What should WOTC do about Golden Wyvern Adept? (Keep Friendly)

Our last thread was closed because of misunderstandings and personal attacks, though at its end everyone seemed to be resolving conflicts and moving forward. This poll could offer valuable information to WOTC in helping their decisions with fluff feats like this. I am relaunching the poll for that purpose, as it is obviously an important issue considering all of the debate.

Lets all heed what the moderators asked and keep all discussion constructive and friendly in here. Remember, this is for the game we love and we all need to work together to offer good solutions to WOTC that is as close to a win/ win for everyone.

Here is the overview of the Golden Wyvern Adept and other fluff named feats, pros and cons:

Obviously Golden Wyvern Adept is causing a huge amount of debate right now. As we are getting closer to 4e's print time we need to get WOTC to look at both sides of the debate and have a clear descision on where to go with these sort of fluff+crunch core materials. I know there are lots of discussion on this matter slipping into every thread, but this could be the last chance to change the feat (if that is what most D&D players want) and get the attention of WOTC with a poll here.

For those on the fence or in the dark, here is what the arguments are:

Golden Wyvern Adept is good...
1) Because it gives DMs with little time on their hands instant fluff with no work.
2) It allows DMs to fill in the blanks with artsy names and be inspired creatively.
3) It gives players some direction and a feeling of history by rules they choose
4) It defines a core D&D mythology and story

Golden Wyvern Adept is bad....
1) Because it shoe horns the campaign setting to include golden wyvern adepts
2) It doesn't describe what the feat's rules actually do and is thus counter-intuitive to the other game mechanics
3) It gives players a way to mess with a DMs campaign by bringing in fluff they don't want
4) Renaming the feat to remove its fluff is messy
5) DMs can't attach the feat easily to their own wizard orders
6) Official campaign settings are going to have trouble working around feats like this, espcially settings like Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Planescape, Birthright etc. where a "generic" order with a sterotypical monster doesn't belong like that.
7) 3rd Party publishers will have trouble pluging on even more so than they did with the named spells from greyhawk.
8) Golden Wyvern Adept starts a trend of naming feats in confusing and campaign damaging ways. Once this form of feat naming begins, it just flows over into all the sourcebooks and SRD material creating a huge list of frustrations for DMs who do not want it in their games.
9) Feat names like this encourge lazy game mechanic naming.
10) Fluff with no meaning behind it is bad, empty fluff calories. It is to subjective to make a standard that is used.

Overall, there is more reasons not to keep names like golden wyvern adept. I would like to see your opinion on what WOTC should do.

No offence, but I believe it's poor form to re-open a thread after it's closed. You might want to ping one of the mods (if you haven't already).

Where is it stated that there has to be an Order of the Golden Wyvern for the feat to work?

IRL we have judo, karate, kung fu and lots of others as various schools of basicaly the same thing (martial arts). I've trained a bit im my youth, you could call me a teak-won-do adept if you like, but I never ever joined some mystical order

Besides, if there are half a dozen or so feats associated with each school, I prefer them to be organised as GW Adept, GW Master, GW Expert than Spell Shaper, Improved Spell Shaper and Ethereal Spell Shaper so they are right next to each other in the feat section.

There are lots of RL examples of names that lost their origins over the time. Simply say aeons ago someone called spellshaping the Golden Wyvern Technique and it still sticks to this day. No need for fancy fluff-rebuilds.

And before you say "there are no wyverns in my game", there's no pegasus in RL either, yet we have a greek restaurant named so.

Ragnar69 said:

Where is it stated that there has to be an Order of the Golden Wyvern for the feat to work?

IRL we have judo, karate, kung fu and lots of others as various schools of basicaly the same thing (martial arts). I've trained a bit im my youth, you could call me a teak-won-do adept if you like, but I never ever joined some mystical order

Besides, if there are half a dozen or so feats associated with each school, I prefer them to be organised as GW Adept, GW Master, GW Expert than Spell Shaper, Improved Spell Shaper and Ethereal Spell Shaper so they are right next to each other in the feat section.

There are lots of RL examples of names that lost their origins over the time. Simply say aeons ago someone called spellshaping the Golden Wyvern Technique and it still sticks to this day. No need for fancy fluff-rebuilds.

And before you say "there are no wyverns in my game", there's no pegasus in RL either, yet we have a greek restaurant named so.

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I am pretty sure that "Golden Wyvern" was intended to be a reference to the many animal-symbolic names in alchemy, such as White Eagle, Black Crow, Peacock's Tail, Phoenix Reborn in Fire...

Mods, can we please have a moratorium on Golden Wyvern threads? there's been at least a half dozen of them in the past weekend alone and there seems to be a very unhealthy level of fixation on the name of one feat.

