One of each at will per class.
Thief - Sly Flourish/Basic Ranged Attack (Striker)
Fighter - Steel Serpent Strike/Basic Ranged Attack (Defender)
Cleric - Righteous Might/Basic Ranged Attack (Leader)
Wizard - Magic Missile/Basic Ranged Attack (Controller)
???
Ow.
I'd appreciate a little more variety in basic attacks. I assume there's only one "thief" build - sly scoundrel. (Incidentally, the "thief" doesn't have Sly Flourish, so I'm guessing that's a rogue with the wrong name. But that's a miniscule issue.)
The cleric and wizard are the ones I have the biggest issue with. I assume the cleric is using Righteous Brand (even if it's called Righteous Might)... so where's the option for Lance of Faith? The wizard is even worse; no AoE at-will and no controlling at-will like Ray of Frost.
With basic attacks, at-wills, encounter, utility, daily's and magic items all added together by 10th level, most PC's have a LOT more than 10 options.
I keep forgetting about magic items.
The 15 minute adventuring day! I forgot about that one. File away as a "secondary" benefit of this format. Everyone has encounter powers. 15 min adventuring day is TOTALLY gone, you can game, and game, and game, it all resets with EACH room/encounter. I left it out, but they have an energy component in HoN that needs to recharge before you can start your next adventure. Energy seems like something totally pointed at a CRPG. No random/wandering encounters. This is a GOOD call out, at least insofar as it would add value to a story.
Perhaps, but
if you can't heal between encounters, it's still promoting the 15 minute day.
The 15MD is caused by two factors, one being daily resource management, and the other being not controlling for that. In 2e and 3e, the daily resources were spells and hit points (spells being the best way to restore hit points). In 4e healing surges and daily powers are the daily resources instead, with encounters giving PCs a "bridge" for when you are tapped out of daily powers. Even so, 4e can have a 15MD issue, if the players always want to be at full-strength and try to take an extended rest after every encounter.
Fortunately, there are ways of dealing with this. "Random encounters" are a bad name but a good concept; they don't have to be "random". They just have to be present but unaccounted for, and can show up repeatedly to threaten PCs who insist on resting too often. Naturally, multiple simultaneous encounters can take on groups that have holed up and are resting after only one encounter, on the grounds that you're supposed to face X encounters per day, and you will! And then there's time-relevant plot events, etc. The problem can be solved, but it's still there to
be solved.
When you say "reset", do you mean you full heal between rooms? Because if hit points are a
daily resource, you still have the 15MD issue. After an encounter or two, PCs will want to hole up and heal (and apparently nothing stops this, although that's a video game issue and not a 5e issue). On the other hand, if PCs are essentially getting an extended rest between each room, then each encounter is a day, and each encounter power is really a daily power.
Out of curiosity, did you play in the 1e days?
No. I started with 2e.
I did, and it was different then. You had very little access to magic items.
Same in 2e IME.
Making them more rare made them more magical.
2e made no attempt to balance magic items. More modern game systems have to take that into account. If you have three parties, one with magic items below the standards, one with items at the standard, and one above the standard, you're going to have a problem. I use inherent bonuses in my campaign in part to minimize the issue.
I'm not saying that in 1e or 2e you didn't get enough items, or you always got too many, I'm saying
you couldn't tell because item balance wasn't in the rules. I would expect a 4e or 5e game to take that into account. Perhaps it's best to make items rare for flavor and balance reasons, or perhaps everyone should be festooned with level-appropriate items, but either way I expect the game designers to pick a standard. (I would prefer fewer items myself, but the most important thing is for item distribution to be
predictable by level.)
You played to SURVIVE, and if you did, you kept what you earned.
XP vs other rewards. IMO the reward was gaining XP. Items were just ... there. (In 3.x, it got worse, since you
had to have items.)
The difference between 1, 3, 6, 10 was CLEARLY noticeable, but wasn't THAT BIG of a deal.
I don't see how having a difference in THAC0 and hit points of 9 and, say, 45 hp, could be considered a small deal. That's huge, even without taking items into account.
If you had a party of a 4th, 2nd, 2nd, and 1st level characters, it was not "Monte Haul" to have a 4th along with you on the adventure. Was he better? A little. BUT you would NEED it because you could face more difficult challenges and a few bad dice rolls were tough to overcome. That level 4 character had EARNED every stripe, XP, and magic item he had access to, in the meantime.
This is a completely different way than I'm willing to play. Having a higher level PC in the group just made the game less fun for others. (Or should I say "higher XP" because in 2e, some classes took more XP than others to gain levels.)
I would not support a game or edition that encouraged that, and that's completely apart from magic item issues.
