Review this House rule!

[Grimmjow]

In fairness to the old school, you did not forget simple stuff. They were still in your spell book. You had a limit of how much you could keep in your head. I support the "flex option" rather than let them use all encounters the ever learned every encounter.

Couldn't you limit the number of encounter powers they can use per encounter and the number of daily powers they can use per day? They'd be more flexible, but the power jump would be a lot less.

Ya I'm thinking of putting a limit by finding out how many encounter powers and daily powers they should have at their level, and then saying "from the encounter/daily powers you have now you may have X ready for today" which i guess is sorta like the old school, but the problem i had with old school is not that you would forget the simple stuff, but that after you cast a spell, you would forget how to cast it again until you sit and study it again. Now i may be wrong about that, but that is how it was explained to me and i dislike it.....alot

 

[fba827]

the two issues that jump out at me are:
1) power level. each pc will be proportionately more powerful as they have more dailies and encounters that they can use in place of at-wills (which are considerably less powerful than most dailies and encounters)
2) decision paralysis. i don't know what your players are like, but i do know some players where the more choices they have, the longer they take on each of their turns as they have to weigh every option when their turn comes around. so it could lead to slower turns (if for no other reason than to read all the choices even if not taking long to decide on the choices).

of course, if you're willing to accept those issues then in of itself i don't see it as a huge deal.

Having said that, if it were me and i accepted the premise that older stuff should still be available, then i would probably do what was suggested up above, you have your regular encounter and daily slots but you just have more to choose from (maybe you don't need to decide ahead of time and can make the choice as you use that slot; or maybe you do have to decide ahead of time). I would opt to do it this way to avoid the power increase issue because with an increased power level i'd have to reevaluate any encounters from the default assumptions, and i might not always have that time or motivation.

as an aside, i don't know if you noticed it (and i think someone else said it above in this thread) for many (but not all) encounter/daily powers that you would 'forget' there are actually similar higher-level versions of it that you could learn (doing more damage or adding a slide or going from melee to close burst 1, etc). So if your PCs choose those upgraded versions it isn't that you're forgetting it but rather you're just learning how to cast it more powerfully.