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

[Minigiant]

The main reason why I like feats as one pillars is that it hold an assumption that works for all Player Characters...


...and all NPCs and monsters.

If the game is designed that a level 7 PC has 3 combat feats, they will know he is not extremely hampered with fighting an ogre.

But with 3E and 4E style "choose your pillar" feats, your guy with 2 exploration and 1 social feat gets curbstomped by the ogre. The ogre is designed to go down in 4 hits by an equal level PC with all combat feat. But your party has only 50% combat feats and TPKs.

This was the problem with 3.5. Monsters were designed as if you took feats (and spells) at a certain proportion between pillars. Take all combat feats/spells and you stomp all over the monsters. Take too many noncombat feats/spells and your party died.

And who has to fix it? The DM. MORE WORK FOR THE DM!

All combat feats, please.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

But ultimately, what we've had in the past is not THAT broken. 3.5 and 4e were both great games. If you produce something that is incrementally better than both, you're on a good trajectory.

I don't completely disagree with that, but I'd say that all of 3E/4E feats suffer from a granularity problem. Namely, they are too fine grained, which makes them difficult to balance well, and leads to having a lot of them, which feeds into the first problem yet again.

Pick an edition with feats. Take all the feats produced. Ruthlessly go through them, combining some of them (and bits of some of them) into a few "super feats". Aim to end up with around 10% of the original total (ignoring the third party side of the bloat). Whatever bits are left, throw away. Reduce character feat acquisition. That won't be perfect, but I can almost guarantee that over the universe of all D&D characters made, the feats will be significantly more evenly distributed than is current.

Or, if you prefer, think of feats on a balance scale, and generously rank them as something like zero to 2, with zero being "absolutely worthless" and 2 being "banworthy overpowered". The vast majority of feats will rank somewhere between .5 and 1.4, rounding off to 1--i.e. worth one feat--even though we know full well they are not. With really narrow feats, it's hard to change something that is inherently around a .5 into a .9 or 1 or 1.1.

Make "super feats," and this gets a lot easier. The feats have such a wide scope, that if you've got feats ranging from zero to 10, you want most of them to end up around 5, then getting something from 8 to 5.3 or from 3 to 4.9 is not that hard. And even if you screw up and end up with a few 4s and 6s, it's not that big of a difference.

Not that this is foolproof, as the history of D&D classes can attest.

Their theme/feat direction seems to be aiming for at least one side of this fix.

 

[Tallifer]

Pathfinder has Traits, although they are in fact just minor feats, some of which are better than regular feats.

I like the proposal to have Feats, Skills and Traits. It is simple, symmetrical, elegant and balanced.

I doubt that the Fifth Edition will solve any of the problems of D&D, but this whole playtesting process is giving me plenty of great ideas for my own fantasy heartbreaker.

 

[GX.Sigma]

Please no three-pronged feats, and please no "combat-feats, exploration-skills, interaction-whatevers". Putting explicit barriers between the three pillars is too metagamey in my opinion, and is not the way to go; they should flow together smoothly.

I support the feat system being entirely replaced by the theme system. Feats should be nothing more than the atoms of themes. Custom themes should be treated as a form of homebrew, and homebrew should be encouraged with transparent game design advice and moderated by the group's collective bull**** valve.

 

[Herremann the Wise]

I like the idea of fatter feats (ones that encompass multiple elements; particular if they cover all three pillars but even two could be adequate). It should allow for an evening out of feats (I think equivalence is not possible but a relative evenness should be). I would even like to see hit point advancement pushed into the feat (and away from class), as both a further lever to even feats out as well as to assist in representing what hit points are all about.

Considering that 4e currently has 3,218 feats, I think mixing them in three at a time should not be that difficult, and there will still be plenty of flavourful options. I really don't see such a structure as being terribly limiting in terms of scope or choice.

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[dkyle]

Please no three-pronged feats, and please no "combat-feats, exploration-skills, interaction-whatevers". Putting explicit barriers between the three pillars is too metagamey in my opinion, and is not the way to go; they should flow together smoothly.

Nobody's saying that these things would have any barriers between them. Nothing would stop someone from using whatever abilities they have whenever they are applicable. It's just a way to organize mechanics in a sensible way, and help facilitate characters that can contribute in various aspects of the game, while maintaining balance. I do not see what is even remotely "metagamey" about that.