What I don't get is this: Feats are one of the aspects of your character you are least likely to talk about in character. Unless you go down the, hehe, anime route of declaring your powers out loud every time you use them, I can't see why you need to have a flavourful feat. It's just an aspect of your character that has an effect in the game. It doesn't need to be given a fancy background name. You don't need to call Move Silently 'Rice Paper Walk' if you're a monk, because chances are when you use the skill, you'll simple say 'I sneak past the guard'. Spells, until now, have been very much the opposite, they have inherent names given to their effects - I think this is something less important when you lose the fire and forget mentality. Classes can be referred to in character, sometimes people don't like that. Races typically are. Feats, I've not come across as being explicitly named in character except for those that are flavourful, like Thunder Twin or similar. Does WotC want us to label our abilities explicitly in character? Because that sounds somewhat counter-roleplay, counter-imagination and extremely forcing.

Ragnar69 said:

And before you say "there are no wyverns in my game", there's no pegasus in RL either, yet we have a greek restaurant named so.

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I know some people don't think it is a big deal, but what if you don't have pegasus or wyverns even as mythical creatures.

For example, Dark Sun is a setting that had very few herbivore mammals. So no horses, no cows, etc.. So having a minotaur didn't even make sense. It would hurt the look and feel of the game. I realize this seems minor to some people, but it can have a fairly big effect on a DMs plans if they don't want specific symbols, terms, mythical creatures etc.

It just seems like WOTC is being a bit careless with how they have handled their naming conventions in the past. Rich, well detail worlds are enjoyable and these feats could effect the feel of campaign settings both homebrewed and officially published.

La Bete said:

No offence, but I believe it's poor form to re-open a thread after it's closed. You might want to ping one of the mods (if you haven't already).

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I know this subject is important to discuss, and as long as we respect each other the moderators are fine with this subject. The thread was closed for people being rude to each other, not for the subject being dicussed.

Firevalkyrie said:

I am pretty sure that "Golden Wyvern" was intended to be a reference to the many animal-symbolic names in alchemy, such as White Eagle, Black Crow, Peacock's Tail, Phoenix Reborn in Fire...

Mods, can we please have a moratorium on Golden Wyvern threads? there's been at least a half dozen of them in the past weekend alone and there seems to be a very unhealthy level of fixation on the name of one feat.

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None of the threads are dealing with the subject with a poll or the overall effect of naming feats with fluff content and the effect it has on the game. We are discussing that specifically here. This thread should be the primary one for that reason, as it addresses the main issue of fluff based feats and whether they should be in the core rules.

Najo said:

Overall, there is more reasons not to keep names like golden wyvern adept. I would like to see your opinion on what WOTC should do.

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It's not the number of pros vs cons, it's the weight of each. But even with that, the number of pros vs cons you've listed is self-created, and includes indicators showing bias.

Thus your list is of insignificant value.



BTW: I don't particularly like any of WotC's chromey snap-tite names... GWA is just the worst one yet.

Najo said:

None of the threads are dealing with the subject with a poll or the overall effect of naming feats with fluff content and the effect it has on the game. We are discussing that specifically here. This thread should be the primary one for that reason, as it addresses the main issue of fluff based feats and whether they should be in the core rules.

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To be totally honest, when the Golden Wyvern adept thing broke, which I believe was over a month ago, I was kind of like, "Hey, something that sounds like you'd have found it in real history. Cool," and I felt that the people who were complaining about it sounding like "anime" or "MMO" were simply people who had never been exposed to actual history before and were dealing from ignorance, and reacted much the same way that most people react to something they don't understand. That is, giving it a label and shoving it into a little cubbyhole in their mind where they don't actually have to examine it.

The flavor of Golden Wyvern is historical in nature, because REAL things were named after stuff that was frankly a hell of a lot more obscure, and real things in European history, no less, while Japanese martial arts techniques are named a lot of boring things that basically translate to English as "Front hip throw" and "Rear foot snap kick." I'm getting sorely tempted to name my next wizard character Golden Wyvern just so I have somebody in my campaign history to name the feat after, and if that causality loop doesn't snap your neck, you aren't looking at it in the right light.

We've reached stage two because we're over a month in and people are still complaining about stuff that has no actual basis in fact. We're also reaching a state of obsessive-compulsion, where people are complaining with increasing vehemence about something that is at worst neutral in value. I personally think that Rich Baker backing off so precipitously from Dragon's Tail Cut was actually one of the worst things he could have done, because he inadvertently gave the internet fanboy community, who collectively (and I include myself in this) has the worst entitlement complex imaginable, the idea that they could change the design of 4th Edition if they complained loudly enough.

To wrap my thoughts up and move on, I think people need to start getting over themselves and realize that their personal preferences don't reflect the hobby as a whole.

-- Fire (with apologies to Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw)