Daily Powers Linked to Milestones

[Vyvyan Basterd]

How balanced do you think it would be to tie Daily powers to milestones achieved? My initial thought would be that your characters would start the day with no daily powers available to them, but each time they achieve a milestone their daily powers would all refresh. The obvious downside is that you'd start without dailies, but you could also earn multiple uses in a single adventuring day.

Thoughts?

 

[Locutus Zero]

You'd need to consider the balance of including utility dailies or not. I think you'd have to exclude them or you would create a balance issue between daily utils and encounter utils.

You'd also have to make sure all the characters have the standard AEDU setup. If you have Essentials or Psionics in there, it's going to be tough to come up with a system that balances well with all setups.

All that aside, it would create odd restrictions on what you can do as a DM. You can't put the big boss fight at the start of the day, because the players will want to use their dailies.

If your goal is to extend the adventuring day, you will probably get about one extra encounter out of this setup. Healing surges tend to be the bigger day-ender in my experience. Maybe each milestone you get a daily refreshed OR one (or two) healing surges. Even better, a number that scales related to how many surges you start the day with. 1/4 max surges rounded down, or 1/6, or something.

 

[the Jester]

Uh... no, I don't like it.

Too much 'meta' involved in deciding whether to keep going or not. I'm not quite sure what this would fix or improve. If the goal is to push for a longer adventuring day, I'd look at recharging a couple of surges per milestone or something.

 

[TirionAnthion]

Daily Powers and Milestones

I allow my players to recharge one used daily power at each milestone. If they have not expended a daily power then they don't get one back. In my games this has not seriously unbalanced the game and has a tendency to make the players use daily powers more often. This speeds up combat somewhat and overall it has went over well with my groups.

I also allow players to recoup a healing surge at each milestone. I use things that cause the players to lose surges throughout my adventures so the extra boost helps to keep them going. These two little tweaks have went a long way towards eliminating the 15 min workday.

I also should note that my groups tend to be filled with casual players many who don't even read the rules closely. They rely on me to explain how the rules work. They usually come to me to interpret the meaning and usage of powers. Some of them gamed with me in the 2e days and much of our rules at the table were left to DM interpretation. A more dedicated group with rules savvy players may find ways to exploit these house rules.

I do not use this system for Encounters, however, as I tend to run those much closer to RAW. This helps keep some of the confusion factor down for new players.

 

[Quickleaf]

I guess this is like an adrenaline / limit break rule, the idea being that the PCs are only at their best when the chips are down and the stakes are high. As the fighting/conflict intensifies, they begin to pull out their big guns. In martial arts films it would be setting up that perfect move (which has nothing to do with a 24 hour period or an 8 hour rest!).

IMHO it could better model games where there are a small number of combats per day (say 1 to 4) to avoid NOVA syndrome. I don't see it as a lure that would directly influence players to delve deeper into the dungeon *right now*; rather it removes one aspect of meta-game thinking (eg. if we don't rest I can't do cool stuff I've already done). Instead not resting is no sweat, as long as the party is doing ok with healing surges.

I actually think this might balance fine with essentials, because it would have the effect of normalizing daily use (unless one could *store* dailies gained at milestones) to 1 daily power per every 2 encounters or so. Essentials classes - at least the martial classes - are more normalized in terms of DPR. A limit on how many dailies can be used in a given encounter could slightly lower DPR while giving more staying power.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Limiting daily use this way means a few things, some of which don't make a lot of sense:

With the right party set up, the party are likely to be much more effective after 6-8 combats than they were when they were fresh for the day.

It also means that if you're low on surges and camped outside what you reasonably suspect to be the final room, you go look for some unimportant mooks, or a skill challenge to start the day with.

It also encourages you to dump dailies every single encounter on the grounds that you may never recharge them all anyway.

It also ignores the fact that even amongst the AEDU classes, some have drastically different weights on different powers. Rogues won't miss getting their full complement of dailies all that much. Wizards will feel it keenly.