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<blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 5874238" data-attributes="member: 5100">I'm of two minds on this one. On one hand, I have a couple players who would love to just pick class, race, and theme and carry on with life. There are some days, that's all I'd care to do. At the very least, it gives me a quick way of building NPCs. So, I'm fine with some of this.On the other hand, when I was looking through my 3.5 PHB pondering &quot;how would I build 5e&quot;, I realized that not only did 3e suffer from an outrageous level of feat bloat, but it was made worse by having things that should really be class abilities thrown into feats -- and the same feat list, even. Why is Weapon Specialization a feat and not on some selectable class ability list for Fighters? Better yet, why are Weapon Specialization and Improved Familiar on the same list of anything? They had no problem making Uncanny Dodge span multiple classes, so why not Improved Familiar? What logic is used to determine which bucket an ability goes in? I'm really, really concerned that both Themes and Backgrounds signal an approach to 5e that pushes feats even further into the catch-all for stuff the designers don't know what to do with.I think it was Monte who said that feats were originally supposed to be a class ability just for Fighters. I'm really starting to think that's where they should have stayed. Some sort of perk mechanic would be nice in D&amp;D, but the way feats were handled in both 3e and 4e wasn't the right way. They became just a listing of powers. The strength of D&amp;D compared to, say, Hero System is that D&amp;D is simple and straightforward. If you use a mechanic like feats to try to be all things to all people, you lose that benefit and just find yourself with a list of prebuilt &quot;templates&quot; that's longer and more boring to read than the actual list of Lego-style powers in Hero -- and considerably less easy to use.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mercule, post: 5874238, member: 5100"] I'm of two minds on this one. On one hand, I have a couple players who would love to just pick class, race, and theme and carry on with life. There are some days, that's all I'd care to do. At the very least, it gives me a quick way of building NPCs. So, I'm fine with some of this. On the other hand, when I was looking through my 3.5 PHB pondering "how would I build 5e", I realized that not only did 3e suffer from an outrageous level of feat bloat, but it was made worse by having things that should really be class abilities thrown into feats -- and the same feat list, even. Why is Weapon Specialization a feat and not on some selectable class ability list for Fighters? Better yet, why are Weapon Specialization and Improved Familiar on the same list of anything? They had no problem making Uncanny Dodge span multiple classes, so why not Improved Familiar? What logic is used to determine which bucket an ability goes in? I'm really, really concerned that both Themes and Backgrounds signal an approach to 5e that pushes feats even further into the catch-all for stuff the designers don't know what to do with. I think it was Monte who said that feats were originally supposed to be a class ability just for Fighters. I'm really starting to think that's where they should have stayed. Some sort of perk mechanic would be nice in D&D, but the way feats were handled in both 3e and 4e wasn't the right way. They became just a listing of powers. The strength of D&D compared to, say, Hero System is that D&D is simple and straightforward. If you use a mechanic like feats to try to be all things to all people, you lose that benefit and just find yourself with a list of prebuilt "templates" that's longer and more boring to read than the actual list of Lego-style powers in Hero -- and considerably less easy to use. [/QUOTE]

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