How much ought feats scale per level?

[harpy]

I've seen many comments where a feat that has real value should be relevant throughout the course of a character's career, and that those which don't scale (or remain relevant) are overall poor feat choices.

As an examples:

Weapon Focus

Pulling out the handy "Spine Analysis" from Trailblazer it looks like for your average fighter type at 1st level Weapon Focus is providing 20% of the character's overall to hit bonus.

Now leap ahead to level 20 and you see that Weapon Focus is now only contributing 2.85%. If you want to be kind, then you can note that WF is unlocking Greater Weapon Focus, in which case the total for the two bonuses contributing to the to hit total for the character is 5.71%.

Iron Will

Another example would be one of the saving throw feats (like Iron Will), if you were to take it at 1st level to boost up one of your poor saves (we'll assume your ability score is a 10), then the feat is contributing 100% to your bonus, and giving you a 50% chance at succeeding at the average DC at that level.

Now leap ahead to level 20 (and assume no multiclassing). The contribution that is being gained by Iron Will at this point is 18% of the overall save bonus. What is really depressing is that you're chance of success is now 35% to make the save versus the average DC at that level. Being "Iron Willed" doesn't seem to count for much at this point.

To just step back for a second, with the Weapon Focus example there is still some fuzziness. WF is a prerequisite to a lot of other feats that are offering benefits, so some extra value is hiding in there somewhere and so that should be noted. However, what I'm looking at is the mechanics of having each feat scale so that it's selection has a constant mechanical relevancy across the character's career. Unlocking, while it has mechanical value, is overall a clunky way of controlling character power over many levels.

WF is also a bit murky in that to hit bonuses continue to water down over the course of the character's career. By ninth level the average martial character is hitting on anything other than a 1 result and remains that way all the way to level 20, which makes WF on it's own even less valuable. It only begins to have relevance again when you start fighting gigantic ancient dragons, who's CRs were deflated, and consequently their defensive value outstrips everything else in the game.

Looking at some of the answers other systems and have given:

4E

A big part 4Es rebuild over 3.5 was the "spinal alignment" of the entire system. Rather than having this odd looping curve where to hit rolls become less relevant and instead the ablative effects of hit points become the metric to how a battle is conducted, 4E aims to give a much more linear development to the system as a whole.

As a consequence, Weapon Focus in 4E shifts from being a to hit bonus to a damage bonus. To hit bonuses become a much tighter linear path up the levels, trying to stay within a consistent to hit percentage.

Saving throws were also completely reworked, tossing out save or die type effects and instead focusing on conditional effects, because of this there is no "Iron Will" feat in that system. For 4E the general principle is that a character should always have a 55% chance of saving from a condition. Various powers, and magic can help in specific situations, and humans have a feat that gives them +1 on all saves, which is a big deal when the consistent target that is being aimed for can't be altered by much.

In terms of scaling, 4E still does provide some answers. While WF has a different purpose and effect in the game, in general what you see with a wide variety of powers and magic items is that you get a +1 per 10 levels in the game. The range is slightly different, with 4E having 30 levels versus the 20 levels of 3.5.

The end result though is that as a general principle, if a player selects a particular power for their character it should scale up in potency over the course of the entire character's career. It should always remain a useful tool in the character's arsenal. In the case of saving throws, the chance of success remains a constant across all levels, and so the human feat that gives +1 is always relevant.

Pathfinder

Pathfinder's answer to scaling is a bit unfortunate. It is relying on the "unlocking" principle to address problems in the game. Rather than trying to pad the numbers a bit to help realign the spine, it offers up additional feats to give players specialized boosts.

The problem with this is that it isn't providing consistent effects in the game, but just giving different "swings" where the character is well optimized with one particular effect, but still highly vulnerable in other areas. It's not that specialization isn't a valuable element to have in the game, but if you don't attain a certain range of predictability across all levels then it puts a strain on the storytelling portion of rpgs.

In terms of WF, Pathfinder doesn't change anything, but it does give additional feats further in the chain. This does add more value to WF, but it's still too fuzzy of a value and it certainly isn't such a boost that one could say that it is truly scaling up through the levels.

For Iron Will, Pathfinder likewise didn't change the core feat, but instead gave another unlocking feature with Improved Iron Will. The problem with this is that Iron Will is still a lousy feat to gain, the bonus only shores up a dike which is already being over-topped by save or die effects.

