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My Lovely Horse posted:Throw out all feats that aren't race or class feats, or Expertise/Defenses. To be safe, throw out those from Dragon magazines that are, too. God no. Dragon is pretty essential to some classes. Avengers and Paladins don't really work without it, for instance. You can prune a lot of cruft out of 4e, but some stuff you need to keep, and you can't just blanket-assume all of Dragon is bad.
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Feb 9, 2018 11:22
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watch me
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Feb 9, 2018 11:24
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4e would be a lot better if feats were separated into "makes you fight better" and "doesn't make you fight better" and you had to alternate between the two. That'd remove a bunch of the trap options right there.
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Feb 9, 2018 11:27
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Like 80% of feats in 4E are "MAEK BUILD WORK" things and I'm not terribly convinced we have ever profited as a species from the idea of feats in D&D.
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Feb 9, 2018 11:27
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My Lovely Horse posted:watch me Hope nobody in your game wants to play classes that rely on Dragon then. E: dont even fink about it posted:Like 80% of feats in 4E are "MAEK BUILD WORK" things and I'm not terribly convinced we have ever profited as a species from the idea of feats in D&D. This is total bullshit. A decent chunk of feats in 4e are poo poo like the Tribe feats, the White Lotus feats, etc etc etc that are fluff-based and terrible. Or stuff which is just outright obsolete, like Barrelling Charge. thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Feb 9, 2018 |
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Feb 9, 2018 11:29
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thespaceinvader posted:Hope nobody in your game wants to play classes that rely on Dragon then. Oh excuse me, important detail--80% of the feats I end up taking, unless I'm feeling particularly insane that day.
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Feb 9, 2018 11:39
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thespaceinvader posted:God no. Dragon is pretty essential to some classes. Avengers and Paladins don't really work without it, for instance. You would be a hundred times better off cutting Mordenkainen's Emporium than Dragon. Though that'd basically kill all flail builds.
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Feb 9, 2018 11:46
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dont even fink about it posted:Oh excuse me, important detail--80% of the feats I end up taking, unless I'm feeling particularly insane that day. You mean you don't take the feat that lets your Tiefling use their tail as a hand?! 
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Feb 9, 2018 12:24
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isndl posted:You mean you don't take the feat that lets your Tiefling use their tail as a hand?! See this is what I'm saying. That's awesome, in a world where that's not weighed against feats that give you a +1 to your combat rolls.
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Feb 9, 2018 12:26
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The solution is to just take all of the non-flavour feats out of the game completely.
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Feb 9, 2018 12:40
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Lurdiak posted:See this is what I'm saying. That's awesome, in a world where that's not weighed against feats that give you a +1 to your combat rolls.
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Feb 9, 2018 12:49
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I assume Lurdiak was referring to this feat: Even thieves' tools!
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Feb 9, 2018 13:06
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My Lovely Horse posted:You can't use that feat to hold a shield with your tail while wielding a two-handed weapon, right? Cause I'd argue that against a flat +1 is still worse, but competitive. As far as I know all the prehensile tail feats specify that you can't actually do anything cool with it.
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Feb 9, 2018 13:06
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Ah yes, that one. I always thought that was mainly good for potions, and it's actually not awful for that but the action economy for potions is so hosed that it's a good houserule target anyway, and once you houserule it it doesn't matter whether someone draws a potion with his hands or his tail or his penis. If anything that feat should be a racial feature.
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Feb 9, 2018 13:10
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I've played in a few games with an "odd feats for odd levels" rule, where you give players more feat picks for the oddball stuff like that or extra skills and languages.
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Feb 9, 2018 13:44
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dont even fink about it posted:Oh excuse me, important detail--80% of the feats I end up taking, unless I'm feeling particularly insane that day. Well duh. Making your build work is what feats are for.
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Feb 9, 2018 13:55
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thespaceinvader posted:Well duh. Making your build work is what feats are for. Yes and that's horribly redundant and made a terrible experience by the amount of garbage or things you would almost get except for the 5 things you want that are going to keep you ready to fight the game's math battle. Just build into the class! Make loadout packages or something! gently caress!
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Feb 10, 2018 01:19
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I started running my current 4e game a couple years ago. Of my five players, one was experienced in 4e, one had played a few RPGs but never 4e, two only knew Pathfinder, and one had never played a TTRPG. I like introducing people to things and teaching and I like to think that I'm pretty good at it, and I really enjoyed going through character creation with my players. I never did figure out how to introduce feats to new players, though.
