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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8952074" data-attributes="member: 6790260">There is a major difference between cleaning up the crap powers (of which there are sadly a lot, one of the most valid criticisms of 4e which you will basically never hear) and smushing every power source's powers into a single common list. Likewise feats. By the end of 4e's run, there were a ton of pointless, dull, or just weak feats. That's not always the designers' fault, sometimes they implemented the same idea in more than one way and one of those ways was Just Better (e.g. the Essentials expertise feats are actually interesting and not just dull number goes up stuff.) But a lot of them just...they aren't designed as badly as 3.x feats were, but they aren't nearly as good as they should be.The thing is, you basically can't avoid this "problem" of having lots of powers, because "power" is the word for "actions a character option can perform." Classes give them. Themes give them. PPs give them. EDs give them. Some feats give powers all on their own. For God's sake, items give powers! Add those up, and yes, you're going to get a large, large number of powers; it is unavoidable because of how utterly baseline the concept of "powers" is. To limit them too much would be equivalent to saying that you can only have a maximum of (frex) 100 class features to spread across all 13 of 5e's classes. That's only 7-8 class features per class, counting subclass features AND spells. It's just not feasible.For 4e, we can get an idea of what a good "slimmed down" amount of powers should look like by setting some rules for reasonable limits. Class alone (excluding Essentials which did its own thing here) provides some kind of power 21 times (several of which are replacements of lower-level powers.) Of them, 2 are AW, 7 are E, 7 are D, and 5 are U. It is reasonable to say that, for each of these choices there should be at least one "generically good" option, and typically but not necessarily always one option for every "build" (baseline class feature choice) the class has. The number of builds varies between classes by quite a lot, but 2 is always the minimum and 3-4 is usually common once a class gets some support. So I think 4 is a reasonable limit here, and we'll say 75% of the time there's a build-specific power for any given choice, meaning there should be about 4 powers for every E/D choice and 5 powers for AW.That gives 5+4×(7+7+5)=81 powers per class typically, though really the function is 1+X(1+7+7+5)=20X+1 where X is the number of builds for that class. If we keep at least 20 classes (granting that some, like Seeker and Runepriest, could be folded into existing classes as build variants), then we should expect about 20×80=1600 powers from baseline class growth. And this is with fairly conservative numbers, I hope you'll agree. If we want to preserve the fun synergy between class features and powers, we need to be open to what SOUNDS like a lot of powers, because powers do everything.*But that 1600 doesn't include special features like Channel Divinity, Wizard Cantrips, baseline class features (Marks, Warlocks' Curse, Rangers' Hunter's Mark, Leader encounter heals, etc., etc.), PPs, EDs, items, or feats. PPs and EDs only provide a few powers each typically speaking, but there are hundreds of the former and dozens of the latter. There are likewise hundreds of items with item powers. Feats which directly provided powers are uncommon, but they do exist. Add all that up, and yeah, we probably should expect on the order of 3000-4000 powers in a solid, condensed rework of 4e that trims the fat while preserving the meat. For comparison, the actual number of powers in 4e across literally everything (as far as I can tell) was 9409. So aiming to cut out around half to two thirds of all powers is a relatively reasonable goal, at least by the numbers; we should expect if to be extremely hard to preserve the essence of 4e with something less than (say) 2500 powers, simply because of how much we'd want to keep.*Even if we made it so only every other choice offered build-specific powers, the above equation would only change to 1+20(0.5X)=10X+1. Using the previous 20 classes with 4 average builds each, that adds up to 20(1+10×4)=20×41=820 class powers. Add any more class ideas, like how I wanted to expand Shadow into something of a "monsters" power source with a Werebeast defender, a Necromancer Leader, and some kind of psionic or charming Controller e.g. Demon or Devil or Mindflayer, and the whole thing grows along with it.</blockquote>

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