Daily Inspiration?

[WeissAllein]

I recently joined a 3.5 game where the DM was using the spell point system. I asked if I could play a Factotum and he agreed so long as I didn't bring any of its legendary game breaking to the table.
I have basically built a knowledge monkey who is designed to use his knowledge to make his allies better.

However something that has me concerned is he thinks the encounter based inspiration system is too much so he tripled my pool but limited it to a daily amount. This resulted in me being very choosy on when I use the points and our first big encounter had him glaring at me as I used the large pool I had left to as best an effect as I could and made a bigger impact on the encounter then he was happy with.

I have tried voicing that if that one encounter was such a concern for him that he should change inspiration back to the way it was so I wouldn't have so many points to spend in big encounters and even tried to tell him that with how several Factotum abilities work this larger pool will just be more trouble the higher my level. His response was he wants to keep the change and make more changes to limit how effective the large pool is.

In the end I guess I came here to ask if I should keep trying to convince him to return the class to normal or if I should just try to accept his changes and try to keep my promise of not being broken?

[Elves]

It sounds like your DM had a kneejerk reaction that per-encounter somehow gave you too much longevity, but realized novaing was the bigger problem for him. So he should go back to the way it was.

Over its lifespan 3e started to trend away from per-day in favor of per-encounter, with per-day still reserved for accessory abilities like magic items. In late 3.5 and then in 4e there's an increased focus on the individual combat encounter, in contrast to what seems to me like a more standardized, dungeon crawl based attrition model with per-day.

[Psyren]

I would calmly explain to him that I'm having trouble with not novaing with the higher daily pool because the class was designed to have a smaller per-encounter resource, but that if he still wants to make it larger and daily then I'll try. I'd also ask to leave the door open for us to reassess how the class is doing a few sessions into the future and see if either of us wants additional changes then.

Personally I think a better approach might be to keep it per encounter, but limit how many times you can refill it. I'd go with a soft limit whereby each time you refill it you get less back (down to a minimum amount that isn't zero so that you're not totally useless if there are too many encounters in a day) until you rest for the night and reset it.

[Thurbane]

Yeah, some DMs, including one in my group, have a really weird reaction to per encounter or at will abilities.

When I first played a Dragon Shaman, he thought a mediocre breath weapon I could use every 1d4 rounds was incredibly overpowered! :smalltongue: I think it was because he was used to Vancian mechanics.