D&D 3E/3.5 3rd Edition Revisited - Better play with the power of hindsight?

[Yora]

I think the designers of the PHB understood very well how few feats most characters get.

It's the writers of the splatbooks that introduced a thousand more feats who I strongly suspect did not really think things through.

I don't think the crazy character build minigame was intentional. Three or four nice little tweaks to customize your character. It was not intended to create new play styles by combining several feats from half a dozen sources.
If you don't goo looking for a combination of five feats and two prestige classes that have quirky interactions with each other, then Skill Focus and Mobility are not that bad.

 

[payn]

I think the designers of the PHB understood very well how few feats most characters get.

It's the writers of the splatbooks that introduced a thousand more feats who I strongly suspect did not really think things through.

I don't think the crazy character build minigame was intentional. Three or four nice little tweaks to customize your character. It was not intended to create new play styles by combining several feats from half a dozen sources.
If you don't goo looking for a combination of five feats and two prestige classes that have quirky interactions with each other, then Skill Focus and Mobility are not that bad.

Whether it was intentional or not, I think it was a mistake making feats like skill focus and mobility fight for the same resource pool.

 

[James Gasik]

I think the designers of the PHB understood very well how few feats most characters get.

It's the writers of the splatbooks that introduced a thousand more feats who I strongly suspect did not really think things through.

I don't think the crazy character build minigame was intentional. Three or four nice little tweaks to customize your character. It was not intended to create new play styles by combining several feats from half a dozen sources.
If you don't goo looking for a combination of five feats and two prestige classes that have quirky interactions with each other, then Skill Focus and Mobility are not that bad.

Generally the Fighter (and to a lesser extent the Wizard) killed Feat design. Any time a designer made a new Combat Feat, they had to balance it with the knowledge that Human Fighters got 19 of the damn things, so they would add all these prerequisites so they couldn't have all the cool Feats on one character, or get very powerful Feats early.

This made it really difficult for any other class to invest in the better Feats, let alone in a timely fashion.

 

[Yora]

Continuing my reading of the PHB, one thing that stands out as weird is counerspells. When did they think this would be used?

You must have the correct spell prepared, and then during the fight you have to ready an action to counterspell.

You kind of have to know what spells an enemy will be using in a fight, and you have to be worried about some of those spells so much that you dedicate your participation in the fight to just countering those spells, instead of contributing with your own spells.
And you can't counterspell spell-like abilities, which you are much more likely to know you will be facing in advance.

 

[payn]

Continuing my reading of the PHB, one thing that stands out as weird is counerspells. When did they think this would be used?

You must have the correct spell prepared, and then during the fight you have to ready an action to counterspell.

You kind of have to know what spells an enemy will be using in a fight, and you have to be worried about some of those spells so much that you dedicate your participation in the fight to just countering those spells, instead of contributing with your own spells.
And you can't counterspell spell-like abilities, which you are much more likely to know you will be facing in advance.

I think you can use dispel magic to counter but at a penalty or something? I always liked the concept, but like many things in 3E, the juice wasnt worth the squeeze.

 

[Orius]

I think the designers of the PHB understood very well how few feats most characters get.

It's the writers of the splatbooks that introduced a thousand more feats who I strongly suspect did not really think things through.

I don't think the crazy character build minigame was intentional. Three or four nice little tweaks to customize your character. It was not intended to create new play styles by combining several feats from half a dozen sources.
If you don't goo looking for a combination of five feats and two prestige classes that have quirky interactions with each other, then Skill Focus and Mobility are not that bad.

I think the writers of the splats didn't think a great many things through. And given the high turnover rate of people at WotC during 3e it's not too surprising that some designers didn't quite understand what they were working with. The rapid pace of releases didn't help either.

Generally the Fighter (and to a lesser extent the Wizard) killed Feat design. Any time a designer made a new Combat Feat, they had to balance it with the knowledge that Human Fighters got 19 of the damn things, so they would add all these prerequisites so they couldn't have all the cool Feats on one character, or get very powerful Feats early.

This made it really difficult for any other class to invest in the better Feats, let alone in a timely fashion.

Honestly, it's okay if a fighter has a lot of cool combat feats, because that's supposed to be his benefit in the first place. He's the combat expert. The barbarian has rage, the paladin and ranger have their special abilities and spells, and the monk just sucks. The get feats too, but where they get to be good at maybe one aspect of combat, the fighter can do multiple styles and that's fine. Some powerful feats should have prerequisites (and prerequisites that actually make sense) so PC's can't front load them.

