D&D 4E 4E Powers and "magic points"

[CapnZapp]

Any thoughts, links or other references on the following would be appreciated:

It seems 4E would rather easily lend itself to a magic point driven alternative system, the main point of which would of course be to remove the "you have already done that particular maneuver today, so you can't do it again until tomorrow" aspect of dailies, primarily the non-magical ones.

Shooting from the hip here:

Say using an at-will costs one Power Point. Then an encounter power could cost 3 PPs, and a Daily could cost 5 PPs.

Assuming further: you go through an average of five encounters a day (half a level's worth), each encounter averaging 12 rounds of combat.

This leads you to handing out 60 Power Points to each adventurer (irrespective of class or level), with sleep/rest restoring 10 PP per hour.

Finally, when you run out of PPs, you're exhausted. First, any further PP expenditures will have to come from hit points. Second, you should probably suffer from some kind of adverse condition (save ends, but each time you use a power it returns).

What do you say? I'm sure this (or something similar) has been discussed already?

 

[Lokathor]

I'm toying with an all PP based system for 3.5 that incorporates a battle-rechargeable pool of PP as well as a daily PP pool. I'll say that At-Will powers should probably cost 0, and restoring 10/hour kinda messes with 4e assumptions compared to a 5 minute short rest.

Also, you could have players start with some PP, and then as they level up they gain more and more PP (based on the power rate) until they max out around level 20 when they get their last daily power.

The biggest problem is that in 4e daily powers should really almost never be recoverable. Any daily that people would actually pick is almost definitely too good to be using every combat if you're trying to have more battles in a day be more draining on a party. Now, you can make it so that the party effectively gets an extended rest after every battle, but that's a very different game.

 

[WYT]

I think daily powers are sometimes so powerful, so allowing them to be used more than one time per day would be definitively overpowered.

 

[Lokathor]

I forgot to mention that many encounter powers that miss and do nothing on a miss should be almost trivially recoverable. The fact that nothing happened should already be penalty enough.

Also, there is a group of daily powers that simply do half damage on a miss. They're generally inferior to Reliable powers (which let you be sure to get your "rider" before the power is expended), Conjurations (and other sustainable powers), and Stances. I really don't know what to do about them. My first instinct is to make them all Reliable type powers... but that has its own problems. It's a quandry.

 

[ameinild]

You might want to check this out:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-fan-creations-house-rules/243335-power-recharging-mana-pool.html

It's a mana pool and power recharge system we've created for our group. Please comment.

 

[Exen Trik]

I believe that the 4e system can have a mana point system worked into it... mostly because I've been working on something along those lines for a while. It's fairly different from 4e except in mechanics, so a lot of my work wouldn't apply here. All the same, I have some insight on this:

First off, I wouldn't even try to adapt all the 4e powers as they are into a mana system. Depending on the level and cost of a power, it should have a strength around that of an encounter power, edging perhaps halfway towards at-will or daily powers. Special effects like continuous damage that normally are only seen in daily powers are ok, if the rest the power is relatively weak in exchange.

Anything as weak as an at-will shouldn't have any cost, unless you want to be stuck with nothing but basic attacks when you run out. And daily powers are just too strong, you would naturally blow it all with as many as you can use, possibly ending up without encounter level effects. Or even worse, if you can recover points between battles, the daily powers would either be usable far too often, or too expensive to do anything else

I'd suggest designing it around encounter level powers only, redesigning them for that purpose. Leave daily and at-will powers out of it completely. Or perhaps some at-wills can incorporate it, with a normal free effect, and an MP boosted one.


Also, you might consider using the HP system as a base, so you there would be a stat added to it, a class based bonus, mana surges, etc. This may present its own complications, though. It really depends on how much effort you want to put into it, and how you want it to function.

 

[scarik]

This seems like a bad idea to me, my favorite part of 4e is the by and large lack of 'novas'.

Adding a magic point system just seems like it would encourage popping a bunch of dailies every fight.

 

[CapnZapp]

This seems like a bad idea to me, my favorite part of 4e is the by and large lack of 'novas'.

Adding a magic point system just seems like it would encourage popping a bunch of dailies every fight.

If you are referring to the 15-minute adventuring day, I'm discussing this in another thread.

So while my response is "but how doesn't the default 4E system encourage popping your dailies every fight?" I guess we could discuss that there instead.

Here the topic is how to convert 4E into a MP system. Not why it is a bad idea.