How many activated abilities before it gets confusing?

[OgreBattle]

So D&D characters have the swift/immediate, move, standard actions (plus AoO's). That means you can do around 1-3 declared actions per round, and an encounter is usually made up of 1-6 rounds.

So how many activated abilities should you have to feel like you have options but not get bogged down in fiddly accounting? 'Course this varies from class to class and choices are made at different points such as divine casters prepping a dozen spells from a list of hundreds.

D&D4e set the limit at level 20 to:
-2 at wills (3 for humans and half elves)
-3 encounters
-3 daily
-5 utilities
-1 racial power
-2 paragon/epic powers? I don't remember exactly

That's 16 things you can do at the start of your first day's encounter. But there's also feats you can take to gain more powers and items also have activated powers. It felt like too many to me, but that's largely because the powers didn't feel very different from each other and having 3 uses of 1 useful ability would've been better than 3 uses of things that almost do the same thing but differ in invisibly fiddly ways.

[Blicero]

Before you get a real answer for this question, you're going to have to put a baseline on how decent your expected player is at system mastery. Otherwise there really is not answer.

I knew people who played 4E and would consistently just use their basic attacks because the at-wills were too hard to keep track of. My current group plays Legend, and more than half of them are not capable of keeping track of the 5-8 things they can perform some subset of any given round. As the MC, I'm usually capable of running 5-8 Legend characters at once, although it can be difficult to play them super optimally. But I find it very difficult to keep track of both the characters I'm running and the player character's abilities.

That being said, there are a lot of threads here about option paralysis and the like. A lot of them were from the Winds of Fate era, as I recall.

[tussock]

It's not 16 choices though, really. You shouldn't be using at-wills until you're out of encounter powers, and should be roughly dropping 1 daily per fight, ideally strait away for maximum impact, unless you've got a go-to encounter power that stays up all fight or something.

1: Daily (3 choices, 4 if you might skip it for your best Encounter power).
2-4: Encounters (~2 choices, you use the higher level ones first).
5+: At-Wills (2 choices, but really there's only 1 most times).

With the Utilities, items, and so on sometimes acting as extra encounter powers that are usually worse than your real ones. Some characters might need to shuffle an area-effect at-will to the top of the list to clear out minions, but not every fight. Paragon gives encounter or daily powers within the 3/3/5 limit.


Now, some players totally reverse that order, which is weak play but they do it anyway, and that still leaves them with about 2-4 choices per round. And you (OB) felt like you should be considering everything every round, but that's wrong too.





Anyway, besides that bullshit, the number of choices people can handle and still feel good about afterward is 7+-2. Where it's smaller for things you're new to and bigger for things you're an expert at. Noting that a lot of people don't even want to be an "expert" at D&D, they're just hanging out between work hours.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magica ... _Minus_Two

[shadzar]

1

look at AC to understand why. does DEX apply now? is my shield ready or not? which magic item actually it granting AC?

it gets even worse when you are doing stuff because all the affects tacked on and status of this and that from this and that.

[Cyberzombie]

The problem mostly comes when you have a series of very similar abilities with similar roles.

Having an ability to let you fly or an ability to let you teleport probably doesn't cause many problems. People call on those abilities when they feel they need them and it's relatively obvious. It can get problematic if you have excessive buff stacking, but that's another issue not related to action paralysis.

Where you run into problems is when you have have three abilities that are single target attacks and each having some slightly different stats and you create more action paralysis. The question of do you want to do 5 more damage or prevent the target from moving from its square is one that's going to cause people think more. Because now you need to know if perhaps that immobilization will help your buddy flank or something similar.

[ubernoob]

//

[Ice9]

Five choices can be plenty when they're all actual choices. But sometimes the scenario eliminates some of your choices.

For example, let's say you've got Web, Scorching Ray, Hideous Laughter, Vampiric Touch, and Cone of Cold. That sounds like five fairly diverse choices, so that's plenty right?

But you're fighting skeletons in close quarters. So actually, you're just spamming Scorching Ray. Which sucks.

So - it seems like a fine line to walk. Personally, I would rather sometimes have too many choices than other times have too few. But that's going to vary by person.

[ubernoob]

//

[ishy]

Surprisingly enough, different people want different amounts of choice.

Some are happy with only having the ability to smash things in the exact same way, and others like many options.

Luckily you can make different classes to appeal to different people.

