Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 5858817" data-attributes="member: 1465">Definitely. In a nutshell, they weren't simply a good idea... they were probably the simplest possible idea for implementing add-on abilities: to define a measure of "smallest" add-on and try from there to design more of them that would be balanced against each other.This is a good thing! If you differentiate the mechanic for different uses, you reduce the flexibility of character design. This is in fact one reason why I don't like changing from feats to AEDU: once you've separated the A/E/D/U you have certainly made it easier to balance their design, but then you have to pick X at-will + Y enc + Z dailies... you're no longer free to design a whole character with at-wills and another with only dailies, and everybody else in the middle, you're stuck with whatever standard formula the designer have decided for you (the DM of course can vary the formula, but still everyone in the same game has to use the same formula, or balance is again under question).Even if you differentiate by usability area instead of mechanic, it's the same. Imagine you take all feats related to attack actions and call them "tricks" and take all feats related to defense actions and call them "talents", and you separate them not just by categorization (which isn't bad) but also by dictating how many "tricks" and how many "talents" each PC has to choose at certain levels. You're no longer allowed to focus wholly on one or the other or anything in between, you've restricted yourself.Unfortunately true. Too often the designers just added feats to a book with little care. Sometimes they just added +N feats at random, other times they built upon other designers' mistake (+2/+2 feats everywhere because they're "cheap" to design), and some other times they made overly complicated feats that should have really be game/class options on their own (e.g. the "vow feats"). Maybe they just assumed that since feats take up so little space in the book then they deserved little design time, and this is a gross misunderstanding on the impact that a feat can have on the game!</blockquote>

Verification