D&D 5E 2016 Feats Review

If you use Sharpshooter or just have a high enough stat, using a d6 weapon instead of a d8 weapon is barely a dent in your damage.

Furthermore, with the ability to ignore cover (SS) and ignore being in melee (CE) there are almost no instances where firing a bow/crossbow is ever worse off. It becomes really difficult for a DM to ever challenge that.
 

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So you saying that with another feat it's too powerful?
Sure, that's totally the fault of Crossbow Expert in isolation.
 


So you saying that with another feat it's too powerful?
Sure, that's totally the fault of Crossbow Expert in isolation.
I'm not here to assign blame.

I fully agree the problems can't be pinpointed to Crossbow and Crossbow Expert alone.

It's just so happens that by removing Crossbow Expert and/or Sharpshooter you remove a source of many common problems.

If there was an equally isolated but different source that also sourced many of the same issues, we could remove that instead.

But let's not pretend there is, and let's not pretend I was honest above when I said "it just so happens"... because if you say something like "remove cover as a game construct" BAM you have your problem right there. I mean, it's not like you need to do extensive analysis to conclude "being able to shoot crossbows just fine even when surrounded by monsters" is a massive buff to ranged builds.

In other words, I know the root cause lies with the specific benefits of these feats, even though the design space is too complex to "prove" it.



Which leads us to the other possible takeway from the context of your quote, namely the argument "since you can't specifically say it is totally the fault of this single feat, you shouldn't remove it".

But that leads you nowhere. That's just an argument for not changing anything. The true argument would be "I like it as it is and nothing needs to change", but that's off-topic for this thread.
 

Very good thread so far. I look forward to seeing your rejigged Feats. Now that my Players are starting to take Feats I've been looking at them closer than I had previously and I'm not sure about a lot of them.

I was over all a bit disappointed with how Feats were implemented in 5E. In terms of Power they vary far, far too much. Some being pointless, others (SS, GWM, CBE) being far too game influencing, and others simply having a throw away line in them that has a ridiculous long term effect, such as Alertness's never surprised, or Keen Mind's never forget anything.

I liked the idea during the Playtest, that any given Feat should have 3 basic benefits - one that's reasonably game influencing, one that affects skills or similar, and one small fluff type ability. Instead we got what's in the PHB.

I do really like that you have to make the choice between Attribute Increase or Feat, but at the same time it should be a hard choice for a Player to make. Feats vary so much, and the good ones are so good, that it really isn't. I also feel that taking a Feat and what it does for a character should be fairly Character defining, something that makes a Character stand out beyond the usual race/class combos.
 

I'm not here to assign blame.

I fully agree the problems can't be pinpointed to Crossbow and Crossbow Expert alone.

It's just so happens that by removing Crossbow Expert and/or Sharpshooter you remove a source of many common problems.
And yet you rate Actor as 'alright', despite it having a far bigger impact when paired with another feature (False Identity)? (Especially if paired with playtest Changeling or a spell that mimics a Changeling's feature.)
 
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And yet you rate Actor as 'alright', despite it having a far bigger impact when paired with another feature (False Identity)? (Especially if paired with playtest Changeling or a spell that mimics a Changeling's feature.)
I'm not aware of this combo, but this thread is definitely a good place for you to tell me about it :)
 

others simply having a throw away line in them that has a ridiculous long term effect, such as Alertness's never surprised, or Keen Mind's never forget anything
Exactly.

On the immediate surface, that sounds innocent enough, but if they ruin as much as a single storyline, they're no fun.

D&D was notorious about overwriting the DM's ability to tell a story (the countless NPCs wearing hats of non-detection just because the game offered a stupidly powerful Detect Evil spell is perhaps the most egregious example) and 5th was supposed to finally wash away that kind of silliness.

Which means that these throwaway lines are doubly disappointing. D&D really knows better by now.

Zapp

PS. The real let down is when you realize these things could have been so very easily tweaked to deliver essentially the same benefit, only without shortcircuiting the DM.

