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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5252334" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>The problem here is that you're working on the theory that powers are an explicit thing that exists in the game world itself. This is just not true. Powers are a mechanical device that the PLAYER has available to him in order to mediate his ability to take narrative control of the game.</p><p></p><p>In the context of the fighter he's just swinging away all the time attempting to do the maximum possible damage and best disabling tricks he's capable of every single round. The PLAYER has the option of stepping a certain number of times per encounter/day to alter the narrative of the story and say "this time when I hit the ogre its a crushing blow and does 3x normal damage". You can obviously fluff this in game that the character took an especially powerful swing, but that doesn't mean it was more powerful than the last 3 swings he made, it just means that in this particular case it connected especially well and that's a function of the player's narrative control.</p><p></p><p>You can look at wizard spells similarly in a lot of cases. </p><p></p><p>It simply isn't NECESSARY to have an in-game explanation of daily powers. They're a PLAYER resource.</p><p></p><p>Beyond that the concept of situationally better at-will powers is a recipe for problems down the road. It leads to the 3e kind of "I always trip/grapple/sunder everything" because any such conditionals WILL be exploitable. The right item or feat or whatever combination is required will lead to some condition being easily applied by the character ALL THE TIME. So what you end up with isn't a character that can pull off some extra tricks situationally, you end up with a trick monkey that repeats the same 1 (or 2 or 3) tricks every single round. It creates a really large hassle for the game designers too, because they have to insure that every time they add some new element to the game that could be combined with these at-wills in various permutations they have to insure that none of them can lead to this kind of abuse. It rapidly becomes impossible. If instead the super cool thing is a daily then its naturally limited. Even if its awesome and even if some feat makes it more awesome it still only gets to be used once a day, it doesn't create a one-trick pony. At worst it may need to be nerfed if it is really seriously overpowered. </p><p></p><p>You can see this in the game now. The worst abuses exist when players learn to trick out an at-will or a basic attack somehow (or figure out a way to make a less often useful power into effectively an at-will).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 5252334, member: 82106"] The problem here is that you're working on the theory that powers are an explicit thing that exists in the game world itself. This is just not true. Powers are a mechanical device that the PLAYER has available to him in order to mediate his ability to take narrative control of the game. In the context of the fighter he's just swinging away all the time attempting to do the maximum possible damage and best disabling tricks he's capable of every single round. The PLAYER has the option of stepping a certain number of times per encounter/day to alter the narrative of the story and say "this time when I hit the ogre its a crushing blow and does 3x normal damage". You can obviously fluff this in game that the character took an especially powerful swing, but that doesn't mean it was more powerful than the last 3 swings he made, it just means that in this particular case it connected especially well and that's a function of the player's narrative control. You can look at wizard spells similarly in a lot of cases. It simply isn't NECESSARY to have an in-game explanation of daily powers. They're a PLAYER resource. Beyond that the concept of situationally better at-will powers is a recipe for problems down the road. It leads to the 3e kind of "I always trip/grapple/sunder everything" because any such conditionals WILL be exploitable. The right item or feat or whatever combination is required will lead to some condition being easily applied by the character ALL THE TIME. So what you end up with isn't a character that can pull off some extra tricks situationally, you end up with a trick monkey that repeats the same 1 (or 2 or 3) tricks every single round. It creates a really large hassle for the game designers too, because they have to insure that every time they add some new element to the game that could be combined with these at-wills in various permutations they have to insure that none of them can lead to this kind of abuse. It rapidly becomes impossible. If instead the super cool thing is a daily then its naturally limited. Even if its awesome and even if some feat makes it more awesome it still only gets to be used once a day, it doesn't create a one-trick pony. At worst it may need to be nerfed if it is really seriously overpowered. You can see this in the game now. The worst abuses exist when players learn to trick out an at-will or a basic attack somehow (or figure out a way to make a less often useful power into effectively an at-will). [/QUOTE]
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