HomeDungeons & DragonsDungeons & Dragons Fourth EditionAn Utterly Random Thought On 4e Combat

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An Utterly Random Thought On 4e Combat — 4 Comments

  1. This is a way of negating one of the glorious parts of 4e. In 3e it was always a pain to keep track of the durations of all of the round by round spells and effects. Now, not only would you have to track many more effects, you’d have to keep track of 20+ powers this across battles. And since many groups don’t always end with an extended rest, you’ll have to keep this information between sessions – hard on monthly groups. Each turn will take longer because you’ll have to keep track of each power used. And the long challenging combat you mentioned earlier won’t require the use of daily powers or consumables because they’ll get to use encounter powers multiple times. It sounds like a big pain in the rear to solve a minor problem. A problem that doesn’t come up in all games. While some players save daily resources, others will use them as they feel appropriate.

    • Glad to have feedback!

      Like I said, it was a random idea. 🙂 There may well be a different, better, solution to the “all or none” nature of 4e combat… I know a lot of players prefer “many small, short, encounters” to “three or four full-sized encounters”, and there ought to be a means of providing that within the system.

  2. To be honest, I’m not really sure what the benefit of having encounter powers is at that point. I mean, that feels more like 3.X style binder abilities that recover every 1d4 rounds at that point.

    Oooh! Actually, ignore that thing I just said altogether. You know what this reminds me of? Iron Heroes. You could just use a token system to keep track of assorted powers, or, you could go whole hog and assign all powers some kind of token cost and differentiate classes by their method for gathering tokens. Then you could treat power lists more like a series of 3.X style sorcerer spells.

    Mmmph. That gives me excited chills. I could behind that sort of abstraction in a way I cannot get behind the encounter recharge mechanic, and better yet, there’s potential mechanical benefits.

  3. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying does this in 3rd edition. All the discrete actions you can take come in the form of printed cards. Each one has a refresh value on it and that is the number of turns you have to end before you can use it again.

    One bonus of this is that ongoing effects are tracked in the same way, they keep going so long as the action is recharging.

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