Replacing Powers

[Falling Icicle]

Looking at the Powers by level chart, here: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20080416a one thing particularly stuck out to me - you replace encounter/daily powers as you go up in level. A 30th level character has lost his 1st, 3rd, 7th and 13th level encounter powers and his 1st, 5th, 9th and 15th level daily powers. Interestingly, a character retains all of his utility powers forever (thank the gods for that, at least).

The question I ask is why? Does it really hurt anything to let people keep their lower level powers? I really don't like the idea of losing powers, especially when you get so few of them.

 

[BarkingDeathSquirrel]

Looking at the Powers by level chart, here: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20080416a one thing particularly stuck out to me - you replace encounter/daily powers as you go up in level. A 30th level character has lost his 1st, 3rd, 7th and 13th level encounter powers and his 1st, 5th, 9th and 15th level daily powers. Interestingly, a character retains all of his utility powers forever (thank the gods for that, at least).

The question I ask is why? Does it really hurt anything to let people keep their lower level powers? I really don't like the idea of losing powers, especially when you get so few of them.

Some higher level powers are likely just "better" versions of lower level powers, or at least that's the idea behind it as I understand it.

Still, allowing characters to keep all their power doesn't seem to introduce too many extra powers into the balance and might not disrupt the game too much...

 

[Fallen Seraph]

Well... I dunno, this is out of left field sorta. But what if those numbers represent how far-up you can pick Powers from.

So for example, level 30 Encounter Powers:

P, 27, 23, 17

P: Pick any Paragon encounter power

27: Pick any encounter power up to level 27

23: Pick any encounter power up to level 23

17: Pick any encounter power up to level 17

 

[Falling Icicle]

Still, allowing characters to keep all their power doesn't seem to introduce too many extra powers into the balance and might not disrupt the game too much...

Agreed. I don't think knowing 25 total powers instead of 17 at level 30 is going to break the game. That's still alot fewer spells than a Sorcerer knew at level 20 in 3.5, and Sorcerers had the least number of spells known of any core class.

 

[small pumpkin man]

Looking at the Powers by level chart, here: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20080416a one thing particularly stuck out to me - you replace encounter/daily powers as you go up in level. A 30th level character has lost his 1st, 3rd, 7th and 13th level encounter powers and his 1st, 5th, 9th and 15th level daily powers. Interestingly, a character retains all of his utility powers forever (thank the gods for that, at least).

The question I ask is why? Does it really hurt anything to let people keep their lower level powers? I really don't like the idea of losing powers, especially when you get so few of them.

It seems to work kind of like ToB. Some powers are worth keeping at high levels (White Raven teactics, many stances are still helpful at high levels). Some are just High level versons of lower level powers (like the tree of healing powers, or the tree of con damage powers). Maybe one in three powers just get "left behind"*.

Replacing powers allows you to keep the amount of options down, keeping the amounts of "things" a player has to keep in their head or on their character sheet to minimum, since lower level encounter are still more powerful than at wills, and daily powers are still more powerful than lower level encounter powers, keeping old powers around will require either rebalancing or having everyone use the Wizards "preperation" style, so I ask you, what do you feel is the benefit of keeping the old powers around?

*Statistics made up on the spot, may not be representational of anything in particular.

 

[Falling Icicle]

Replacing powers allows you to keep the amount of options down, keeping the amounts of "things" a player has to keep in their head or on their character sheet to minimum, since low level encounter and daily powers are still more powerful than at will powers, keeping old powers around would require either rebalancing or having everyone use the Wizards "preperation" style, so I sak you, what do you feel is the benefit of keeping the old powers around?

Well, a 20th level Sorcerer knew 45 total spells, and I don't recall anyone ever complaining about them knowing too many. Besides, assuming you played that character from level 1, you gained each and every power gradually, giving you plenty of time to get used to each power before gaining another. By the time you reach level 30, those 25 powers shouldn't seem like that much at all to keep track of. You should be intimately familiar with each and every one of them.

I suspect the reason they did this is just because they wanted to make sure characters still run out each battle, forcing them to conserve and use at-will powers. Maybe they thought 8 encounter powers (assuming you get to use each one once) would be too much. This could have been solved by limiting you to 4 encounter powers per encounter, but maybe they thought that would be too complicated. In any case, I expect that letting players keep their old powers will be a common houserule.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Looking at the Powers by level chart, here: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20080416a one thing particularly stuck out to me - you replace encounter/daily powers as you go up in level. A 30th level character has lost his 1st, 3rd, 7th and 13th level encounter powers and his 1st, 5th, 9th and 15th level daily powers. Interestingly, a character retains all of his utility powers forever (thank the gods for that, at least).

