D&D 4E Question about Daily Use Items

[Jhaelen]

1) PCs lose their daily item power use limit. This is good because many powers are both necessarily daily, but yet too trivial or limited to be worth spending resources on. Items with these powers in the old system were generally useless and it greatly constrained the item design space.

Quite true which is why I was quite interested about this change.

E.g. my character has boots of spiderclimbing which I never use because I also have a staff implement with a daily power that can be used to increase the area of effect of a power.
The latter is often decisive to win a combat against overwhelming forces while the former is very situational and often only needed outside of an encounter.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have to admit that I never understood the rationale behind some of the "daily power" and/or encounter power decisions the designers made, and that isn't limited to items.

Somebody once explained to me that allowing more than one Fireball during an encounter would be unbalancing. Now it never seemed to unbalance any previous version to allow stuff like that, and it doesn't unbalance Pathfinder, but somehow it will just destroy 4e.

Did this ever get changed ?

4e lacks charges on items, so in 4e if you say got a Wand of Fireball (IE one fireball per day) that's OK, but since you can MAKE that wand you could have 12 of it eventually. Whereas having one extra FB per day is OK, or having an AD&D-style Wand with 20 fireballs EVER in it is OK (you'll regulate use of it yourself), having 12 a day doesn't work. The original solution was to just bake a limit into the PC. The current solution is just to take away the ability to enchant items (and then give a very restricted little bit of it back in the form of common items). Either strategy works, but you have to pursue one or the other.

There were other problems as well with the old way. For one thing a lot of rather trivial powers become rather nasty when spammed. There was a horn for instance that would immobilize enemies and push them or somesuch, nothing really all that thrilling but if you larded the whole party full of the things you could just shut down entire encounters with a couple uses. The whole item had to be banned because it wasn't worth being high level yet it was too effective in numbers. In the new system that item could as well have an encounter use power as long as the DM never gives out more than one of them. This is a much more open item setup.

As for the "no selecting the same power twice" the idea is to avoid one-trick PCs where the character or the entire party is built around using the same one or two powers again and again. Given the low degree of party interaction in tactics in previous editions this was less of a concern, plus wizards without at-will and encounter powers were more constrained in terms of spamming out spells, they usually didn't cast every round or often had to use low level spells just to manage resources, so you would be unlikely to see fireball after fireball in one encounter.