D&D 5E Resilient Feat

[The Myopic Sniper]

You definitely have to know your players and do any adjustments to character creation (either liberalising or restricting options) based on your experience with the players and the type of campaign you want to run.

I don't actually mind DMing a group of min-maxers as long as they are all on the same page. I just encourage them to take on more challenging encounters and play more strategically myself.

You do get into spotlight challenges when you have a couple of min-maxers thrown in with players who are doing other things with their characters or are new to the game. Usually, in those cases I can sit down with the non-minmaxers and help them bring their characters up to par while keeping their character concepts. It does occasionally involve homebrewing new feats and subclasses. I would probably suggest that newer DMs or one's who are less familiar with the system to probably go the other way and adopt a more restrictive overall approach to character customization (limit feats and multiclassing) until they know the system or their players better.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

I fully agree with [MENTION=55013]The Myopic Sniper[/MENTION]. As the DM, I always have options that players don't, and DMs shold be able to provide creative challenges to players regardless of the players' capabilities. This is a game that, from my perspective, should be story driven. Mechanics simply provide structure for how that story is told. This only becomes a problem when players do not balance against their peers in terms of power, which can cause frustation. But as [MENTION=55013]The Myopic Sniper[/MENTION] mentioned, a DM can always work with that player to find ways to bring them up, whether through home brewing new options, providing magical equipment, story rewards, ect.

 

[lall]

I am surprised, i always thought it could be taken until you run out if non-proficient saves

Me too!

 

[Awesome Adam]

If a player wants to invest his feats into Resilient, I'm more than happy to let them.

Is a player being proficient in 4 saves, after 8 levels and 2 feats invested, going to harm the other players in any way ? No, it is not going to harm other players, in what should be a co-operative game.

Will a player being proficient in additional saves increase his survivability ? Possibly, maybe even probably. Is that a bad thing ? No, it is not.

 

[Yardiff]

I'm only a player so far, and as a player I was looking at taking this feat only once but was interested in what others thought if it was available more then once.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Is a player being proficient in 4 saves, after 8 levels and 2 feats invested, going to harm the other players in any way ? No, it is not going to harm other players, in what should be a co-operative game.

I'm not sure if that's the right question to be asking here. A better question would be, "Is it more fun to include this option, or not?"

If a player is choosing between a +2 to Wisdom or proficiency in Wisdom saves, then that's not an interesting choice because the second thing is obviously way more useful at keeping you alive (unless Wisdom is a primary stat for the character, in which case that's going to already be maxxed out). To contrast, a choice between +2 Wisdom and +2 Dexterity is an interesting choice, because they boost different skills and change how the character is portrayed.

By including obvious feats that increase the power of every character, you remove the number of interesting choices available. If this feat is allowed twice, then the baseline expectation for survivability is that everyone takes it twice and nobody is bad at any of the important saves. (You still have the option of shooting yourself in the foot, if it's important that you role-play a character who is too dumb to live.)

 

[Hawk Diesel]

By including obvious feats that increase the power of every character, you remove the number of interesting choices available. If this feat is allowed twice, then the baseline expectation for survivability is that everyone takes it twice and nobody is bad at any of the important saves. (You still have the option of shooting yourself in the foot, if it's important that you role-play a character who is too dumb to live.)

I disagree that this is an "obvious" choice. There are many feats that offer at least as much power as the resilient feat. Examples that immediately come to mind are Warcaster, Sharpshooter (and it's melee equivalent), Crossbow Expert, Alert, freakin' Lucky (now that is a powerful feat). This doesn't even take into consideration if you are going for particular builds such where things like two-weapon fighting, tavern brawler, sentinel, or grappler come into play as good options.

The resilient feat gives you a bonus in a very specific situation, as feats should. You might hit those saves all the time. But then again, it's easy to get into situations where those saves may be rolled at disadvantage. In addition, having a great Wisdom save, or even a great Strength save, is not gonna save you from the guy that maxed out his grapple ability and is pinning you down while his friends beat on you. Once again, if you take a lot of save proficiencies, yes, you become hardier against those spells and effects. But it's not gonna stop arrows, fall damage, get you out of those locked chains, or prevent the scorching ray from burning you to a crisp.

If we were comparing resilient to feats like Keen Mind, which seems to me to be more of a ribbon ability feat/role play focused feat, your argument might be more sound.

Also, what about the aforementioned Monk or Paladin? Them taking these feats at any point is almost a wasted unless they know they will never reach the point where their class abilities to boost their saves kick in.

Resilient is good, but it is good in a relatively limited way, just as all feats should be. You aren't gonna excel in every situation, but when that situation that you excel in comes up, damn right that's your time to shine.

 

[Awesome Adam]

I'm going to agree with Hawk Diesel on everyone of his points.

In our campaigns, it's been understood that you can take resilient multiple times and no one has done it. In our campaigns, I've only seen two people take it at all. In both cases it was because failing a nonproficient save nearly killed their character and they wanted to strengthen that save should the situation happen again.

 

[bid]

You can pick the missing 2 of warcaster, shield master and resilient (Wis) to somewhat cover all 3 big saves. I don't think that replacing them with multiple instances of resilient makes a big difference.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I disagree that this is an "obvious" choice. There are many feats that offer at least as much power as the resilient feat. Examples that immediately come to mind are Warcaster, Sharpshooter (and it's melee equivalent), Crossbow Expert, Alert, freakin' Lucky (now that is a powerful feat).

Each of those feats is extremely obvious to a particular type of character, which means they aren't a real choice, and their inclusion makes the game less interesting. A barbarian with a greatsword doesn't have a real choice between the Great Weapon Master feat and +2 Wisdom or +2 Dexterity, because the feat is obviously better. At most, you might have a choice early on, as to whether you want to get GWM or maximum Strength first, but it's a foregone conclusion that you'll take the feat eventually. Feats are balanced with +2 to your primary stat, but your primary stat caps out at 20, so any feat that's even remotely "balanced" is going to be a massive power boost for you.

For each character type, there are maybe three feats that are roughly on-par with improving your primary stat, which means you have very few free choices remaining. Even if Resilient isn't as good as +2 to a primary stat, or even as good as Great Weapon Master, it's still way better than +2 to a non-primary stat that you might otherwise care about for purposes of saves and skill checks. If you can take the feat twice, then that's one fewer free choice you have left.

And of course, some character types don't have that many obvious feats that just make them better, so they're forced to resort to the deliberately-underwhelming boost in non-primary stats earlier. By including feats, you just increase the disparity between the haves and the have-nots.