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Feb 10, 2018 01:26
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I don't have a problem with feats as a customization layer conceptually, except that they were allowed to bloat to an obscene degree and the variety of elements they interact with is too varied. Pare them down & give different feat categories their own slots for advancement (class/skills/combat/multiclass/etc.) and it'd function better.
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Feb 10, 2018 01:41
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dont even fink about it posted:Yes and that's horribly redundant and made a terrible experience by the amount of garbage or things you would almost get except for the 5 things you want that are going to keep you ready to fight the game's math battle. Just build into the class! Make loadout packages or something! gently caress! What else do you want them to be for?
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Feb 10, 2018 10:54
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thespaceinvader posted:What else do you want them to be for? Narrative theme and flavour.
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Feb 10, 2018 14:26
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Lemon-Lime posted:Narrative theme and flavour. I'm not sure why you'd want or need feats for either of these.
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Feb 10, 2018 20:06
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Yeah. Feats are mechanics. Flavour is what you make of the mechanics. If you need your flavour to be written down on your character sheet to know it's there, there's a big ol' notes box. Or the back of the page. Or. Get this. Your imagination. (In all seriousness though, I can see where people come from on this, and I don't have any objection to feats HAVING flavour attached to them. But feats which are basically pure flavour might as well not exist - because for me, I'd prefer my flavour to be MY flavour. I've never once built a character who follows the default flavour for their mechanics, and I've usually built them so if I described their flavour, you wouldn't have a scooby what their mechanics were unless I started naming abilities.) To put it more succinctly, narrative theme and flavour are what happens in and as a result of playing the game. Not making your toon. thespaceinvader fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Feb 10, 2018 |
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Feb 10, 2018 21:25
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13th Age did feats right.
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Feb 10, 2018 22:05
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thespaceinvader posted:Yeah. Feats are mechanics. Flavour is what you make of the mechanics. We're getting waaay past my thoughts on the issue. Hear out this line of argument: Feats became a long way around to create the illusion of customization or the ability to create an "unusual" (actually mechanically bad) character. If you got feats as part of a package deal on your PrC, paragon path, epic destiny, theme, or whatever you want to call it, very little would ultimately change, except the game would become more accessible. So in general, feats should not be an open-ended pick-em system, but things that should be package deals or rolled into package deals.
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Feb 10, 2018 22:25
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Ehhhhhhh nah. There should be markedly fewer OF them, but I disagree that they should be part and parcel of builds. Because... that's really limiting. The thing I really LIKE about 4e is that it has so much customisability, so much room to take a mediocre class and make it cool, optimise a weird hybrid or whatever. It makes it a lot less accessible too, which isn't good, but D&D is just not an accessible game, at all. Even with what you're proposing here, which is just making common combos more common and less common combos impossible, it's still a terrifically inaccessible game for new players. It pretends to be easy and quick, but realistically if you don't have both a connection to the cultural history of it AND a strong inclination to gently caress about with numbers as part of your storytelling, it's not the system for you. But this is really just lumper/splitter stuff at work. I don't particularly have an issue with the concept of boiling feats down per se, I just prefer them as they are in terms of complexity.
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Feb 10, 2018 22:38
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If we're eliminating choice of feats because it's too cumbersome, why not also eliminate choice of powers? Ability scores? Themes? Background benefits? You could make it so the only decision point is choice of class if you really wanted. How much choice/mechanical freedom is acceptable?
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Feb 10, 2018 23:22
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I'll clarify my previous post. 13a feats work because they're specific to class. There are a small number of "general" feats anyone can take, and each race has a feat or two for their racial ability, but overwhelmingly, feats are connected to your class stuff. Feats, then, are used to customize your character within the parameters you've already chosen. AKA they're specific. 13a feats actually have an expressed purpose, which feats never had otherwise. A wizard who pumps their feats into one specific spell to make it more devastating is going to be different from a wizard who pumps their feats into their familiar to make it more useful for utility. And by keeping feats connected to the class ability, you remove the avalanche of billions of feats that other d20 games have suffered through. Best of all, because feats are not generalized, you don't have to worry (too much) about minmaxing poo poo; there are gonna be useless feats, but even useless feats do something and help establish your character. And of course, you can also retrain your feats, so you don't have to worry about making your character useless because of decisions made early on.
