D&D 5E D&D Next Blog "Avoiding Choice Traps"

[Crazy Jerome]

At some point, there needs to be a decision rule for resolving tasks. What are your alternatives? Roll against some kind of target. DM ruling. Auto-success or fail because of some characteristic of the PC. And... what else? With the first, you've got your sterile claim. With the second you've got the "Mother, may I?" complaint. And with the 3rd you're emphasizing the build even more.

Sure, but note that I said "single" roll. I didn't say this, but it is really that it is a single roll with a binary result, pass or fail. This is different than, say, combat. Not that combat is pure on this tack, either (nor should it be), but it has enough to work with that it doesn't matter that much if a sword adds a +1 to the d20 roll to hit.

Among other problems, the single roll tends to front-load all the decision points, and the decisions are all "use this thing to boost my roll". I'm not saying that everything needs to be ultra-complicated. "Shinny up that short tree and look around" can stay a simple check (or even no check, since it is unlikely to fail).

Take something like a climbing kit as an easy example of the problem. Spend some money, get +2 to your climbing roll. All you've done is complicate the DCs and probabilities of climb checks a bit in return for a gold sink. Well, ok, you've also put in the option for a character to be without the kit at a bad moment, which is something, but not much.

Just making something up here, but how about if instead a climbing kit changed the rules for climbing somewhat, but when you fail, it gets partially frayed and/or used up? Now, you don't use it all the time, but you certainly will on risky climbs. Now your mage can use that mending spell to fix the kit in a bad moment. When you are halfway up the mountain, and a bad roll leads to you dropping key pieces of the kit, you need to decide whether to send someone down for it, or press forward.

Then tying that back into Dausuul's point, you now have two things climb related feats can address--the nature of the skill roll and how equipment performs. Maybe a crafty character has a feat that lets them improvise ad hoc climbing kits out of spare ropes and dull daggers.

That's off the cuff, and probably not that interesting. If they put a little time into it, I'm fairly certain the designers could stake out a few parts that would be more useful.

 

[Dausuul]

Just making something up here, but how about if instead a climbing kit changed the rules for climbing somewhat, but when you fail, it gets partially frayed and/or used up? Now, you don't use it all the time, but you certainly will on risky climbs. Now your mage can use that mending spell to fix the kit in a bad moment. When you are halfway up the mountain, and a bad roll leads to you dropping key pieces of the kit, you need to decide whether to send someone down for it, or press forward.

I like this idea. Suppose we broke down the abstract "climbing kit" into its component parts, and then thought about those parts and how you can use them in the game?

So you've got pitons. They can be hammered into hard surfaces, giving you handholds that make climbing much easier for a short distance, and providing anchor points for your rope in case you fall. But they're heavy and you can only carry so many. And hammering them in is pretty noisy.

You've got a grappling hook. You can throw it a limited distance to snag on something, if there's something to snag, and then climb the attached rope. But there is a slight risk that it might not be as firmly seated as you think, and come loose when you're climbing. Best not to use it if the fall looks really dangerous.

You've got rope, of course. No adventurer worth her ten-foot pole would so much as get out of bed without at least a hundred feet of rope. I shouldn't need to explain all the ways rope is useful.

Et cetera. Now, instead of a boring game-mechanical widget giving you +2 on a roll, you have a handy set of tools that make you really think about that wall you're climbing, and can be used in a variety of creative ways.

[/offtopic]

 

[trancejeremy]

I think they should just do away with combat feats altogether.

You might think a character gets better with more combat orientated feats. But in reality, he doesn't, because his opponents have to be made tougher as well.

 

[pemerton]

We have all seen the model of what feats should look like. They are published in 4e and labeled "utility powers." Most provide new abilities. Some (like the rogue stealth enhancing powers) allow the use of old powers in new ways. A number of at-will class abilities in the Essentials books could also be turned into combat feats. A push rider on a basic attack seems like a reasonable combat feat to me.

These feats all meet the critical standard of being useful and important enough to be worth keeping track of.

Couldn't XP, but QFT.

 

[am181d]

I think they should just do away with combat feats altogether.

You might think a character gets better with more combat orientated feats. But in reality, he doesn't, because his opponents have to be made tougher as well.

The point of combat feats isn't always to make you strictly better at combat. They're also there to open up new options and to make existing, sometimes sub-optimal options more viable.

 

[MortalPlague]

I'll go into something like this:
1st level: combat feat
2nd level: exploration feat
3rd level: social feat

I like this idea, albeit with one small change. I'm not sure if anyone else brought this up (since I only read up till the quoted post), but I'd be intrigued to see it shaped like this.

Levels 1-3: Pick one social, one exploration, and one combat feat. In any order.

That way characters can load up one way or another, but every three levels they're all balanced up.

 

[eamon]

If you don't want nifty tricks, why should you have to sift through a huge list to find the best set of Boring Bonus Feats? There should be an alternative to feats that just gives you a set of flat bonuses. Boom, done. Call it the Boring Fighter Option*.

Since it's a package deal, there's no worry about people cherry-picking the best "+X to Y" feats and piling them all together. If the designers can get the bonus level right, a Boring Fighter and a feat-based fighter can coexist without trouble. Everybody's happy.

So let's go with this idea and see where it leads:

1. We're going to have several different package deals. That's going to lead to a huge feat explosion for no good reason. This entirely defeats the purpose: simplicity!
2. WotC has not traditionally done a great job of making such pre-built selections. Likely it will be much weaker that a manually built selection, which kind of defeats the purpose of having a sufficiently competitive option.
3. You're introducing this notion of package deal (i.e. an extra rule) - but why exactly? KISS. And what do you do with someone that likes it simple but wants one particular trick? It's needlessly inflexible.

I think you're overreacting to things like expertise. Do you think that lightning reflexes, toughness, improved initiative, or weapon focus are actually problematic?

Also, in 4e a 14th level human/16th level PC of another race has 10 feats. How many special combat tricks does he want to learn? The current feat system is at its core perfectly fine; let the PC pick standard, simple options and give him the choice to branch out to get a special trick: nothing wrong with that. The problem is the huge explosion of boring feats (e.g. why are there so many +X to A, +X to B, +X to C feats that are essentially equal), in combination with the even greater number of extremely specialized feats for one particular class's build with one particular race (and even one particular weapon/at-will combo, sometimes!) These feats just make the choice really, really tedious. Uninterested players will choose poorly, and powergamers will find the broken options: these choices break the game.

Boring fallback feats are good; too many feats are bad. Let me put a number on that: at the end of its life, 5e should not have more than 200 feats, preferably fewer; and it should have a set of simple default choices from day 1. By comparison 4e currently has 3218 feats.

 

[Stalker0]

2) make non-combat feats cheaper (if you take "fast runner" you can also take "the hand is faster than the eye" as part of the same slot)

Agree here, it gives us a better way to balance feats if we can tweak the cost.

To maintain some simplicity, I would probably go no more than 2 types of feats.

Greater
Lesser

You can get 2 lesser for every greater feat.

 

[triqui]

How exactly "having less feats" is a con?
do we really need 3500 feats?