D&D 5E [5e] Feats, what gives?

[Satyrn]

No, "less likely" doesn't equate with "would never". And I suspect a majority of people posting in general are players, given a majority of the fan base is players.

I really should've put a smiley in my post.

 

[Mistwell]

I really should've put a smiley in my post.

And I'm in a cruddy mood or else I probably would have spotted the implied smiley

 

[Satyrn]

And I'm in a cruddy mood or else I probably would have spotted the implied smiley

Well then I'm glad you didn't respond with a lengthy retort, wasting your time over a joking post because of your foul mood. I've done that before.

I hope your funk passes soon.

 

[Waterbizkit]

Hi,

I'm a complete REDACTED player of the worst kind. I'm going to break your game if I want to. Want to restrict feats? Go ahead. Want to cut some of the classes? You do you boss. Going to go whole-hog and restrict alignments to good only? Sweet. I'm gonna break your game if I want to.

End scene.

Sorry for the hyperbole, I was mostly just having a laugh. In my experience, which will certainly be less than many of you, players will be a problem if that's their intent and no number of restrictions is going to slow them down. This doesn't mean everyone needs to allow everything in their games or they're a "bad" DM, far from it. Just skim my post history and it won't take any of you too long to find that I love reading about everyone's house rules or campaign restrictions because the best thing about this game is making it our own.

That said, I feel like many people are too quick to jump on feats or similar options as the root of problem players... I'll agree to disagree. Anyway... what was my point? I forget... fin.

 

[Warpiglet]

Simple.

Some people want their challenges and world to be a challenge, and worry that by crunching numbers a player can tilt the balance.

Others suggest that you just up the ante.

Then some worry that penalizes the less powerful.

I say try to play with a group that has a similar focus and its all good. Either that or don't equate a good time with being 1:1 damage output with the next guy and roll with it. The game is built on some assumptions and the number of class, feat, multiclass and race combinations have been tested in every possible combination. Some things are going to get silly if you combine enough and I suspect that is why AL wants PHB+1.

Some people are not into the 3rd edition combine 10 prestige classes for MOAR power...some people ARE. Neither is right but I prefer to play in one of these camps for the most part.

A major thing I judged 5e by was whether A. you could simply make sh*t tons of magic at a whim and B. whether there were millions of prestige classes that could be combined. Neither one of these possibilities sit well with me, personally. Its all preference.

Some DMs don't like to deal with combinations that make others feel feeble, that things that do not seem to have any verisimilitude in their campaign world or that demand challenges that others in the party cannot rise to.

My group has access to anything we want because we are friends and don't want to ruin the campaign or make others have less fun. We use some restraint and do some things for MOAR power and some things for RP. Most groups I suspect are similar.

However, you can encounter individuals that make the most powerful character they can and do not worry a great deal about the fun of others, throw their weight around and make challenges less exciting. DMs can match any of it. However some want to have fun and not work so damn hard to modify things into relevance for the fringe players who do not exercise any restraint.

I think it can be a real problem...but the problem lies more with the player group than the ruleset.

TLDR: Do what you want but don't f*** up the game and the prep the DM does and for Pete's sake remember other people want to have fun as well. Respect the game and the DM might leave more options open to you! Like feats...

 

[iserith]

There's also a certain amount of miscommunication in topics like this I've noticed.

If you say "In my experience, feats lead to powergaming and I don't like that...", that's a statement of experience and preference. It might invite unsolicited advice on how to deal with "powergamers," but otherwise nobody can really gainsay you. After all, it's your experience and preference and those things aren't up for debate.

If you say "Feats lead to powergaming...", well, that's a whole different story and you basically deserve all the comments that follow in my view, even if what you only meant to say it was your experience and preference.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think DND rules in general induce a build type mentality. The moment you say "roll a character". You have to think about what role you want to play, and build towards it. Like I said in a previous post, remove feats and people will still optimize stats and classes/items.

I suppose the class system (pi) could be a root of the problem. Classes are very limiting to concept, so to play the character you want, you avail yourself of whatever choices are available and are always looking for more, once some choices accumulate, certain ones stand out as better than others, and that, in itself, is also limiting, only to 'optimal builds' instead of classes.

