Fixing 4E Power System

[Lago PARANOIA]

I can sort of see where they were going with this but the execution is just utter ass. For one, until you get to about level 11 or so you're not going to have enough powers for an encounter. And worse, the scheme encourages the 5-minute workday we all hate.

So you know what? Here are the base changes that I am going to recommend.

Player Characters from now on gain Focus Points. You need Focus Points to use your powers. Every round you gain a number of them determined by your character tier and you can only stockpile so many of them at once. From now on, there's no such thing as at-will, encounter, and daily powers. They shall henceforth be known as Basic, Medium, and Strong powers and cost correspondingly higher amounts of focus points.

Certain actions in combat like rolling a natural 20 on your first attack roll, using a second wind, aiding another, and so-on add to your focus points.

Here's the kicker; when you use the power, you can't use it again until you take a special action to recover all powers of that group. For the basic group, it's a move action. For the Medium group, it's a standard action. For the Strong group, it's a full-round action.

The general idea is that in the heroic tier, characters will generally use a pattern of Basic -> Medium -> Strong -> Medium -> Strong.

I'd also like to get into the idea of iterative attacks but that's another discussion.

[fliprushman]

This just doesn't really work well with DnD 4e but more like Bo9S 3.5.

[Aktariel]

Aigh. Why on earth do you want people to keep track of points? I don't really like the current system, but it's a hell of a lot less math than what you're proposing.

If I want to keep track of pools of points (Focus points or Chakra points or whatever the hell), I'll go play Iron Heroes.

[Draco_Argentum]

I didn't see anything in your proposal preventing people from going strong > strong > strong. Unless you're only going to let people have one strong power.

[Talisman]

Here's the kicker; when you use the power, you can't use it again until you take a special action to recover all powers of that group. For the basic group, it's a move action. For the Medium group, it's a standard action. For the Strong group, it's a full-round action.

Agree with Aktariel: points seem unnecessary and mathy. I like the idea behind the above mechanic, but you could just tie it to the current At-will/Encounter/Daily power mechanic (and rename them to Weak/Moderate/Strong if you so desire). A major problem is that you burn through your encounters and dailies in a hurry, and are forced to grind through the monster's remaining 180 hp with at-wills. Some sort of rechange mechanic - a non-random-die-roll recharge mechanic - would help a lot.

Since my game crew wants to experiment with 4th Ed , and since I'm probably the most critical system-wise, I've been pondering something like that. Say, spend a standard action to recharge an encounter power; spend a standard action + a healing surge to recharge a daily. The reason for the healing surge cost is that, otherwise, everyone gets their daily powers for every encounter, and the best option is seriously Daily > Recharge > Daily. "Always use your best attack" is boring tactically.

[Username17]

The way 4e's hit points accumulate, you can't really give an action cost to regaining powers without it becoming a no-brainer or a never-used ability.

Simply put: it takes a lot of hits to drop any enemy. To the point that spending 2 actions to do double damage is really directly equivalent to spending one action to do normal damage, because you literally do need to do more than twice as much damage. So if spending one action to regain the attack and one action to use it is bigger than just attacking twice, you'll just do that. If it's smaller, you never will.

As it happens, Encounter Powers that are worth taking have a tendency to do a small amount of extra damage and cause enemies to lose an action. Which of course is directly equivalent to the action you lost to get it back. So instituting such a rule would just cause the battle to nominally take twice as many rounds to resolve and the players would inflict a marginal amount of extra damage on their attacks (like seriously one extra d8, or close enough).

4e's powers are shitty, and manipulating the power structure generally makes them even more shitty.

-Username17

[ckafrica]

WOuld it be possible to create powers that would only work in conditional situations?

THings like: you've got to be above the opponent, the opponent has to be bloodied, you have to be grappled, etc...

The idea being that instead auto blasting your best ability, your have to set up your thwacoom abilities.

[JonSetanta]

I don't like the Focus Points. Stick with actions since you have a good variety.