Feat Points?

[Andor]

I like the approach Iron Heros took to this problem, with it's feat mastery ranks and feat trees. I doubt a point system could improve on that.

 

[Arkhandus]

I am not in favor of attempting to make D&D a point-buy game to any degree. I prefer rolled ability scores, though point-buy ability scores aren't too much of a problem to me.

Feats should be designed to have roughly equivalent potency/versatility overall, rather than varying usefulness and varying costs.

Skills already provide the scaling value you want. Tweaking skills ought to be enough for the 'D&D should be less D&Dish' crowd, to get the variance of character abilities they want. You can always add new skills, or compact the skill list, or add other things that can be done with sufficient ranks in skills (i.e. 'anyone with X ranks in Y skill can now try this trick with it').

I'd rather not complicate D&D more by increasing the amount of point-buy effects in it. Skills offer more than enough of that as-is.

 

[Psion]

In the past I enjoyed games like HERO.
But as it is, I find tracking skill points complicated enough. I don't wish to go further down that road.

Could it go that way? It might. I hope not... and I expect not. I don't think 4e will entertain as big changes as many people are thinking.

 

[RFisher]

Yes, it would be good. But, the trade-off is not just some additional arithmetic when building a character (or monster). It also introduces a pricing problem. Choosing the right price is hard & no matter what you do choose, it's going to be considered broken for for some groups. It's introducing another axis into the balance equation. (Or maybe greasing an existing axis.)

(I can't quite put words onto why I feel this would be more a problem than the current situation in which some feats are "better" than others despite costing the same.)

 

[Nifft]

And so it goes: the HEROoization of D&D.

Prestige Classes would have to be better balanced. As it stands, people excuse high-power PrCs because they have "high pre-reqs" in the form of sucky feats (among other low-power requirements).

If you fix Feats so that the sucky ones don't cost as much, you'll have to fix PrCs, too.

Cheers, -- N

 

[GreatLemur]

And so it goes: the HEROoization of D&D.

Prestige Classes would have to be better balanced. As it stands, people excuse high-power PrCs because they have "high pre-reqs" in the form of sucky feats (among other low-power requirements).

If you fix Feats so that the sucky ones don't cost as much, you'll have to fix PrCs, too.

Hell, that's a bad system, anyway. The worst part of it is that those crap feats are left around as traps for those who don't know any better.

But, while I much prefer point-based character construction to any other kind of system, I've gotta say that I do want D&D to remain--for lack of a better term--slot-based, largely because D&D has always been the gateway drug of RPGs, and simplicity is obviously vital for that role. In fact, I might even like to see skills simplified for that very reason. That's the part of character creation that always seems to turn newbs off.

So, yeah, instead of assigning point values based on the relative strength of the existing feats, I'd rather just see feats that aren't laughably unbalanced.

 

[Harm]

And so it goes: the HEROoization of D&D.

That would be a blessing. Faster combat, more dynamic characters and no excuses to create hundreds upon hundreds of pages of special rules for spells and hundreds upon hundreds of bland prestige classes to fill up books and sell dead trees.

Prestige Classes would have to be better balanced. As it stands, people excuse high-power PrCs because they have "high pre-reqs" in the form of sucky feats (among other low-power requirements).

You mean like the Ultimate Magus' requirement of "any metamagic feat?"

If you fix Feats so that the sucky ones don't cost as much, you'll have to fix PrCs, too.

Very easily done. The best fix for prestige classes is to remove them.

 

[Darklone]

My 4 page character sheet, 10 modifiers to every to-hit roll and a spell system with hundreds of pages of unique rules would argue against that point of view. I can't off-hand think of a PnP system that isn't more simple.

You're right, the quantity of D&D feats and other stuff is huge to offer a certain versatility. Yet the system itself is extremely simple. You add up things. You add up a lot of things.

Yet most other RPGs I know are game mechanically more difficult.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I think that WoTC needs to make the game what it's slowly but surely becoming point based.

I know, "levels! CR! Automatic Hit points and assumption of Skills! Some Sense of Balance!"

Balance is long dead when all the options are turned up unless you've got a hella lot of smart players and an equally smart GM.

 

[tbiaslorin]

We're testing a classless/point-buy system, with a base cost for most feats, a higher cost for the better feats, and a lower cost for the less powerful feats.

The problem with the feat system currently is there are a great many feats, but not enough interesting ones that anyone ever takes. Per another thread suggestion here a while back, I've started letting people have a bonus feat at every level (only non-combat feats for the bonus ones) and it has not proven overpowering yet (party is around 8th level average).

Having a point-buy system will allow for players to take a good number of the lower-power (and perhaps more role-play oriented) feats for the cost of a few high-power feats. Thus, the jacks-of-all-trade types can really be diverse, and it opens up the door to really sampling all the different feats available.

I don't see having a point-pool for feats as much more complicated than the character creation system available currently. Balancing would be an issue as some others have mentioned, but as of now, there is no balance; people take the better feats and ignore the less powerful ones (generally).