Non-Weapon Proficiencies

[FinalSonicX]

Like I've said many times I'm all against the system wanting to protect players from themselves. Taking your options to be All Combat or All-non combat should be possible, and that is not a possibility if they are siloed because that enforces a certain combat/non-combat ratio instead of trusting each player to decide what he/she wants.

I agree with you, but my point was that the entire strength of NWP's in my eyes was that players were given free resources to effectively take these which fleshed out their backstory or developed more non-combat roles. In other words, it forced players to adopt a few defining non-combat related features in their character. If role-playing feats compete with combat feats, then you're going to end up with a lot of fairly "flat" characters that are very good at combat and very bad at everything else. Following along the same lines, if players had to choose between purchasing skill points or getting new feats, I think most players would choose feats unless they were a rogue or had a particular talent in mind.

Basically, I want 5e to support people who want to be very combat-centric and people who want to be much less combat oriented, but I want the system to make it an easy choice to add a few defining "flavors" and "features" to your character. That way people don't have to deal with the peer pressure to take that next awesome combat feat when really we want a silversmithing ability. Make sense?