D&D 5E New Race Feats Appearing in D&D's 'Xanathar's Guide to Everything

[gyor]

That why for Grudge Bearer you pick humans, who really are everywhere, plus getting treat certain skills like expertise when dealing human subject matter, like human Religions, is huge.

Because to pick humans you have to chose humanoids and there for you get a second humaniod race pick Elf (fluff it as a grudge against the drow), or Dwarf (substitute Deugar for Drow).

This is a good chunk of the cultures worth knowing anything about.

 

[gyor]

I like the Drow High Magic for utility and flavour, Detect Magic at will with no need for a ritual, leviatate, and I forget the other one.

I like the High Elf one, Misty Step once per short rest is of great use.

I like the Wild Elf one, I think it would go great with Arcane Archer thematically.

The Teifling ones are nice.

Grudge Bearer is awesome, for the reasons I pointed out.

The Forest Gnome one is good.

The Rock Gnome one should have just given the ability to use their gizmo building feature to build tiny servants like frim the Tiny Servant spell.

 

[Mistwell]

I'm not thrilled about this part of Xanathar's only covering the PHB races and not the EE or Volo's races, especially since it sounds like they DID design them, but they're only going to be available to DnDBeyond preorderers and won't be official.

They did not design them, and they have put out nothing for DNDBeyond preorders. That's purely the DNDBeyond team that did that.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I am a bit skeptical that you would be using the abilities of Actor, Athlete, Dungeon Delver, Keen Mind, Linguist, Mage Slayer, Martial Adept, Mounted Combat, Observant, or Tavern Brawler more often than you would make an attack or damage roll. Or Stealth roll if you are a thief.

Also-- while a +1 on a D20 is a 5% increase, a +1 on a d8 is a 12.5% increase.

Right... and the actual benefit is much harder to work out: your outgoing damage from those two things has gone up by 5% + (final hit chance)*12.5%. If we make your final hit chance 70%, then you're killing things 13.75% faster. In an ideal world that means they do 13.75% less damage, so your party can adventure for ~15% more fights per day.

An adventuring day consists of about 7 encounters, so if everyone takes that +1, you're handling an extra encounter.

That means that if one those feats mean you overcome 1 encounter per (party member) days, you have a net gain. If actor (for instance) boosts your chance to avoid an encounter by 25%, and you get one chance to do so per adventuring day, then it has paid it's way.

Did athlete mean that you didn't lose an attack because you could stand up from prone quicker, climb to a target, or make a jump? That's bumping up your damage for that combat by ~20-30% (depending on how long the fight lasts).

Did dungeon delver save you from some traps?

Some are more obscure than others - and will only work with specific characters and in specific campaigns, but the bar is really not all that high.

 

[gyor]

Right... and the actual benefit is much harder to work out: your outgoing damage from those two things has gone up by 5% + (final hit chance)*12.5%. If we make your final hit chance 70%, then you're killing things 13.75% faster. In an ideal world that means they do 13.75% less damage, so your party can adventure for ~15% more fights per day.

An adventuring day consists of about 7 encounters, so if everyone takes that +1, you're handling an extra encounter.

That means that if one those feats mean you overcome 1 encounter per (party member) days, you have a net gain. If actor (for instance) boosts your chance to avoid an encounter by 25%, and you get one chance to do so per adventuring day, then it has paid it's way.

Did athlete mean that you didn't lose an attack because you could stand up from prone quicker, climb to a target, or make a jump? That's bumping up your damage for that combat by ~20-30% (depending on how long the fight lasts).

Did dungeon delver save you from some traps?

Some are more obscure than others - and will only work with specific characters and in specific campaigns, but the bar is really not all that high.

That was truely insightful thinking outside the box.

 

[Elon Tusk]

Right... and the actual benefit is much harder to work out: your outgoing damage from those two things has gone up by 5% + (final hit chance)*12.5%. If we make your final hit chance 70%, then you're killing things 13.75% faster. In an ideal world that means they do 13.75% less damage, so your party can adventure for ~15% more fights per day.

