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Discussing 4e Subsystems: POWERS!
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<blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 4541120" data-attributes="member: 114"><p>An aspect that you don't really touch on Stalker0, but is perhaps implicit in your discussion, is the apparent lack of guidelines for powers and levels.</p><p></p><p>With spells in 3e we had a pretty clear basic idea of the amount of damage appropriate to different spell levels, and a general idea of the appropriateness of effects from a long history of existing spells.</p><p></p><p>4e powers do seem to be all over the shop. As well as the wildly differing value of different powers at a given level, there are also some startling things that crop up when you look at powers which are almost identical but at different levels - e.g. the discussions on Cloudkill (19th) vs Stinking Cloud (5th), or Spiritual Weapon (5th) vs Mordenkainens Sword (9th). Nor does it seem to take into account the huge difference that weapon choice makes to W powers, compared to the fixed dice of the implement powers.</p><p></p><p>The conclusion that I've regrettably come to is that the developers didn't have a plan for the relative value of various effects, various damage levels, various durations and so on, and they just made it up as they went along, eyeballed it and decided it was "good enough".</p><p></p><p>You rightly say that the Powers subsystem is the most significant change introduced in 4e. Unfortunately, for me at least, it is the weakest and least fun of all the changes.</p><p></p><p>Cheers</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Plane Sailing, post: 4541120, member: 114"] An aspect that you don't really touch on Stalker0, but is perhaps implicit in your discussion, is the apparent lack of guidelines for powers and levels. With spells in 3e we had a pretty clear basic idea of the amount of damage appropriate to different spell levels, and a general idea of the appropriateness of effects from a long history of existing spells. 4e powers do seem to be all over the shop. As well as the wildly differing value of different powers at a given level, there are also some startling things that crop up when you look at powers which are almost identical but at different levels - e.g. the discussions on Cloudkill (19th) vs Stinking Cloud (5th), or Spiritual Weapon (5th) vs Mordenkainens Sword (9th). Nor does it seem to take into account the huge difference that weapon choice makes to W powers, compared to the fixed dice of the implement powers. The conclusion that I've regrettably come to is that the developers didn't have a plan for the relative value of various effects, various damage levels, various durations and so on, and they just made it up as they went along, eyeballed it and decided it was "good enough". You rightly say that the Powers subsystem is the most significant change introduced in 4e. Unfortunately, for me at least, it is the weakest and least fun of all the changes. Cheers [/QUOTE]
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