X/day mechanic; what's the problem? (Mercule, looking your way...)

[swrushing]

Well, lets just say that I personally nor my players have ever thought of a rather abstract pool representing some sort of heroism to be a conceptual hurdle.

nor have mine, but they likely would if it were tied into, organically linked to, or even necessary for using a specific class ability.

IE the pool stops being about exceptional heroism when it becomes a mechanical crutch for basic, defining class abilities, as described here...

Right, but you also have that option if you give the players some pool like action point or resolve or whatever to stretch their limits, but which lack the "wiff factor" annoyance...

So I feel I can satisfactorily get rid of the SOD problem without importing the "damned dice" problem by using a limited resource pool like action points.

with a die roll thingy, the action dice become a "part of the usual mechanic".

On the other hand, were one to let the "more times per day" not be a die roll but a flat out "spend action point, get an extra use" then it remains an "exceptional heroism" kind of thing and is not something you might need to just use the ability normally.

i typically allow action dice/action points to give my guys an "extra use per x" as a general thing.

 

[Mercule]

It's not any less arbitrary. It's just mroe abstract and less "in your face", and thus (to me) less of a SOD-breaker.

Agreed. I like action points. They may be x/level, but they are so incredibly abstract and intangible that they don't intrude on the SOD at all. My group tends to forget that APs are useful for anything more than boosting a d20 roll or auto-stabilizing before dying, so the +1/day mechanic had totally slipped my mind. That actually takes the sting out of it a bit -- although I'd still rather have an alternative.

As has been pointed out, RPGs involve some trade-offs. The x/day mechanic is one of these. The core x/day things don't really bother me too much. I don't much care for the mechanic, but I understand the trade-off. The sudden metamagic feats represent that "one step too far", though. I'm not sure exactly the way to say it, but it pushes it to the point that I want to say, "Hey! Wait! Don't propigate and rely on this mechanic. Start looking for a better way to handle it in 4E." I guess it stops feeling like a trade-off and starts feeling like a crutch.

 

[woodelf]

As I said, I can see where some of the flavor objections come from. But I'm still not convinced there are any viable alternatives. I don't like a whole mess of "roll to see if they work" abilities; it slows things down, and it means someone having a bad night has become useless. And as was said, when would the "increasing difficulty" reset?

IMC, supernatural 1/day abilities reset at a given time--i.e., the cleric's turn undead resets when he gets his new spells--while nonsupernatural ones like rage reset when the character sleeps. It seems the most logical way to do it.

Well, if your goal is to get rid of the arbitrariness, and funny break points (like raging six times in a 2-hr period, because it starts at 11pm (or whatever), then it doesn't reset, it dissipates. So, for every, say, hour that you don't use the ability, the DC to activate decreases by 1, or something like that. Otherwise ,you still have the insta-reset problem at midnight (or dawn, or whatever).

An excellent example of this is the Psychic's Handbook, which uses strain--essentially non-lethal damage--as the currency of psychic abilities. Whenever you use one, you incur strain. If you run out, you're done, but it recovers on an hourly basis. So, with judicious temporal spacing, you might get more uses of a power than a spellcaster gets uses of a spell. But in a crunch, you might run out quicker. And so on.

IMHO, that's exactly the sort of thing that is a much better regulator of special powers than an X/day hard limit.

 

[Mokona]

So, why do you object? And--rather than sharing any of my own notions to start with, since they're pretty off-the-top-of-my-head, and since I don't object to the X/day)--what would you folks suggest as an alternative?

Now that we've seen Mouseferatu listed in the credits on Tome of Magic for WotC I wonder if any of the discussions in this thread will show up in that book. Of course, D&D might consider the x/day mechanic a sacred cow.

 

[Psion]

(whoops... it didn't occur to me this was threadomancy.)

 

[Mercule]

(whoops... it didn't occur to me this was threadomancy.)

I'd totally forgotten about it. I saw my name in the title and that it had two pages and thought, "What did I do, now?"