no more regional feats?

eve_of_dante · Dec 11, 2007

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?p=14534935#post14534935

Rich Baker:

WotC_RichBaker said:
There will be some new "builds" published in the FR player character sourcebook, but I don't think you could call those FR-specific talent trees. We will have some FR-specific mechanics in the form of a revised approach to character region (something simpler to navigate than regional feats, we hope), but most of what you'll see as character options in FR sourcebooks should be widely applicable to core D&D characters too.

Stogoe · Dec 12, 2007

Good riddance; Regional feats from FR seemed to fall into two groups; insignificant skill bumps, or quote unquote 'region limited' munchkinnable must-haves.

Mortellan · Dec 12, 2007

Yup. Regional feats started a power creep of feats in later splat books. Baker is good on this one.

Voss · Dec 12, 2007

Except for presenting them as somehow 'hard to navigate'. They weren't hard to use, they were either garbage or too good. Balance is very difference from complexity.

Whizbang Dustyboots · Dec 12, 2007

Voss said:
Except for presenting them as somehow 'hard to navigate'. They weren't hard to use, they were either garbage or too good. Balance is very difference from complexity.

Other people may have had different problems.

delericho · Dec 12, 2007

Also very glad they're gone.

kennew142 · Dec 12, 2007

I found regional feats annoying. They encouraged players to want to build characters from different regions so that they could take advantage of them. I felt the same about regional equipment. Some GMs may have had no problem with this desire, but I've always run games where the characters are integral to the setting. This model is a little difficult to manage with characters coming from all over Faerun. I finally allowed all the regional feats to any character. I made them background feats and allowed each character to take only one.

Cthulhudrew · Dec 12, 2007

I liked the Regional Feats when I first saw them, but quickly changed my mind. To me, they were basically the same sort of generic cultural handwaving that I dislike in a lot of fantasy fiction (Jordan's Wheel of Time series comes to mind, notably); the notion that, "Well, Nation X is a mercantile Oligarchy, therefore everyone in the nation can be represented as being the best darn negotiators around, just because that's where they're from, so they can have the option of taking this (in some cases) unbalanced feat to represent that, while someone whose character background is a merchant won't ever get that benefit and be quite as good because he's from another country."

It just seemed an artificial means of stimulating roleplaying, and unnecessary as a result, IMO. I think Eberron handled it better in the ECS Book, with suggestions for builds, rather than mechanics.

Lord Xtheth · Dec 12, 2007

I didn't mind any of the regional things at all. It added flavour to characters, and gave them a "home" and sometimes even a background to work off of.

dmccoy1693 · Dec 12, 2007

Lord Xtheth said:
I didn't mind any of the regional things at all. It added flavour to characters, and gave them a "home" and sometimes even a background to work off of.

Right there with you. It shows that one area specialized in Thing A. The player has a home instead of just, "I grew up in the middle of nowhere after my parents died and I developed social skills from talking to the wolves. That's why I am multiclassing swashbuckler with aristocrat."