Alternatives to the feat-tax solution to to-hit and F/R/W defenses

[cmbarona]

Yeah, I've seen a few threads/posts proposing item fixes. But I do fear that, at the very least, this complicates things for the DM. And I rather like that 4e is easy to DM. Having to add in items into the current economy will shift stuff around more than I'm comfortable, especially those that boost ability scores rather than defenses or attack directly.

This bears the question: what do we actually want in a houserule of this sort? Obviously, solutions will not have all of these elements. I'll list some criteria I see off the top of my head:

1. Easy to implement on the DM's behalf
2. Easy to implement on the PCs' behalf
3. Implementable (is that a word?) through the existing DnDi Character Builder
4. Scales appropriately relative to monsters of the same level
5. Adjusts all three defenses for all characters
6. Fair to all characters of all builds (I'm looking at you, Rageblood Barbarians!)
7. Maintains balance of action, power, feat, and item economies, or compensates appropriately
8. Enhances flavor (yummy! )

Others?

P.S.: So far I'm liking Alisair Longreach's proposal most, though I would make my own adjustments. Not sure what those adjustments are yet, though... Maybe keep +1 at x4/x8 and add 2 more levels of +1 to all abilities per tier (maybe at x4/x8, maybe not)?

 

[Elric]

1. Fair to all characters of all builds (I'm looking at you, Rageblood Barbarians!)

Others?

Proposals that increase your highest two ability scores suffer from two problems.

1) This increases AC for light armor characters (who boost Dex/Int), which means that these characters' ACs are both too high relative to the monster's scaling and too high relative to heavy armor users. If you increase heavy armors' benefit as well, as Alisair proposes above, then AC scales faster than monster attack bonus by default (in his case, by 30 over 29 levels), which is problematic in its own right and maintains the asymmetry in the scaling of AC and FRWs.

If you just remove Masterwork Light Armor in proposals that increase stat bonuses, you're getting closer to this goal (though Light Armor under 77IM and Alisair's proposals would both scale 1 point faster than Heavy Armor and scale sooner- at lower levels- even if you remove masterwork light armors.

2) Increasing primary and secondary stats changes the balance of the classes much more than increasing tertiary stats. For example, the Tactical Warlord-Battle Captian gains hugely from his Int increasing faster. Just adding to-hit and defense bonuses directly avoids this problem.

 

[77IM]

Oh, here's another simple fix I just thought of, which addresses all of cmbarona's critera except point 8 (enhances flavor) and possibly point 3 (easy in character builder):

Every character trait based on 1/2 your level (such as attack bonus, skill bonus, ability check bonus, and defenses) is instead based on 2/3 your level.​

So, over 30 levels, you gain +5 to attacks, defenses, skills, etc. over the current system, which closes the gap nicely (your attack and good defenses will pull 2 points ahead of the monsters, but your weak defenses are still dropping 2 points behind, so I think that's a fair trade). I think MW light armor may need a balance adjustment under this system, but am too lazy to do the mathematical analysis right now.

-- 77IM

 

[Elric]

Oh, here's another simple fix I just thought of, which addresses all of cmbarona's critera except point 8 (enhances flavor) and possibly point 3 (easy in character builder):

Every character trait based on 1/2 your level (such as attack bonus, skill bonus, ability check bonus, and defenses) is instead based on 2/3 your level.​

So, over 30 levels, you gain +5 to attacks, defenses, skills, etc. over the current system, which closes the gap nicely (your attack and good defenses will pull 2 points ahead of the monsters, but your weak defenses are still dropping 2 points behind, so I think that's a fair trade). I think MW light armor may need a balance adjustment under this system, but am too lazy to do the mathematical analysis right now.

You'd need to adjust all Masterwork Armors. At the moment, AC gains +27 over 29 levels, but this would increase that to +32 over 29 levels, which gives PCs a significant advantage in the default progression.

Characters end up 1 point ahead on attack and strong FRWs, not 2 points. In general, I think any fix that leaves the PCs scaling better than monsters by default is too much- among other things, it's greater than the increase in power brought about by PH II's FRW and Expertise feats.

If you tone this down to 0.6*level, then characters gain +3 over 30 levels. At this point, I'd prefer to keep the 1/2 scaling and add exceptions at levels 5/15/25, which seems easier than doing the entire 3/5 progression and ends up with the same overall scaling.

