As I said in the post you quoted, nothing ever stops anyone from trying anything. A non-Bard can try Acting if so desired...just much less likely to succeed, is all. All Bards become Actors simply as a feature of thier class training at x level; it's up to them whether they go on to make much use of the ability or not. And why can only Rangers (and Druids) auto-know which way's north? Because on a cloudy or foggy day they know enough about how plants grow, how they are affected by the sun, etc. to easily find north. Again, others can try; and in some situations e.g. you can see the sun success might be automatic anyway. Conversely, there'll be situations e.g. suddenly appearing in the middle of an endless sheet of ice, where even a Ranger isn't guaranteed success.
That wasn't my point.
Mistwell's complaint is that the existence of certain feats encourages thinking that people without them cannot take those actions.
BUT everyone gets feats. If the DM says Bob can't make an attempt without the feat, all Bob has to do is wait 3 levels to get his next feat and then he can.
BUT if you were to bake the feat into a class, Bob would have to multiclass. Which is a
different optional feature that may not be included in Bob's game. That feature could also be
deep within that class, forcing Bob to wait a half-dozen or more levels to get it, potentially in a class that he has no interest in.
IMO: the reason these feats were feats and not class features is simply because they are too generic. Like, if GWM was Fighter only, what Barbarians can't be great with big weapons? Or Paladins? I think the designers saw this and made them feats for exactly that reason.
I'm not so sure. It's on both the DM at the table and the designers in the PH to point out that anyone can try anything, to be sure. But baking many of these things in as class abilities and completely removing all the rest gets away from the endless plethora of feats a player has to navigate through every time a character levels up.
You only need to navigate the feats once. They aren't going to change between level-ups. (this is assuming we're keeping with the average 5E campaign timeline, not some super-long multi-decade game) Also,
splat wasn't an issue Mistwell was complaining about. His complaint was about the first part, DM's thinking that people without certain feats couldn't do that thing at all.
Even now, someone trying something for which they don't have the feat forces the DM to gauge all the details before determing success, failure, or a DC. Nothing changes there; except in this particular instance TWF becomes a distinct feature of one or two specific classes instead of being open to all.
Or the DM could say "NO, you need the feat." and not gauge anything at all.
This is assuming there's a roll-play problem that needs to be fixed.
Well...we
are talking about mechanical elements of the game. That speaks to the
roll
not the role.
Exactly! That's the intent here: keep the underlying mechanics nice and simple (and preferably as out of sight as possible) and let the fluff take over from there.
Forcing the GM to gauge a situation and see if a roll is appropriate speaks directly to the
roll and the
mechanics and is decidedly NOT fluff. How I attack with my weapons, that's fluff. How many attacks I make with my weapons, that is
mechanics. Failure to differentiate between fluff and crunch increases complexity, it does not decrease it.
If you want to be good at fighting with two weapons you'd have seen during char-gen that there's only one or two classes that have this as a feature; and you'd have had to make a choice at that point whether TWF was more important to have than, say, heavy armour use.
LOLWUT. This just directly contradicted EVERYTHING you just wrote.
Can people try anything in an attempt to be good at it?
Or
Do they have make specific build choices?
Because you just spent half this post arguing the former, only to say "Well they shoulda made the right build choices!" Make up your mind, because the latter is exactly what Mistwell is arguing against.
More fundamentally, I am a proponent of each character - as reflected by its one class - being good at what it does and rather bad at everything else. This way each character brings a few clear strengths and a lot of weaknesses to the party, with the strengths of one mitigating or cancelling the weaknesses of others. In turn this promotes (but does not force) running as an inter-reliant party.
So everyone should follow specific build advice and make sure to choose the correct features?
What ARE you arguing actually? Because I am
totally lost at this point.
Feats and multiclassing run counter to this: they promote the construction of jack-of-all-trades characters who can do a bit of everything and who eventually become one-person parties; they have no real reason to rely on anyone else and thus have much less need for the rest of the party other than simple strength in numbers.
Lanefan
Okay, I get it, you just hate feats.
That wasn't Mistwells argument though.
Next time warn me when you're going to tangent off like that. I'll remember not to engage in the unrelated tirades.