But it ain't just about the numbers. What the options do matters more. When you're juggling complex options, most people want fewer options.
If your options don't really matter and/or are really similar people get bogged down.
If you mix at-will abilities with long cooldown abilities (like dailies), many will get bogged down (do I use my ability now, or when I really need it)
etc.

[Kaelik]

No uber, Ice9's point is a good one, and it is simpler than that.

You can't say "what is the right number of choices, 7? Okay, everyone gets 7 abilities ever." Unless you are going to never let anyone or anything be immune to anything. Since that is a boring shit game, it won't happen.

So when making choices, you have to take into account that things will be reduced by circumstances. His list of spells is diverse, and that is the point. Because even diverse lists become extremely limited with very little situational modification.

[ubernoob]

//

[Red_Rob]

So how many activated abilities should you have to feel like you have options

1

[Seerow]

No uber, Ice9's point is a good one, and it is simpler than that.

You can't say "what is the right number of choices, 7? Okay, everyone gets 7 abilities ever." Unless you are going to never let anyone or anything be immune to anything. Since that is a boring shit game, it won't happen.

So when making choices, you have to take into account that things will be reduced by circumstances. His list of spells is diverse, and that is the point. Because even diverse lists become extremely limited with very little situational modification.

Pokemon works pretty well with having outright immunities be few and far between. Not that I disagree with the overall point. And my point about starcraft is that it isn't an absolute number, but a grouping thing. If you only have up to five choices at each point of the decision tree, and you have three mini decisions to get to your final decision, you can have 125 abilities without going into analysis paralysis.

In Pokemon though, you have 24 different abilities at the start of the match, even ignoring options like "Switch to a different pokemon" which is what literally makes up the majority of the metagame.

[RadiantPhoenix]

In multiplayer Pokemon, you have at most nine options at any one time:

• Move 1
• Move 2
• Move 3
• Move 4
• Pokemon 2
• Pokemon 3
• Pokemon 4
• Pokemon 5
• Pokemon 6

EDIT: Okay, I guess 2v2, 3v3, or other exotic battle types might have more.

[TiaC]

Items can add a lot more options.

[Lokathor]

Not in multiplayer pokemon they don't.

[...You Lost Me]

I'm not sure if Pokemon is a good comparison to make. The multiplayer isn't really how D&D plays and the campaign can be super-variable: I used no items, no grinding, and spammed my way through the game using whatever was super effective for 3 generations, but I know people who will craft specially breeded skill sets just for the campaign.

[OgreBattle]

Is there a chart that shows activated powers per level across D&D3e classes? And expected activated items per level too. I used D&D4e 'cause AEDU makes it easy to calculate.

Though "Significance of action" is also important, like how the Tome Samurai just has "Kill things Hard" as a power to use over and over it really does kill things hard when you use it.

[ishy]

So how many activated abilities should you have to feel like you have options

1

Well, you do have the option to activate it or not

And probably options that don't involve activated abilities.

[TiaC]

How many activated abilities before it gets confusing?

1

So shadzar has admitted the limits of his intelligence?

[Mask_De_H]

There's that sociology tidbit that says the sweet spot for the human mind to keep track of is 4-9 discreet choices. Chunking allows you to have more options in bulk without having the subject succumb to option paralysis, so the money shot is something like 4e or Frank's alternate power scheme thing where you have a few at will and/or encounter abilities you can choose from and cycle through during downtime.

[hogarth]

If you're a simulationist (oops, I used the "S" word), you probably want at least as many options at any given time as you would expect a character to have in that genre.

[OgreBattle]

I figure combat actions can be broken down into 3 broad categories:

-Single/Multi target attack/debuff
-Enhancing/healing/defending an ally
-Protecting yourself

Summoning critters and walls of various materials are a 4th action but their purpose fits into one of those 3 broad categories. By default in D&D you can make an attack, aid another, or go full defense.

So that's 3 things everyone can do. The simplest activated action to tack on that would be something like "reroll a miss" or "Take an extra action" set to a recharge schedule like X per encounter/daily or it refreshes when you spend a swift/move/standard/full action doing something/nothing.

[Cyberzombie]

That's more an issue of skeletons being immune to half the shit in the game than a problem with spell design.
Targetting AC, Ref, Will, Fort, and buff is five categories of actions right off the bat. Subdivide into blast/cc/buff/no save debuff/etc.

I like monsters having immunities to stuff you can do. It's what made 3E a much more interesting game than 4E.

[ishy]

In my experience, rerolls on a daily basis is one of the slowest, most annoying mechanics you can implement in a game.