Encounter powers are dumb.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 10:15 pm

At least, if they're done like they are in 4e. In 4e, you're always going to spam your big nukes and then grind the mob to death. There's no time in which you're going to say, "Gee, I guess I shouldn't use my encounter power this fight," and that's stupid. It's pretend resource management. Sure, there's the crappy "five minutes of rest" to recharge them, but that's not going to matter 95% of the time.

In order to make encounter powers not suck, I can think of two main solutions:

1. Give them drawbacks: is it worth it to hit every adjacent foe this round if your attacks and defenses take a penalty next round?

2. Make them tactical choices: no bonus damage or anything that flat-out makes them superior to other choices. Instead, they need to be situational or otherwise have tactical aspects to them. (If you can completely negate an opponent's attack, do you want to use it against the bad guy's next hit, or do you want to "save" the power to use against a stronger attack and trust the healer to keep you conscious until then?)

Thoughts? Suggestions? Other ideas?

koz · Post by **koz** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 10:17 pm

You forgot option 3: call a spade a spade and make them at-wills, because otherwise, the system sucks. Even with that change, it still sucks, but just a little less.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 10:38 pm

I was actually considering this. At-wills are minor actions to use, encounter powers stay the same but are usable at-will, and dailies are encounter powers.

MartinHarper · Post by **MartinHarper** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 11:24 pm

Maybe if you don't use your encounter power, you get your hitpoints back without needing to spend a surge?

koz · Post by **koz** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 11:26 pm

Psychic Robot wrote:I was actually considering this. At-wills are minor actions to use, encounter powers stay the same but are usable at-will, and dailies are encounter powers.

That would go a very long way toward making 4E less stupid, actually. After that, all you need to do is make each class actually do something meaningfully different and have it scale sensibly. Oh, and bring back noncombat stuff.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sun Feb 08, 2009 11:45 pm

Mister_Sinister wrote:That would go a very long way toward making 4E less stupid, actually. After that, all you need to do is make each class actually do something meaningfully different and have it scale sensibly. Oh, and bring back noncombat stuff.

...It's really just easier to house rule 3e.

Any other thoughts on how encounter powers should work, though? (Outside of 4e, mind you.)

Naszir · Post by **Naszir** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 1:10 am

What if:

Encounter powers cost 1AP to use after you use them once in an encounter.

Daily powers cost 2AP to use.

koz · Post by **koz** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 1:24 am

Naszir wrote:What if:

Encounter powers cost 1AP to use after you use them once in an encounter.

Daily powers cost 2AP to use.

Since no-one can spend more than 1 AP anymore ever, this system does not work.

Naszir · Post by **Naszir** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 2:09 am

So make an exception for daily powers. PR is already trying to house rule.

JonSetanta · Post by **JonSetanta** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 5:33 am

Psychic Robot wrote:I was actually considering this. At-wills are minor actions to use, encounter powers stay the same but are usable at-will, and dailies are encounter powers.

Might be a decent fix. I expect some breaking when X and Y powers are combined for some truly cruel stunlock in the very same round, while originally they would not, but those aspects can be tweaked.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 5:30 pm

I like encounter powers. It's kind of not a bad idea to tell people they can use something once per battle, because it leads to people using more of a variety of attacks, instead of just spamming the same attack over and over again, which would be the case if everything was at will.

Good at will attacks are generally bad for the game, especially for a game as simple as 4E. Because then people just pick the best one and keep doing it.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 6:13 pm

RC2: Why not just give them a variety of at-will attacks?

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 6:49 pm

Psychic Robot wrote:RC2: Why not just give them a variety of at-will attacks?

Because then there's not any incentive to use different attacks. You take your best one and spam it. Especially in 4E, there's really no reason to mix it up at all. You find the power with a stun effect or that deals the most damage and you just keep mashing the X button.

It's possible maybe if you had a lot of debuffs that last the entire combat that you could use them first and then get to your damaging attacks. But still you're just not looking at a lot of tactical variety.

spasheridan · Post by **spasheridan** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 7:05 pm

IMO a good way to make it an actual resource management system would be to give the PC access to all of the powers for each encounter slot. In each fight they can use 1 of the level X encounter powers.

Now you have choices that are interesting.

You can also keep the encounter powers "better" than the at wills because they are not something you can spam every round.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Mon Feb 09, 2009 7:22 pm

RandomCasualty2 wrote:Because then there's not any incentive to use different attacks. You take your best one and spam it.

I was assuming that one would have a variety of choices available, and the "best" wouldn't always be clear.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 3:18 am

Psychic Robot wrote: I was assuming that one would have a variety of choices available, and the "best" wouldn't always be clear.

The problem is that 4E is such a simple game, ti's pretty easy to determine which is the best.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 4:43 am

Right, right. I didn't make clear that I meant in a not-bad game.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 5:12 am

Psychic Robot wrote:Right, right. I didn't make clear that I meant in a not-bad game.

