What should WOTC do about Golden Wyvern Adept?

[Najo]

I think more people would find your arguments convincing if you didn't use ridiculous hyperbole.

World-shattering? Having to change a feat name is world-shattering? Really?

Spit on your hard work? Give us a break. One could just as easily argue you are spitting on the designer's hard work by using your own setting and house rules. Yes, that would be a ridiculous assertion. So is yours.

Since inception, D&D has encourage players to make their own worlds and take and adapt their materials as their own. This is the first time fluff has been made this core. The Greyhawk as the core setting before was fairly unobtrusive. This is more so than that.

Being world shattering, I mean a campaign setting. If you have spent years playing in and build a campaign world, to have WOTC come along and force their fluff without backstory into your game, you are being forced to either a) change the names of an unknown number of feats and other game mechanics or b) accept these changes into your setting.

Option a) creates more work for a DM. Option b) changes the feel of his hard work without him being able to have much of a choice.

These named feats are a bigger deal than some may realize. They are not the same as having a pantheon of Greyhawk gods, some greyhawk named spells, magic items or monsters. All of those items are DM controlled, and therefore are placed in the setting or removed when the DM decides to include them or not.

Player options work differently. Players choose their classes and the options those classes present, thus, player's bring in the feats, skills and talents that come with their class. This creates an immediate conflict between DMs who do not want those materials and players who do. WOTC is unintentionally making life a lot hard on all the DMs who do not want Golden Wyvern Adept and its like in their game.

The simplest way to resolve this is to add in fluff in sidebars. That way the fluff is OPTIONAL and there to inspire new players and dms, but removed enough that veteran players and dms who don't want it don't feel stepped on by it.

 

[Najo]

I dispute this. I will bet cash money that WotC has a more accurate marketing sample than a self-selected sample of 135 people.

Your ignoring all of the other valid points I am making. If this wasn't such a big deal, then why are all the message boards full of people upset about it?

Just because it doesn't bother you or the way you play, doesn't mean it is the right thing to do and WOTC isn't making a mistake. I think they want that sort of material to help new players and put some fantasy energy into the game more, but it has further reaching effects. For one, it homogenizes EVERY D&D campaign setting. If we wanted to play the SAME game then we would have all been playing Greyhawk with 3.5. But DMs like to create their own settings.

This approach steps on 1) story driven roleplayers 2) World Building DMs 3) fans of specific campaign settings. I can easily see that being 50% of the market.

WOTC needs to find a solution that doesn't alienate the creative half of the hobby. They should be encouraging D&D as a tool set to create with. It would be like Photoshop forcing you to use certain filters or color pallets.

D&D is not a world, it is a tool for creating them. The campaign settings are worlds.

 

[Mad Mac]

I think some of you guys are overstating the value of "clear" feat names a little bit. When I first picked up 3rd edition, I was looking up feat names all the time. Prior to 3rd Edition, the definition of "Cleave" was not "Bonus Attacks if you kill someone first". It is now, of course, because it's been around for years and I'm playing Non-D&D video games that use a similar cleave mechanic. Combat Expertise, Lightning Reflexes, Combat Reflexes, ect gave me headaches back in the day.

I know what all the core feats do now, more or less off the top of my head because I've been using them for 7 years. Non-core feats I almost always have to look up, no matter how explanatory the name is.

I'll bet money that no one on these boards will ever, ev-er forget what Golden Wyvern Adept does, though.

 

[dmccoy1693]

It would be like Photoshop forcing you to use certain filters or color pallets.

Preferred analogy: It would be like Microsoft Windows forcing you to use Internet Explorer and putting a virus in windows to make firefox not work properly. (Ohhh ... wait a minute ... didn't microsoft get sued over that?!?)

 

[Najo]

Spit on your hard work? Give us a break. One could just as easily argue you are spitting on the designer's hard work by using your own setting and house rules. Yes, that would be a ridiculous assertion. So is yours.

One more point:

Throwing an adjective and noun together and calling it setting is not hard work, its lazy.

Golden Wyvern Adept. What does that mean exactly? It has no point of reference, it has no descriptive purpose and it doesn't guide your audience to anything. Stephen King himself said this sort of description, using adjectives for the sake of adding extra color, is bad writing. it just wastes page count.

If the designers then add in background (and thus hard work) it becomes more of an intrusion on the DM and their own work. If there is no background, then why bother to name the spellshaper feat Golden Wyvern Adept?

By accepting Golden Wyvern Adept with no background, suddenly we are in another logic. Why not call Power Attack something like Hammer of the Three Gods? Call Lightning Reflexes the Cunning Displacer Beast's Instincts. Spring Attack could be Furious Faery's Leap. We could call combat expertise, Dwarven General's Tactical Evaluation.

