How do you feel about the only-general-feats direction of D&D?

[mkill]

I used to be a big fan of feats but lately I've grown weary of them.

I got badly burned with feat prerequisites when I tried to level my Dragonborn 2WF ranger with a flail as main weapon. For some reason, all those specialized feats never applied: the Dragonborn ranger feats were useless, flails already have the worst feat support of all weapons but then the only weapon style for flails only supported marauders, not 2WF rangers, and so on...

I'm in the camp that feats (and rules bits in general) should be as generic as possible. This allows the most flexibility in character creation, and a slim, easy to use ruleset. The flavor should come from description text and the background and in-game play of the character.

Lately, I've been toying with the same idea as TwoSix, that 5e could be entirely featless. The little bonuses that you are expected to gain from feats can just be baked into the general progression. However, there still needs to be room for customizations, like multiclassing, weapon and armor proficiencies, extra skills, new languages and so on.

The racial customization issue is easy to solve: choose an improved racial power at a higher level, say 11th and 21st. For example, instead of standard fey step, you can choose between one that has an attack tied to it, one that heals you, and one that allows you to take an ally with you. In other words, rather than spending a feat to upgrade your racial power, you gain an improved version at a fixed point.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yeah, I'm entirely sick of the ridiculous number of feats, most of which are pretty much useless. There were a bunch of rather poorly considered experiments with feats, like the 'Tribal' feats and most of the super specialized fighting style stuff in MP2.

Feats should simply do what they do, pretty much lack prereqs, and be broad enough to cover a variety of similar situations. Most of them should be simple static add ons. Actually the new Weapon Expertise feats are a good example. Instead of having a bunch of feats that support Eladrin spear use, just make a couple generic feats that make spear use better, then make spear use something that benefits from a good DEX and voila, eladrin will take it, and so might some others that want to excel in that weapon.

There can be a few cases where a race-specific feat does make sense, but I don't think most races need more than 3-4 of them at most.

I'd be OK with racial power swaps, but they need to be very carefully considered so that they don't pigeonhole a race too much. I really have no interest in a whole extra slew of power choices, that's just a different bloat, not an improvement. Characters have enough power slots already, just use them.

It is OK for a feat to be useful in a narrow set of conditions, but it should be useful to a wide variety of character builds. This lets each little thing you might enhance down to one or two specific feats.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I suppose that when you think about it feats were introduced into 3e as the (much needed) customisation axis for the non-caster characters - which also had benefits for casters too.

It could easily be argued that in 4e they could be irrelevant as the customisation for all classes comes from hugely customisable power choices.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, PS, the thing is how do you provide a basis for distinction between characters? Yes, they can pick different powers, but any given character of a given race/class is pretty much faced with exactly the same options. What basis are you left with? The fact that Joe has a potent magic sword and Fred has a potent magic spear? How do I depict "I'm really good with spears"? You could simply discount that "oh, any warrior can use any old weapon effectively" but really that's not the way things are. Maybe the distinctions that exist now are a bit excessive, but actually I think it is more that people feel like they are. Or maybe the real distinctions should be based more around situational utility.

Anyway, it seems like there exists some aspect of customization that is cross-cutting. It is more than just "I picked a power that is especially useful with spears."

 

[Destil]

The 3000 feats include things like "drow long knife proficiency." It's not quite as bad as it sounds.

No, it doesn't. Do a comprendium search. Melee Training, Skill Training, Skill Focus etc area all only listed once.

All Feats - 3078
Feats Names Containing
Expertise - 27 feats
Focus - 29 (skill focus, weapon focus and implement focus are three feats)
Proficiency - 9 feats (It only lists weapon proficiency once)

 

[Incenjucar]

No, it doesn't. Do a comprendium search. Melee Training, Skill Training, Skill Focus etc area all only listed once.

All Feats - 3078
Feats Names Containing
Expertise - 27 feats
Focus - 29 (skill focus, weapon focus and implement focus are three feats)
Proficiency - 9 feats (It only lists weapon proficiency once)

Hm, you are correct. Thank you for pointing out my error.

That said going through the list, I noticed a significant number of feats are feat sets, like the Net feats, which these days could as easily be made into a theme instead.

Personally, I'm fine with having many feats in the game, so long as the redundant or useless feats are easy to locate and ignore, and feats aren't made highly specific unless they must be or doing so is especially valuable to the game - dragon breath feats, etc. I think a strong categorization of feats, along the lines of the recent Rituals article, would be tremendously helpful.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hm, you are correct. Thank you for pointing out my error.

That said going through the list, I noticed a significant number of feats are feat sets, like the Net feats, which these days could as easily be made into a theme instead.

Personally, I'm fine with having many feats in the game, so long as the redundant or useless feats are easy to locate and ignore, and feats aren't made highly specific unless they must be or doing so is especially valuable to the game - dragon breath feats, etc. I think a strong categorization of feats, along the lines of the recent Rituals article, would be tremendously helpful.

Well, that's basically what Essentials did, left out a lot of redundant stuff, rewrote feats to cover more ground, categorized them all strongly, removed unneeded prereqs to improve re-use. Obviously the Essentials feat list by itself is fairly meager but reasonably you'd just continue on from that and add in other interesting stuff in a measured way.

See, this is all why I think Mearls and co just hate dealing with 4e. If business-wise they could clean-slate, they could really fix a lot of issues with 4e.

 

[Destil]

Yeah, better grouping would help a lot. Many of the existing 'groups' are stupid or narrow (guild feats, anyone?). The split should be based on who finds something useful, not what you want to do (so you wouldn't see a feat to enhance spells that deal acid damage in the CB unless you actually have spells that deal acid damage, for instance). Something like

Class feats
Race feats
Weapon group feats (i.e. axe feats)
Implement feats (i.e. wand feats)
Energy type feats (i.e. acid damage feats)
Power Source feats
Power feats
Skill feats

General feats
Proficiency feats
Defense feats
Multiclass feats

 

[Incenjucar]

Eh. Essentials and especially essentials+ aren't much better, they're just NEW examples of the old collection of issues.

A clean slate doesn't do you much good if you immediately start flinging stuff at it again. HoS especially.

 

[Marshall]

Well, that's basically what Essentials did, left out a lot of redundant stuff, rewrote feats to cover more ground, categorized them all strongly, removed unneeded prereqs to improve re-use. Obviously the Essentials feat list by itself is fairly meager but reasonably you'd just continue on from that and add in other interesting stuff in a measured way.

No they didnt. They introduced whole new categories of feats, introduced redundant feats, pinned more feats into smaller niches and amped up the power of some feats to make them automatic choices.
Then they went and bundled the feats into completely nonsensical categories that are harder to decipher than the feats themselves.
Why was it so hard to separate feats by Race/Class and Weapon/Implement or Attack/Defense? Instead we got "Quick Reaction" and "Vigilant Reflexes", what kind of nonsense is that?

See, this is all why I think Mearls and co just hate dealing with 4e. If business-wise they could clean-slate, they could really fix a lot of issues with 4e.

He did, they just wont call it 4.5. As far as the Devs are concerned, nothing published before HotFL exists. Thats why we got blanket cop outs on Rarity and zero support for anything thats not e-related. Even the CC articles only exist because they were supposed to be an e-book.