D&D 5E Lets Discuss Feats. Do you like them? Plus, some questions!

[Mouseferatu]

Why? What did you hate about them?

I didn't hate them. I just greatly prefer the new ones.

I prefer fewer, more meaningful feats to more, less meaningful ones; I like choosing a feat to be a major character decision instead of just a quick detail. I prefer the more flavorful modifications. I prefer the fact that they come with multiple themed aspects. I prefer that they're not nearly as circumstance-specific. I prefer the fact that people can choose not to use them, and still not fall behind.

Everything, basically.

 

[BryonD]

I love the 3E style of building a character bit by bit.

I love the 5E style of grabbing a concept and running with it.

 

[Li Shenron]

I didn't hate them. I just greatly prefer the new ones.

I prefer fewer, more meaningful feats to more, less meaningful ones; I like choosing a feat to be a major character decision instead of just a quick detail. I prefer the more flavorful modifications. I prefer the fact that they come with multiple themed aspects. I prefer that they're not nearly as circumstance-specific. I prefer the fact that people can choose not to use them, and still not fall behind.

Everything, basically.

I also like how they made it possible to easily ignore feats and just get the ability score bumps, especially for a player who doesn't want to increase character complexity.

IMHO however what people normally dislike about 3e feats got to do with either the actual feats provided* or with underlying problems of the whole rules system**, rather than with the size of the feats, which is the main difference between 3e feats and 5e feats.

*most people hated having too many published feats, boring +X feats, or totally off-way feats -> all these problems could happen again with larger feats, it's not the size that causes these problems

**e.g. using certain feats as "fixes", or having lots of different bonus types and then clone feats for each type

All the good things you mentions above (which I agree they are better done in 5e than 3e) could have nevertheless been done with 3e-sized feats also. Including the idea of a major character decision, which was in fact proposed during playtest as "specialties".

I would have preferred smaller 3e-like feats because then this would have been one more thing that players could choose between a "major decision" and "fine-tuning" (it would have mirrored what already happens with skills and backgrounds, where you can choose a background or individual skills), but also because these large feats are going to cause frequent nuisance due to their granting stuff that many players would not want or could not benefit from because they already have them.

 

[exile]

I like feats across the board (in 3.X, 4E, Pathfinder, and 5E). I really like them in 5E.

 

[exile]

The feets I don't like in 5E are the little, shod, halfling ones.

 

[Saeviomagy]

From what I've seen, the "-5 to hit, +10 to damage" aspects of Great weapon master and sharpshooter are probably too good, and actor really grates my cheese because it 'allows' you to do something that you should be able to do without the feat, and therefore implies that you can't do it without it.

I wish all characters started with a feat, or had some option to do so, because it opens up character possibilities.

I wish more class abilities had feat equivalents, especially skill-based ones.

Apart from that, the tradeoff between higher stats and cool things to do seems a very hard choice.

 

[Staffan]

I wish all characters started with a feat, or had some option to do so, because it opens up character possibilities.

I sort of agree - I wish there was an additional customization choice at 1st level, because it would make many 3e conversions so much easier - things like Dragonmarks. I think that, given the scale of them, a full feat is a bit much, and the only other customization choice at 1st level is the background feature which I think is (a) too much fun to get rid of, and (b) too low a cost to pay for something like that.

 

[Mouseferatu]

All the good things you mentions above (which I agree they are better done in 5e than 3e) could have nevertheless been done with 3e-sized feats also. Including the idea of a major character decision, which was in fact proposed during playtest as "specialties".

I actually disagree. I don't think they could have gotten nearly the thematic flavor out of smaller feats, since it's precisely the combination of benefits that offers that flavor. Plus, it would have made some feats a no-brainer/feat tax. Not every caster takes the Warcaster feat because they can't all use all of its benefits. But if it was broken down into more feats in a more feat-heavy system, parts of it would become absolute "duh" selections for spellcasters. If you know you're getting a bunch of smaller feats, taking a feat that removes disadvantage for casting in melee range is an absolute gimme.

Also, and I realize I'm getting deep into personal preference territory, I think it's possible to get too granular in character creation. What I like about a class-based system like D&D is that it's flexible, but within defined parameters. If I wanted more granularity, or to fine-tune the tiniest details, I'd play a non-level-based system.

 

[Staffan]

Also, and I realize I'm getting deep into personal preference territory, I think it's possible to get too granular in character creation. What I like about a class-based system like D&D is that it's flexible, but within defined parameters. If I wanted more granularity, or to fine-tune the tiniest details, I'd play a non-level-based system.

I completely agree with this. In my experience, and ironically enough, systems that allow large amounts of flexibility often lead to more similar characters - or at least characters with a similar core of competency. In a game like RuneQuest, for example, everyone either starts out with decent scores in skills like Spot Hidden and various athletic skills or they develop them in play, because they tend to be used a lot while adventuring. This is particularly true if you have diminishing returns on buying skills: if you can either bump one skill from expert-level to master-level, or increase three skills from apprentice-level to journeyman-level... many players will go for option 2.

This is actually one of the things I noticed while playing WoW: many classes have (or at least had, they've cleared many of them out now) some skills that aren't directly useful in combat. For example, Shaman have a spell called Farseeing, which lets you look around as if you were standing somewhere else within your LOS (and while using the spell, you can recast it to project your vision to yet another place), so you could basically explore a whole continent using it). Had WoW been a point-based system, I'd never have spent points on that spell, at least not unless those points came from a separate "Fun stuff" pool (like Shadowrun's hobby skills). But getting it as part of the rest of the shaman tool kit? Sure, I'll take it, and have fun with it.

 

[fjw70]

I am not a big fan of feats. People say they like them to differentiate characters but in my experience it is a tool to make characters more powerful. As far as feats go I like 5e feats more than other edition feats.