An adventuring day consists of about 7 encounters, so if everyone takes that +1, you're handling an extra encounter.

That means that if one those feats mean you overcome 1 encounter per (party member) days, you have a net gain. If actor (for instance) boosts your chance to avoid an encounter by 25%, and you get one chance to do so per adventuring day, then it has paid it's way.

Did athlete mean that you didn't lose an attack because you could stand up from prone quicker, climb to a target, or make a jump? That's bumping up your damage for that combat by ~20-30% (depending on how long the fight lasts).

Did dungeon delver save you from some traps?

Some are more obscure than others - and will only work with specific characters and in specific campaigns, but the bar is really not all that high.

It seems like you are comparing a party who all take a +1 to one PC taking a feat.

 

[Saeviomagy]

It seems like you are comparing a party who all take a +1 to one PC taking a feat.

That's because encounters are handled as a party. Like I said: if EVERYONE takes the +2 ASI, then you end up dealing with ONE extra encounter per day. Each person is only dealing with a fraction of an encounter. In a 5 person party, each +2 ASI is only handling 20% of an encounter per day.

That means that the feat you take to replace the ASI only needs to deal with 20% of an encounter per day. Or it needs to have a 20% chance to deal with an encounter each day. Or it needs to automatically deal with an encounter every 5 days. Whatever it is, a single feat doesn't have to do much to be better than an ASI.

 

[Blue]

Personally I think people overvalue attribute increases. Think about it - a +1 to every single roll you make only shifts your chance of success by 5%, so it really only makes a difference in about 1/20 rolls. I'd argue that most feats are going to make their presence felt more often than that. Well, unless they're feats that only trigger on crits or ones that hand out +1 bonuses...

You're only talking about d20 checks there. Many ability attributes get added to weapon or spell damage. Or show how many times per rest you can use an ability like bardic inspiration and many clerical domains. CON gets added to every level's HPs AND every day's natural healing.

 

[Mistwell]

Feats and racial classes just entirely devalue the races that came out after the PHB. And particularly in regards to Volo where the races were designed as absolute garbage, the last thing that is needed is to devalue them even more by giving the PHB races elite overpowered feats and racial classes.

And, make no mistake, I guarantee you that the feats are going to be stupidly over-powered. If they weren't stupidly overpowered, people would just ignore them and stick to the most broken feats in the PHB and it would just be a waste of paper and ink to have printed them at all. In this edition character don't get many feats and some of those in the PHB are so vastly superior to others that those others never get taken by any characters at all. And that is putting aside the fact that feats have to compete with raising your attributes by 2 points-- which, until your attribute is a 20, could well mean getting a +1 to 75-90% of the rolls you make in the game. So if these feats are things that people would at all be tempted to take instead of gaining a +1 to the majority of their rolls OR take one of the stupidly broken feats already in the PHB....

Yeah, just stupidly powerful abilities to boost the handful of actually well designed races to further ensure that absolutely no one ever plays the ones that they created later.

Over, and over, and over again we see evidence that players don't tend to min/max and choose the "overpowered" options over the "normal" or "underpowered" ones as a generalization. And yet, over and over again I see people, like yourself, make the claim that everyone plays that way. What's it going to take to convince people that the typical 5e player just doesn't seem to make those kinds of choices nearly as often as the typical message board poster does?

 

[Parmandur]

Over, and over, and over again we see evidence that players don't tend to min/max and choose the "overpowered" options over the "normal" or "underpowered" ones as a generalization. And yet, over and over again I see people, like yourself, make the claim that everyone plays that way. What's it going to take to convince people that the typical 5e player just doesn't seem to make those kinds of choices nearly as often as the typical message board poster does?

NOOOOOO, IT'S NOOOT POOOOOSSIBLEEEEE!!!!!1