Additionally, this type of fix would affect spots in the rules that seem to scale appropriately- skill modifiers, ability checks, and initiative. Absent some evidence that players need to scale by +5 on skill checks, ability checks, and initiative, I'd prefer to lose the uniformity by only handing out Attack/Defense bonuses rather than impact the balance there.

 

[KarinsDad]

If I didn't care about changing the game's base rules in a significant way, but did care about having characters scale appropriately in a less exception-driven way, what I'd do is:

1) Characters get +1 to-hit and all defenses (including AC) at levels 5/15/25

2) At levels 4/8/14/18/24/28, add 1 to three ability scores.

3) Masterwork Light Armors don't exist. Masterwork Heavy Armors are as follows:
+1 additional bonus to AC for heavy armor with a +2 magic enhancement bonus
+2 additional bonus to AC for heavy armor with a +3 magic enhancement bonus
+3 additional bonus to AC for heavy armor with a +4 or +5 magic enhancement bonus
+4 additional bonus to AC for heavy armor with a +6 magic enhancement bonus

4) The Expertise feats, Robust Defenses, Epic FRW are banned (and maybe ban Paragon Defenses and the Unyielding Fortitude line of Epic PH II feats as well).

I see how this works, I just think that WotC handled (after AV and PHB II) armor ok, so it doesn't need a fix.

But having said that, I do have houserules that don't need to be there.

 

[CapnZapp]

Excellent and interesting responses so far!

So, let me repeat where we currently stand and you can agree or disagree:

As for to-hit bonuses, the easiest solution that keeps coming back again and again is to simply grant a +1 bonus (cumulative) at levels 5, 15, 25. Like getting the Expertise feat for free, and for all attacks.

The crux seems instead to be the defense scores. Most proposals that go for simple end up giving the best defense too much. What we want is a clean way of propping up your tertiary defense without a way for players to munchkin their way into using that bonus for their primary one instead, no?

Problem is, there is no such thing as "your worst save" defined by the rules. It's like the very idea goes against the design philosophy of the game - we don't like the DM to review our characters and to select which stats that needs propping up, when we all know that it's usually better to focus every bonus on a single number. We want the design to use objective, not subjective, methods of determining which selections that we can make.

The easiest proposal accomplishing this is the ability increases to three stats idea, because clumping your choices won't stack for increasing your primary defense. Shame though this means sacrificing the very neat "you need to make the hard choice of leaving one of your defenses in the dust".

Meaning that we want players to have to make this choice, but then end up with the defense not being left in the dust anyway (because that equals "monsters hitting on a 2"). Nevertheless, this suggests to me the idea isn't entirely cooked through...


But, to summarize, do you agree? To-hit has its rather neat solution (basically just ditching the feat tax) (even if not all of you end up going that route) but that we haven't hit the nail on defenses just yet...?

 

[BartD]

BartD had a nice solution in another thread to just decrease the levels of the monsters for each encounter. You can list this as solution #2 CapnZapp.

As an example, subtract 1 from the encounter levels at Paragon and subtract 2 from the encounter levels at Epic.

Thanks to KD for plugging my simple suggestion (you usually think things through so your reference is appreciated). Actually I suggested reducing monster levels by 1/2/3 from levels 5/10/25 to match the Expertise feats, but the idea is the same and the best thing is that it requires *zero* extra bookkeeping for anyone and easily satisfies cmbarona's list except 5 (it "adjusts all *4* defenses for all characters") and 8 since it is of neutral flavour

1. Easy to implement on the DM's behalf
2. Easy to implement on the PCs' behalf
3. Implementable (is that a word?) through the existing DnDi Character Builder
4. Scales appropriately relative to monsters of the same level
5. Adjusts all three defenses for all characters
6. Fair to all characters of all builds (I'm looking at you, Rageblood Barbarians!)
7. Maintains balance of action, power, feat, and item economies, or compensates appropriately
8. Enhances flavor (yummy! )

As far as I can see here, the only real downside is that my suggestion is so simple that it may not be worthy of this forum and that if you really want to use specific monsters you may have to modify their level a bit.

