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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shardstone" data-source="post: 9611226" data-attributes="member: 6807784">I think the game should one day switch from Level to Tier play. You have 4 or 5 tiers, and powers in lower tiers are designed to largely only be useful at their power level and are swapped out for new powers or updated mechanics at higher levels. One big thing I think causes issues at higher level play is how features stack on each other. This is especially bad for spellcasters, as spells cast at higher level keeps old options useful, and limited high level spell slots means you have to keep track of your whole spell list instead of just having a tighter spell list adequate for your level of play.It's hard to solve this issue, even with my original idea mentioned above. Ultimately, players are going to want to hold on to one or two things throughout the entire career of their character. For martials, that's easy to achieve. Barbarians have Rage (and maybe Brutal Strikes too) in all tiers, and the rest of their abilities are specifically drawn from their tier. This would require immense changes in design philosophy; for example, something like Bear Totem would be good at all tiers, so you'd want to give that in higher tiers. In lower tiers, you'd want useful but not too useful powers, but that runs the risk of just being boring and unfulfilling (see early levels of PF2E or Symbaroum IMO).You could make it so you can choose to take some things from lower tiers and only use those, not taking anything in the upper tiers. So let's say that Bear Totem is tier 1, and tier 2 there's nothing that excites you or your character fantasy, so you keep bear totem. It would be important to not make Bear Totem scale with tier as IMO that would complicate the underlying logic here.With this model, you could make a T4 or 5 character and only end up with, say, 5-10 abilities (including spells) instead of 20-30+ from 17th level on.  You could also have an option where you can start with fewer abilities and sub them for magical items (which, imo, should take up an "ability slot" in this situation).This is something similar to what Daggerheart does where you have the VAULT and your HAND. The Vault is all your abilities, but your Hand holds what you can use right now, and you have to pay a price (either in that game's version of HP or in time) to replace an ability in your Hand with one in your Vault. This might be the better version of my idea, but I'm not sold on it definitively being so.Anyway, once characters are easier to design at upper tiers, designing challenges and stuff for them becomes easier too IMO. Yeah, the wizard might have Plane Shift and Teleport, but that's all they have and those tricks are only occasionally usable. That's easier to plan for then a Wizard with those spells + force cage, dominate monster, imprisonment, etc etc. Some might argue this makes the game no longer D&D, but I disagree.</blockquote>

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