More feats, fewer choices

[Amphimir Míriel]

This PHB is the biggest, heaviest, most crunch filled book D&D has seen in ages, if we've ever seen one at all. And yet people whine that its intentionally light to trick you into buying more books.

For crying out loud. Its only one book. By its nature, its the most generic of the books. So its got a lot of generic feats. That's how it goes.

This.

The new PHB is so chocked-full of crunch that I find it hard to believe that they could add any more feats or powers without surpassing the maximum page count for the book.*

I do think the number of feats available is a tad small (not unusable, but still a bit tight), and maybe we should campaign for an article of extra feats for the first or second issues of the new (beta) Dragon online magazine, while it's still free.

Still, compare the feat list to that of the 3.5 PHB and you'll see a lot better feats... I sighed in relief when I saw that the whole bunch of "+2 to two skills" feats disappeared (those were a waste of good pages)

-

* Disclaimer: I am still not entirely convinced of the 50 pages in the PHB devoted to magic items. I am a bit of a grognard when it comes to that...
I would have preferred those 50 pages dedicated to something else... maybe a divine controller class (druid?) or something like that... but on the other hand, adding another class perforce adds more feats... dunno if 50 pages would have been enough... I don't have the books with me right now...

 

[lutecius]

I already alluded to this in the latter part of my Strength example. The problem is that Abilities (game consturct) already cover an unreasonably wide range of abilites (abstract notion).[...] Why should book-learning ever correlate to AC increases in the first place?

That's precisely why ability scores should contribute to the appropriate abilities.
The rules do limit the players' imagination for the sake of balance and simplicity. They assume things that don't always make sense (the Int bonus to AC certainly is a stretch) and some concepts simply won’t work within these limits. All the more reason to make them consistent
whenever possible.

I'm not saying that my suggestion is the best way of treating abilities. [...] The major disadvantage, of course, is the disconnect between the common understanding of a term like "Strength" and what it actually ends up meaning under my use.

Fair enough I think the major disadvantage of your system is more the disconnect between the various abilities actually affected by Strength and what it ends up meaning to you.
Will you reinterpret them too, or will you ignore the bonuses that don’t fit your concept?

 

[Aldarc]

med stud's right. Also, there's a solid gamist reason here- feat prereqs that relate to non-standard ability scores provide diversity of abilities for characters. If every wizard spellcasting feat has an Int related prereq, every wizard will go all int and dump everything else. Putting some of the abilities in Cha, some in Wis, some in Con, some in Dex, etc, creates a reason for wizards to have stats in other areas, and makes wizards with stats in each area slightly different from one another.

Take the way that Improved Trip was Int related in 3e. Was that the only way it could have been done? No, of course not. But it created the opportunity to design intelligent fighters. I suppose somewhere there was some guy who angrily claimed, "But I want to make a fighter who trips people, and is also stupid! This is forcing me into a build!" but it wasn't that valid of a complaint.

In general, dropping these feat prereqs probably won't break your game. But drop enough of them and it might make your game more bland.

I have no problem with Wizards trying to diversify stats through the stat requirements of feats, but the problem is that the required stats sometimes just do not make any logical sense (i.e. Astral Fire).

 

[Atlatl Jones]

What I dislike about all the stat prerequisites is that it commits the cardinal sin of 3e character creation: the need to pre-plan your character from 1st level. It's not as bad as 3e, but if you want to do certain things later in your career, you need to have planned for it at 1st level and the stat-increase levels, or you're out of luck.

 

[lutecius]

It's not justifications, it's explanations. Justifications are only necessary if you made up your mind beforehand what something is supposed to mean.

Justifications are necessary when some rules seem to have been created with only balance and gamist considerations in mind and the "in game" explanation looks like an afterthought.

What I meant was to not have any preconceived notions about what something should be. Handle every situation as it comes along. You can prepare, but don't prepare in detail, because it's impossible to prepare for even close to every eventuality.