Actually, I think this is a bit of a silver bullet. However, since it is so simple WotC could never publish it as a fix alternative to Expertise feats etc. ("Ok, so we slightly miscalculated things at higher levels. But if your players do not heavily optimise their characters and therefore struggle in appropriate encounters, consider pitting them against slightly lower levels threats - and do it without telling them.") What a cop-out user-friendly but won't sell any books.

 

[KarinsDad]

Actually I suggested reducing monster levels by 1/2/3 from levels 5/10/25 to match the Expertise feats, but the idea is the same and the best thing is that it requires *zero* extra bookkeeping for anyone and easily satisfies cmbarona's list except 5 (it "adjusts all *4* defenses for all characters") and 8 since it is of neutral flavour

The only reason I thought the 1/2/3 solution was overkill was due to the fact that AC is 56% of the attacks in the MM and your solution appeared to decrease the monster's to hit vs. AC (compared to level one) on some levels. But, I went back and did the math and it is only worse on 5 levels out of 30 and better on 6 levels (so, it was a wash). With specialization, it was worse on 16 levels and better on none, but that's ok since a feat was used.


So, combining your 1/2/3 solution with the raise 3 ability scores solution would probably be optimal with the second least number of changes handling all of the major points, and it can easily be done in Character Builder.

 

[Elric]

The only reason I thought the 1/2/3 solution was overkill was due to the fact that AC is 56% of the attacks in the MM and your solution appeared to decrease the monster's to hit vs. AC (compared to level one) on some levels. But, I went back and did the math and it is only worse on 5 levels out of 30 and better on 6 levels (so, it was a wash). With specialization, it was worse on 16 levels and better on none, but that's ok since a feat was used.

So, combining your 1/2/3 solution with the raise 3 ability scores solution would probably be optimal with the second least number of changes handling all of the major points, and it can easily be done in Character Builder.

This solution ends up very similar in terms of to-hit and defenses to my solution above. The difference is that I remove MW light armors and scale down MW heavy armors, both of which take effect at high levels (+4 armor for light armor, +5 for heavy armor) and prevents AC from scaling faster than monster to-hit. This also means that, in my fix, AC scales at the exact same rate as FRW; if AC effectively scales 3 faster than it does now and FRW scales 4 faster, you've only made up 1 point of the 3 average that AC scales faster than FRW in the default rules.

One benefit of changing AC a bit is that as written (and you’ve noticed), AC actually gets pretty far behind monster to-hit, hitting an average of around -3 for most of levels 21-27 (for heavy armor, assuming it upgrades at 3/8 levels). So my proposal only causes AC to scale 1 faster over 29 levels, but raises it quicker, preventing it from ever falling behind that far.

The other big difference is that if your solution is using monsters at lower levels (I’m assuming this means using 5 monsters of 1/2/3 levels lower as an "even level encounter", rather than using more monsters of lower levels), this impacts monster damage, hit points, and other abilities. At level 5, people don't typically complain of grind, and removing one level of monster HP will be a pretty big proportion of total monster HP. On top of all the other changes, this might make these levels too easy.

Lastly, there may be a psychological component where if you're banning these newfangled and powerful feats, players would prefer to have the bonuses on their character sheet rather than assurances that you, the DM, will compensate by sending lower level monsters at the party (or essentially running them through a level 12 module when they're level 13, for example). If you give the bonuses directly to players, it may feel less like you're taking away a benefit they were expecting.

 

[KarinsDad]

I've been trying to fine tuning my house rules on this.

1) +1 to hit and to FRW defenses at levels 5/15/25.

2) At levels 4,8,14,18,24,28, characters get +1 to three ability scores, not two ability scores.

3) Monster damage is too low, so Paragon level creatures do one extra die of damage and Epic level creatures do two extra dice of damage.

4) Drop Expertise and Epic level Defense feats (including Robust Defenses).


I was toying with the idea that Epic level creatures recharge special attack powers on an additional pip on the D6 roll since well over 90% of Epic level recharge special attack powers recharge on a 5 or 6. The idea is to have them do their nasty powers more often and up the threat level. But, I think that might result in Epic level creatures using the recharge powers too often and rarely using some of their other powers. For example, a Dragon might become Breath Weapon followed by Claw/Claw followed by Breath Weapon followed by Claw/Claw, etc.