PCs With Recharging Abilities... Why Not?

[Pbartender]

So, in the thread about the Devil preview, these two posts caught my eye...

Because of the recharge line, though, the Trident can only be used every other round (-ish).

So the claw comes back in the picture.

Right. I'm liking this approach, myself. In action movies, you never see a sword weilder using his biggest home-run style swing over and over. He's mixing it up with pommel strikes, thrusts, and even a punch or kick. I think the recharge times on good attacks will emulate this effectively. You just have to get on board with it mentally. Instead of thinking, "Let's see if my good attack has recharged" you have to think "hopefully an opening will happen this round and I'll get to use my good attack". To me, that's what the recharge number reflects.

I like that point view... Both the idea that a recharge ability forces a monster to mix up his attacks, and that from a martial perspective the recharge can be viewed as waiting for a good opening to use the ability.

And so now I'm thinking... Why hasn't this been applied to PCs?

Wouldn't this idea be perfect for actions like Trip and Disarm? Things that you want let characters be able to do more than once an encounter, but you don't want them doing it every round. Why not just make them at-will actions that "recharge".

 

[catsclaw]

Why hasn't this been applied to PCs?

How do you know it hasn't?

 

[Pbartender]

How do you know it hasn't?

I don't, of course...

However, we've seen quite a few previews now of 4E characters, and to my knowledge (anyone, please correct me if I'm wrong) we haven't seen any recharge abilities for PCs yet. I am presuming that, A) recharging is meant to be used for those abilities that should fall somewhere in the frequency between encounter and at-will for whatever reason you care to use, and B) Trip and Disarm are widely regarded, both by game players and game designers, as falling within that category -- not quite specialized enough to limit to once per encounter, but often too powerful to be used on an at-will basis.

That we haven't seen any recharge abilities for PCs yet, and that Trip and Disarm, arguably the two PC actions that could most benefit from the mechanic, aren't using it, says to me that recharge abilities either aren't be used at all for PCs, or aren't being very widely used.

 

[Henry]

How do you know it hasn't?

It's possible, but all the stuff we've seen from pregens suggests it's not, otherwise at least one of the pregens would have had it; plus, I think a designer did speak about deciding not to go with recharge abilities on PCs for some reason or other, but I'm blanking on where and when.

 

[Benimoto]

I believe, based on a post by Mearls, that this idea was tried and then ditched. He said that it just turned into PCs using their best rechargeable ability, spending the next turn doing whatever they needed to do to recharge it, and then using it again.

I think the idea is just to give PCs enough abilities that there's no need for an ability between at-will and per-encounter frequency. Personally, I suspect that we'll start seeing rechargeable abilities sometime during the lifetime of 4th edition, as the designers grow bored with the existing powers.

 

[DandD]

Also, I think that PCs will have far more abilities than the NPCs or the monsters to chose from. While the monsters only need to have some few distinctive things, the player characters can or may use several at-will, encounter and daily abilities, the higher level they are.

 

[Pbartender]

He said that it just turned into PCs using their best rechargeable ability, spending the next turn doing whatever they needed to do to recharge it, and then using it again.

I don't entirely understand this... "whatever they needed to do to recharge it" just requires the player to roll a six-sider at the beginning of his turn, and hope he gets lucky. It's not as if recharging requires the PC to take a special action.

So, sure, I might use my best recharge ability as often as I can, but while I'm waiting for it to randomly recharge, I'll likely have several rounds in which I can use my other recharge abilities -- or one of my many at-will or encounter abilities.

But maybe that's just me.

 

[I'm A Banana]

And so now I'm thinking... Why hasn't this been applied to PCs?

Wouldn't this idea be perfect for actions like Trip and Disarm? Things that you want let characters be able to do more than once an encounter, but you don't want them doing it every round. Make them at-will abilities that "recharge".

Yeah, I made this point in one of those early Trip threads, too. It seems infinitely better for my believability to have a "recharge" that represents waiting for an opening (the element of luck!) than to have a hard and fast "once per five minute" rule on things you can do.

Part of it might be the quantity. If you've got 10 different encounter powers, and you're rolling for each one to recharge, that's a lot of extra rolling. In fact, the extra rolling might be all of it -- more rolls does slow down the game. Monsters, in comparison, might only have an ability or two that is recharged, so they're easier to manage.

Still, I like the feel of the recharge better than the hard-and-fast per encounter rules...

 

[Benimoto]

I don't entirely understand this... "whatever they needed to do to recharge it" just requires the player to roll a six-sider at the beginning of his turn, and hope he gets lucky. It's not as if recharging requires the PC to take a special action.

Ah right, well I wish I could remember where I saw it, but I think he mentioned it the context of many of the D&D Miniatures creatures, who have powers that recharge under specific conditions.

I'm not sure how I feel about random recharges for PC abilities.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I don't entirely understand this... "whatever they needed to do to recharge it" just requires the player to roll a six-sider at the beginning of his turn, and hope he gets lucky. It's not as if recharging requires the PC to take a special action.

So, sure, I might use my best recharge ability as often as I can, but while I'm waiting for it to randomly recharge, I'll likely have several rounds in which I can use my other recharge abilities -- or one of my many at-will or encounter abilities.

But maybe that's just me.

I think this recharge note was related to the Bo9S style recharges, where every class had a different mini-game. They abandoned each of those approaches.

For some reason I think that the Recharge-ability powers might not be available for PCs, but it's more a gut feeling then anything that can be tracked back to a specific designer post.
What I can see is magical items with this ability, though I think they want to use milestones for this purpose.