Are feats selections too limited?

[cgraph]

There are a LOT of feats out there. Many that are nice-- but when you combine the pretty limited number of feat slots any class has, and couple them with the fact that their are feats that you really need to get to be competitive, well, the actual ability to take advantage of those feats is pretty limited.

Should feats be opened up a bit more, either by giving more of them, or making it possible to have a "swap out" mechanism? (Though that last seems a bit MMOish).

 

[Crothian]

There are too many feats in the game. Instead of allowing characters to have more feats and increasing the power of all the characters even more I would get rid of about 60% of all the feats in existence.

I disagree that there are feats that a character needs to be competitive. I'm not sure who they need to be competitive with either. But if you feel that classes need certain feats always then that seems to reinforce the need to get rid of all those other unneeded feats.

 

[SkredlitheOgre]

I don't mind the number of feats, but I also don't think there are feats that you "need," in a generic sense. Yeah, there are feats you need or want for your character concept, but I can't think of feats that a specific class "has" to have.

I, like Crothian, have never seen the "competition" aspect of picking feats. Who would I be competing with? Other party members? From my point of view, shouldn't all of the players be trying to cooperate with each other instead of competing?

Personally, I'd get rid of the feats in the APG and Ultimate books, but then I've never used those in game, so I don't really think they matter.

 

[IronWolf]

I think there are too many feats in the game as well. One of the things I recall early on with Pathfinder was the breath of fresh air it felt like with only feats from the Core Rulebook in the early days. I think the APG as a whole was a really strong book as well, not sure all the feats are really great as I think there are a few that stick out as better than some of the others. But I would probably keep the feats from there as well. The rest could all go away in my opinion.

I know, as a player I can ignore the other feats - and for the most part I do. As a GM I can rule out feats from other books, which I have not done yet. I try to avoid the "you cannot choose" that type house rule these days unless it is really game breaking (and obviously so at the time of choosing it).

Even giving characters more feat slots doesn't help greatly. It does let you pick up a few more feats, but not sure how much dabbling in some of the so-so feats it will do. Probably a couple of so-so feats will start getting picked up.

I think I can see where one might see a competition aspect. I don't think anyone likes to be the lowest performing party member time and time again. When your buddy at the table is throwing down 30 to 40 points of damage and you are just lucky to break 10, then often times you start to feel less effective. Even if the other players don't comment on that (and I rarely see that), many players are bound to feel a little odd about the disparity.

 

[Ramaster]

The problem is not a wide selection of feats, the problem is "trap" options.

Make Quick draw and Run a single feat, for example.

Also, the "+2 to one skill/+2 to another" feats are worthless (so is skill focus). The bonus could be +15 and they would still suck.

Give me interesting options, like the monk style feats from ultimate combat.

 

[Kaisoku]

I agree. I really disliked the design decision of making the game purposefully imbalanced to promote system mastery as a game factor.
This was a decision made back with the design of 3.0e, when WotC took over. I'm guessing, but I'm pretty sure, that the decision was pushed hard by WotC people who saw how much MtG was bringing in, and felt some similar design process was needed to make D&D successful.

I'm of the personal belief that the Player shouldn't have to be concerned about making poor decisions that can drastically alter his choices and "power level". If the game design is done well, then the Player can decide to choose whatever he wants, because of theme, flavour, or fluff even, and still be at least reasonably close to a power level as the "optimal" choices.
The reason having a wide variance in power level for a given level is bad is that it makes the tool (APL, Character Level, CR, Encounter Level, etc) that much more useless for the DM to adjudicate his game.
It's bad enough when the disparity is between the party and an adventure path or a PFS game.. gives the DM more work to do.
It's at it's worst when there is disparity between players, because now you have the problem where one player might not be getting as much "spotlight", which can make the game less fun overall.

I guess it can be summed up into one sentence: System mastery creates an environment where there's fairly good potential for the loss of the primary goal of playing.. fun. And DM heaaches.
Okay, that's two sentences.


If I were to make changes, I would personally like to go through a lot of the basic feats (Power Attack, Combat Expertise, etc), and make many of these simply combat options, like fighting defensively and maneuvers.

After that, I'd make feats scale more. If there's a feat that is basically replaced by a later version (or the later version just tacks on something to it), you only need the one feat. Two-weapon Fighting and Vital Strike, I'm looking at you...

Finally, I would reduce the feat "tree" requisites. Keep ability score and other requisites, however make a feat need "one of" a selection of feats as a prerequisite, or just using BAB minimums. Whirlwind Attack being the greatest offender, but it's not the only one.


Ultimately, I'd love to move D&D away from the "bonus" side of things, and focus more on lateral improvements; gaining more functionality or easing restrictions, rather than just giving an extra +.

This would take a revamp of the system though, as a lot of the "other side" (monsters, traps, APs encounters, etc) are designed around the level of bonus scaling that's currently in place.
Something for the next edition, perhaps.

 

[Kaisoku]

Regarding looking at adding more feats for characters...

The game had the general rule of adding an extra feat every 2nd level, giving 10 feats over 20 levels.
This was in an environment where you had ~176 feats to choose from.

