D&D 5E I hate choosing between ASIs and Feats

[ChrisCarlson]

It seems that with the pople i play with there seems to be a belive that maxing you to hit is very important.
and ability score increases increase to hit and spell DC feats don't

This is exactly what I was referring to.

I fully admit I tend towards feats over stat bumps. Full disclosure. Its just that, having played a great deal of 5e, with characters I sometimes never bothered to increase their primary stat above 16, I find I still succeed at plenty of stuff. Thank you bounded accuracy. But same said characters had lots of additional "fun flavor points" thanks to the feats I chose. So did I succeed at having fun adventuring?

I would say, categorically yes.

Arguably more so because I took choices I thought were more fun to play. Might I have succeeded a bit more often in discrete instances? Probably. But even then, my choice (to take feats instead) only affected the outcome in the rare moments when I miss a roll by only exactly 1 or 2 points. Missing by any more than that (likewise all the successes in excess of 3 or more) and even a 20 stat would have made no difference. Which, statistically, is much more often.

So did I choose poorly? It's hard for me to argue that I did.

 

[Azurewraith]

And yet, there are plenty of fighters out there today who take Great Weapon Master (for the -5/+10) but not Mounted Combatant (for advantage to cancel out the -5, and for mobility to mitigate the downsides of being a melee fighter). Does the existence of Mounted Combatant make GWM fighters somehow less? Or is this really a social problem wherein the goal is to excel in the Internet metagame instead of have fun at the table? The Internet hivemind hasn't really picked up on that GWM/Mounted Combatant synergy so from that perspective no one is likely to mock you for not having it, and if winning the metagame is the goal, anything the hivemind doesn't know about is non-mandatory... which means that the problem isn't the hypothetical dozen sword-related feats, it's the metagame's awareness of those dozen feats.

Solution: cut the Gordian knot. Exit the metagame.

Wont the mounted combat feat be a a bit useless in alot of cases cramped dungeons, larger than large enemy's, forests etc? For me its a Tad unreliable.

 

[Fanaelialae]

1. When designing 5E, they seem to have put a higher priority on making the feat system optional than making it good. Hence the issue in this thread.

I disagree. I think it is good because it is optional.

Sure, players who like to consider all of their options might be unhappy with having to make a choice of either/or. But when dealing with a new player or a player who isn't very mechanically oriented (we have one of the former in our current group, and I've known several of the latter) it's a blessing. They don't have to try to pick through 20+ feats. They can just assign a + 2 and be done. And effective.

2. Looking at 5E from the DM's chair, I'm not sure there is a good solution. I'd like to make the stat boosts automatic and let people pick feats at every opportunity, but there aren't enough feats for that to my taste. Not for a 20 level game, though the likelihood of most campaigns not getting that far mitigates that to a certain degree,

Granting both would be overkill IMO. Although it might not be a bad option for a no-magic-items campaign where you still want the party to be above par. Even in that case, I'd only double the standard ASIs gained at levels 4, 8, 12, 16, and 19. I don't think that fighters and rogues need the extra boost that doubling their bonus ASIs would give them.

3. I agree with the sentiment that combat and noncombat feats competing for the same slot is a bad thing.

Unfortunately, this runs counter to 5e's design philosophy. 4e had a fairly strong design concept of separating combat and non-combat abilities into different "silos". 5e doesn't do this. For example, the class design of the fighter is heavily oriented towards the combat pillar, whereas the ranger is less heavily combat focused but has more exploration abilities. If they had gone that route, we'd be looking at a VERY different game today, IMO.

 

[jayoungr]

What I'm hearing is that your optimizing side and your flavor-loving side are at war. The optimizing side pretty much always wins, but the flavor-loving side is unhappy because it feels neglected. If you switched it around and went the other way, then your optimizing side would be unhappy because then it would be neglected.

Sounds to me like a problem that is best solved by you figuring out how to balance your priorities, rather than by changing the rules.

I also wonder if the fact that you're playing AL is contributing to this dilemma. At a friendly home table, you might feel less pressure to "keep up" through optimization.

 

[happyhermit]

I love it! I love difficult decisions that have real consequences.

ETA; Just noticed this was AL. Interesting because I just heard an interview with Mike Mearls where he said that he wished they had excluded feats by default in AL.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Wont the mounted combat feat be a a bit useless in alot of cases cramped dungeons, larger than large enemy's, forests etc? For me its a Tad unreliable.

