How is requiring a 5 minute rest to refresh your stored divine energy odd? Seems reasonable to me. I just think of it working kind of like Psionic Focus--you need to prep it, and it takes time to do that.
Or something like "the Gods help those who help themselves" and so will only offer their power once per battle to the faithful... I like that one.
The per encounter stuff takes a little thought to have it make in-world sense, but IMO its worth it for a good game mechanic.
Well, what can I say, I don't like it.
Rituals make sense for divine clerics to me - the gods demand offerings/libations, but Channel Divinity should, imho, be a case of calling upon your deities favour in a life or death situation.
But then, in a
really dangerous situation, you ask for help twice, and your god says "no, you've had your fill, call me in 5 minutes", wtf?
Psionic Focus, otoh, makes sense to me already, I've got no beef with it. In fact, it's a prime example of what I regard as good game design - no limit on how often it can be used, just an action cost to set it up.
Whereas Channel Divinity isn't a good game mechanic for me precisely because it fails as a per encounter mechanic from where I'm standing. Per encounter balance should balance across a range of encounters - anything from a tiny skirmish to a full-blown battle, which brings me to...
I guess I don't see how you can say anything is hard-wired into the system. The entire point of 4e is Exception Based Rules. Everything can changed the "hard wired" rules because the base system is designed to run off those changes. I'm looking forward to the Divine Power book, where I expect to see Paragon Paths, Epic Destinies, and Feats that make more of Channel Divinity. So much as a feat that says, "You may use Channel Divinity twice per encounter, but no more than once per specific power" would change the paradigm. And it is fully within the possibility set forth by the game.
Well, an Extra Channeled Divinity feat would help. In the same way the recharge with Action Point Paragon Paths scattered about help, but it's not enough.
For me, per encounter balance should be independent of the difficulty or duration of the encounter. It should be done on the basis of action costs so as to determine number of uses of abilities. This is what token based mechanics achieves with Iron Heroes (I know I bang on about IH, but, well, I love it
). HP determines how much stamina a character has in a given encounter, but as long as they're standing they can take the time to spend the actions to accumulate some tokens and then use their cool class abilities. As an aside, my houseruled IH also now includes the Saga Condition Track - so what you get is PCs that work to withdraw from the frontlines, move back up the Condition Track and accumulate some tokens, and then return to the fray. Put it all together and it really encourages teamwork and tactical play, as well as making for some great cinematic combats. and with Healing Surges to keep the HP refreshed from time to time the game facilitates anything from a short small-scale encounter to a bruising 50 round battle against a small army.
Now, sure, Extra Channel Divinity is an option, and it extends the stamina of a character a little bit, but it's alleviating a problem rather than solving it. And that still leaves all the other things that are per encounter. If a later supplement introduces the kind of comprehensive recharge mechanisms for "encounter powers" that I'm looking for, it will throw the balance off (sinc Encounter and Daily powers are presumably balanced based on the limits on their use), or will by necessity come with prohibitive opportunity costs, otherwise any character with any sense would start taking advantage of the mechanic (and if it's only one class who gets it, we risk a new CoDzilla!). So, yeah, from the standpoint of what I want from a recharge mechanism, the encounter and daily balance stuff is hardwired into the system, because it's the fact that every class runs on this 1/encounter paradigm, Channel Divinity is just one example of what I'm talking about.
The other gripe with 4e I have is that it still has per day mechanics. Imo, the only per day mechanic there should be is hp. And even that is a fluid resource with Healing Surges et al. Rituals nicely cover out of combat utility magic, so I don't see any need to retain the paradigm within class design at all. What it does is brings us back to the 3e assumption underpinning balance of X many encounters per day. I've never run a campaign where that didn't feel forced - e.g. I don't run dungeon crawls, my group has always found they strain credibility/versimilitude - my campaigns vary wildly from slogfests with a dozen encounters in a day, to heavy RP for weeks with only occasional fights. Most DMs I've run with have been the same. Daily mechanics mean that the PCs are running on empty by the end of the slugfests, and can nova a one-off encounter - it fails at both ends of the spectrum imx.
That assumption was always the thing about 3e that pissed me off most as a DM, more so than power disparities between casters and melee or any of the rest of it. They've solved a lot of stuff with 4e - enough that I can work with the basic system to produce what I want better than I could with the base 3e system, it's so close to what I want, but it needs a lot of work to get it past the finish line imo.
But, hey, if it works for you good luck to ya!