In D&D, as this is a D&D forum, this means that if you go into something new with a strong notion of what things should mean, you will end up angry and frustrated and you won't win anything by it. If you, for example, say that Charisma is all about wit and charm, then you will be angry and frustrated when a feat about spell casting has Charisma as a prerequisite. If you instead see that it has Charisma as a prerequisite and accept it as a fact and come up with an explanation for it that you like, you are 1) more satisfied and 2) you have made your game richer.

I had no preconception of what abilty scores should be. Actually I even wished they'd redefine wisdom and charisma because they overlapped and the distinction was never clear.
So my only expectations were clarity and consistency. Let just say they didn't deliver

 

[Cadfan]

What I dislike about all the stat prerequisites is that it commits the cardinal sin of 3e character creation: the need to pre-plan your character from 1st level. It's not as bad as 3e, but if you want to do certain things later in your career, you need to have planned for it at 1st level and the stat-increase levels, or you're out of luck.

Are you sure about that?

Most feat prereqs are 13s in an ability score that logically relates to what you're trying to do. A 13 is the easiest thing in the world to get, and on top of that, you get +1 to all ability scores at level 11 and 21. So if you absolutely forgot to invest in Dexterity, but you want to do dexterous things like quickdraw your weapons, you can catch up pretty easily.

The feats with higher prereqs than 13 exist to reward specialization, and are mostly for characters who will definitely have those ability scores anyways. For example, Potent Challenge exists to reward high Constitution Fighters. If you're not a high Constitution Fighter, its not for you. And if you are, even if you started with a Con of 13 you can pick it up by level 8.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

One thing I think we all have to remember is that retraining is built into character development. Given that 13s are not difficult to qualify for, simply replace a feat you no longer want with a new one of the equivalent tier. If you had to take Skill Focus for lack of anything better, and now you qualify for Burning Blizzard, ditch Skill Focus.

 

[lutecius]

Well, yeah, I think that's reasonable. This is not a game that gives in-depth "game world" explanations for how things happen. They're largely left up to the DM and the campaign group's consensus.

I think it's safe to say that people who want the rulebook to give in-fiction explanation of how things work the way they do will not, generally, be satisfied with 4e. It doesn't make doing that a priority at all.

I don't mind, since I'd rather come up with that stuff myself. The default setting is a blank slate, I dig that. People who don't like it that way, I'm imagining the Forgotten Realms books will dig deep into fluff and use some pagecount to explain why the world works the way the rules describe. You may want to wait for that to come out and see if you like that approach better.

There are a lot of roleplaying games where the rules only serve to describe the results of actions, and the entire fictional description of how those results come to be has to come from the imagination of the players around the table. It's not necessarily a bad thing. But I'm sure it's very jarring if you're not used to it.

That's not what I meant. I've never used a published campaign setting and never cared for most of the dnd backstory (great wheel et al.)
I don't need long fluffy descriptions, i just want to feel that a rule stands for something "in game", not the other way around.
And when the fluff rationale behind a mechanic isn't self explanatory, maybe a justification of sorts would be good.

 

[med stud]

Justifications are necessary when some rules seem to have been created with only balance and gamist considerations in mind and the "in game" explanation looks like an afterthought.

Justifications are necessary when something real is at stake. What you are looking for are explanations, something I trust roleplayers to come up with (as we as a group tend to be creative people).

I had no preconception of what abilty scores should be. Actually I even wished they'd redefine wisdom and charisma because they overlapped and the distinction was never clear.
So my only expectations were clarity and consistency. Let just say they didn't deliver

You are contradicting yourself here. First, you say that you have no preconceptions about ability scores, then you say that you want Wisdom and Charisma redefined since they [in your opinion] overlap. That looks to me like you had a clear idea what those ability scores should mean.

 

[Incenjucar]

Honestly, I always assumed they would eventually make all casting based on all three mental stats as a default, with each having a different benefit. So this works rather well for me.