Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5000719" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, the problem people have constantly run into with this logic is that Expertise is available to both the 18 starting primary guy and the 20 starting primary guy. Yes, the feat will equalize the two if the 18 starting guy takes it, but why wouldn't the 20 starting guy also take it? In practice its no equalizer. Its just a +1 to-hit that most everyone has and the DM's response to that is to give you tougher monsters to fight. If by some chance one party member doesn't take an Expertise feat, then they're just relatively weaker than everyone else. It may be true that they aren't absolutely weaker than some other characters due to ability score allocation differences etc. but they still aren't as strong in combat as they easily could be.So yes, its an option, and in a well run campaign where the DM pays attention to the utility of other non-combat options it may not even be better than Skill Training, Linguist, Skill Focus, etc. Since for a given PC there are probably other options in heroic tier to compete with Expertise it may not even be an option that is exercised right away, but at some point every player is going to look over the feats and say to themselves "hmmm, I need a feat to up my combat ability a bit more" and bingo Expertise is going to pop up as the hands-down best choice they have available to them. This is pretty much certain to happen sometime in mid-paragon when the bonus becomes +2 and its now absolutely better than any other combat feat.Really it isn't so much about "broken math" as it is about a relatively overpowered feat. Even if you believe the math is perfectly fine (and I have my own views on that whole argument) Expertise feats are still overpowered. Any improvement in the situation either means making them free feats or just removing them from the game or nerfing them down to a static non-scaling +1 or something.It does make sense to call it a "feat tax" too. Its an analogy. By creating an overpowered feat (and overpowered for ALL PCs at that) the designers have essentially created a choice that every player must exercise at some point in the game or else fall behind the rest. What ends up happening is everyone has at least one Expertise feat and thus loses out on taking some more interesting choice.</blockquote>

Verification