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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5861270" data-attributes="member: 22779">Whereas for me, unexpected doesn't need to come from randomly generated elements.  A player deciding to smear poison on his hand and feed it to the dragon is more than awesome enough for me.  I don't need to have a 1 in 100 chance that it actually happens to make it awesome.Sure, that player decides to initiate that action, but, for the other six people at the table (or however many there are), it's pretty damn awesome.  Let's be honest though, that's extremely unlikely to happen in a game that is spread over twenty or thirty levels.  Might work in something like E6, where you don't have that much advancement.  But, the odds that you will only ever be able to get a +2 attack bonus is pretty darn slim.  Look, the whole point of having the -5 penalty is to prevent the action from happening more than once in the same encounter.  Why bother?  What is gained?  We've all agreed that we don't WANT the same thing happening twice per encounter.  It doesn't fit with genre fiction, it doesn't make a lot of sense, and, let's not forget that we're not sure what the expected length of an encounter will be.  In 3e, encounters were generally only about 5 rounds long.  That means a character is doing the same thing half the time (well 40% to be exact).  Not exactly special there is it?The goal is to make specific actions special.  Instead of futzing about trying to create a perfect wheel where we have to balance every new element against the idea of how many bonuses we're going to get, so we can avoid repetitive actions, why not just say, no repetitive actions?Let me rephrase the question.  How is a complicated mechanic that interacts with a number of other mechanics, requires constant tracking (did I trip this combat yet?  - remember, no powers means you don't track those kinds of things), acts as a trap for people who aren't terribly good at calculating odds and doesn't actually achieve the goal of stopping people from spamming actions better than a single line that says, "Power, Encounter"?</blockquote>

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