Second, Improved Iron Will is likewise a bit weak for what you are getting. If you had it at first level then it would definitely have some value. You'd end up being able to shore up a weak save so that you had a likely 75% of success. Of course the only situation which would allow for this would be to have a human take Iron Will and Improved Iron Will at first level to avoid a sleep effect or some such. That very unlikely to happen.

At 20th level IIW gives you about a 50% chance of success on your weak save. That percentage is a lot better, getting close to the 55% chance that 4E is trying to adhere to, however this bonus is only available once a day. At 20th level you're likely to have many save or die effects tossed at you in a single combat, much less a whole day.

If Pathfinder had made it a strait reroll for all saves of that category then it would be somewhat worthwhile at high levels, though you're still dealing with a painful feat tax, needing to spend two feats just to get yourself to a 50% chance of surviving. Spending two (out of eleven) feats in the Pathfinder system on just that isn't very inspiring.

Pathfinder does address the problem slightly by nerfing several powerful spells so that the loss of a saving throw isn't as deadly. However, not all of the spells were consistently nerfed, and it doesn't really address the fact that taking Iron Will will significantly help the character.

Trailblazer

Trailblazer's answer to a lot of the problems of 3.5 is through action points. By applying an overall blanket bonus to the system players can decide what it is that they want to shore up or boost to even high effects. It's a solid patch which I think works pretty well, still, it isn't really addressing that there are lousy feats which ought to be modified to make them worth taking.

Trailblazer does boost WF just a bit. Rather than being a single type of weapon which gains the bonus, instead a whole group of weapons gain the bonus. This does help make the feat more versatile, giving the bonus to several different weapons which increase the likelihood of having the right tool for the right job.

Iron Will doesn't see any boost. The action points do help address the problem with saving throws overall in the game, however it's still unlikely that most players would desire to spend a valuable feat on the meager bonus of Iron Will.

What the heck am I getting at with all of this?

I've spent over a decade playing euro boardgames and one of the great game design themes in that genre of gaming is that players should have a limited number of choices each turn of the game, and each of those choices should be painful to make. It works well as a game design goal because player's enjoy the positive tension that arises out of making those decisions. It's positive because the choices are rarely penalties, you aren't picking the lesser of two evils, but rather the greater of two goods.

The 3.0 design was heavily influenced by the design of Magic the Gathering. Magic the Gathering has a "system mastery" element built into it where players gain satisfaction out the deck building process by separating the wheat from the chaff. Players dive into the pool of cards and break down their value to find out what is worth taking and what isn't.

From a business design standpoint, and even a design goal standpoint for Magic, I can see that is being worthwhile as a gaming experience. For RPGs however I don't think it works well. An RPG isn't a CCG and requires a different approach, one that I think is closer in line with euro games in regard to feats.

In regard to feats, I think they ought to be more equally weighted, so that when a player is deciding on which feat to take next they are looking at a menu filled with delicious options. The menu shouldn't be listing "3 day old bread" or "bowl of ketchup" but instead have enticing entries that make you pause with indecision over what succulent dish to pick.

Feats are wide ranging and modular, so you can't be completely systematic about their values, but scaling is one way that it can keep certain feats relevant. So what I'm trying to figure out is what a general principle would be for feat scaling?

My suggestion

4E has three tiers, because it has 30 levels. For 3.5 the system is 20 levels so it ought to divide evenly within its range.

Iron Will is fairly easy to examine. Based off of a core design feature of 3/4E system that most rules are "exceptions", then the feat ought to make an exception to a poor save. "I may be a dumb fighter, but I can grit my teeth real hard and stubbornly refuse to get knocked out by that crazy wizard!" Thus the poor save becomes a good save. That would be worth a feat slot.

If you wanted to stick with the numbers, then Iron Will could give +2 to start, and the character gains another +1 for every five character levels. The end result would be the same, gaining +6 at 20th level.

So on a general principle, scaling every five levels might be a way to go. If you applied that to WF then you'd get the weird effect of adding a bonus onto an already healthy supply of average bonuses, so it wouldn't have much of a direct effect. It would cascade through the system a bit more, allowing high power attacks, making two weapon fighting more effective. Overall you'd be increasing to hit and damage output to martial classes, which compared to spellcasters are still weaker even with these added bonuses, so the system isn't really being strained by scaling feat bonuses.

