Legends and Lore: Uber Feats eat Prestige classes and Paragon Paths or give +1 to ability

[gyor]

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130415

Interesting, I'm intrigued, but slightly skeptical. I'd like to see it in practice. Could be good for any class that suffers from MAD.

The more I think about feats being like class features the more I feel were returning to the one thing I feel we lost from the first playtest and which I really liked

 

[Kraydak]

Do not want.

 

[GX.Sigma]

I'm not 100% sold on this particular implementation, but I like the philosophy behind it: some people hate feats and don't want to use them, so they should be given a simple option that doesn't involve choosing something from a giant list. (A quote from the feedback I gave on this most recent survey: "Feats suck. Not just the feats in this packet, but the whole concept of feats.")

I'm actually really looking forward to seeing this in action. Maybe it'll fail, but hey, you have to take risks to make something great. And even if it fails, they just change it for the next packet. It's not even really a risk. I'm all in favor of shaking up the system like this.

I suppose that starting ability scores will be lower to accommodate for this? Maybe straight 3d6?

 

[JamesonCourage]

Not enough information to judge, but the "+1 to an ability score instead" option isn't good, in my opinion. But, let's see what he means by making feats more powerful.

 

[gyor]

Your still only allowed a natural ability score of 20 so all the ability score does is encourage vertility of abilities at that point, so bounded accuracy won't break that.

Does this remind anyone of the original more interesting specialties of the first packet, like necromancer, Aylcoyte, and the like, one example of which necromancer gave you a skeleton servant.

Does this feel like that to anyone else? I'm growing hopeful.

 

[Jack99]

Offhand, it sounds like the worst idea since THAC0.

 

[Raith5]

Not enough information to judge, but the "+1 to an ability score instead" option isn't good, in my opinion. But, let's see what he means by making feats more powerful.

Agree. I always thought feats were about breadth and customization rather than power.

Feat level prerequisites make sense but are nothing new.

I am not sure what to make of recent announcements of DDN.

 

[Sunseeker]

If this leads into another system of having X of Y and Z of Q with all this other meaningless dribble in order to take up a specific PP or PRC, forget it.

 

[Blackwarder]

My first reaction to this is that I don't like it, mainly the part about different classes have different feat progression rates, basically making feats mandatory... Blah.

I'm all in favor of making feats the great mechanical features they were in the first packet but I don't want to make them mandatory... And having it a feature that you gain feats by different rates depending on your class make them mandatory while killing the idea of speciality at the same time.

I'll have to see it in practice but currently it doesn't sound that great.

Warder

 

[Li Shenron]

The article is hilarious... I have strong negative opinion on everything, worst L&L article ever!

Many people hate feats (not me) so what do we get? Feats are now totally mandatory. Consider that since the start until the second-last playtest packet, feats were totally optional, so this is going clearly backwards.

Then +1 to ability scores right... as if between generous ability score generation (4d6 drop lowest) + racial ability score bonuses + class ability score bonuses + double increase every 4 levels... apparently we didn't have enough!

The whole 5e game is built around abilities being more important than level-based bonuses due to bounded accuracy, why giving them away so easily? Now pretty much every single 1st level PC is guaranteed to have at least 18 in her primary score. In a way this feels like it will become mandatory... be prepared to see every mid-level Fighter have Str 20, every mid-level Wizard have Int 20 and so on.

Also I can't believe that Mearls is so overlooking the reason why his Sorcerer friend couldn't find a feat. That clearly was not because of the feat mechanics but simply because there were no feats in core 3e interesting enough for Sorcerers. IOW, core 3e did not have enough feats. I know that people complain that there were too many feats in 3e, and too many of them were garbage or broken, but that was only after you factor in dozens of supplements. The core 3e had too many combat feats, and too few non-combat feats.

Even the part on prestige classes as feats leave me skeptic... it could work, but they will certainly be tempted at writing a purely sequential feat chain instead of a pool of feats and feat tree, which would be more interesting and will (finally!) make more prestige classes be worth to widely different classes.