Remove Daily Tracking; Massively Simplify Feat Selection

[Siberys]

GOAL: There are only three things I dislike about 4e; the glut of feats, tracking daily power usage, and tracking conditions. I've come to terms with the last, through the tools I use for tracking combat. The other two still bug me. I have two houserules, one to handle each.

RULE 1: Action points are not reset to one after an extended rest. Instead, they are set to 1 + 1 per Daily attack power + 1 per tier.

Daily attack powers can now be used once per encounter. However, using such a power costs one action point.

Players may use more than one action point per encounter, but may not gain additional Standard actions more than once per turn.

Note that this requires minor changes to a couple of paragon paths, and I think an epic destiny too.

REASONING: This moves the tracking of daily power usage from the powers themselves to AP, which I can track with tokens given to the players. With this, all I expect to track gamewise between sessions are AP, HP, and Healing Surges.

I figure a daily is about as powerful as an extra Standard action, so if a player wants to just forgo their daily they're getting a decent trade.

The + 1 AP per Daily attack power is pretty straightforward - that way a player can use their Daily attacks, obviously - but why the +1 per tier? Well, I didn't wanna make an exception for daily Utilities or daily Magic Item powers, so I figure +1 per tier would cover that. Not exact, but close enough for government work.

RULE 2: Feats are severely restricted. The current list I'm working with is basically the base multiclass feats, divinity feats (as appropriate), Dragonmarked feats (in Eberron), Ritual Caster, Skill Training, Hybrid Talent, and Proficiency feats. PCs get a free Expertise feat at first level, and Improved Defenses at 5th. I may increase the power of Skill Training or Proficiencies somehow, but that's not really the focus of this house rule.

Additionally, instead of taking a feat, a player may choose to gain an additional action point after each extended rest.

REASONING: The idea here is that most of the time, the player should choose to take the extra AP, and the feats they would take would be fairly major - strong mechanically, but with a short enough list to prevent choosing a feat from being a chore. This is inspired by the way feats are apparently looking to be set up in Next - or how the description would end up looking if I were at the helm, anyway.

Again, I'm playing kinda fast and loose with an AP's value. By some back-of-envelope math, I'm guessing an AP is approximately equivalent to a feat that gives a +2 to damage rolls (at first level anyways). Sounds reasonable to me.

So, thoughts on these?

 

[Quickleaf]

So a 6th level PC under this system might devote all feats (levels 1,2,4,6) to gain 4 extra action points after an extended rest. These action points can used to trigger any of their daily powers (of which there are only 2 to choose from). Only instead of having 2 daily power uses they now have potentially 6 (plus the one from the original action point), and they can use their 5th level daily all six times?

That's just crazy!

 

[Siberys]

That's assuming that there are at least 3 combat encounters in the day, and they never think to use the AP for extra standard actions, or for utility powers or magic items. And note they /can't/ use their 5th level daily each time; those work just as encounter powers, so they're once per fight. Given milestones, the earliest such a player could use all of their AP if they were only using it to pay for dailies is 4 encounters, with four uses each of their first and fifth level dailies.

And do remember this is at the expense of other feats; no Frost cheese, no dwarven Weapon Training, not even Weapon Focus. The AP is supposed to be very good, to facilitate dramatically cutting down on feats. I did the list last night; there are about 200 on my 'allowed' list, of which the vast majority are Multiclass feats or Divinity feats. The average character will only have a dozen options at feat time, of which one is gaining an AP. For the purpose of this, I'm using Multiclass feats as a power baseline, not normal feats, and Multiclass feats are very good (moreso in my houserules, because I basically package all of the power swap feats along with 'em).

Especially given my preference to only really use big, dramatic, important fights, I think this all roughly balances out. Definitely good, but not out of the ballpark.

EDIT: I should probably make getting that extra standard action a daily power that all PCs have access to, to prevent them from just dumping them all in one fight...

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=30619]Siberys[/MENTION] I see. If your intention with these house rules is to facilitate one or two challenging combats per day, then they should work fine. Having "de-limited" action points in a recent paragon-tier boss fight (each PC had 2 AP to spend in the encounter), I can say it's a major edge for the PCs because of force multipliers (warlords, paragon paths, feats that trigger on AP expenditure).

 

[Siberys]

I do have to refigure AP gain - I'd forgotten just how many feats a PC gets!

I think I'll drop feat gain once PCs hit Paragon tier. They can still retrain should a player want a feat for RP purposes - multiclassing, for example. That way AP'll max at 10 (11 for humans).

I'll go with setting the extra standard action as a Daily power, maybe with additional uses at paragon and epic. That way, players won't be able to spam AP in early combats.