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

[dkyle]

If they were discarding old feats as they went, some slow growth wouldn't be bad. Start with 30 feats. Practice shows 5 of them aren't all that. Make up 7 more, deprecate the 5. Next go around, get rid of those 5 completely, evaluate the other 27 again. Add a few more, mark some as borderline. And so on. Eventually, you have a solid core of great feats that you can confidently state, "these we keep." The rest of it is in flux.

If Themes are feat-delivery mechanisms, I don't think that can work. If you deprecate a feat, that means having to errata each theme that used it.

If they're going to errata, I'd rather they errata the bad feat and make it good.

But constant adding of more and more? That's just making it that much harder to find what you need.

If you don't care about varied or optimal character building, then what you "need" is in the core rulebook. Adding more in splatbooks is just benefit to those that actually want those options.

As far as the "super feats," I agree those have problems. I said as much above, when I indicated historical problems with classes, though I guess that might have been oblique. My main point, though, is that whatever problems broad feats have, they are easier to balance and manage than narrow feats. Where to draw the line exactly is the big question.

Not really, unless you permit balancing the broad feats by having tradeoffs within the feat between the pillars. I.e., intentionally making the combat part more potent, at the expense of the other two. But I don't think that's desirable, since it defeats the whole "equal amounts in each pillar" principle.

As long as there's a constraint that each sub-feat be balanced with each other, I don't think there's a meaningful difference in difficulty of balancing the super-feat system, and having those sub-feats split out into feats, skills, and traits.

The only real difference is the greater number of combinations between feats, skills, and traits, and potentially unexpected synergies. But that seems rather unlikely given their separate spheres of operation. I don't think that small gain in design ease is worth the quite large loss of flexibility for players to define their characters as they wish.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

If you don't care about varied or optimal character building, then what you "need" is in the core rulebook. Adding more in splatbooks is just benefit to those that actually want those options.

You may misunderstand me here. I don't want a set of "core feats" so that I can have less feats. I want the set of "good core feats" and not the rest of them. However, there is no good way under any previous implementation to do that. The only way it can happen going forward is some kind of tagging system. My point about tagging by source is not that I want to tag by source, but that if I can't even do that, I'm unlikely to get what I do want.

I'd even settle for a way to make my own list, without having to hand copy all of them. I'll go through them for my group, mark them "good", "indifferent", "sucks", etc. Then at least the players won't have to suffer. That'd work too. Just give me a DDI option to mark the 3/4 of the redundant, awful, and generally useless stuff as such, and then let the players pick from the rest.

 

[avin]

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

 

[billd91]

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

This would be my preferred structure as well. I really don't like the idea of each feat needing to apply to all 3 pillars. That seems really forced and cumbersome.

And if you want a little more variability in characters' investment in the pillars, allow them free choice of a feat from any of the 3 pillars every 4th level.

 

[jshaft37]

What is you took a "package" at level increments? The package would include a related combat, exploration and roleplay boon. For example the "tough" package gives toughness, improved endurance, and intimidate. That way you are choosing a character aspect rather than picking a specific mechanical bonus. It could encourage building a PLAYER Character rather than an optimized character. Additional for those who like simplicity, it would be pretty easy to glance through 20 packages such as tough, fast, sauve, lone wolf, etc.

 

[dkyle]

What is you took a "package" at level increments? The package would include a related combat, exploration and roleplay boon. For example the "tough" package gives toughness, improved endurance, and intimidate. That way you are choosing a character aspect rather than picking a specific mechanical bonus. It could encourage building a PLAYER Character rather than an optimized character. Additional for those who like simplicity, it would be pretty easy to glance through 20 packages such as tough, fast, sauve, lone wolf, etc.

First, in what way is an optimized character not a "PLAYER Character"?

Second, what if I want to roleplay a tough character, but who isn't particularly intimidating? Really, having a lot of HP and endurance doesn't really sound anything like being intimidating, to me. What, fear me because I don't die as quickly if I'm attacked, and I can run far distances?

 

[CAFRedblade]

I had suggested a minor separation of feats and traits for combat and non-combat abilities on the article.

Feats thus would grant a combat ability boost, and could provide an exploration boost, while Traits provide a roleplaying and could provide an exploration boost. This way you could balance the strength of the feat or trait with an additional factor. A very strong combat feat could have a minor exploration boost, while a lesser combat feat could have a stronger exploration component. Same applied to Traits and roleplaying/exploration.

Further thinking that this could just be Feats in general, each feat has a major component from one of the three pillars, and a secondary component from one other pillar.

I personally don't like each feat granting a bonus to each pillar, as it strikes a potentially needless symmetry. But if feats had abilities and bonuses to two pillars on a regular basis, and occasionally to three of the pillars, I'd be happy.

At any rate, looking forward to how things actually play out in the Beta test in a few weeks, and going forward.

 

[Aenghus]

I don't want combination feats, as existing examples from previous editions of combination feats vary hugely in quality, and suffer from randomly associating different elements to produce Frankensteinian combinations. Forcing people to take a triple feat just to get one component, and being lumped with one or two elements they don't care about, or worst, don't want at all, doesn't sound like good design to me.

Also it's much easier to get a feat with one component right than one with three components attached. Simpler individual components are simpler to work with, simpler to write, simpler to read, simpler to choose.

So I would prefer separate siloed rule fragments for the three pillars, whatever they end up calling them, siloed so as not to compete with one another. This can be done by having separate, feats, backgrounds and traits or by separating out feats into the three categories and having feat slots dedicated to each category, so feats from diifferent categories don't have to compete with one another.

With feats/backgrounds/traits or siloed feats any or all of the categories can be left out if not desired, while combo feats make it much more difficult to leave out elements IMO.

 

[GX.Sigma]

After thinking about it for a bit, I wouldn't mind "fat feats" as described in the blog post. It is slightly annoying that it explicitly addresses the three pillars (like pulling the curtain back and showing the ugly machinery), but it makes for fewer, bigger choices, which is nice.

The problem is that feats swell in size, which means we’d likely do fewer of them. Doing fewer of them means fewer choices and also incentivizes us to deliver them less frequently.

I don't know why Rodney thinks these are problems; all of these points sound pretty good to me. The only actual problem I can think of is that it adds more complexity for themes, which are supposed to be the simple option.

 

[Sunseeker]

I don't think Feats being 33/33/33 or 100/0/0 are good solutions. Some feats should speak to multiple things, ie: stealth is useful both in and out of combat, but the feat only speaks to one thing. This can make the feat severely overpowered in certain situations, particularly campaigns with a lot of dungeon crawling, urban midnight adventures or general sneakyness.

Some feats should be 50/50/0, some feats should be 100/0/0, all feats, like all classes, should aim for a 100% level of functionality.

To this end, what feats should seek to accomplish is emphasize a particular theme.
Some feats should favor combat, some should favor sneakyness sure, others should favor singing and dancing and others should deal with how good you are in a drinking contest. Some should be very particular in dealing with poison, but because they are so particular they should be strong. Others should be more general.

EX: Poison Hardiness, +3 to saves against poison.
compared to:
Physical Hardiness: +1 to all fortitude saves.

The former is specific, so it's powerful in specific situations. The latter is general, so it's not as powerful, but more useful.