Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5421926" data-attributes="member: 2011">I've only seen this level of not being able to pay attention start to occur at low to mid Paragon where the number of individual player options (i.e. powers) starts climbing significantly.One helpful solution to this with core 4E is to hand out very few items that have Powers associated with them. The Common, Uncommon, and Rare guidelines help out with this a little. If a player has 4 items at level 10 with powers instead of 7 items, that's 3 fewer Powers listed on his character sheet.Another thing to do is to follow the guidelines on PC advancement. If the PC advances too quickly, some players might start getting overwhelmed with new options before they have had many chances to see the Powers gained from the previous level.The theory that Essentials streamlines the system is mostly (but not completely) dependent on which Essentials class one plays and which powers one picks.For example, the 10th level Mage has 3 of each type of power (At Will, Encounter, Utility, and Daily). A 10th level core Wizard only has 2 At Will powers, so he has one fewer power, but he has one additional encounter class feature. The Mage also gets bonus abilities at various levels that the Wizard does not get, but most of these are static that just add into the character sheet. With Mages being able to use any Wizard spell, nothing has really changed with respect to complexity and hence, streamlining.The 10th level Thief has 9 Utility Powers (backstab can be used twice per encounter, but it is still just one power), and 0 At Will Attack, Encounter Attack or Daily Attack powers. 9 powers is fewer than the 11 of the 10th level Rogue but the player of the Thief doesn't have to worry about saving or using Daily powers. So although the Thief has fewer total powers, every single one of them can be used at least once in an encounter and often more than once.In reality, the Thief (like the Mage) has more usable every encounter (and sometimes every round) power options (9) than his 4E counterpart the Rogue (who has 8).The minor streamlining for the Thief is twofold. One, he doesn't have Daily powers to worry about. But encounter in and encounter out powers that he uses, he has one more of those than the Rogue. The player still has a lot of powers and hence options to be aware of.Two, some Rogue encounter powers can Daze foes or give penalties to foes or whatever. Most Thief powers tend to give advantages to the Thief himself. The player keeps track of the bookkeeping for his PC, the DM and/or players do not have to keep track of the extra bookkeeping for multiple NPCs (which NPC was at -2 to the end of the Rogue's turn?). However, this is a choice. A player of a 4E Rogue can pick powers that do not put conditions on foes and hence can be about as streamlined to play as the Thief in this regard.And, the Thief powers can have the same questions associated with them as you posed. Is the power an Immediate Interupt, or an Immediate Reaction? The same scenario that you posed of interrupting the DM 30 seconds after the fact can occur with Essentials.So Thiefs can be slightly streamlined over Rogues in this regard, but do not have to be. Mages are not especially streamlined over Wizards. It depends on which Essentials class one plays and which powers and abilities one picks.There are also some specific streamlining that can occur with Essentials like Fighters having an Aura instead of a Mark. In a one hour combat, that can save a minute or two of total bookkeeping time. But again, the streamlining gain is fairly minor.</blockquote>

Verification