Iron Will, etc taken more than once?

[hong]

There is a feat in epic level handbook that's called Greater Iron Will or so.
Prerequisites: Iron Will
It gives a bonus of +4 INSTEAD of +2 from Iron Will.
So Iron Will seems not to stack (who would wait till epic and take it then if he could have double iron will at 9th level ...?).

Everything I've seen about the epic rules seems to indicate that balance is a strictly optional extra at those levels. Therefore, saying that something is bad because it invalidates the ELH isn't a particularly great argument.

Like the others have said, nothing will be broken by allowing people to take Iron Will (or Great Fortitude) multiple times. So what if someone can boost their Fort to sky-high levels? They're still vulnerable to getting bashed to death, fireballed to death, drained to death, or held and then coup-de-graced to death (CDG Fort save DCs tend to be astronomical). Danger comes in many forms in D&D, and you can't be invulnerable to all of them, even with this rule change.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Also, it's easy enough to just rule that each epic save feat grants a +4 unnamed bonus to x save. That still makes it better than (in fact, exactly twice as good as) the non-epic save feats. The question is whether we want to allow the epic save feats to stack with themselves.

 

[Clay_More]

lol, you cant use EH as a guideline for feats. The feats increase in odd ways. Toughness +3 hp becomes Epic Toughness +20 hp (which is a x6.66 increase in efficiency). On the other hand, Epic Spell Focus only acts as an increase of +2 (being the equivelant of all the other Spell Focus Feats, just epic and able of boosting spell DC additionally).
Also, remember that the DC of wizard spells increase less than saving throws. A 20 th. level wizard can cast a level 9 spell which increases his spell dc by +9. A 20 th. level character will have saves of +12 (and +6 in some cases), so they will already be advantaged against wizards and spellcasters.

 

[Quinn]

I, for one, disagree with allowing this stacking.

The examples that are being put up assume that the character is spreading the wealth among other feats and between the three saves. In the extreme of this example, a character could drop all those feats into one save --

Fortitude: Death from Massive Damage, Coup-de-grace, and most save or die spells are now moot. Poisons are now useless as well.

Reflex: A whole host of spells are now wasted, because the character cannot fail a Reflex save.

Will: A whole host of spells are now wasted, because the character cannot fail a Will save.


If you play with this part of the game engine (the save boosting feats), you will deal great potential harm to other areas by opening up whole new avenues of abuse.

Most of these difficulties don't even require all the feats to be spent in one save -- even two or three make a character FAR more resistant to even powerful spells, because a spellcaster can take Spell Focus and Greater Spell Focus, but can't go past that (so they have a maximum of +4 to a specific school of magic); as an example, a person takes Great Fortitude twice, and SF/GSF Necromancy is now completely countered -- take it three times, and even these specialists of specialists can't hurt the character.


Summary -- No. I think this is a bad idea, that will see nothing but abuse.

How many times are characters going to spend a feat on Iron Will, Lightning Reflexes, or Great Fortitude in order to create this unbalance? They'd have to pick one particular save to create any such inbalance to begin with. A fighter stacked in Iron Will, for instance, would end up doing so at the expense of feats such as Weapon Specialization, Imp. Critical, Cleave, Great Cleave, etc. A wizard would do so at the expense of his Item Creation feats., etc. Yes, you wouldn't succumb to a save or die feat as easily. However, you are far less effective in other ways as well. Just because a character specializes and proves difficult to take down in one arena doesn't mean he's unbalanced.

 

[Bagpuss]

lol, you cant use EH as a guideline for feats. The feats increase in odd ways. Toughness +3 hp becomes Epic Toughness +20 hp (which is a x6.66 increase in efficiency). On the other hand, Epic Spell Focus only acts as an increase of +2 (being the equivelant of all the other Spell Focus Feats, just epic and able of boosting spell DC additionally).

Epic Toughness is not direct follow on from Toughness, there is already Dwarf's Toughness and I think Ogre's and Giant's in the splatbooks which I think add something like +6, +12 and +18 HP's respectively.

 

[Clay_More]

If I were a wizard, I would definitely prefer to spend a feat on Wondrous Item Creation and make myself a cape of resistance +4 instead. This is equivelant of six save-boosting feats. All in all, it doesn't upset the game, simply allows for players who want to negate their really bad scores.