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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Transformer" data-source="post: 5995474" data-attributes="member: 70008">Your background gives you skills, and your specialty gives you feats. That's the way the second playtest packet works. As of yet there is no official option to pick your feats and skills (and backround traits--this applies to them as well) a la carte, piecing together your own "background" or "specialty." Now, I'm unclear on whether or not WotC has promised us that option: if so, can someone link me to the article where they explicitly promised it? Regardless, I see a major problem looming.The problem is this: if WotC explicitly gives us the option to pick skills and feats a la carte, then immediately picking them a la carte becomes the norm. Any player with even a passing interest in character optimization will always hand-pick his skills and feats. Want to make a character who used to be a blacksmith? Well, pick the interesting and potentially useful Item Crafting Trait, but drop the crappy Local Lore and Professional Lore for something better.  You're just as legit a blacksmith, but your skills are way better. You'd be crazy not to do it, as long as character effectiveness matters even a little in your group. In fact, always drop the crappy (and now, very granular) suggested Knowledge skills for something more likely to come up in play. Why not? You can still roleplay a knight/commoner/artisan just as well.Want a specialty with a great 3rd level feat, but a mediocre 1st level feat? Drop something better in there at level one. Why wouldn't you? Grab Toughness at level one, when it actually doubles your hit dice, then head into something else later when it makes a smaller difference (in terms of percent increase in effectiveness).Now backgrounds and specialties are pointless. Remember starting package in 3rd edition? Did you care? Of course you didn't. You mixed and matched feats and skills and equipment as you liked. No one cared. New players rarely even cared. I am absolutely convinced that backgrounds and specialties will end up in the exact same place if the option to mix and match is presented. No matter how much emphasis they're given, no matter how much the book tries to present them as the norm, in practice they'll become nothing more than annoying suggestions that everyone ignores.And now the format of the books is stupid. Nearly everyone mixes and matches, but now all the first level feats aren't in the same place. They're scattered throughout all the different backgrounds. If everyone mixes and matches (which is, again, what will happen), why not put all the feats of a certain level together for easy reference instead of packing them into these silly starting pack--uh, "specialties" that everyone ignores. It's incredibly inconvenient. And since everyone mixes and matches anyway, is there anything wrong with releasing stand-alone feats that aren't part of any background?And now look where we are: back in 3rd edition, with feat bloat, and us scanning through four hundred feats just to make a first level character. Except now it's even worse because all the 1st level feats aren't even together in one list. And even if they were together in one list, that would only marginalize the actual specialties even more: now I don't even really have to look at them, I just skip straight to the feat list where the actual mechanics for the feats are.But WotC can't officially not allow mixing and matching either. People would freak out; over on the D&D boards disgruntled fans would be proclaiming that they're bringing the apocalypse upon us by limiting player choice so sharply into these arbitrary categories.So what's to be done? Allow a la carte, and specialties and backgrounds suddenly don't matter any more than starting packages did, and we're solidly back in 3rd edition bloat territory. Disallow it, and everyone gets mad. Either way, there's trouble on the horizon. Maybe making it DM-optional would solve the problem? Have a sidebar saying that you can mix and match if the DM deems it a good fit for his game? Or maybe I'm over-reaction, and everyone won't actually ignore backgrounds and specialties like I think they will?</blockquote>

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