I like encounter powers and rituals but not at-wills and dailies

[Sadrik]

The drawbacks of removing at-wills would be that you force people into using weapons and spending ability score points (or good rolls) on abilities they normally would not need. This can have side effects like combat taking longer, since once Encounter are gone, the character is down to weaker attacks.

I am not sure this would be the case. By the rule you would have 2 additional encounter powers. Encounter powers are much more powerful and would knock out a lot more creatures faster early. A controller for instance would actually be pretty good under this system imo, they could hit multiple creatures with spells that are actually do more than scratch them. Letting the defenders and strikers clean em up. So despite the wizards INT based limitation they are actually contributing more with three encounter powers than they would with a myriad of crap at-wills. This could revitalize the controller role.

You will want a way to countermand this. You might want to be more generous with ability points or allow using "non-standard" ability scores.

Possibly, on the other hand, lower the arms race for some and you might wind up with characters that are not auto 18 or 20 - even the classes who use STR and DEX. If a 16 or 18 is good enough for the wizard and the paladin then it may also be good enough for the rogue and fighter too. It could foster a lowering of the arms race.

Tangent - Having a high stat is just so powerful in 4e at low levels. The difference between having a +3 and a +5 (a +2 difference) is huge considering feats give you a +1 bonus in most cases. I think the feats were designed poorly and basically contribute to 4e stat bloat.

A different idea I had would require a lot of work, so it's more "academical". Basically, over the tiers, characters become more "magical", so to speak. You start off as a pretty martial character, but depending on your class, you might get an arcane or divine encounter or daily power. At Paragon Tier, Mages and Clerics finally get their first arcane/divine At-Will, and at Epic Tier, all their At-Wills are divine or arcane.

But I think this would both disrupt the role and the power source system (the latter not such a big problem in my mind, the first one would be.)

I also think this would be a whole sale re-write of the 4e. Not really an option. Thanks for the comments.

 

[Garthanos]

I also like your condition idea, after using a daily you take on a condition or a couple damage or something. Perhaps create a condition that is simply - "you may not use any powers on you next round." In a 12 round combat, not being able to use a power for a round is a hit. But if the at-will are gone this is not really that bad because you will only be able to use so many powers anyway.

Conditions / Implications are rather cool.
How about a Loa style mage class there dailies might allow them to become posessed but they can only do this a pretty limited amount because using it more results in memory loss, ie from the players point of view lossed experience points.

In context... how many gold pieces is an experience point worth? I was also considering a ... 3.5 flash back where certain insane mages imprinted rituals on their own mind (like a scroll) ...which also resulted in experience point loss ;-) but much faster ritual casting.