The question I ask is why? Does it really hurt anything to let people keep their lower level powers? I really don't like the idea of losing powers, especially when you get so few of them.

The idea is to keep the number of choices that players have to make smaller to avoid their turns taking too long. If you have to decide between 15 powers or between 30, deciding on those 30 is going to take longer.

Plus more powers mean not having to ration resources. If a battle lasts 6 rounds and you have 10 per encounter powers, you just need to decide which one to use each round and whether or not you should switch to a daily or not.

If you have a battle lasting 6 rounds and only have 4 encounter abilities, then you might not want to use one first round in order to save it for another round when it would be more useful. It adds a more tactical element to the game. It encourages hard choices by giving you less choices.

Plus, versitility is a power all its own. If you have the ability to fly, teleport, disintegrate walls, tell if someone is lying, do ice damage to an area, do fire damage to an area, do ice damage to a single target, do fire damage to a single target, push enemies, pull them, teleport them, stun them, immobilize them...and so on all at the same time then even if you can use only 1 of them a day, when you use that one use it will be the most useful thing you can do that round.

If you have the ability to fly and do ice damage to multiple targets you might not use either in a ground battle against one enemy. Thus, it limits your power simply by limiting your versatility.

 

[small pumpkin man]

Well, a 20th level Sorcerer knew 45 total spells, and I don't recall anyone ever complaining about them knowing too many. Besides, assuming you played that character from level 1, you gained each and every power gradually, giving you plenty of time to get used to each power before gaining another. By the time you reach level 30, those 25 powers shouldn't seem like that much at all to keep track of. You should be intimately familiar with each and every one of them.

Well, except that they're trying to make high level work for characters who are just making their 26th level characters, something that was actually quite annoying for all spellcasters in 3.x, people didn't really complain about Sorcorers because Wizards were so much worse, but stating up a high level Sorcorer was still a pain, even if ToB are actually worse. However if you don't care about that then sure, there's not much difference between 20 and 45.

I suspect the reason they did this is just because they wanted to make sure characters still run out each battle, forcing them to conserve and use at-will powers. Maybe they thought 8 encounter powers (assuming you get to use each one once) would be too much. This could have been solved by limiting you to 4 encounter powers per encounter, but maybe they thought that would be too complicated. In any case, I expect that letting players keep their old powers will be a common houserule.

Maybe. The system is new and strange enough for most people that I expect this and changing their powers to work a bit more like Sorcorers or Wizards and less like ToB characters to be relatively common, I also expect many people to stuff it up a bit.

On a side note, whenever people talk about how they expect something to be a "common house rule" I tend to cringe a bit. How many house rules were really "common" in other editions? I know that if I go from my game to my old DMs game to a couple of other GMs around I've seen, or look at the many "my house rules" thread, the only consistant house rule that I can remember has been "something to make hp less random". Everything else tends to comes down to personal preference and is incredibly variable.

 

[FadedC]

I suspect that they may want to keep your at will powers useful as well. If you have say 8 per encounter powers, each of which is stronger then your basic at will power....then your unlikely to ever use a non encounter power unless the fight is really long.

And of course the second reason I suspect they did this was simplicity. Some people were saying characters could already get pretty complex just at like lvl 7.

 

[hong]

Looking at the Powers by level chart, here: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4ex/20080416a one thing particularly stuck out to me - you replace encounter/daily powers as you go up in level. A 30th level character has lost his 1st, 3rd, 7th and 13th level encounter powers and his 1st, 5th, 9th and 15th level daily powers. Interestingly, a character retains all of his utility powers forever (thank the gods for that, at least).

The question I ask is why? Does it really hurt anything to let people keep their lower level powers? I really don't like the idea of losing powers, especially when you get so few of them.

It is to avoid the problem of picking stuff that looked good at the time, but turns out to be crappy 10 levels down the track.

You do not solve this problem by just giving out more stuff, because expectations change. If I have N powers, then the expectation is that those N powers will all be useful. Not that (N-M) of them are useful, and M of them are crappy powers that I picked because I didn't know any better. This holds for any value of N.