Also keep in mind that while that level of strategic depth is technically possible, it's very hard to create.

There are two ways of approaching it.

D&D Chess: This version is going to have long combats and assumes that you know your foes pretty well. You actually need quite a bit of thinking ahead and countermoves, and you must know your enemies capabilities. This is a very hard game to set up, but would actually be damn awesome if it could be done.

Puzzle Quest: Somewhat easier to make is the puzzle monster approach, which makes this a bit easier possibly, but the drawback is that your strategic depth is lost unless you constantly introduce new puzzle monsters. Once they realize that the Snow Pudding is killed by lightning, they'll just lead right off with their lightning attacks. So the puzzle game relies on constantly creating new monsters and new puzzles, because once you know the answer there's no challenge anymore.

Convoluted Math: This one isn't really a system so much as an attempt to make the math and system so complex that it's difficult to tell what's best. This is actually bad game design, but works for many systems to disguise bad mechanics.

But really, those are your main choices if you want people to select different at will attacks in combat. Otherwise the answer will pretty much be obvious.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 7:45 am

Pretty much. And I don't really think D&D Chess is super viable because ideally the DM isn't playing the monsters to win, he's playing them in character to provide challenge and enjoyment. Chess sort of loses its charm when only one player is trying to win.

Everything else comes to resource management schemes. Spending the future for bonuses now, building up for larger later attacks, Making the most of unpredictable resources of short notice, and so on. Charge casting is a relatively uninteresting and repetitive resource schema. You use your charges as early as possible in any confrontation where you intend to use them at all, and you try to reset your charges as often as possible.

-Username17

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 8:28 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Pretty much. And I don't really think D&D Chess is super viable because ideally the DM isn't playing the monsters to win, he's playing them in character to provide challenge and enjoyment. Chess sort of loses its charm when only one player is trying to win.

That just requires playing in character for a monster to be the same as trying to win with it. Please imagine I'm doing air quotes around the word just.

Bigode · Post by **Bigode** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 11:07 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Pretty much. And I don't really think D&D Chess is super viable because ideally the DM isn't playing the monsters to win, he's playing them in character to provide challenge and enjoyment. Chess sort of loses its charm when only one player is trying to win.

If you limit how many resources you deployed for yourself, you can play to win without actually having much of a chance. I.e. lower enemy CRs enough in 3.x and you can do whatever you want and be happy with how close you came to winning - which, BTW, various people have said benefits player enjoyment as well. Hence, yay D&D Chess.

MartinHarper · Post by **MartinHarper** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 6:47 pm

You could also get players to change at-wills by having battles change mid-stream. Every bad guy has a transformation sequence at half health, every set of minions starts to run away at low health, every army assault gets reinforced by the marines at 3pm. It's still easy to pick the best at-will, but it does mix things up a bit. It also rapidly becomes unbelievable.

SunTzuWarmaster · Post by **SunTzuWarmaster** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 10:25 pm

Martin, you can mix those tactics enough to where players don't think that you are doing it.

Monsters have a number of 'lose' options, for instance:
Retreat (run)
Retreat (run + get reinforcements)
Retreat (fall back and make traps)
Retreat (to behind a trap/spell)
Surrender (for realz)
Surrender (switch sides/defect)
Surrender (and still be in the way)
Surrender (to save skin)
Surrender (lie about it and strike from the shadows later as a captive)
Hide
Run (sell player info to enemy)

You can fairly easily use all of the following over the course of the campaign to change up a combat/adventure mid-stream without the players realizing that you are doing it.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Wed Feb 11, 2009 1:28 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Pretty much. And I don't really think D&D Chess is super viable because ideally the DM isn't playing the monsters to win, he's playing them in character to provide challenge and enjoyment. Chess sort of loses its charm when only one player is trying to win.

Yeah, for D&D chess to work, you'd have to adopt a lot more of an adversarial set up between PC and DM, at least during combat, such that the DM is trying to win.

But if you really want a minigame that complex, then it may not be a terrible change to do so. D&D is already very gamist anyway.

The problem with D&D chess is simply making the game balanced and fun. Most deep strategy games are based on equality, not inequality, however inequality is a staple of RPGs. It's not swordsman versus swordsman, it's swordsman versus dragon or swordsman versus giant. Sometimes it's 4 PCs against 1 dragon, or 15 goblins against 4 PCs. It's like imagining chess where someone could drop their bishops for 4 knights, or change 2 rooks into a second queen, or even someone with a board of just 24 pawns. RPGs pride themselves on having a variety of situations, but you really need to account for all of these situations and make the tactics interesting.

However, you also need the game to be simple enough such that the DM can run his side quickly, yet it also has to be deep enough that there's thinking involved.

That's hard to do.