More feats, fewer choices

[lutecius]

I'm just here for the "that doesn't have a fluff reason!"

It's much easier to go in with an open mind, read about the feat and then come up with a fluff reason.

Does Spell Focus need Cha 13? WTF? OK, there must be some reason for it. The reason is probably that project your force of will through your arcane energies to make them harder to resist. Essentially, the world is bowing to your authority in this (small) instance.

There, an explanation that took five seconds to come up with, which adds to the collective fluff of your game.

Go with the flow. It's a good philosophy for life over-all, but especially for RPGs .

The problem with 4e is that there is just too much of that.
Having to come up with justifications for every wtf rule that the designers didn't even bother to give is not what I look for in a rpg. Such explanations are bound to be far-fetched or inconsistent from case to case, not to mention from table to table.

And uh I don't know if that was sarcastic but to me "going with the flow" doesn't sound like such a good philosophy in general. Definitely not when it comes to voting with your wallet.

 

[phil500]

I'll admit that over half the feats I wanted from Paragon tier simply added to my defenses (maybe because the feat choices were so blah in Heroic, I was absolutely stoked to go for Great Fortitude and its siblings, for instance)

I feel the same, and suspect all of the characters I roll will end up taking toughness and the +2 to will, fort, and reflex save feats simply because the other feats are inaccessible or substantially less useful.

 

[med stud]

The problem with 4e is that there is just too much of that.
Having to come up with justifications for every wtf rule that the designers didn't even bother to give is not what I look for in a rpg. Such explanations are bound to be far-fetched or inconsistent from case to case, not to mention from table to table.

It's not justifications, it's explanations. Justifications are only necessary if you made up your mind beforehand what something is supposed to mean.

And uh I don't know if that was sarcastic but to me "going with the flow" doesn't sound like such a good philosophy in general. Definitely not when it comes to voting with your wallet.

What I meant was to not have any preconceived notions about what something should be. Handle every situation as it comes along. You can prepare, but don't prepare in detail, because it's impossible to prepare for even close to every eventuality.

In D&D, as this is a D&D forum, this means that if you go into something new with a strong notion of what things should mean, you will end up angry and frustrated and you won't win anything by it. If you, for example, say that Charisma is all about wit and charm, then you will be angry and frustrated when a feat about spell casting has Charisma as a prerequisite. If you instead see that it has Charisma as a prerequisite and accept it as a fact and come up with an explanation for it that you like, you are 1) more satisfied and 2) you have made your game richer.

 

[Cadfan]

med stud's right. Also, there's a solid gamist reason here- feat prereqs that relate to non-standard ability scores provide diversity of abilities for characters. If every wizard spellcasting feat has an Int related prereq, every wizard will go all int and dump everything else. Putting some of the abilities in Cha, some in Wis, some in Con, some in Dex, etc, creates a reason for wizards to have stats in other areas, and makes wizards with stats in each area slightly different from one another.

Take the way that Improved Trip was Int related in 3e. Was that the only way it could have been done? No, of course not. But it created the opportunity to design intelligent fighters. I suppose somewhere there was some guy who angrily claimed, "But I want to make a fighter who trips people, and is also stupid! This is forcing me into a build!" but it wasn't that valid of a complaint.

In general, dropping these feat prereqs probably won't break your game. But drop enough of them and it might make your game more bland.

 

[AllisterH]

Hmm..You know, I never really thought about this but
Y
ou know...That's an interesting point Cadfan...

For a fighter in 3.x, technically you needed only STR and CON but if you wanted the choice feats, you needed an INT 13 (and Combat Reflexes was no good if you didn't have at least a 14 DEX plus TWF).

Why the hell DID the fighter have to have STAT requirements in scores that weren't his primary yet the spellcasters got to make out like bandits (none of the spellcasting metamagic/item creation feats were STAT-required)?

Did everyone at WOTC hate the fighter? Geez, did the fighter in 2E somehow run up and steal somebody's lunch money?

 

[Cadfan]

Did everyone at WOTC hate the fighter? Geez, did the fighter in 2E somehow run up and steal somebody's lunch money?

I played 3e for almost a decade, and the one thing I'm absolutely, positively certain of is that Regdar slept with some WOTC employee's sister. There's no other explanation.

 

[Szatany]

I know what my first generic house rule will be (other than houseruling bunch of racial abiltiies) - you can take a feat w/o meeting ability requirements, but feat's effects are halved or otherwise reduced in some way.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

The problem with 4e is that there is just too much of that.
Having to come up with justifications for every wtf rule that the designers didn't even bother to give is not what I look for in a rpg. Such explanations are bound to be far-fetched or inconsistent from case to case, not to mention from table to table.

And uh I don't know if that was sarcastic but to me "going with the flow" doesn't sound like such a good philosophy in general. Definitely not when it comes to voting with your wallet.

Well, yeah, I think that's reasonable. This is not a game that gives in-depth "game world" explanations for how things happen. They're largely left up to the DM and the campaign group's consensus.

I think it's safe to say that people who want the rulebook to give in-fiction explanation of how things work the way they do will not, generally, be satisfied with 4e. It doesn't make doing that a priority at all.

I don't mind, since I'd rather come up with that stuff myself. The default setting is a blank slate, I dig that. People who don't like it that way, I'm imagining the Forgotten Realms books will dig deep into fluff and use some pagecount to explain why the world works the way the rules describe. You may want to wait for that to come out and see if you like that approach better.

There are a lot of roleplaying games where the rules only serve to describe the results of actions, and the entire fictional description of how those results come to be has to come from the imagination of the players around the table. It's not necessarily a bad thing. But I'm sure it's very jarring if you're not used to it.

 

[simply not edible]

Don't forget that the standard array (it exists, people) gives 3 stats at 13 or higher to start of with, and you can always put down your racials on those 12 and 11 if you really must have access to nearly every single feat.

 

[Kaffis]

I think your disconnect comes via your definition of Min/Maxing.

I (and probably smallpumpkinman too) define it as choosing, in minutia, to build a character with the non-key abilities exactly the lowest they can be to get the maximum number of benefits without paying much for it, then pour everything else into the key abilities (either all at once for a one-trick-pony or in several ways to get extreme versatility).

In that sense, choosing 8 in a stat because you want to roleplay your character having a notable weakness in that ability score is less min/maxing than grabbing 13 in that stat because you need it to get the prime feats. Going into character build with the list of feats open and selecting your stats (and planning the raises) exactly so you can qualify for feats all the way through your career definitely seems like min/maxing to me.

So, wait. You want to take a low score for roleplaying reasons, and then ignore your clumsiness/dimwittedness/frailty/what-have-you when it comes to feat choices?

That seems a little... pointless. If you're a clumsy character, you shouldn't be getting extra damage or defense from TWF, so it makes sense that if you're really playing your character as clumsy, he shouldn't have those feats anyways. Likewise, if you're not really in shape, it's preposterous to take the +2 to run speed feat and claim you're staying within your roleplaying concept.

Non-issue, IMO.