House rule on Feats and their requirements

[Garthanos]

Well that mostly wont work without changing the modifiers for the armors. Look at what they did with the penalties, take that into account and then you might have something.

The inferiority of one or another armor within a single category was historically covered by price and availability...more impact than subtle differences in functionality unless the differences were extreme. The price differences in D&D are perhaps too subtle to show it. Chain would became a poor rich mans tool after plate became available ...

The D&D heros are the rich guys you would see using the best in the category they have the feat for.. I dont have a problem with that.

The penalties might also imply Hide might be put in the light rigid category.

Having 5 feats for them really is not that big a deal it is that you need a 15 STR and 16 CON to even begin to train for it. And when the 8 str, 10 con paladin just wears it with ease.

I guess I just silently agreed that removing stat requisites made sense remember my comment about Plate being easier to wear than chain.

Mostly I like house rules which can easily do their job. But switching around all the penalties on all the different types of armor so that I can have less feats to take is not really going to happen. That is more of an overhaul when I am looking for a tune up.

That is a very focused location to be called an overhaul I really dont think each item in a category needs exactly the same restrictions just... close enough that you wouldn't be put out moving from one item in that category to another item in that category... the items within a category that are clearly superior do need to be more expensive.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

All non-ability prerequisites remain.

For the tier requirements - have you actually read those feat? They are not overly powerful. Why are they even there? those feats are weak and waiting till 21st level to get a critical range of 19-20. Give me a break. Inescapable force and evasion. Sure, give it to the players whatever. What is so bad, break it?

I don't think allowing epic feats at heroic tier would break the game, but I do think epic feats are better than heroic feats. Not better like 3e's Improved Metamagic and Multispell were better than non-epic feats, but better nonetheless. If you want to drop feat prereqs, I think you should do it. It might work out, it might not; either way, you learn something.

TS

 

[77IM]

All feat ability prerequisites are removed.

I instituted this house rule on day 1, and after 21 sessions with 9 different characters and 7 players, I can confidently say that:
1) Everybody loves this house rule.
2) It's not unbalanced in the slightest.

This is because 1) those ability prereqs are really frustrating and un-fun during character creation, compelling you to either contort your ability scores or miss out on a feat you want ("That feat would be perfect for my character concept, but I'd have to hose my ability scores in order to qualify") and because 2) ability prereqs as a balancing mechanism to counter traditional min-maxing is redundant with the graduated-scale point-buy.

(I'm actually kind of surprised they even included ability score prereqs in 4e; they are such a PITA and require a level of advanced build planning that seems to go against their other design goals.)

All feat tier requirements are removed.

I haven't tried this. While I don't think it would be too unbalanced (higher-tier feats are better than lower-tier, but not game-breakingly so), I think it would be unfun because you would run out of interesting feats to get. Under the current system, you always have better feats to look forward to. Under your proposed house rule, you'd snatch up the best feats within the first few levels, and by the time you hit epic you wouldn't care about feats any more because the only ones left are the crappy heroic-tier feats you skipped over initially.

-- 77IM