D&D 5E Feats: Do they stifle creativity and reduce options?

[jasper]

It's not that I don't believe you, but... how were they doing those things? Were they optimizing their non-weapon proficiencies? Practicing their dice rolling in order to try and get the stats they wanted?

The reason this behavior became mainstream in 3E was because 3E introduced point-buy elements into character creation, in the form of feats and expected wealth guidelines; you could plan which feats to take, and which magic items you wanted. AD&D didn't really have avenues by which a player could shape their character, until you got into very late 2E with things like Skills & Powers.

Creating dice rolling apps um Basic software programs on the trash Um TRS 80 with 32K memory. Rolling, rolling, rolling and rolling until they got the stats they wanted. Presenting the dm with a wish list of magic items they wanted to buy. Farming modules. Or reading modules and having a homebrew wealth guidelines.
I think someone found a point buy system and ported over to AD&D.
We were doing things that became called crunch and fluff.

 

[5ekyu]

It's not that I don't believe you, but... how were they doing those things? Were they optimizing their non-weapon proficiencies? Practicing their dice rolling in order to try and get the stats they wanted?

The reason this behavior became mainstream in 3E was because 3E introduced point-buy elements into character creation, in the form of feats and expected wealth guidelines; you could plan which feats to take, and which magic items you wanted. AD&D didn't really have avenues by which a player could shape their character, until you got into very late 2E with things like Skills & Powers.

Back in 1e and iirc 2e there were multi classing and dual classing which were useful for builds.

Back in 1e and forever there were as many stats acquisition systems as you could imagine. What 3e did was incorporate and standardize things already being done at many tables as far as point buy options and the like.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

As with many laments about the allegedly dilapidated state of newer editions, I find the issue largely comes down to focusing too much on specific methods, rather than the motivations behind them.

Optimization has been there since day 1, or Gygax wouldn't have felt the need to introduce the ear seeker. Sure, it was often less rigorously mathematical, and more dependent on knowing (and plying) the preferences of your DM, but it's always been there under one name or another. It's a game; it may not have a "win condition" in the sense of "the game ends, and you are declared victor," but it absolutely has success conditions, and people work to leverage their resources as optimally as possible in order to maximize those success conditions. People just talked about SOPs and the like more in yesteryear.

 

[Mistwell]

It is VERY SIMPLE. A vast majority of players have found that DMs do not implement Inspiration the way the rules suggest.

Link? Objective source of any kind?

 

[The Crimson Binome]

People just talked about SOPs and the like more in yesteryear.

That's exactly my point, though. Back in the day, people spent more time on the actual game - the part where you do stuff in the world - because there wasn't this whole char-gen boondoggle to distract everyone away from the game.

 

[transtemporal]

Role-play doesn't solve roll-play issues. It just pretends they don't exist. Which isn't helpful in resolving the problem. I may disagree with the OP that there is a problem, but saying "just role-play the way you want to play!" doesn't help because role-play doesn't fundamentally alter the mechanics of the game. Me saying I'm good at fighting with two weapons is not at all the same as me actually being good with two weapons. Especially when in your scenario, me wanting to role-play anything outside of my class features causes me to endure additional penalties and higher chances of failure.

I actually have a good example of this. In my old campaign I had a Goliath monk with 12 strength, 6 charisma and the performance skill. Now, because the goliath race description says something about being capable of great feats of strength, he's always saying things like "I throw the orc across the room" or "hold up the falling ceiling". Most of the time he fails and says "Hey! But the descriptions says..."

By the same token, he's quite happy with the idea that his performance skill (acting) is not mechanically great. Thing is, this player IS actually an actor and he's hilarious and I usually give him advantage because the role-playing is awesome... but even then he mostly fails. And he's ok with that because he's knows how a performance can fizzle, even when you think it's going to succeed.

 

[cbwjm]

This might just be a case of picking a bad example, but this stood out to me.
The battlemaster gets to do it as part of an attack. Another character trying would at best get to do it in place of an attack (more likely as an action).

I think it is in place of an attack according to the example in the DMG for disarming an opponent.

 

[Guest 6801328]

the more rules you have, the less freedom and creativity the player's have under the illusion they have more "options" which were almost always options they had if they could think of it in the situation.

Although I agree that in general more rules actually becomes constricting, I don't think that is intrinsically true about all Feats. But, yes, some of the feats you mention might have this effect.

What is needed is a higher quality (and more balanced) selection of Feats.

 

[Lanefan]

False, within the context of RPGs at least.

Role-playing is playing your character, making decisions based on the character's viewpoint and in-game-world elements as opposed to or contrasted with making those decisions based on player knowledge and outside the in-game-world elements.

Yes, which means that you're inserting yourself into a role.

