Deconstructing Powers

One of the things I do love about the Esssentials martial builds, especially the rogue and the fighter, is that the new powers are mostly deconstructed versions of previous ones. What I mean by that is that the heart of most rogue powers was their ability to do damage. How accurate the attack was or how much damage it did was really a function of what additives the particular "power" gave the character. The more awesome stuff a power did, it became less accurate, less damaging or harder to do by limiting it to encounters or dailies. To support this, I offer that in my quick comparisons, "Sly Flourish" matches pretty well with the thief's basic attack.

However, we still need to give the thief something interesting to do. The designers of this class build decided that the thief needed to be the master of mobility. By removing the move actions from powers and making them at-will move tricks, we no longer need to worry about those penalties when doing our attack since we are sacrificing our move action. Thus the thief could still do his damage and have some fun movement options without unbalancing the game. The final item was to provide a class feature that made their melee basic key off of dexterity instead of strength, something that probably should have been in the original version too.

A nice by-product of the simplified power structure is that only so many different powers can be produced. By combining moves, attacks and other benefits within one action type, we introduce infinite variation, each combination needing its own "power." By pulling them out, we allow the players to build their own combinations without cluttering up the character builder with 1000s of powers.

The issue I have with this change is that the build is a bit too simple. When I read through the list, they all seem a bit fiddly to me. They don't have enough differentiation to make me really interested in choosing between them. In addition, I really miss having that cool cinematic moment in the game where I worked for a few turns to set up a situation I wanted. Perhaps I used my rogue's forced movement powers to move the bad guy towards the edge of the cliff so I could have that cool 300 moment where I kicked him off. Or I just really wanted the opportunity to pull out 6d6 at once. Regardless of the setup, some of the excitement is just gone for me. One easy solution would be to add more trick options. Perhaps we could add a trick that uses a minor or move to allow the character to push their target on a hit.

Now it isn't all bad. Maybe seeing their players get bored or feel too restricted with the pre-made options for their characters will open DMs up to the wonder of page 42 (from the original DMG). That's the page with the damage by level charts and information on how to adjudicate rules on the fly. As a DM, when your player wants to do something not covered by the normal rules, that's the first place you should look for guidance on how to adjudicate their requests. For instance, if one of your players wants his character to swing from a chandelier into the bad guy, you can find damage expressions here.

Another option that I have floating around in my head is an expansion of the power points system. I really don't like how they get used in PHB3. Each power has some additional options that can be purchased through power points. The problem is that you might like parts of two different powers but neither one completely. Imagine if instead, you could build your own powers on the fly. Adding an additional two shifts or pushing a character one space costs one point. Adding another melee basic attack costs two points. I'm not sure of the details but I think it would satisfy what I find missing from the build and even make me like power points.

Well that's how I feel anyway. I know a number of you really love the thief and fighter and I'm so glad to hear that. At the end of the day, I just want us all to have fun. And if you are interested, here is the auto-build thief from character builder. Yeah, some issues with the build exist and I notified Wizards of the Coast customer service about them.