With such a plethora of feats out there, some scaling would need to be scrutinized more closely, such as DC bonuses. These don't need any significant scaling since their progression between DCs and Monster Saves is pretty linear. At most you'd just do a 10 level scaling.

Initially though, I'm not seeing real problems with a 5 level scaling system for feats.

What do others think?

 

[Ilja]

Just a quick thought: Another way might be to actually change what these feats do so that the effect is more "unique" and automatically scales. For example, you could turn Weapon Focus into "once per encounter, reroll a failed attack roll with the chosen weapon". The "make bad will save good" for Iron Will seems nice, but makes it useless for people with good saves - also, it takes further power away from the classes with several high saves as this feature is easier to replace.

 

[Celebrim]

I think that the overall idea of scaling feats is a good one since that design would parallel the fact that spells scale with level.

But you'd have to be careful about it.

In particular, the analysis you are doing is flawed in alot of ways.

Let's say you have Iron Will at 1st level, and you have to make a DC 13 Will Save which you'll do 50% of the time or 40% of the time if you didn't have Iron Will. Now, again you have to make a Will save at 10th level against DC 13, but now you save 70% of the time or 60% of the time if you didn't have Iron Will. The important thing to notice is that Iron Will is worth exactly the same to you at 1st level or 10th level. It's utility hasn't diminished just because its a smaller portion of your total bonus.

Similar things apply to Weapon Focus. Just because it is a smaller percentage of my total bonus doesn't mean it isn't doing the same thing for me at higher levels that it was at low levels - one more pip on the die is a success rather than a failure. It's not like your 1st level fighter is 20% more likely to hit, and the high level fighter is only 3.8% more likely to hit.

Iron Will is already a really important feat that most Fighters are going to take at some point. If it does something as powerful as making my bad save a good save, I'm never going to not take it, because I'd be an idiot to forgo it.

 

[Sylrae]

Hmm, I've noticed alot of issues with the feats myself.

this is a new approach, and it might work better than the one I've been doing.

I accepted that feats are static, and they usually become less useful as you gain levels, but was working on ranking them in terms of usefulness and power, and using a point system like with skills where you gain points that you can use to buy feats.

You'd have to design a whole new feats system though, and ditch the existing one (possibly converting tings over). That could be alot harder. Feats would need to be equally relevent across all levels of the game.

for many of them, I would suggest combining feat trees into a single progressing feat, where they may be able to choose additional options for the feat. And it should not matter what level you take a feat at, they should work the same as if taken at level one.

Iron Will, if done your way, would give a +6 to Will Saves by 20. That means that if you take it and already have a good will save, you'll have a will of 18 before bonuses at 20. And that's better than making it worthless to someone with a good Will.

It's a good Idea, but it means redesign of a major part of the game.

Also, it's worth noting, that in 4e's tier system, much of their third tier is above the powerlevel attainable in the 1-20 range of 3.5e. Look at the lords of the hells, and some of the demons and angels. Major Planar conflicts are often in the realms of Epic Levels (which were poorly done in 3e).

You could redesign the game to follow classes to 30+ gracefully, but that would ALSO be alot of work.

All in all, your feat redesign concept is a good Idea, but it would take some major redesign, and you'd need to make alot of them for variety, if you just convert the ones from the PHB and ditch the ones that aren't good enough you'll have a pretty short list. It's a great idea if ou can implement it. Feat trees already scale! You just need to determine how much of that scaling you want to be included in a single feat.

You need some other feat that just lets you select an additional option from your other feats from the feat trees that you didnt take. Ideally it would give you a bonus option every so many levels.

For the skill ones, instead of +2 to 2 skills, you could make it: +2 Skill Points for each 4 levels. these points, when used on a skill, raise the maximum number of ranks by one for that skill from then on above the norm, or above what it had before. (Adjust numbers to suit the power level of the other feats you're using).

As mentioned by celebrim though, you need to pick a power level for these feats, and decide how big that should be, how much things should scale by 20, and then be consistent as you redesign the whole feat system.

It should be noted, that if feats scale ALOT more than they do now (which they likely would), you should be getting alot less of them.

Also keep in mind, that if you want to replace the feats system for players, you should be doing it for the monsters the same way.

 

[Celebrim]

As mentioned by celebrim though, you need to pick a power level for these feats, and decide how big that should be, how much things should scale by 20, and then be consistent as you redesign the whole feat system.

That's not exactly what I said. What I said is that you have to be on the lookout for things that actually do decrease in utility as you increase in level.

