Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="RyvenCedrylle" data-source="post: 4544197" data-attributes="member: 66726">AFAIC, the main problem with the powers system is the fact that they're pre-packaged. The brilliant part, on the other hand, is that the designers did an excellent job working out tiers of increased damage and effects that are easy to copy and reverse-engineer. The mechanics should have stopped right there and allowed the players to roleplay combat as in previous editions with a token-like system to increase the to-hit bonus, damage, or collateral effects of a particular chosen action. To be more specific, each character would have five level-dependent additional statistics. Let's call them "At-Will Output," "Encounter Efforts", "Encounter Output", "Daily Efforts" and "Daily Output". The "Efforts" indicate the number of tokens useable per encounter or day (total number of encounter/daily 'powers' basically) and the "Output" is a numerical value indicating the amount of damage or type of rider effects allowed on a given attack. For instance, I am a fighter and I want to attack a foe's leg to slow him down. I have an At-Will Output of 1, Encounter of 3 and Daily of 5. At-Will 1 gives me no ability to hamper a target really. If I choose to expend an Encounter Effort, I can do 1[W] and slow until the end of the target's next turn. If I blow a Daily, I can do 2[W] and slow until end of next turn or 1[W] and slow until save. Each non-spellcasting class has their own unique table of Output to effect/damage conversions. Spellcasting classes list spells by required Output to cast. I am currently writing a system that does exactly this, although it uses a 3-dice "Risk" sort of mechanic for conflict resolution (combat AND non-combat) and so it requires no table. It might be possible to reverse-engineer this into 4E (more or less) such that you crush the at-will, encounter and daily powers into triads. You'd have, say, 4 powers at first level - each power has an at-will, encounter and daily variant. At most levels, you pick up a feat or another encounter or daily "token." Occasionally, you gain a new power or access to another set of better at-will/encounter/daily triads. I think perhaps this last option would have suited me better for 4E.</blockquote>

Verification