D&D 5E Fixing the terrible Weapon Master feat

[pming]

Hiya, again.

On the other hand, now you have a group where all of your Fighters and Barbarians have no feats. How is that more diverse?

Not saying you're wrong about feats-no-adding-diversity. Am questioning the logic of your decision, however. I would have thought feats and no feats can both lead to undiverse characters, so how about combating the real issue at play here: which likely is groupthink among your players...

Cheers

I think what it's going to boil down to in the end is "group style". For us, in our experience, over time players tended to create characters that got sucked into "standard Feats" for any particular trope. If you wanted to make a Fighter (Champion) who used a two handed sword...are you going to take GWM, or Skilled? If you were making a Ranger (Hunter), was the choice really that hard between Mounted Combat, or Sharpshooter?

Now, of course a player could take the 'less optimal' choice for his character concept, but the moment the PC encounters an equal leveled NPC (or PC) who does have the 'optimal' feat in question...well, the more diverse characters spotlight is dimmed significantly. Your "two handed brute" is suddenly quite a bit worse than "that in-shape guard guy over there" because the guard has GWM and you don't. Your elven bowmaster is good, but not nearly as good as the human thief who has Sharpshooter. Your heavily armored dwarven cleric is suddenly in need a much more healing than the heavily armored gnome who has Heavy Armor Mastery. That was the kind of thing we were seeing. If a Feat existed for some particular "concept", you were all but forced to take it.

However, without Feats, a fighter with a two handed sword and another fighter with a two handed sword were equally "as good" as the other; now the things that made them better/different/unique was their personalities and the players playing them. With feats, both players had to either have, or not have, GWM; the moment one took it, the other had the stigma of 'second-fiddle'...why send in Bill when Bob is exactly the same, except he has the option of -5/+10 on his attack?

Certain play groups would obviously not care one way or the other about this. Our group fits mostly into this category. However, after time, it did get...annoying. The inclusion of Feats wasn't granting more 'fun', it was causing more un-spoken resentment and annoyance. And, as a DM, I found that I had to start thinking more of character Feats than about logical and cool story stuff. I had to specifically place "PC-specific" challenges. This sort of adventure writing just sucked all the fun out of it for me. I don't "build encounters" to fit my players PC's. My adventures are built with virtually nothing but the most broad PC capabilities in my head (e.g. "the're mostly human and about level 4"). I don't care if there are no fighters, or three clerics, or no outdoorsy types...if the PC's go investigate "The Haunted Halls of the Zombie Lord" and they don't have a cleric or paladin...not my problem. But when Feats were being used, I found myself thinking about the players PC's as much as I was about the internal consistency of my campaign world. And that sucked. Didn't like it one bit.

Anyway, play on! Feats are fine for those that want the extra work and don't mind adding more and more (because Feats are like crack to some players; they are always looking for the next, bigger, "high" of some particular character optimization build). Thankfully, 5e wasn't designed with Feats and MC as a base.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[TallIan]

I do think that the feat is better than you say, its far from the worst, but I'll agree that it could do with a buff. I have used it on characters to make them fit my concept better - but mechanically it has always been a suboptimal feat.

Option 1: Absolutely NOT, +1 to hit messes with bounded accuracy too much and would make this feet almost a no brainer.
Option 2 & 3: almost the same effect (the average rolled on a die one size bigger is +1) for that reason I would not choose option 3 because it adds a level of complexity that doesn't really bring anything to the game.

Having something that potentially makes this feat attractive to fighters as well is quite nice.

Tall

 

[Eubani]

I found more often than not players looked at the feat mainly for proficiency in a single particular weapon prof. to fit a concept/flavour, so the other weapon prof. gained from it were usually wasted (This is my experiance from 3 different tables and various forums). So I created the following:

Military Training
* +1 to Str or Dex (max 20)
* Proficiency in 1 weapon (either military or simple)
* Gain 1 Fighting Style (That you do not already have)

 

[Ahrimon]

Hiya, again.



I think what it's going to boil down to in the end is "group style". For us, in our experience, over time players tended to create characters that got sucked into "standard Feats" for any particular trope. If you wanted to make a Fighter (Champion) who used a two handed sword...are you going to take GWM, or Skilled? If you were making a Ranger (Hunter), was the choice really that hard between Mounted Combat, or Sharpshooter?