Iron Will has the same basic utility regardless of level. I don't consider it actually a candidate.

Weapon Focus loses some utility, but only because your attack bonus is likely to go high enough that for many targets you only miss on a 1, at which point the bonus from WF is irrelevant in those cases. It's worth noting though that if that is the case, that adding an additional +1 to the bonus doesn't help us. So I don't consider it a good candidate either.

An example of a good candidate is 'Toughness', which is very powerful at low levels, but utterly worthless at high levels. Why? Because while a +1 bonus to hit at low levels doesn't make you 20% more likely to hit, +3 hit points might make you 20% more likely to survive. Conversely, at high levels a +1 bonus to hit still gives you 1 more pip on the die where you hit, but +3 hit points actually does contribute less to your chance of survival.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Some guy, who used to work for WotC, came up with / observed the following 'tiers', some time before 4e was even conceived:

1-5 gritty; 6-10 heroic; 11-15 wuxia; 16-20 superheroes.

And from that was born E6, incidentally.

All that aside, I honestly can't see a problem with Weapon Focus, or Iron Will et al. The test, for me (well, us) is whether a feat ever gets taken, by players who at all value a character's usefulness/power (or who see that as fundamental to the concept; either way) - if so, it's not likely to be significantly underpowered, unless it's *purely* a prereq, of course. Then, it might be something to look at. But WF, GWF, IW, GF, LR, etc.? No, they've been taken plenty of times. And yeah, WF hasn't always been about getting to WS as quickly as possible, either (though it sometimes has.)

A case where I believe Pathfinder got it right is the '+2 to two skills' type feats. Adding some value further down the road sweetens the deal, so that they might seem more tempting, more often. Likewise, Skill Focus. You know, other than SF: Concentration/Use Magic Device, or some random crap for a PrC.

 

[Ilja]

A case where I believe Pathfinder got it right is the '+2 to two skills' type feats. Adding some value further down the road sweetens the deal, so that they might seem more tempting, more often. Likewise, Skill Focus. You know, other than SF: Concentration/Use Magic Device, or some random crap for a PrC.

That I solved in my games simply by making SF and the 2/2 feats add the skill as a class skill too. Hasn't seen overuse so far, nothing worse than a fighter with UMD.

 

[cooperflood]

The idea of scaling feats isn't exactly a new idea, but that doesn't mean it's not a good one. One of the more interesting systems that explored the idea of scaling feats was written by Frank and K. Their feats scaled based on your BAB or Skill Ranks (depending on the feat).

Here is one example:

Iron Will [Combat]

+0: You gain a +3 bonus to your Willpower saves.

+1: You gain the slippery mind ability of a Rogue.​

+6: If you are stunned, you are dazed instead.

+11: You do not suffer penalties from pain and fear.

+16: You are immune to compulsion effects.

These feats are obviously more powerful than anything written by WotC, but they do give some interesting ideas. To see more go to: http://middendorfproject.googlepages.com/frank_k_0.5.1.pdf​

 

[milo]

The scaling is a solution, but I don't think it needs fixing. I see a +1 bonus as a +5% chance of success at any point as long as it isn't a situation where it takes a 20 to succeed or a 1 to fail. I have found iron will to be extremely useful with my fighter types over the years. Many times I have made a save by 1 or 2 points, if not for iron will I would have failed.
Weapon focus even more so. It gives you a +5% chance to hit at 1st level and at 16th level it gives you a +20% chance to hit every round(5% per attack). May not always be true(1 or 20 situations) so might say a 10% or 15% chance every round. Then you figure in the feats that have this as a pre-req(specialization, improved focus, improved specialization, melee weapon mastery, etc.).
I personally think the static bonus feats are some of the better feats in the game as is, but I am a numbers guy and on a D20 every +1 is 5%, so personal opinion and preference.
If you add in scaling to your feats you would have to look at your class balance also, fighter is balanced as is, as well as human, but you make the feats they get more powerful and they may not be.

 

[Aus_Snow]

fighter is balanced as is

Many, many gamers disagree with this PoV. Some, rather vehemently! Obviously, not all, but still, you might well be in the minority there. . .

FWIW, I am in the (probable) majority, and strongly believe that Fighters in 3e need one hell of a boost, especially at the higher levels.

How many people are willing and wanting to make a Fighter 20 character, what with all the other base and prestige class options out there? Yeah, exactly.