Improved Rapid Shot feat

[The Souljourner]

You want to know why improved rapid shot is balanced? No power attack, no cleave, no attacks of opportunity, no flanking, friends providing cover, needing a feat just to remove the -4 from shooting into melee, drawing AoO with every attack, and finally... you're wielding a two handed weapon that only does 1d8 damage and doesn't get 1.5x your strength bonus.

The greatsword wielder over there is laughing at the archer as he dumps feat after feat into this style, whereas he could take skill focus: basket weaving and still out damage the archer.

-The Souljourner

 

[two]

You want to know why improved rapid shot is balanced? No power attack, no cleave, no attacks of opportunity, no flanking, friends providing cover, needing a feat just to remove the -4 from shooting into melee, drawing AoO with every attack, and finally... you're wielding a two handed weapon that only does 1d8 damage and doesn't get 1.5x your strength bonus.

The greatsword wielder over there is laughing at the archer as he dumps feat after feat into this style, whereas he could take skill focus: basket weaving and still out damage the archer.

-The Souljourner

This doesn't really qualify, in my opinion, as a very thoughtful post.

Nobody is saying archers have no disadvantages; we are pondering if those disadvantages are disadventageous enough.

It's easy to play the "ha ha" game, "ha ha" goes the archer, full attacking, as the fighter is mauled by a "improved grappling" dire bear (because the melee fighter had to close to attack). 50 points of damage later, the fighter wishes he was elsewhere.

See, it's easy.

See, it's rather pointless.

I personally, after having run the numbers using spreadsheets supplied by other contributers (note, positive contributers) to this thread, now agree that IRS is not overpowered. I also don't think archers are in an way underpowered, even compared against a boring "raging charging barbarian with a greatsword".

 

[slingbld]

Precise Shot only matters in a specific situation (while firing into a melee). That doesn't happen all the time (or even most of the time). And you won't be getting a +4 to hit on every attack just because you have that feat. It is merely cancelling a penalty that occasionaly comes into play.

I would have to disagree with precise shot hardly comming into play. The group I am currently GMing has 2 tanks & 2 archers. THe archers fire into melee EVERY combat. The tanks take the brunt of the assault while both archers rapid shot into the fray. Now precise shot negates a -4 penalty that IMHO occurs (or can occur) quite often. (I see it frequently in my home games as well as in the Living Greyhawk gaming sessions in my area). I see no problem with improved rapid shot. Yes it negates a -2 penalty for something that an archer will ALWAYS do. But I see it as being ballanced. provide a +4 bonus in limited circumstances or a +2 in more frequent circumstances.
And as stated earlier, you need to burn 4 feats in order to be able to do that. That is a lot of feat investment. When you consider that many archers are not pure fighters but rather fighter/ ranger or fighter/ wizard(sorcerer) combo classes, that is a large number of feats for a +2 bonus...

 

[James McMurray]

Yeah, Precise Shot is most definitely an "almost every battle" occurrence in my games. The only time it doesn't come into play is if the spellcasters and archers nuke the for before it gets close.

 

[jgsugden]

Once again, I encourage people to try the feat out. Check and see how many times it makes the difference between a miss and a hit. That'll be the *only* way to know how powerful the feat is in your game. Running the numbers may be fun, but they lack meaning unless placed in context, and each campaign is an incredibly different context. I play in one game where an archer could probablt use rapid shot in every combat. I play in another where the archer will almost certainly die if he stands in the same place long enough to use a full attack. In one of those games, this would be a nice feat. In the other, this would be a horrible joke of a feat.

I'm being really repetitive with this point because I think too many people ignore it. That is their right, but it leads to long discussions on message boards that tend to focus on the 'trees' rather than the 'forest' and result in people complaining about things that look bad on paper, but are fine in practical use. If you see something that appears to be problematic, your best approach is to see if it actually causes problems in a game before assuming that the prblems are more than illusions.

 

[Scion]

It is exactly for those points why running the numbers is more important than seeing it in play. The numbers are the same, whereas any campaign might change everything. To know if it is over/underpowered you have to compare it with a lot of different variables, putting them into campaign specifics ruins the whole effect.

In your campaign it might be that there is no such thing as a bow, so any archery feats that are out there are always underpowered. But this has no meaning on whether or not the mechanics are or not.

Discussions here are about mechanics, when those are more or less agreed upon to be all right then it is time for the campaign specifics to fly in (generaly in houserules) to make things fit appropriately into actual campaigns.

The basis is made first as best as possible (running the numbers) and after that adjustments are made on a campaign by campaign basis, going the other way around (or ignoring the numbers) will just wind up causing headaches.

Numbers have a certain elegance to them, and are difficult to dispute when used properly, but everyones campaign world is different, generally drastically so.

 

[two]

Well we can see the trees, not the forest

The problem with your take on things (everything dependent upon the campaign), is that sometimes people want to discuss thing "across" campaigns, i.e. in a general way.

The argument you just made, that a feat is campaign-specific and needs to be judged within a campaign, could be true of any other feat you make up, no matter how lame-brained. Hey GM, I have a new feat that allows you to cast 2x the number of spells that a character is typically allowed. Is it fair or balanced? It could be, if the campaign world has almost no magic/very rare magic, and there were no spellcasting PC's.

However, it's also plenty true we can talk about this feat "across" campaigns and justly comment, "it's hella overpowered, stupid, and get rid of it."

It's not a wrong judgement, even if the feat is balanced in some specific campaign settings.

So, what we are doing is, yes, more difficult than simply saying "hey, in the campaign world I'm playing is it's fine, but since I can't explain all the details of that world, just take my word on it."