I don't know, "you're only surprised when you roll 1 on your Perception" say. This allows the DM to proceed with his scripted surprise (perhaps the character's daughter is throwing a surprise party, for crissake) even in the face of a rules-lawyery player that simply won't accept that his character can be surprised "it says right here I can't be surprised", simply by telling the player "I rolled for you in secred and I rolled a 1". Whether that's a bald-faced lie or not, doesn't matter.

And in the case of Keen Mind, formulate it in a much more roleplaying-friendly manner. Since the idea is that Keen Mind turns the character into a walking encyclopedia "given enough time, you can remember enough of any event to piece together any crucial clues."

This way, the player gets what the adventure can actually deliver, instead of asking the DM to impossibly ad-lib things that every human around the table surely have forgotten.
 

I'm not aware of this combo, but this thread is definitely a good place for you to tell me about it :)
The ability to imitate other people if you've heard them speak for a minute (Actor), the ability to forge notes and documentations if you've seen examples of such (False Identity), and a completely seperate identity (False Identity), all backed up by advantage on your Deception and Persausion checks (Actor)?

Throw in some form of shapechange (and maybe scrying) spell and you can cause anarchy.

Tried it once. Was a first level rogue Changeling with the Actor feat (the DM having granted us all a free feat). With expertise in Deception and Persausion I was able to successfully imitate almost anyone (unless the dice hated me). Acquiring official papers was the goal of the day, and when I achieved that... oh boy.

It does require a DM that interacts equally with the socialisation and combat pillars though.
 

The ability to imitate other people if you've heard them speak for a minute (Actor), the ability to forge notes and documentations if you've seen examples of such (False Identity), and a completely seperate identity (False Identity), all backed up by advantage on your Deception and Persausion checks (Actor)?

Throw in some form of shapechange (and maybe scrying) spell and you can cause anarchy.

Tried it once. Was a first level rogue Changeling with the Actor feat (the DM having granted us all a free feat). With expertise in Deception and Persausion I was able to successfully imitate almost anyone (unless the dice hated me). Acquiring official papers was the goal of the day, and when I achieved that... oh boy.

It does require a DM that interacts equally with the socialisation and combat pillars though.
Okay, I see.

Well, in that case I don't think I've missed anything - I had a hunch this was how the feat would play out.

Mechanically, I'm thankful the feat at least isn't trading in absolutes ("You automatically mimic anyone you study for 1 minute with no risk of detection").

Other than that, I'm afraid I can't give you a satisfactory answer to the greater issue. D&D has always been a game that severely undervalues what you can accomplish outside of combat. Just look at how long Charm used to work in previous edition...

So I'm afraid "fixing" irritating players is out of scope of any feat rebalance (and certainly for this review). Social problems is best fixed using social solutions. What I mean by that is: when we role-play, we generally resolve combat almost entirely by mechanics (rather than the player and DM duking it out :p), and so combat imbalance needs to be fixed with rules.

But social issues are much more often (and in most but not all groups) handled at least in part by evaluating the player's performance (rather than the character's alone).

So if a player "abuses" his share of the spotlight, and derails adventures by influencing NPCs away from the plot, that is something I'd solve by having a talk out-of-game with the player. No rule can fix this; and certainly not a tweak to this feat.

More generally, I'd hesitate to call this player a "social power gamer" even though that is exactly what he is. I mean, when a minmaxer breaks combat, I respond by nerfing the rules elements that aren't proofed against that level of optimization. But since the purpose of the game is at least in part to become good at killing monsters, I don't consider that gamer someone that ruins the game.

But when it comes to social, I do. The game simply doesn't have any rules knobs and levels to control him with, in the way the rules supposedly allow power gamers to play without the risk of breaking something, so the only solution IMO is to play with people that voluntarily doesn't wreck campaigns using features like Charm or Actor.

Since most people don't find it interesting to minmax something that can be trivially broken, this isn't an issue for most groups, I believe. Most people simply go "sure I could spend our session making sure we solve the problem without actually going on an adventure... but why would I want to anything like that?".

Zapp

PS. Edited in a short mention in the Actor review that briefly mentions what you and I have discussed here, Yunru. DS
 
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