With just adding the APG, UM and UC, we are looking at an extra 529 feats. That isn't including anything from the guides or APs.

There are now 4 times as many feats to choose from, with the same amount of selection.

If you wanted to maintain the ratio of feats per level to feats selection, you'd have to boost it to 2 feats per level!

Which isn't necessarily bad.. it would mean earlier access to feat trees that assume you only get one every so many levels. However, I feel that's something that can be done away with anyways, so maybe it's a good idea.

It would mean Fighters could craft magic items sooner than 7th level (since the prerequisites require waiting until 5 ranks in a skill to gain the introduction feat). It would mean gaining Whirlwind attack sooner... but who cares?

It could mean people may actually coordinate and pick teamwork feats.

As a patch for avoiding having to re-write the system, it could work.
Short of a few options that they'll pick anyways, Casters don't get nearly as much improvement from feats as say, well anyone else. That fits my yardstick for whether a choice is overboard or not.

I haven't looked into it too hard, but if full spellcasters can abuse this too much, then maybe any level you take a level in a full spellcaster class, you only get 1 feat. And summoner. Pretty simple.

*Edit* Note that this does pretty much plunge you head-on into powering up the party. I'd probably treat the group as APL+1 as a baseline for determining their strengths after the first couple levels. From there, you can resume your balancing act between party vs AP/CRs that you normally have to do.

 

[IronWolf]

Regarding looking at adding more feats for characters...

The game had the general rule of adding an extra feat every 2nd level, giving 10 feats over 20 levels.
This was in an environment where you had ~176 feats to choose from.

With just adding the APG, UM and UC, we are looking at an extra 529 feats. That isn't including anything from the guides or APs.

There are now 4 times as many feats to choose from, with the same amount of selection.

If you wanted to maintain the ratio of feats per level to feats selection, you'd have to boost it to 2 feats per level!

Our group played several 3.5 games where we received a feat every level. It was certainly fun as a player and did boost the power level a bit. But in reality I am not sure how much it helped with the sprawl of feats available because even then there were still feats that were better than others. And even with an increase in the number of feats you could choose I would still find myself leaning towards them.

So that ranger character could not only be a good ranged fighter and pursue those feat trees, but he could also pursue melee feats and such. While he might dip to a different tier of feats, there were still huge swaths of feats he didn't consider taking.

I think some of your points in your first post would do more to make feats better again.

 

[Kinak]

If you feel there are feats certain classes (or builds) need to be competitive, give them out as freebies. Just giving out more to everyone will help whoever they're trying to catch up to as well, washing out the effect.

For example, if you think Power Attack is needed to make two-handed weapons competitive, just house rule "All characters using a two-handed weapon can Power Attack as the feat." But if you just give out more feats, they'll never catch up with other approaches.

Letting people retrain their feats is (in my opinion) a win-win. Make it cost something in game, like a week or two spent training, but leave it otherwise open.

They certainly let you do that in WoW, but they also let you do it in the real world. We've all gotten out of practice at things while we work on other stuff.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[Matthias]

There are "too many" feats in the game only in the sense that there are "too many" character concepts that can be constructed within the game.

It has been impossible for a long time to be able to keep track of every published feat that's out there, but the chief detriment to this aspect of the game is not the number of feats that exist. There are other aspects more important:

1. Feats too underpowered to be worth spending a feat slot on; fails the "would anyone take this feat" test. Example: a feat that grants a one-time bonus of 3 hit points (good for low-level characters but useless for everyone else)

2. Feats too overpowered to be worth spending a feat slot on; fails the "would anyone *not* take this feat" test. Example: a feat that grants an inherent bonus to all ability scores.

3. Feats too specialized in their prerequisites. This doesn't include feats at the top of a feat tree (Whirlwind Attack and so forth), but feats that are permitted only to a very narrow range of character concepts. Example: a feat that has a single specific race and class for prerequisites.

4. Feats that do something which another feat already does. (Feats from previous editions and other game systems don't count.) Example: a feat called "Craftsman" which grants +2 bonus to any two Craft feats--this is redundant with Prodigy feat (Ultimate Magic).

Regarding looking at adding more feats for characters...

The game had the general rule of adding an extra feat every 2nd level, giving 10 feats over 20 levels.
This was in an environment where you had ~176 feats to choose from.

With just adding the APG, UM and UC, we are looking at an extra 529 feats. That isn't including anything from the guides or APs.

There are now 4 times as many feats to choose from, with the same amount of selection.

If you wanted to maintain the ratio of feats per level to feats selection, you'd have to boost it to 2 feats per level!

Which isn't necessarily bad.. it would mean earlier access to feat trees that assume you only get one every so many levels. However, I feel that's something that can be done away with anyways, so maybe it's a good idea.

This is a short-sighted way of looking at the situation. The question to be asked is not "how many feats do I not get to use with the character I just built"; it should be "how many characters can I build before I have played with every feat at least once?" The fewer feats you have in circulation, the faster you will "wear out" what feats you do get, meaning becoming bored with the same few feat-powers used over and over.