So!

With the advent of Omens my whole party is drooling over the new cards, which also makes their 'build' and training somewhat circumspect or moot (IE if certain cards were available earlier, they would have already had them purchased). Now I know that it's a 4e concept, but does anyone have any solid house rules for 'retraining'? Namely if someone want's to replace a card in their build order later in life, is there a rule for it that doesn't involve yet more careers?

I think we've settled on 1 card per rank with appropriate training and story-motivations.

[i appologize if this is in the wrong place, I could see it going in the Question forum or the GM one, but since it's not clearly either, and has no spoilers I figured I'd just ask generally]

No house rule, but if a player can supply a reason why he would have a particular action (i.e. it fits the character better somehow) rather than one he allready has I'd let them swap. But I would not let them swap too many cards, maybe one or two.

Yeah, I think that 'I would have got that card had it been available' is a perfectly good reason to swap it for free. I don't feel the need for rules or penalties or ic rationale to cover this sort of thing. After all, the cards aren't ic. But then, I don't really hold up the character sheet (cards!) as some sort of meaningful ic game entity in its own right. It's just a means to an end.

The specific example is a roadwarden turned investigator who's been fighting rapierre-main-gauche since inception. Although he took things like 'duelists strike' etc, the new diestro cards are much more up his alley. Moreover, he managed to *TINIEST SPOILER ALERT* convince a famous duelist in EoN to give him some lessons. We went with the more monkeylite approach, but I wanted to pick the brains of the fine folk on the forums and see if there were any other ideas floating about.

I have a soldier who's playing his character like a protector of the group, so when Omens came out I allowed him to swap cards to get the new "Bulwark" line of actions.

Remember that when the players chose their actions, they couldn't pick the ones from Omens, but their characters should have been able to pick up whatever style they wanted. I think you "punish" your players by not allowing them to swap.

Of course someone using shield/sword, shouldn't suddenly, when Omens come out, swap to Tweihander style, because his character didn't use those back then!

When Omens came out I just let characters swap out some action cards for the new ones as long as they fit into the style of character they'd be already playing.

Every time we get new cards I allow players to swap any cards for the new ones if they like.

My gut reaction has always been that the answer should be no, there are plenty of opportunities to pick up new actions as the campaign goes on and every session does drop at least one experience point. That said, I feel a little shaky on that front after having read some of the other replies.

For me, it is a bit like how my game handles traits on action cards, "If it makes sense." Using that logic, I think it is a pretty good play to let them do a bit of a swap-out as long as it doesn't lead to power-gaming. These new action cards represent something new to be delved into, maybe not all bought up, all at once. But if it makes sense . . .

@LCR keep in mind that you get 1 point to spend. And alot of times you are limited. If you are mid-career (say 3 advances in) and you bought 2 actions and your cap is 2-3 as usual, you might have to wait 8-10xp before a new career (you cannot buy actions out of career) and opportunity opens up. That is 8-10 games. Since we play every other weekend, that's half a year before you get your 'new shinies'.

At the same time, my gut reaction was closer to yours, and while my players are good at math, and they are taking the new cards in particular because they are fun and work so well together, it's not without the 'flavor' aspect by a long shot (heck my Sigmarite in one game is picking up some Zweihander cards himself). So I figured I'd poll the groupthink. Some great GMs and good advice on these forums, usually well reasoned out.

So, we work it into the story (duelist training) and do the 'retraining' so to speak.

shinma:

We do play weekly which does provide a much faster experience in terms of when one might be able to buy new actions or generally advance and I did ultimately agree with previous posters regarding "retraining."

I think my point really, though, is we have adopted the one house rule to rule them all, at least in the context of our interaction with WFRP: "If it makes sense." This has already lead to a bit of action swapping as one of our players was an Ironbreaker and we found the armor a bit on the unbalanced side for a rank 1 party. He swapped out of the sword-and-board Ironbreaker and into a dual-wielding Troll Slayer for the sake of the greater game. It only made sense in this instance to allow him to swap in what he felt was right.

If my players were early in their careers, I may well insist that they buy the new cards to control how rapidly they are introduced to the game. If they were already tapped out on action cards, however, I could see a bit of "retraining." Luckily, this is yet to be an issue.

Thanks for the feedback, shinma.