Forked Thread: How would you have done 4e's Powers?

[Knight Otu]

And with utility powers... I would change the distinction between attack and utility powers - into a separation of attack (well, obviously attacks), defence (stuff like shield) and utility powers, meaning you can put more out of combat powers (like Astral Speech) into the utility category, as they have to compete less with the more combat-related utilities).

You haven't read my notes, by chance?

 

[mmadsen]

Use only effect powers. Powers that do effects and get activated under certain effects.

Can you expand on that, xechnao?

 

[Shadeydm]

For starters I would have liked it much more if they made daily powers for spell caster types only. Perhaps this could have been balanced by giving the sword swingers an extra encounter power or two. I just don't like the flavor of daily martial powers at all.

 

[justanobody]

For starters I would have liked it much more if they made daily powers for spell caster types only. Perhaps this could have been balanced by giving the sword swingers an extra encounter power or two. I just don't like the flavor of daily martial powers at all.

Good point. It kind of seems like when a "martial power user" can't use a power he is probably too weak to continue fighting at all. Like Boromir after getting shot with the arrows barely swinging at thin air.

 

[Rel]

Here's my house rule (cut and pasted from my "How I Fixed 4e" thread)

Powers - Generally speaking I'm cool with the powers based nature of 4e combat. I like the way many of them work and how they synergize among the party members. However I do think that they can have the potential to get a bit repetitive over time. I want to introduce the ability for PC's to break out of the rigid constraints of the powers once in a while in ways that they think are cool. In short, I like rules that let you break the rules on occassion.

My answer is Action Points. If you want to do something that fits the general theme of what your character should be able to do then spend an Action Point and I'll let you modify one of your Daily powers to do it. If your Cleric of Moradin wants to call upon the god of the mountains to cause a section of the cave to crumble down and block the pursuing Drow, spend an Action Point and a Daily power and you can do it. If your Ranger wants to shoot away the supports on the rope bridge and send the Orcs tumbling to their doom, spend an Action Point and a Daily power and let fly! If your Fighter wants to call upon every ounce of his strength to lift the boulder off of the trapped child, spend an Action Point and a Daily power and you're a hero. If the Wizard wants to use his magic to animate a statue and have it attack on behalf of the party, Action Point and Daily and he's in business.

Now certainly this is going to require a bit of adjudication. The animated statue may not last very long or may not do a lot of damage but I'm willing to let the PC do it if that's important to the player. That's what I'm there for as the GM! I adjudicate stuff! So long as the players understand that I don't really want to haggle about this, I think we'll be ok. They want to do something amazing. I'll consider whether that seems reasonable and fun and then let them know if it's doable. Simple as that.

 

[Lord Xtheth]

When I first heard about 4e breaking the classes down into archetypes I was hoping for somthing very different than what we see now.

I was hoping that every archetype would have a big list of powers and manuvers to chose from and you get to "cherry-pick" How you want to play your character.

Ie. You want to play a martial character so you roll up your stats, pick a race, pick your skills and BOOM there's every martial power at your disposal, you only get to pick so many you can use in X amount of time (At will, Encounter, and Daily) but you get more options as to how your character acts.

I thought multicalssing would allow you to branch out into the other archetypes powers. It would even work with the currant feats, just re-word them a little bit an viola, you get truly personalized characters.

Maybe I was thinking too much about True20 when 4e came out.

 

[WhatGravitas]

Ie. You want to play a martial character so you roll up your stats, pick a race, pick your skills and BOOM there's every martial power at your disposal, you only get to pick so many you can use in X amount of time (At will, Encounter, and Daily) but you get more options as to how your character acts.

While conceptually appealing, there's something I dislike about handing out a lot of powers - the fact that players, as they're usually people, have a limited working memory capacity - you can only keep track of so many things at once. Sure, you can compensate that by making the player memorise their powers better or by listing them - but since characters change a lot, I don't think that's a good way to handle it, because memorising and lists slow down. With a limited set of powers, you have most of your stuff on your mind - because I frankly hate these situations that go along this line: "oh, I forgot I had this power, this could've changed everything!"

It's not fair to punish players for not learning every possible power they have.

However, I do think that 4E doesn't use enough of your memory space on lower leves, leading to monotony easily - the lack of a 1st level utility is most aggravating! Only attacks on 1st level... Not happy with that.

Tying in with my post above, I'd rather try to diversify the powers by giving them out faster than 4E does it (with no traditional multiclassing, frontloading isn't a problem any longer) and making powers more modal - like a fire spell can produce a fireball or a scorching ray - and so on. But I wouldn't go a lot above the upper limit of known powers, usually.

You could still keep track of them pretty easily - as I totally embrace the use of power cards - but you'd get a lot more variety, add in the interactions with other powers (again, see my post above), the powers could get a lot more interesting that even a limited set of powers has a host of different applications.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Plane Sailing]

How would you do the 4e power system to do it "right".

I've got several ideas

Option 1: Import talents and force powers (renamed mystic powers) wholesale from Star Wars Saga Edition. I believe the Gneech has already done a lot of work on this approach.

Option 2: Turn martial dailies into encounter powers; double the damage done by implement daily powers. Essentially make 'daily' an prepared spell kind of thing, but make it more powerful to balance giving the martial characters their 'super encounter' powers.

Option 3: Possibly included with option 2. Turn 'implements' into weapon equivalents, so that different weapons have different bonuses to hit and/or damage dice. e.g. wands get +1 hit and do -1 die size. Orbs, rods and symbols are +0 hit and do standard die size. Staffs are 2H weapons requiring 2H for wielding, and are +0 hit and to +1 die size. A scorching burst from a wand would do 1d4+int, from an orb would do 1d6+int and from a staff would do 1d8+int - the staff might be favoured by multi-damage-dice attacks, the wand might be favoured for attacks where you want to land the hit to get the effect, and orbs are already great.

Option 4: Rework the system so that as you progress into paragon levels you can turn some of your heroic encounter powers into at-will and heroic daily powers into encounter powers. At epic levels further promotion would become available. (this is the least tested idea, even as a thought experiment, but it is something I'd quite like to see!)

Cheers

 

[Fifth Element]

You want the 2 dailies first, then take them first. It just means you have to make sure you are picking the right thing as a player, rather than the game telling you the "right way" to play it.

Wait, so 3E characters getting feats at certain levels, and spellcasters getting access to spell levels at certain levels is 3E telling you the "right way" to play the game?

So each class needs its own system for gaining powers, IMNSHO.

I think I agree. The classes do seem a bit too unified in that way. But I haven't played 4E yet, so maybe it won't make a lick of difference to me.

 

[Minigiant]

One more thing I'd do it simplify the damage dice. 3E's 1d6 per level was nice. You knew what the average damage of your attacks/spell easily and knew what damage was expected at that level. But 4E is all over the place like they just picked up some dice it or something. Same with the [W] powers.

It would be nice if there was a nice pattern with a few exceptions rather than "this power deal 2d8 damage, that one 1d10, and this one 3d6.".