D&D General Path of Feats: a Superior Design than Subclasses

[SkidAce]

.... if your feat requires another to access you won't be getting it sooner than 8th level, which is often not too soon before most games end.

All I would say (agreed with your post), is that becuase of their value in character defintion, many DMs are being a little freeer
with feats.

Giving everyone a free feat at the beginning of near beginning of the campaign brings that "wont be getting it sooner" value down to about 4th level. which I feel is just right.

 

[saviirkad]

On metric value:
If the concern is that the metric itself isn’t valuable, then I need to know what you think a valuable combat metric would measure. Without either concrete features or an alternative metric, I can’t address the objection.

I don't think there ultimately is a combat metric to measure, because we are discussing a game with both hard and soft features that can be engaged with in various measures that incorporate both to different degrees. An analysis based on hard metrics will always exclude too much of the game to give valuable insight, even within the scope the metrics are pulled from.

Request for concrete features
If you think I’m wrong, then I need the specific support or control features you believe materially change that outcome so I can model them. Broad categories like “support” or “utility” aren’t actionable, I need the actual features.

I want to be clear that I don't think your math is wrong, I just think that its results have no impactful meaning beyond itself. If all one is doing is abiding by some sense of curiosity to see which of these separate dice rolls have a greater average total than the other, the math is right within its scope and curiosity is sated. But if the results are to be used in any way outside of that, up to and including validating the statement of "combat is abysmal," then its value in my opinion plummets to zero.

Can specific support or control features be added to the math and change the result of that math? Yes. I did name a few examples (commander's strike, heroism, bardic inspiration). Would it add value? I don't think so. If anything, what it suggests is that if you want to maximize just those metrics within  just this comparison, then the answer is both. You want to play either the fighter-bard or the barbarian opposite the other.

 

[Silam]

These below are all valid arguments, but they’re also not absolutely true. Feats can be designed either as cohesive or not.

i would assume the reasoning would be because subclasses can work on the guarantee that a character will have X, Y and Z features, both ones from baseclass and prior subclass levels, meaning they can make connections between those features in a way that feats can't really do, a monk subclass knows it gets to call upon ki/focus points (and by proxy, flurry of blows, patient defence and step of the wind), unarmoured defence, martial arts, unarmoured movement, a decent chance of high DEX or WIS and probably more i'm missing.

Let’s say we wanted to give Fighters more options, but by following a feat-based approach rather than a subclass approach. We could achieve this by setting a feat’s prereq as one of the Fighter class features. Here’s an example, below:

Come and Get Me
General Feat (Prerequisite: Level 4+, Second Wind Feature)
You have a way of getting under the skin of your enemies, making them overextend themselves and run out of steam before you.
Goad. Once per turn, you can talk or gesture to an enemy that can see you to entice them to attack you. Until the start of your next turn, that enemy has a -2 penalty on attack rolls against everyone else but you. If multiple people goad the same target, then the target suffers no penalty against any of them.
Payback. If you hit an opponent with a melee attack within one round of them hitting you with a melee attack, and then activate your Second Wind feature as normal, you deal extra damage equal to the amount healed for yourself.
Unstoppable. Once per day during a short rest, you can regain two uses of Second Wind rather than one.

Is there any reason why you wouldn’t let both a Champion and a Battlemaster have this feature? Then it’s better as a feat than as a subclass feature. Is it cohesive? I think so…

feats, by their nature of being individual packages, tend not to get those guarantees except for when they have prerequisites, which are generally not the most desired feats due to said gate to entry, they have to be accessible to a rogue, a barbarian, a warlock and all the other classes,

I think that’s an artificial constraint. If it were true, feats like War Caster would not exist, but clearly they do. Furthermore, there is nothing inherently wrong with making a feat have a prereq that’s even more restrictive than War Caster (as in the example above). Elven Accuracy is another example of a fairly restrictive prereq. Of course, it’s fine to make feats that are more accessible as well (e.g., having Weapon Mastery as a prereq which can be gotten from many classes and even from another feat). There is really no requirement that a feat needs to be accessible to all characters, neither in existing feats nor in future feats that have not been printed yet.

and even if you can access those features by another feat, feats in and of themselves are a very expensive currency that don't come frequently,

Agreed, but I don’t know why that’s a problem. Any class or subclass feature of level 11 or above is by definition a feature you can only ever get from a single class/subclass. So the whole bottom half of every class table is made up of very very expensive currency. But it’s fine right? I don’t think anyone is seriously complaining that they can’t be a Monk 10 / Fighter 11 (to get 3 attacks per action and 3 per bonus action). It’s just accepted as a fact of life. Getting somewhere between 4 and 7 feats is par for the course.

meaning for most people, if your feat requires another to access you won't be getting it sooner than 8th level, which is often not too soon before most games end.

Unless the other required feat is an origin feat, but yeah, some could take a while to get. Just like Epic Boons also take a while to get and most games never get them at all. But is it a design issue that Epic Boons exist at all? I don’t think so…