Good DMs are not that common. It takes a lot of experience to become a good DM, and along that road you probably start out as a bad DM and then progress through mediocre and then acceptable and then decent before becoming a good DM. So that's years of play. None of them are "good" DMs on the first day.

All very true. OTOH, 5e is very attractive to returning D&Ders from back in the day, and many of them had years of experience that they can draw upon to ramp back up to 'good DM' status pretty quickly.

So your premise that "a good DM..." is an assumption that's not really helpful. A good DM won't care (though they may have a good reason to exclude feats), but then a good DM is less likely to be reading a thread titled, "Feats, what gives?".

It's a vital assumption, really. DM Empowerment relies on empowering someone who can handle it.

No, "less likely" doesn't equate with "would never". And I suspect a majority of people posting in general are players, given a majority of the fan base is players.

Here on EN World we seem to skew older & DMs. I guess if you're this into hashing over the game, you've likely been playing it a long while, and have taken up DMing at some point.

 

[jasper]

I think [MENTION=277]jasper[/MENTION]'s essentially saying that feats become a tool that -when layered on top of the choices made with stats and classes - provide too many choices for his preferences, that the accumulated number of choices reach a certain threshokd it creates an environment ripe for powergaming - and he doesn't enjoy that.


So if you ignore his denigration of the style and preferences he doesn't enjoy, I read him as saying "Feats are the path to the dark side. Feats lead to choices. Choices leads to powergaming. Powergaming leads to suffering."

Well, his suffering because it's not the style he prefers.

and you read badly. Some feats are ok. Some are not okay. If I was going to homebrew I would limit or drop certain feats. Most of people I have game with who were power gamers demanded that their fun was the most important and only cared for their enjoyment of the game. And I only gamed with them for social reasons. I also wasted lots of time trying to challenge their pcs, while not pancaking the standard array pcs.
The Optimizers knew and were okay with what limits I placed on splat books/etc.
If you power game knock yourself out. I just will not dm for you.

PS. The muppet should let the little jedi kid get a newspaper route and buy his mother out of hock. The poor tyke could just force push papers into pass air cars and inside a month made enough credits to pay off his mommy's debt.

 

[Staffan]

First post here! Just a question really, why do people care so much about feats leading to powergaming?

I just feel like good DM's know the have plenty of tools at their disposal to even the playing fields. Are they more worried that powergamers might outshine the roleplayer types with flavor builds? I feel like if you know you're playing for flavor, you shouldn't expect to be good in certain situations. I don't know, am I being to lackadaisical?

The issue with powergaming is not so much the PC vs monsters balance. As [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] pointed out, I have infinite dragons at my disposal. My issue is more with balance between players, and that balance is important on two fronts:

1. Spotlight time. When one player takes five minutes to play out his turn doing three different things taking out five opponents, and another player's turn is "I shoot that guy. I hit AC 10, so I guess that's a miss?", the second player is probably going to have a worse evening than the first one.

2. Squishyness. If one PC is a lot more powerful than others, any threat I introduce to challenge that PC will obliterate the others. I ran into this in a campaign in a Swedish RPG called Mutant: Undergångens Arvtagare ("Mutant: Heirs of the Apocalypse", only tangentially related to Mutant: Year Zero). In M:UA one of my players played a robot (base armor 4 points) who got lucky on one of his rolls for robot special abilities and gained the Armor ability (another 4 points), and who wore fairly strong armor on top of that (an additional 4-5 points). So this guy reduces the damage done by every hit by 12 points - and this is in a system where a typical breech-loaded gun deals 2D8 damage. So that guy was pretty invulnerable. And if I put in an opponent with a weapon that could seriously threaten him, I would have two problems: such a weapon would blast any other PC to smithereens, and after the fight the PCs were likely to have their hands on the mega-weapon. All in all, that's not a good situation.

 

[Satyrn]

and you read badly.

Indeed.

You played with jerks, but labelled them powergamers. I guess that's where I got confused.