Daily Powers are Great

[Garthanos]

One thought I heard was to divorce dailies from being daily.. make the duration arbitrary number of enconters ie say 4 encounters .. call them inspired powers or lucky breaks the player can see the duration but his character would just feel that it works a little more often when life gets intense... and good thing too.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Meta-magic never leads to good things. Every single meta-magic spell that has ever existed in any edition of D&D was either horribly flat out broken or worthless, there is just no middle ground.

I simply disagree.

 

[mneme]

* OK, in all honesty, I simply find myself wanting more powers period. I'd gladly burn feats to gain more powers. I much prefer the Vancian model of resource management where I have lots of options and must settle on a few for the short term rather than settle on picking one power per level. And no, retraining doesn't do it for me.

Play a wizard? Tome Mastery lets you have an extra encounter power; spellbook lets you have plenty of dailies and utilities to choose from -- plus then pick up lots of tomes with different spells written into them--thus letting you spend daily item powers to use a different daily than what you have prepared, not to mention be able to choose from a huge list of spells to prepare on a given day (as you add the spells on a tome you carry/own to your spellbook).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One thought I heard was to divorce dailies from being daily.. make the duration arbitrary number of enconters ie say 4 encounters .. call them inspired powers or lucky breaks the player can see the duration but his character would just feel that it works a little more often when life gets intense... and good thing too.

Yeah, its pretty easy to make daily powers into for instance 'chapter' powers.

 

[the Jester]

Meta-magic never leads to good things. Every single meta-magic spell that has ever existed in any edition of D&D was either horribly flat out broken or worthless, there is just no middle ground. At best (worst?) you get something that is BOTH worthless AND horribly broken. Meta-magic always sounds like a wonderful theory, and it would be possible for it to work in a game that was totally centered on using it (Ars Magica perhaps?) but it just doesn't work in a game like D&D.

While this is an interesting opinion, in my opinion it is completely wrong. I ran 3e from 1st to about 38th level. From 1st level (extended daze) to the very top (with maximized quickened disintegrates and the like), metamagic feats always had their uses.

Even in 2e, with the Tome of Magic spells, there were some useful things going on- I saw pcs use several (although I'd never say "many") of the metamagic spells to good effect, and I even had a villain that was custom built around metamagic.

 

[Saeviomagy]

The 15 minute workday is caused by an inability or unwillingness to manage risk and resources to increase the length of the workday.

Primarily said inability and unwillingness is an artifact of necessity (or rather the lack thereof). If you don't feel time pressure, and resting is a given, then there is no need to manage resources well: the 15 minute workday is the least risky and most effective tactic.

So in part it's the fault of the players for taking bad risks and not balancing resource consumption (not using dailies to mitigate damage, not spreading damage around the group, not using consumables), and treating the game-world like it pauses whenever they rest and in part it's the fault of the DM for allowing them to feel that way.

 

[Argyle King]

I'm somewhat concerned that builds without dailies will turn out to be more powerful.

Why?

While dailies are usually much stronger than encounter powers, being able to use a power more often usually results in more overall power when you look at the big picture. For example, compare magic items with daily powers with those which have encounter powers. Many of those daily powers are great, but getting one big bang versus getting extra bang out of your magic items every encounter...

 

[Saeviomagy]

I'm somewhat concerned that builds without dailies will turn out to be more powerful.

Why?

While dailies are usually much stronger than encounter powers, being able to use a power more often usually results in more overall power when you look at the big picture. For example, compare magic items with daily powers with those which have encounter powers. Many of those daily powers are great, but getting one big bang versus getting extra bang out of your magic items every encounter...

I don't think that looking at magic items is the way to go: the balance on those things is very swingy. There's lots of examples of encounter powers on items that are way more powerful than their closest daily equivalents at the same levels.

I think you'll find that within class powers, a good daily power is significantly stronger than a good encounter equivalent.

 

[webrunner]

Dailies represent those once-an-episode signature moves that they don't use more than once. There's usually no reason for them not to use them more than once an episode, and no reason not to use them right away, but that's the way it is.

 

[Argyle King]

I don't think that looking at magic items is the way to go: the balance on those things is very swingy. There's lots of examples of encounter powers on items that are way more powerful than their closest daily equivalents at the same levels.

I think you'll find that within class powers, a good daily power is significantly stronger than a good encounter equivalent.

True, but having more Encounter Powers rather than Daily Powers allows you to have more options available during more of the adventuring day. While an EP may not pack the punch of a DP, it's easier to use and recharge an EP and get that punch more often. Throughout an adventuring day, would you rather have one really good move which you can only use once or a slightly lesser move which you can use every fight? There's no doubt about the fact that Daily Powers bring with them an awesome amount of power, but it's debatable how much more powerful a Daily is versus some of the better Encounter Powers.


It will be interesting to see how the Essential Builds interact with things such as the Eternal Seeker epic destiny, the Bard (which allows easier multiclassing and power swapping,) and the Half-Elf feat (can't remember the name) which essentially does what Seeker does; just at Paragon instead of Epic.