I tend to agree that the Death base seems to be pointless as it is currently defined. Kind of a generic way to kill someone that could be done with another base just as easily.
I don't think that every possible base/intent combination needs to provide a useful function. Not every substance makes a good material from which to build a particular item. i.e. building a shield out of glass would be pretty pointless. But that doesn't make glass itself useless. From there, it follows that just because you can throw craploads of power into a particular endeavor shouldn't guarantee that you can come up with something useful, or that it's not a complete waste of time. Yes, "5/5/5 Fire/Perceive" doesn't seem all that useful, unless you want to know where every fire is in the adjacent 500 square miles.
But perhaps rather than redefine the base/intent system, some of the interpretations of the combinations need to be redefined. Why can't you "control/death" to raise the dead? Seems logical to me...
A bit of expansion of the strict definition of the Base systems could allow more things to become useful. For example, what if perceive/fire let you use a fire as a scrying glass? Or as a means of two-way communication? Then a high-powered perceive/fire could be a means of long distance communication, possibly between multiple locations.
Such a relaxation of the interpretation of the base/intent system would let us do a lot more without completely redefining the system.
But I don't think that's what Tom really meant with redefining the core concepts of the game.
I do agree that the continual 1/hour XP/Power regeneration is a bit much for the pace of the game. You can just not do anything at all, and become very powerful. And intentional delays become useful metagaming maneuvers. Wasn't the "certamen" concept supposed to take care of this? Each player involved should lay out the energy they have to work with at the beginning of the certamen.