That's kind of like arguing that flight is actually useless: it takes a very special campaign to make it useless all the time. Horses can fit into a 5'x5' dungeon corridor (at half speed and penalties to attack/defense), and there are options (Find Steed, Phantom Steed) for getting a Large mount even in places where a horse isn't allowed or won't fit, like a 2' x 3' corridor made for gnomes.

How often in your games do you actually find Medium creature taking penalties for "Squeezing into smaller spaces"? If that happens frequently, then you're right, a horse wouldn't work in that game, and neither will Large monsters like most of the stuff in the MM, and suddenly Sanctuary, Sharpshooter and spells like Fog Cloud (or other methods for cancelling disadvantage) become amazingly good because your whole game is going to take place in chokepoints. I've never even heard of anyone playing such a game though. More frequently (at least) a healthy portion of the game takes place in reasonably open areas. Many games take place in wide-open areas where flying mounts like Gryphons and Giant Eagles would work, if you had a way to acquire one.

 

[S'mon]

I also wonder if the fact that you're playing AL is contributing to this dilemma. At a friendly home table, you might feel less pressure to "keep up" through optimization.

Oh, good point, yeah. If I were playing AL I'd have to stick with my Polearm Master
Greatweapon Master Barbarian, but in a home game I can play around with stuff like my Warlord-themed Fighter who I don't think will be nearly as powerful, but should be lots of fun to play (depending on how GM approaches Short Rests).

 

[S'mon]

That's kind of like arguing that flight is actually useless: it takes a very special campaign to make it useless all the time. Horses can fit into a 5'x5' dungeon corridor (at half speed and penalties to attack/defense)

This made me laugh. How about height? Not many 5' wide corridors are going to be high enough, and at 5' width the rider on the squeezed horse is going to be squeezed too unless you've succeeded on a high DC Intimidate check against your poor DM.

Edit: Also, corners.

 

[77IM]

And yet, there are plenty of fighters out there today who take Great Weapon Master (for the -5/+10) but not Mounted Combatant (for advantage to cancel out the -5, and for mobility to mitigate the downsides of being a melee fighter). Does the existence of Mounted Combatant make GWM fighters somehow less? Or is this really a social problem wherein the goal is to excel in the Internet metagame instead of have fun at the table? The Internet hivemind hasn't really picked up on that GWM/Mounted Combatant synergy so from that perspective no one is likely to mock you for not having it, and if winning the metagame is the goal, anything the hivemind doesn't know about is non-mandatory... which means that the problem isn't the hypothetical dozen sword-related feats, it's the metagame's awareness of those dozen feats.

Solution: cut the Gordian knot. Exit the metagame.

But, "mounted combat" is not part of my character concept. As I said, I pick a concept first ("Greatsword Kensai," let's say) and then I want the system to support that concept in a very straightforward and effective way, without requiring me to make hard choices. I love making hard choices during game-play (choices about what my character does), but not during character-creation (choices about who my character is; I should get to pick it without the system pushing back).

I know this is irrational, but it annoys the @#$% out of me. I play the game to have fun, and at the end of the day, isn't having fun always irrational?

 

[GX.Sigma]

I'm put in the position of choosing statistical optimization or fun. I really want to choose the fun option, but almost always end up going with the optimal.

This is partly true because the Feats I want aren't the handful of OP Feats...I want...fun things that aren't as powerful overall. But I just can't bring myself to sacrifice that constant +1.

Did you ever play 4e? Because this reads like a post from the 4e forums. This was a common complaint in 4e, where feats were mandatory. (I'd mention 3e, but whenever I try to think about 3e character building, my brain shuts itself off as a failsafe mechanism.)

The fact is, some choices are just going to be mechanically better than others. Yes, 5e's feats could be a little more balanced, but realistically, it's impossible to make all choices equal for all characters. If feats were mandatory, people would be grumbling about how you "need" GWM or whatever. If the only thing you got to choose was skills, people would be saying "I want fun things like Animal Handling, but I just can't bring myself to sacrifice Perception." If you only got to distribute ability scores, people would be saying "I want fun things like Charisma, but I can't just sacrifice Constitution."

The conflict between "optimization vs. fun" is unavoidable in a system where you mechanically build your own character. The more mechanical decisions you get to make in character building, the more potential there is for optimization. The only way to remove that conflict is to play a game where you don't get to make those decisions (e.g. Basic D&D, FATE).

Anybody else wish this had been designed differently?

No. Conversations like this make me happy feats are optional.