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Feb 10, 2018 23:24
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ProfessorCirno posted:And by keeping feats connected to the class ability, you remove the avalanche of billions of feats that other d20 games have suffered through. I like the 13th Age system too, but I’m not sure you can credibly claim that it doesn’t have a lot of feats, when every class feature or spell has three.
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Feb 10, 2018 23:47
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Subjunctive posted:I like the 13th Age system too, but I’m not sure you can credibly claim that it doesn’t have a lot of feats, when every class feature or spell has three. Which means there's only a dozen or two feats available to any given character, rather than the hundreds plus in 3.5 or 4e.
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Feb 10, 2018 23:50
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Realistically, how many feats does a given character qualify for in 3.5 or 4? Won’t they be missing the prerequisites for most?
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Feb 11, 2018 00:17
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Generic Octopus posted:If we're eliminating choice of feats because it's too cumbersome, why not also eliminate choice of powers? Ability scores? Themes? Background benefits? You could make it so the only decision point is choice of class if you really wanted.  Fuckin' c'mon.
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Feb 11, 2018 00:29
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No shock that most of that was added during the Essentials line.
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Feb 11, 2018 00:41
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The Crotch posted:A lot of powers could go, honestly. Ironically power-picking in 4E is a lot easier despite the huge amount of choice, because it uses a keyword system and if you want to make a maximalist character (i.e. "I DO NOTHING BUT PUSHES AND I WANT ALL MY UTILITIES TO HEAL ME") it's quite easy to word-search from a limited group of 20-ish things. Whereas you open up the feat list and it's like 200 things. THAT BEING SAID, there's lots of underwhelming powers, especially depending on the class and where the developers' focus was.
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Feb 11, 2018 00:43
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Subjunctive posted:Realistically, how many feats does a given character qualify for in 3.5 or 4? Won’t they be missing the prerequisites for most? Anyone wanna boot up the builder and count how many, say, a 1st level human wizard can choose from?
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Feb 11, 2018 02:59
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:Anyone wanna boot up the builder and count how many, say, a 1st level human wizard can choose from? 477 for a pretty basic human wizard, fairly inflated due to there being a feat for proficiency with all the martial weapons you are not trained with, but still, a whole loving lot. Ash Rose fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Feb 11, 2018 |
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Feb 11, 2018 03:31
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Subjunctive posted:I like the 13th Age system too, but I’m not sure you can credibly claim that it doesn’t have a lot of feats, when every class feature or spell has three. UrbanLabyrinth posted:Which means there's only a dozen or two feats available to any given character, rather than the hundreds plus in 3.5 or 4e. Exactly, and, they're organized. I make a FIGHTER in a D&D edition that WotC made. I go to feats. Suddenly I have to pick one, maybe two, out of like, a thousand. And there's no organization to this, beyond 3.x arbitrarily declaring that some feats are Combat feats (but not all combat feats are Combat feats). I just gotta swim though all thousand of them to find the singular one I want. I make a FIGHTER in 13a, well, I have my Human feat, there's like ten feats available to everyone, and beyond that...well, what do I wanna be better at? Do I want to be better at using my Counterattack ability? Then I put feats there! Do I want to be better at one specific maneuver? Then I put the feats into that. Yes, every class feature or spell has like three, but they're also limited TO those features or spells. If I'm playing D&D and I want to make a wizard with a cool familiar, I gotta dig through every goddamn book to find what the familiar feats are, or I gotta open the character builder and search for "Familiar" and then go through those. In 13a, I have the "familiar" ability, and if I want that to get better, I put feats into it. Done.
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Feb 11, 2018 04:59
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I agree completely that organization matters.
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Feb 11, 2018 05:30
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Ash Rose posted:477 for a pretty basic human wizard, fairly inflated due to there being a feat for proficiency with all the martial weapons you are not trained with, but still, a whole loving lot. Holy poo poo, that is so many more than I even expected.
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Feb 12, 2018 03:18
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UrbanLabyrinth posted:Holy poo poo, that is so many more than I even expected. And at least 90% are some combination of niche, outdated, underpowered, or nonsense.
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Feb 12, 2018 03:48
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