Not forgetting old powers, anyone tried it?

[Samurai]

Forgetting old powers and replacing them with higher level powers (even to the point of them being magically erased from a Wizard's spellbook) has never sat well with me. (Note: I'm not talking about Retraining, I mean replacing low level powers with higher ones at Paragon and Epic levels).

Has anyone played without replacing the old powers? It would create a longer list of Encounter and Daily powers for a player to keep track of, but I think those lower level powers might still be of some use instead of having to resort to At Will after At Will. I'm seriously considering implementing this idea, but I wanted to hear others' thoughts and experiences with it first.

 

[DeadPlatypus]

I'm quite curious about this too, but my party is still level 3 right now, so I can't test it out yet. I'd like to know if it's viable to never forget your old powers.

 

[Masquerade]

It might work for your group, but I wouldn't want to try it. My 11th level group has more powers than needed already, especially once you factor in magic items!

 

[DeadPlatypus]

Actually, it may not be that good of an idea... Encounter Powers wouldn't feel so special if you used them every round.

 

[Marius Delphus]

I would start out by instituting a limit on the number of Encounter powers usable per encounter and the number of Daily powers usable per day equal to what the characters are *supposed* to have by the RAW. Apart from that, the only problem I see is that everything will take more time as players mull over their options, and there will be more recordkeeping as players have to validate the number of powers they use against their limits.

 

[eloquentaction]

I see this as almost a move back towards the Vancian system that 4E was supposed to get rid of.

I just don't see a reason to keep a power once they've upgraded.

You might consider, however, rewriting the ORIGINAL powers to scale the characters current level and then change the swap ability to a 'scale power' ability.

Thus, the character would never forget a power, but would learn a more powerful version of it, instead.

This way you keep the realism you're looking for, and keep the same balance as the current system.

Note that the players would lose some of their current ability to re-tune their characters, however.

-- Hirahito