Acting out those decisions IRL that your character is doing is a wholly different thing and is not normally required by role-playing. game mechanics can handle the resolution stages and narration is sufficient for the descriptive elements as the standard assumption for role-playing. But actually "performing" in person IRL is not normally at all a part of the thing called role-playing.

Physically performing e.g. swinging weapons or flipping tables, no.

Verbally performing, and being in the same sort of 'headspace' as a stage performer? Hells yeah.

Your character can be strong anf flip a table without you doing so to your gaming table - acting.
Your character can swing a sword of cast heal spells without you acting those things out.

Both quite true.

Your character can give a rousing speech to inspire troops and all that assumes without you giving such a rousing speech IRl.

But here it gets messy. I say that a player should for this at least try to go through the motions (then again, I'd never allow this particular mechanic in my game anyway so it's a bit moot). Same with any other 'social' thing that could be resolved through simple game mechanics e.g. bluffing, diplomacy, etc. - if they don't at least try to roleplay it out it ain't happening.

I myself try to always keep character specifics in mind when "tasks" are attempted in game and i do not normally let the player's "performance skills" have any weight at all - although there are edge cases.

Where I want to encourage my players to be better performers and portrayers of character. Where else do you think my entertainment as DM comes from?

Lanefan

 

[MoonSong]

Doesn't that make the OP's argument stronger? Now that Actor is a Bard-only ability, can anyone else be an Actor? Or reversely, why are all Bards also Actors? And what does acting have to do with imitating how other people sound? Why can only Rangers auto-know where north is?

I don't really agree with the OP, but this seems to make the problem he complains about significantly worse.


Wouldn't it be simpler to let anyone who wants to fight with two weapons...take a feat? Then the DM doesn't have to gauge the details of every situation, every monster, every encounter vs that individual and make a highly situational ruling on if it'll be successful?


Role-play doesn't solve roll-play issues. It just pretends they don't exist. Which isn't helpful in resolving the problem. I may disagree with the OP that there is a problem, but saying "just role-play the way you want to play!" doesn't help because role-play doesn't fundamentally alter the mechanics of the game. Me saying I'm good at fighting with two weapons is not at all the same as me actually being good with two weapons. Especially when in your scenario, me wanting to role-play anything outside of my class features causes me to endure additional penalties and higher chances of failure.

I agree, when there is a disconnect between role and roll things go crazy. I really can't play past that. If y character is meant to be good at something I want the mechanics to really reflect that, the same if my character is supposed to be bad at something. I wouldn't be able to roleplay a fragile waif with Str 18 and Con 20

The underlying point in the post you were originally quoting is that you don't need to build a character in order to play a character. If all you had was a pre-gen Fighter with 17/13/15/10/12/8 stats, you could play that character exactly as well as if you had spent an hour with all of the rulebooks and built something from scratch.

One alarming trend, which more-or-less started in third edition and continued through fourth edition and Pathfinder, is that the character generation mini-game receives an inordinate amount of attention relative to actually playing the game at the table. Some players become obsessed with building interesting and/or powerful characters, which they may not even get a chance to play, but they still spend hours just putting it together. And all of that - the character generation mini-game - is entirely irrelevant to the actual game where you're role-playing the character and deciding what they'll do at that moment.

If you replaced that whole mini-game with a handful of pre-gens, or even if you just didn't go out of your way to add in extra complexity via things like feats and multi-classing, you could spend more of your time on just playing instead of worrying about redundant mechanical differentiation.
No, you don't have several valid options. To use your own terminology, you have a small number of correct choices, and then you have trap options. If you care about optimization, then adding feats reduces your available choices, because more of your nominal decision points must go toward optimization; if you care about optimization, and you don't have feats, then you're free to put points into Charisma or Intelligence or whatever and it's not a trap because you aren't really losing out on anything significant.

If you don't care about optimization, then you were always free to put points into Charisma from the start. The only thing you lose out on, in a game without feats, is the very small number of feats which actually increase your concept space. (See earlier posts, detailing how new mechanics rarely expand concept space.)

Does it count if you want to closely model what you have in your head?

That was one of my favorite parts of the 2E DMG! You basically had a list of all of the class building blocks - hit die, THAC0 progression, weapon proficiencies, spell access and progression tables - and you could make any class you wanted by combining exactly the aspects you wanted.

If you wanted to build a full fighter type (with d10 hit dice, good THAC0, good armor and weapons) and also give them access to evocation and healing spells, you could just do that. The balancing factor was that every option increased the amount of XP required to gain a level.

But yeah, I doubt it got used much.

One guy made the math a ton of years ago, it was possible to really break that system, he -I'm mostly sure it was a he- created a class that had tons of stuff and 0 xp needed to level. I think the class was called the nano-munchkin and the blog was named something like "what is wrong with AD&D"

Link? Objective source of any kind?

No, not me saying it or backing it, but I had totally forgotten inspiration was a thing...