Or, "it's overpowered in my world, ... etc. etc. take my word on it."

There are generalizations that can be made about classes, feats, and weapons, that are true most of the time. Monks don't do a lot of straight melee damage (exceptions occur). Bards don't typically overwhelm with their magic (exceptions occur). Greatswords deal more damage than daggers (exceptions occur).

I'm looking for that sort of judgement "across" campaigns regarding Improved Rapid Shot. It may be too close a call; really not that good or that bad outside of specialized campaign settings; which is fine.

It might indeed be the case that it's 100% campaign dependent. Or not.

But don't act like we are being somehow naive or silly to make such an investigation.

 

[jgsugden]

Numbers have a certain elegance to them, and are difficult to dispute when used properly, but everyones campaign world is different, generally drastically so.

Numbers have a certain simplicity to them. That is why we trust them so much. We can look at them and feel like we understand what is going on.

The problem, however, is that numbers are deceptive in their simplicity. When you apply numbers to a situation as complex as a role playing game, the numerical analysis falls far short of capturing a complete picture. At best, it can serve as an untrustworthy tool. At worst, it leads you to conclusions that are true for only a limited set of circumstances, but are applied to a far wider range of situations ... leading to common belief in falsehoods.

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it ... unless they make their saving throw versus doom [DC15W].

In the 70s, there was this fad in economic analysis called forecasting (or econometrics). Economists looked at things going on around them, broke those situations down into numbers and then crucnched numbers to predict the future: they predicted the stock market, the market for certain products, unemployment, etc ... Some of the most brilliant minds in the world worked in this area, developing complecated formulas based upon heavily researched data.

A few decades later, current economists look back at that work and laugh - hysterically in some instances - at how poorly forecasting and econometrics has served us. Some economists continue to tinker in the area, but the 'revolution' that economists of the 70s expected never came. The data was fine and the formulas were well designed , but in the end, most of the world couldn't be broken down into simple formulas that captured enough of the world for forecasting to be accurate as a tool in more than limited situations.

You can run the numbers all you want. You can compare how much damage an optimal 32 point build character will deal in a full attack when designed as an archer or when designed as a melee fighter. You can look at the difference in damage potential between an optimal archer with and without IRS when doing a full attack action. Analysis like this only captures an insignificant portion of the equation we call balance. Each of these different comparisons implicitely makes assumptions about the situation in which they would be used by not capturing certain variables (and thus effectively holding them fixed).

Large scale game mechanics, like feats, are too complex to be broken down into simple numbers. Sure, you can easily break down the chances of a PC making one particular saving throw, but it is impossible to assess a comparitive value on a feat that grants a bonus on that saving throw until you have a context to know how often that saving throw will come up, what the effect of a failed saving throw will be, etc ... The determination of whether a feat is 'balanced' must be based upon trial and error experience rather than upon numbers that can not hope to catch all the significant variables involved.

Simply put: Math is going to lead you down the wrong path unless you can put it in context. Doing this type of analysis and putting faith into it without applying it to game situations is nothing more than mental masturbation. You may enjoy doing it, but in the end, nothing good is going to grow out of it. And you'll get mental hairy palms and go mentally blind.

Hear me! Math is your False God! Deny it and be blessed by the wisdom of Trial and Error!

I've had my say. You folks can go back to your analysis.

 

[Scion]

I understand what you are trying to say, but i definately disagree with the answer you get from it

This game is not as complex as economics, most feats can be broken down into a simple numbers game, and in fact the whole baseline game is just a series of fairly simple equations.

That is just it though, the whole system, the whole game in fact is simple. Incredibly so. You roll a d20 which you can give a probability curve to, you have +#'s which directly correspond to a certain change in the curve, and you have dc's for the various problems. all of this is incredibly easy, and if you were able to make the rolls millions upon millions of times it will make that curve.

This makes it easy enough to say average damage, average chance to hit, average this and that. Theses averages are directly comparable.

This is no where near the same thing as the economic guessing that went on, you are talking about a system with rules that arent fully known/understood on an incredibly epic scale in a fairly chaotic system..

vs d&d where we can easily see the equations and how they interact.

simple vs complex.. easy to understand vs nigh impossible.. Ax^2 + Bx + C vs chaos theory.

 

[jgsugden]

This game is not as complex as economics, most feats can be broken down into a simple numbers game, and in fact the whole baseline game is just a series of fairly simple equations.

As complex as economic conecepts trrying to encompass all significant aspects of world markets? No. Too complex for simple numbers to capture more than a small component issue? Yes.

The simple equations you refer to are truly simple. The problem is that they only capture an insignificant aspect of the game. It is easy to calculate the increase in the expected damage that you'll deliver to an AC 20 foe when your AB goes from +13/+13/+8 to +15/+15/+10 because you gained IRS. What is impossible to capture with these numbers is how valuable that increase in expected damage will be to your character because there are too many other variables to capture in your simple math. Capturing one instance is easy, capturing the value of repeated and widely altered instances occuring at unknown intervals is impossible.

D&D is far more complex than you give it credit for being. Trying to build mathematical models to express relative values of components of the game is an impossibly difficult process. How often the feat will be used is a huge component of how valuable it will be to a PC. None of the equations shown so far can handle this variable aspect of the balance analysis. Without showing that information, any analysis of the effectiveness of the feat is incomplete (and misleading if used to reach a conclusion).

Let me put it this way: Draw a conclusion for me. Look at the analysis mentioned above and draw any one conclusion from it regarding the value of IRS to a PC. Express it in mathematical terms. Then, I'll discuss that analysis.