with innovative ways to solve in game problems. I don't play the game to slowly crawl through every encounter that the DM thought was cool.
DMs who create worlds where the players have to work every single niggling detail should take a step back and figure out why their players play the game.
The second issue was the "logic of magic" which inevitably says that magic is something beyond what can be accomplished in the real world, and thus just by the very fact that it is magic it takes on too high a degree of versatility. Again, part of the answer is to limit that versatility. The most basic means of doing so is to make the effects of magic transitory. Again, this is what 4e did.
Magic should be above and beyond.
Otherwise, it would be called mundane. This Eberron concept that everyone can do magic, hence, it is just a form of science is BS. IMO.
I play for the fantasy of the game. Not the mundane of the game.
I want the PCs to have cool magical miscellaneous options, not just a dozen different types of guns they can fire which the 4E "most powers are attack powers and most attack powers revolve around hit point damage" does.
I enjoyed the pre-3E days when a Gnome Illusionist could cast Darkness 2 feet off the ground and then duck down a little and see all of the 6' tall foes where the foes could not see him back (at least if the DM was not using metagaming knowledge).
That was interesting. Casting damaging spell after damaging spell after damaging spell. A lot less interesting.
ALWAYS I see the people criticizing the 4e handling of magic just discounting rituals without actually discussing them. "Oh, my players just don't bother with that. Its too expensive." That isn't a valid criticism. Just because players are ignoring a part of the rules that would give them what they wanted if they just paid attention to it is not the fault of the game system. Its either the player's own fault or somehow they're being discouraged from using all their abilities.
I'm in a dungeon killing things. I don't have time for a 10 minute ritual to unlock a door. I cannot cast Floating Disc to load up the unconscious Fighter, mostly cause the Fighter is either dead or conscious and is never unconscious for long, but also because I cannot cast it in combat.
Many of the cool non-damaging miscellaneous spells which could be cast in combat previously are now lengthy rituals that cost money.
This is a terrible design flaw.
Nothing wrong with having rituals. But there is a serious problem if the rituals stand in the way of good play.
