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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imban" data-source="post: 3973708" data-attributes="member: 29206">Anime influence: Almost certainly not actual anime influence, but geez, that Dwarven Full Plate Mail on p31 of Races & Classes reminds me a lot of Gundam mechanical designs. This probably came about because blocky, geometric designs are apparently the Dwarf thing. I don't actually expect anime-influenced art in 4e outside of Eberron, which seems to tend that way on occasion.Videogame influence: While yeah, rewriting your character if you didn't like it was common in many actual play experiences, and unofficially (Hi Drizzt!) a part of D&D for a long time, it's one of the few things in 3e that seemed definitely imported wholesale from video games to me. It was also a patch on 3e's heavily prerequisite-based system, however, so I appreciated it. I agree with Kamikaze Midget that the "videogamey" thing being talked about here is the lack of verisimilitude: EQrpg, which attempted to heavily model EverQuest the game in d20, had bits of hilarity such as entire tribes of kobolds that started at CR 19, with a sidebar stating that, well, it's more fun in EverQuest that way. Likewise, while "free" healing powers that can only be used in an ongoing combat may be balanced and fun in gameplay, they're usually quite damaging to verisimilitude, since healing is something people want to do all the time.(Well, either that or heavy constraint on player actions - the game rules totally making everything other than direct combat the realm of plot devices, for example - but the released info makes it unlikely that 4e is going in this direction.)What you described isn't per-encounter at all - it's just an energy bar. Energy bars (including ones that recharge automatically over time) have been around forever, as you correctly note. Per-encounter abilities are actually relatively unique, and based around "cooldown" rather than cost. I can't think of anything outside Tome of Battle and 4e that functions primarily like this. Certainly, per-day abilities in Neverwinter Nights sometimes behave like this, what with the 20-second rest, and some few abilities in Guild Wars and suchlike have cooldowns such that they can effectively only be used once in a normal combat, but the per-day/per-encounter/at-will setup for abilities in 4e is, to the best of my knowledge, unique to it, or close enough that I can't produce an example of prior art.</blockquote>

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