When does this sort of thing stop?

Some of my examples are a bit much, but they are not far from the can of worms that is going to be opened here. Golden Wyvern Adept is unnecessarily restraining and pointless. It opens a door to confusing game mechanics and removing creativity from the game.

What if I want a Wizard order that uses spellshaper but isn't the golden wyvern adepts? What if I don't have wizard orders in my game?
Why do wizard orders have descriptive feats but other classes don't?
What if all feats get colorful names like this? If it is done to much, how annoying is that going to get?
What about 3rd party publishers trying to plug in with the named feats? Can they? Are they going to go and make their own now too? Again, more confusion.

Now, don't misunderstand me. I like Golden Wyvern Adept as a concept. I have no problem with it being in a campaign setting, with history and background to it. But, that is where it belongs, in a campaign setting or in a sidebar giving an example of a campaign setting. It is not how WOTC should start naming game mechanics that player's choose from the core rules.

Do you understand why this matters to some of us, and why this is a bigger deal than it might seem at first? Put yourself in our shoes. Say you spent years working on a game world, using D&D mechanics, to have those mechanics turned against your work. D&D has not done that until now. It is one thing to work rules that operate behind the scenes as infrastructure. That is easy. It is the fluff anf flavor seeping in through game mechanics that they are doing for the first time.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Question: If GWA is not in the SRD but is in the phb (like the the red wizard is not in the 3.5 srd but is in the dmg), how will it affect things?

 

[Najo]

One more point I would like to make:

Mike Mearls said this about Sunder:

Here's why I think sunder is lame:

It doesn't respect the DM's control of the campaign. Sunder can destroy items that are important to the plot. It's an end point, rather than an extra complication. Contrast that with disarm: if you're disarmed, the weapon is still there, you just need to take a risk to get it back.

In particular, since so much of 3.5's firepower for PCs and NPCs is tied up in gear, giving you a way to destroy that gear works against the system.

If D&D's system didn't rely on items at all, sunder would be fine, but it does, so I don't think it helps the game.

Sunder also gives you another reason to stop adventuring. I think D&D works best when the PCs are playing a game where they worry about diminishing hit points and spells. Adding other resources to drain or destroy muddies the waters.

This is EXACTLY the same reason Golden Wyvern Adept is bad. It doesn't respect a DMs campaign or his control over it. If that is good enough reason to take Sunder out, it is good enough reason to change the name of feats like this.

Sure, DMs can take sunder out or can make it work different. But DMs shouldn't feel like they HAVE to in order to make their game work. The RAW should support the majority of D&D games and make the DMs job easier. By that same logic, the fluff named feats (like GWA) should be optional additions to our game instead of a headache we have to explain to every single player if we want the Golden Wyverns and their like gone. As a DM I shouldn't be forced to take something away from a player that is a core rulebook choice for that player's character, period.

 

[Maggan]

Since inception, D&D has encourage players to make their own worlds and take and adapt their materials as their own. This is the first time fluff has been made this core.

I have found Tenser, Mordenkainen and Bigby to be fairly "intrusive" in my D&D game since 1st edition AD&D. So this is definitely not the first time fluff has been made "this core".

It's just another instance among others.

/M

 

[dmccoy1693]

If that is good enough reason to take Sunder out, it is good enough reason to change the name of feats like this.

I don't think Mearls' arguing that sunders needs taken out but rather the game needs to be not based on the aquisition of items (which WotC's said before they are going to undo that).

 

[Najo]

I have found Tenser, Mordenkainen and Bigby to be fairly "intrusive" in my D&D game since 1st edition AD&D. So this is definitely not the first time fluff has been made "this core".

It's just another instance among others.

/M

The spells were pretty bad, but it is easier to deal with than these feats. a few wizard's names can either be changed or treated like long forgotten wizards from a past age. Worse case scenario is that the spells just aren't there, they can be ignore (not given to players through spell books).

These named feats don't work like that. They force whole orders and world elements in with them. It is like building specific gods onto the cleric's class features or tying all of a fighter's abilities to styles and training schools like in the Book of Nine Swords.

This one feat might seem harmless on its own, but what happens once there is a ton of them? What happens when a DM has to have pages of renamed feats to make use of these feats in their setting (if they choose to do that).

What happens when your Conan styled character who grew up in his moutain tribe and was then sold into slavery and raised as a pitfighter, instead has to have learned from three different martial arts type schools?

With that in mind, did Merlin belong to the Golden Wyverns? Maybe Arthur knew the Lightning Panther Strike. See, this is where it gets really stupid.