This poll is inspired by the many, many threads that have brought up (or been hijacked by) discussions on the use of Feats and their impact on game balance, and the design intention of the 5E developers.
Many see Feats as being a great source of options for a PC, and a great way to individualize their PC, and I think that's accurate. But does this option come with a cost?
Is the use of Feats actually a form of "advanced play"? Are Feats better for players who have a strong understanding of the rules and the game system? Or would those players be better off in games that don't utilize Feats?
Essentially, is activating the Feat Option the same as activating Easy Mode? Select an option in the poll and then post your reasons.
Skimming the first few responses, I can see this question immediately ran into the question of what constitutes difficulty? I've done a bit of work on that. I think game difficulty can be looked at as
subjective and
comparative.
Performance is also a factor.
Subjective difficulty is roughly my expectation of overcoming a game challenge. The baseline is a coin flip: I'm as likely to succeed as I am to fail so I expect to succeed at least once if I try it a few times. "Easy" would mean that I succeed more often than that. "Hard" would mean that I succeed less often. In commercial PVE games the balance is typically shifted so that "Medium" is something like a 2/3rds expectation of success, "Hard" is a 50/50, and "Easy" is perhaps 4/5 or 9/10.
Comparative difficulty is my expectation relative to those of other players. The baseline is that I sit in the middle of my cohort (group of players) and that the curve is normal (a bell-curve). A challenge that is a coin flip for me might be a gimme for someone at the high-performance-end of the curve. While a challenge that is
subjectively "Easy" for me might be "Hard" for someone at the low-performance-end. Challenges are ordered along the x-axis at the point where the players sitting there have a 50/50 chance to overcome them. The y-axis is of course the number of players at that point. A medium challenge in abstract should be one where 50% of players have a 50/50 expectation to succeed. Players are also ordered along the x-axis, so that they are at the point that they have a 50/50 chance to overcome whatever challenge sits there: producing a confound where you have to go back and forth between ranking challenges, and ranking players. The scales are homed in on by having players iterate through randomly selected challenges. This is part of why chess masters in a given era can't be exactly ranked against those in previous/later eras. Bayesian mathematics can be used for these orderings.
Performance captures that some days I'm on fire, other days I'm not so hot. My physical and mental preparedness constantly fluctuates, often due to external factors such as my co-players or local climate that impact my comfort, willingness, and so on. Performance creates fuzziness in my true position, so that each player occupies a range of comparative ranks. The volatility that performance produces means that to know true difficulty for even one player, they need to at least iterate on different days and permutations of the design space for a given game's challenges.
The 5e DMG implies a difficulty scale. The Encounter Thresholds represent designer guesses and intentions about that. "Easy" encounters are those that a player taken randomly from among all players would be heavily favoured to overcome. "Hard" are those that a player taken randomly is still favoured to overcome, but could fail. Even for "Deadly" encounters, I believe a player would be favoured to overcome the challenge, but with a slightly higher chance to fail. It could be something like - for any player - Easy = 99% expectation to overcome, Hard = 80%, Deadly = 75%. To me, 5e appears intended to be an "Easy" game. Baseline.
Against the designed baseline, many feats unarguably increase player expectation of success. Taking Lucky, Sharpshooter, GWM, Crossbow Expert, or any feat that is mechanically stronger than an ASI, causes that consequence. Some feats are "traps". Savage Attacker is the best example. It's strictly worse than an appropriately placed ASI. Some feats are not traps, but might not contribute as much to expectation of success as an ASI. Linguist could be an example. If you want to speak more languages, it nails that for you, but speaking more languages in many instances won't change your expectation of overcoming an encounter. It might be best to think of those as at right-angles to difficulty, at least insofar as the average encounter is concerned. Published adventures also offer a baseline for encounter difficulty, which I think is currently near to but not the same as the DMG baseline.
Many DMs change encounters to match expected performance of their players. They are changing subjective difficulty by sliding their encounters along the comparative x-axis so that their group has whatever expectation of success they equate with Easy/Medium/Hard etc. One would only be able to estimate the true difficulty of their encounters by running them for other randomly chosen groups. That's why some people feel like feats don't change difficulty.
To answer your question then:
yes,
feats make the game easier in a very real sense. Players with access to feats will foreseeably slide upwards along the comparative scale against players without access to feats. Subjectively, they might not notice because their DM might change the encounters they face.
