D&D 5E Can you share your experience with a featless/multiclassless game?

[Undrave]

Looks like he mixed the "They're good dogs Brent" meme with the start of your username. I admit I LOLed.

Shoot, I wanted to type 'Burnt' and went too fast so it came out as 'Brunt'... but yes, that was the plan.

 

[Burnside]

Shoot, I wanted to type 'Burnt' and went too fast so it came out as 'Brunt'... but yes, that was the plan.

Would you say that you bore the brunt of your own burnt in this case?

 

[tetrasodium]

FIFY.

When you see people picking the same feats as a reason to ban feats, it follows that people picking the same spells is a reason to ban spells.

Really, your solution to the 'problem' of 'same-y'ness'....is to force ALL fighters to increase Str/Dex/Con?

It's also possible those feats are banned for being absurdly overpowered in mechanics distorting ways

 

[Rabulias]

When simply looking at it between two or three characters, it looks diverse. But extrapolate that out to the NPC's and campaign world at large... and every fighter is using a 2h weapon, polearm or composite longbow.

I think even without feats, the choice of weapons for fighters will still distill down to a handful of optimal choices that players will gravitate to. The variety may be slightly more broad, but you're still not going to see many fighters with nonmagical tridents outside of pure roleplaying choice. We see this with armor already.

 

[Undrave]

I think even without feats, the choice of weapons for fighters will still distill down to a handful of optimal choices that players will gravitate to. The variety may be slightly more broad, but you're still not going to see many fighters with nonmagical tridents outside of pure roleplaying choice. We see this with armor already.

Especially considering the Trident has the SAME stats as the Simple Weapon Spear. It's heavier and more expensive but it has the same damage and special attributes. By all account it didn't need to exist as a separate game unit and just be some a spear could just... ya know, BE!

 

[Seramus]

Shoot, I wanted to type 'Burnt' and went too fast so it came out as 'Brunt'... but yes, that was the plan.

The original tweets include multiple misspellings of his name. So you were accidentally accurate!

 

[jmartkdr2]

IME Charger is a must.

Class guides generally declare this feat to be subpar, but I used it at the start of more than 50% of my encounters (as a fighter) and probably more than 75%. I went from level 1-13. +5 damage isn't worth losing an attack, but I don't have the feat I could lose attacks. I used it whenever I couldn't "single move" to a target and multiattack at the start of a battle (or even during a battle, if enemies are spread out).

Some of the players were uninterested in feats. However we were different classes, so no "apples and oranges" comparisons.

We had no multiclassing, although a bard (we had one) is practically multiclassed out of the gate.

It's just so dependent on how the dm maps things.

If needing the extra movement comes up often, it's great. If you tend to start 30ft away anyways, it's useless.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Another point I'm seeing in this thread: 3dual/e/5e style multiclassing in particular being seen as a problem, rather than the broader idea of characters getting to break out of their class silos. Which is fair.

Dual-classing and/or 3e/5e style multiclassing is really good at expressing career changes: the fighter gets religion, stops her weapon training and becomes a cleric. You stop adding fighter levels and start adding cleric levels. Perfect! (You'll sometimes also see this when the player of a mid-level martial realizes they've already gotten all the cool features of a class, so they start shopping around, but a ranger deciding to focus more on weapons isn't a huge narrative stretch.)

But that's only one reason to multiclass, and it's not even a common one. Most MCing in my experience is either to make a hybrid character (a sword-mage, for example) or to snag a particular feature from another class (ie the dreaded hex-dip). Neither of these are bad motivations, but the existing 5e multiclass rules don't serve them well, which is a problem.

For dips, the feat system would be a better system to lean on. Some of the recent UA's (and maybe Tasha's, I don't have that book yet) started leaning in this direction. I'm not totally cool with making Hex Warrior a feat, but it'd be better than every paladin and bard making a deal with a 'mysterious entity from the Shadowfell.'

Hybrids, ultimately, need their own class or subclass. It's why we have paladins in the first place. The PHB Eldritch Knight falls short for a lot of people, but it didn't have to.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

feats doesn't really expand the character's options since the only ones that are really good are just too obvious, to the point they become mandatory whenever they are available.

Again, the problems with 5E feats are that they complete with ASIs, you get so few of them, and the power distribution is way out of whack. So when a player is finally thinking about taking a feat, they are most likely going to gravitate towards a very small subset in order to maximize their choice.

Man I really need to cook a nice dinner for my players, now that we can play in person again (I live in CA where we have the lowest cases in the country, and we are all vaccinated as are all of our relatives that we see with any regularity).

I have never actually seen this mindset IRL, only online. I haven't had a single 5e campaign where Keen Mind or Linguist wasn't taken by someone, and few where Athlete, Savage Attacker, Skilled, Observant, and UA and published skill feats. The most powerful feats I see at the table are Dual Wielder, Mage Slayer (we use spellcasters a lot as enemies), Skulker, Fey/Shadow Touched, Mobile, Spell Sniper (we are outdoors enough and fight flying enemies enough that doubled range is really good), ritual caster, probably a few others I'm not thinking of.

I rarely see SS or GWM, Sentinel is used by rogues more than anyone else to get a second SA every once in a while...Don't think I've ever seen PAM on any character in my main group.

My experience, and comments I've seen from the design team bck this up, is that most players are not optimizers.

 

[Scott Christian]

I believe anyone who has played for awhile has some experience with a featless/multiclassless game.

Most of the earlier games were featless. We generally didn't multiclass just because we liked the archetypes we were able to create without multiclassing.

It actually seems multiclassing has become a lot more popular as of late; part of the I want to do everything niche. (It is a niche, but it has grown a tiny bit in my opinion.)

As far as experiences, it makes the game cleaner. Meaning, it gives the PC's more designated roles, which in my experience, leads to more defined roleplaying. This translates to combat being a bit more predictable, but also with that predictability, comes a greater surprise when the wizard hacks down the big-bad with a sword.

D&D is so arrayed, even without multiclassing and feats, that it will not change the game - at all. Zero.