Now, of course a player could take the 'less optimal' choice for his character concept, but the moment the PC encounters an equal leveled NPC (or PC) who does have the 'optimal' feat in question...well, the more diverse characters spotlight is dimmed significantly. Your "two handed brute" is suddenly quite a bit worse than "that in-shape guard guy over there" because the guard has GWM and you don't. Your elven bowmaster is good, but not nearly as good as the human thief who has Sharpshooter. Your heavily armored dwarven cleric is suddenly in need a much more healing than the heavily armored gnome who has Heavy Armor Mastery. That was the kind of thing we were seeing. If a Feat existed for some particular "concept", you were all but forced to take it.

However, without Feats, a fighter with a two handed sword and another fighter with a two handed sword were equally "as good" as the other; now the things that made them better/different/unique was their personalities and the players playing them. With feats, both players had to either have, or not have, GWM; the moment one took it, the other had the stigma of 'second-fiddle'...why send in Bill when Bob is exactly the same, except he has the option of -5/+10 on his attack?

As just an observation on viewpoints, I wouldn't make NPCs with feats except in the rare exception. To me, NPCs follow the standard monster rules and aren't PCs so my world doesn't have a bunch of lvl X this or lvl Y that NPCs around. So it would be rare for a PC to come across someone like that. That keeps the feats more special and unique.

Of course, you could have two similarly themed PCs where one takes the obvious combat feat and another takes an exploration or social feat, but if the 2nd player starts to feel let down then they need to re-evaluate what they want out of the game and how they are playing in my opinion. Are they using their social feat or exploration feat? Or perhaps they don't feel that it is coming up enough. When the 2nd player guided them through the woods or negotiated a better reward with their feat did they feel it was worth it or did they go right back to lamenting that they can't do as much damage as the first player's character can?

But that does bring some onus onto the DM. Combat is always there with opportunities to use combat feats, but since the exploration and social feats rely on outside influences in the game being able to use those feats is often in the hands of the DM. Taking extra languages is fine, but if those never come up in the game it was wasted. But it could also be one of the most influential feats in the right game. Similarly, the combat feat could be next to useless if the majority of the opponents were of a certain type.

Of course not using feats does make the mechanical side of the characters more vanilla which should hopefully push the players to expand into the role playing side of their characters. But it's not guaranteed.

It works for your group and that's awesome, but I do think it's unfortunate that your players didn't see past the big numbers and gravitated towards the same thing.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

I'd change proficiency With 4 weapons to all weapons. That's what being a weapon "master" should mean anyway, and it's not like this would unbalance anything.

 

[Horwath]

I found more often than not players looked at the feat mainly for proficiency in a single particular weapon prof. to fit a concept/flavour, so the other weapon prof. gained from it were usually wasted (This is my experiance from 3 different tables and various forums). So I created the following:

Military Training
* +1 to Str or Dex (max 20)
* Proficiency in 1 weapon (either military or simple)
* Gain 1 Fighting Style (That you do not already have)

This!

Fighting style is more or less worth half a feat. Adding one weapon proficiency wont mean much, but if you really want to learn a weapon this is a great way.

For people that want it for a fighting style wont mind wasting one weapon proficiency on it.

 

[Dausuul]

Junk the feat entirely. Instead, allow players to exchange their background skill/tool proficiencies for weapon proficiencies, one-for-one.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I have to say, the idea proposed to allow you to switch out a singe weapon for shields or 2 weapons for a fighting style seems pretty nice.

The only issue then is whether the ability to get those styles becomes too powerful, which I would have to say no for anyone who is perfectly fine with multi-classing, because the effects are similiar.

Also, I would not allow thi feat to be taken multiple times with that change, so no one is getting more than 3 fighting styles barring multi-class champion shenanigans

 

[AlexSledge]

I feel that weapon master, as a feat, would only feel at the appropriate level "power" wise in a campaign containing many exotic weapons each requiring their own proficiency, that also happened to be martial/basic weapons. But its not great as it is.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Oh hey I remember this thread!

I probably said this two years ago, but in case I didn’t, I think the frat should grant either all martial weapons, or a Fighting Style of the player’s choice.

I also think that the armor proficiency feats are basically worthless.