Custom themes should be treated as a form of homebrew, and homebrew should be encouraged with transparent game design advice and moderated by the group's collective bull**** valve.

They will lose me entirely if they do this. I will pay for a balanced system. I will not pay for something that tells me to the actually hard part myself.

 

[GX.Sigma]

Nobody's saying that these things would have any barriers between them. Nothing would stop someone from using whatever abilities they have whenever they are applicable. It's just a way to organize mechanics in a sensible way, and help facilitate characters that can contribute in various aspects of the game, while maintaining balance. I do not see what is even remotely "metagamey" about that.

What's I mean is, if skills can only be exploration, then diplomacy can't be a skill. If skills can only be interaction, then jumping and climbing can't be skills. Skills should just be skills, and different skills are useful in different areas. They shouldn't try to force things that make sense as being skills into being not-skills just because of an arbitrary "pillar" philosophy. That's all I mean.

 

[El Mahdi]

I'll post here what I posted at WotC:

As concerns making Feats that address all three pillars in a single Feat: I also see a potential problem with the possibility of Feats having overlapping benefits. For instance, the Power Attack example providing an Intimidation bonus...what happens when in the process of designing another feat, an intimidation bonus seems appropriate for it also - ultimately leading to two (or more) different feats that provide an intimidation bonus. Do you instead find some other bonus for the Feat to avoid the overlap, and possibly run into the problem of having the Feat provide a bonus to something that really doesn't seem related at all to the Feat; do you just throw out what would be an interesting Feat because you can't make it support all three pillars; or do you go ahead with the Feat and figure out a way to combine bonuses (or nullify redundant bonuses...which would seem like a defacto penalty)...?

It's a tough question.

With the first one (finding another bonus), you could end up with a lot of Feats that seem to provide a bonus or have mechanics that seem divorced from it's description (fluff)...and we've been down that road before.

With the second (throwing out the feat), you run into what Evil_Reverend alread said in the blog...less Feats. IMO, it would be more than just "less feats", it would be very few feats. I think we could end up with a game that has too few options (which can be just as bad or worse than too many).

With the third (combining or nullifying bonuses), you run into the design and play problem aspect that 3E had to deal with...stacking bonuses. You'd need rules for what bonuses can stack, which one's can't, what priority each bonus type has, or maybe even some funky math formula where the first bonus is full, subsequent bonuses are 1/2, 1/4, etc.

I like the "concept" of having a Feat support all three pillars, but in practice I think it might end up being more trouble than beneficial.

At the risk of adding extra complication to character creation, I think I'd prefer having a different delivery mechanism for each pillar.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

What about weapon and non-weapon proficiencies?

Worked for quite a few years. I would extend it to combat and non-combat proficiencies. Non combat profiviencies could encompass skills and bonuses to skills or alternative uses. To be honest, fast runner could be an athletics skill trick. For every level in a skill you might select a skill trick. Simple as that.
You just have to be creative enough to make up enoug of those tricks from the get go, so that even with only core you have enough choices. Alternatively, you optionally spend a skill point on such tricks.

Feats are things like Power attack etc. Mighty powers.

On the other hand, I voted, that a feat gives a bonus to each pillar. Only because he told us: A feat that encompasses all pillars is more difficult to create and so we will put out a lot less.

 

[Rhenny]

In response to the blog (Now we could do this another way. We could just bite the bullet and say feats are generally combat focused. Feats reflect customization options that speak directly to the combat pillar. Then we could let skills (delivered through backgrounds) carry the weight of exploration and interaction. And then we could have a third element, call them traits, to address the roleplaying pillar. )

I really like the idea of making feats for combat, skills for exploration and interaction, and traits for roleplaying. With these categories, it would be easy to design classes/themes that make PCs competent in the each of the three pillars, yet it still allows players to customize PCs.

With this system, someone can play a charismatic fighter or an intellectual rogue, or a sneaky wizard, or a brutal cleric. Play what you want...and have balance too....yes!

Let me have a combat perk, an exploration perk, an interaction perk, a roleplaying perk, and I'm more likely to make a meaningful contribution in any situation. If there are enough choices (and no clear "must have" perk) we'll have many unique and personalized PCs.

Perhaps as a PC levels up, he or she will have to choose whether to gain a feat, a skill or a trait so he can begin to specialize after the basic foundation in each pillar is solid.