Continuing my reading of the PHB, one thing that stands out as weird is counerspells. When did they think this would be used?

You must have the correct spell prepared, and then during the fight you have to ready an action to counterspell.

You kind of have to know what spells an enemy will be using in a fight, and you have to be worried about some of those spells so much that you dedicate your participation in the fight to just countering those spells, instead of contributing with your own spells.
And you can't counterspell spell-like abilities, which you are much more likely to know you will be facing in advance.

Counterspelling is a nice flavorful option even if it doesn't come up too often. Dispel magic can act as a universal counterspell and some spells are paired as counters to each other such as haste and slow. I think the idea was there to let wizards have something like spell duels in combat every so often, but the type of spells prepped by players didn't lend themselves to the concept very well.

 

[Pedantic]

Continuing my reading of the PHB, one thing that stands out as weird is counerspells. When did they think this would be used?

You must have the correct spell prepared, and then during the fight you have to ready an action to counterspell.

You kind of have to know what spells an enemy will be using in a fight, and you have to be worried about some of those spells so much that you dedicate your participation in the fight to just countering those spells, instead of contributing with your own spells.
And you can't counterspell spell-like abilities, which you are much more likely to know you will be facing in advance.

Improved Counterspell, moving the requirements to a spell of the given school, on a Sorcerer is quite potent. I recall some discussion about whether it could be combined with Heighten Spell, to allow lower level spells to cover all the higher level slots.

 

[James Gasik]

Honestly, it's okay if a fighter has a lot of cool combat feats, because that's supposed to be his benefit in the first place. He's the combat expert. The barbarian has rage, the paladin and ranger have their special abilities and spells, and the monk just sucks. The get feats too, but where they get to be good at maybe one aspect of combat, the fighter can do multiple styles and that's fine. Some powerful feats should have prerequisites (and prerequisites that actually make sense) so PC's can't front load them.

Sure but let's look at the implementation. I'm going to use Whirlwind Attack here, not because it's especially potent, but the design team apparently thought it was.

So we have the following prerequisites:

Dodge (Dex 13+)
Mobility (Dodge)
Spring Attack (Mobility, BAB +4)
Combat Expertise (Int 13+)

Now a Fighter can get this entire chain out of the way at level 4, if they don't want Weapon Specialization, with the only hurdles being the Dex and Int requirements. If they're a Human, they even have something else, like Power Attack or Improved Trip.

Any other class attempting to do this? Level 9. 8 if Human.

Fighters having multiple fighting styles as their thing? Sure!

But so many Feats are printed that effectively say "Fighter only" even when they're not, because, as it happens, every class has Feats designed for them to use that further cut into their meager resources. And the benefits for some of these prerequisites are so meager it's hard to be excited about receiving them.

It always felt to me that if the Fighter didn't have "bonus Feats" as their thing, Feat design could have been a lot friendlier and more exciting.

 

[Orius]

Yeah, that was part of 3e's design. They didn't want to deliberately lock things into specific classes, though there were ways you could do that anyway, such as requiring a class ability from a particular class. Dragon #274 had some tips on creating prestige classes and #275 on feats and I remember at least #274 discouraged DMs from specifically requiring specific classes for a prestige class.

Still I'm looking at ways to shore up the elements of 3e that I think need it, and bonus feats for fighters is not one of them. For me, the fighter's feats is and should be as fundamental to them as spells are to the wizard.

One big element here is that I don't understand why the CharOp community considers some feats good and some bad. I know some of the feats that are considered junk and others that are considered essential, but I think like a DM, not a min-maxing player. I look at feats like a DM and not a player.

 

[payn]

Yeah, that was part of 3e's design. They didn't want to deliberately lock things into specific classes, though there were ways you could do that anyway, such as requiring a class ability from a particular class. Dragon #274 had some tips on creating prestige classes and #275 on feats and I remember at least #274 discouraged DMs from specifically requiring specific classes for a prestige class.

Still I'm looking at ways to shore up the elements of 3e that I think need it, and bonus feats for fighters is not one of them. For me, the fighter's feats is and should be as fundamental to them as spells are to the wizard.

One big element here is that I don't understand why the CharOp community considers some feats good and some bad. I know some of the feats that are considered junk and others that are considered essential, but I think like a DM, not a min-maxing player. I look at feats like a DM and not a player.

Hmm an interesting take. It was by running so many NPCs and monsters I learned which feats where great and which sucked.