PHBII: Retraining?

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Everyone seems to be focused on changing things (like feats) that you thought would be good but turned out not to be so good. My concern is purposely taking a feat that you KNOW you will swap out in three levels.

For example, I'm a wizard so I take Toughness at 1st level. I know that those hp will be trivial later but I can just swap out the Toughness for something like Empower Spell (which would have been a waste at 1st level) once that is more beneficial for me.

The rebuilding rules don't say you can only swap out things that didn't work out as planned - they just say you can swap one thing a level. In effect, they are encouraging a character plan that includes swappable abilities. You should maximize your low level feat choice and decide right up front when you will swap things out to keep you at the top of the power curve.

It's this added source of endorsed munchkinizm that worries me.

(and I'm a player, so don't tell me to "just ban it" if I don't like it)

Frankly, who cares? Like most gamer concerns, its a lot of mincing hand wringing over nothing. A feat should always be useful.

 

[rjs]

However, how often do you take Improved Toughness for a class with a good fortitude save? And this trick only works if you have one. Really, it's such a trivial abuse that I can't see any reason to care. So you get an extra 2 hp at 1st and 1 hp at 2nd - hardly game breaking, is it?

Just to clarify, a 1st-level wizard who selects Toughness cannot replace Toughness with Improved Toughness at 3rd level, since the change isn't legal (the wizard's Fort save bonus was +0 at 1st). Now, the same wizard could pick up Improved Toughness at 6th level and then retrain to replace Toughness with some other feat, which to me, makes Toughness (along with a slew of +2 bonus to two skill feats) more useful.

When I designed the retraining rules, I was nervous at first (though not now, my gaming group uses these rules) about what this would do to the game, which is why I included A) the training cost sidebar and B) the limitations of one retraining option per level. While this does change the dynamic of the game in some ways, it provides an official system for respec which up until now had been done ad hoc. Plus, it allows players to modify their characters in response to the ever-evolving and new rules sets, giving more value to your purchases rather than waiting for your character to die/retire before getting the most out of the next supplement.

 

[Old Fart]

Plus, it allows players to modify their characters in response to the ever-
evolving and new rules sets, giving more value to your purchases rather than waiting for your character to die/retire before getting the most out of the next supplement.

That was my inital impression of the retraining rules - not that they were an encouragement to muchkins, but that they allow a way to quickly (or at least more quickly) qualify for the nifty new prestige class in just-realeased Supplement X, or use the new feats Supplement X contains, while keeping the same character you've got an investment in.

Thus, it facilitates using Supplement X, and thus encourages the purchase of it.

Game design evolving from business sense. Not that there's anything wrong with that; if I spend my hard-earned money on a new product it had better darn well be easy to use.

 

[IanB]

We've currently adopted retraining for feats and class features, but not for anything else yet.

I don't necessarily see the domain thing as a big issue. It all depends on how active you think a deity has to be in the process of a worshipper casting spells - and even if you think they have to be intimately involved in granting every spell and power to the cleric, wouldn't changing your memorized spells also be asking for a different gift all the time?

It all boils down to perspective.

 

[Raduin711]

My concern has been the suspension of disbelief, which seems to be passe' in D&D. Everything is about what happens on the battlemat when the orcs come to call (or the half-dragon, half-demon, half-construct, half-elf...)

It suspends my disbelief when someone at one moment has the ability to do x, and then suddenly doesn't anymore. Yes, I know its a game. but paper and dice are only one part of the game. It's like suddenly everyone forgot the other part.

Alas, poor role-playing, I knew ye well. Now it is simply a game.

 

[Wolfwood2]

It suspends my disbelief when someone at one moment has the ability to do x, and then suddenly doesn't anymore. Yes, I know its a game. but paper and dice are only one part of the game. It's like suddenly everyone forgot the other part.

Can you provide some specific examples here? Most feats, you can still do the thing you used to do, but since you don't regularly train anymore you're out of practice and can't do it as well anymore. I'm thinking combat feats like Improved Trip, Two-Weapon Fighting, etc. You can still do it, it's just that you've got penalties now because you've "lost the knack".

Other feats like Toughness and the saving throw improvement feats operate at a level invisible to the game reality.

Magical item creation feats are a bit trickier, but there's already a lot of handwaving with magic. Shouldn't be that hard to justify just not creating things anymore. (And you probably weren't creating things much before you switched it out, because if you were, why did you switch it?)

So provide some examples of where 'forgetting' something breaches game reality.

 

[MarkB]

It suspends my disbelief when someone at one moment has the ability to do x, and then suddenly doesn't anymore.

And yet, when somebody can't do something at all, and then suddenly - within hours or minutes - can forevermore do it perfectly, that doesn't twinge your suspension of disbelief?

Feat acquisition has always been an extremely granular way of representing changes that would occur gradually over weeks or months in real terms. Retraining represents a re-focusing of skills and training that would similarly occur over a longer period. It's no more or less realistic than what already occurs in a level-based progression system.

 

[Dimwhit]

Now it is simply a game.

When exactly was it ever anything other than 'simply a game'?

 

[FireLance]

The only issue I see with rebulding is the substantial extra amount of paperwork involved to keep track not only of what feat was taken at what level, but also where all your skill ranks and the like got spent. It does seem like a nice option to help out with PrCitis (i.e. the requirement to plan your character from the ground up to be able to enter a PrC) and also with the issue of new appropriate feats showing up in a new book for the character. I know the campaogn I might be playing in soon will use it, so I am much more willing to try weird things out with a character, since he can recover from a "mistake" later in the campaign. If they came up with a bookeeping sheet for leveling up, it would solve the problems with retraining substantially.

It's not difficult to keep track of how you got a feat by simply noting it in brackets after the feat, or noting the ranks you have in a feat after a slash after the modifier. See the following stat block for a 1st-level paladin:

Darren Oaklund
Male Human Paladin 1
LG Medium Humanoid (human)
Init +4; Senses Listen +1, Spot +1
Language Common
-
AC 16 (+4 armor, +2 shield), touch 10, flat-footed 16
hp 11 (1 HD, 1d10+1)
Fort +3, Ref +0, Will +1
-
Spd 20 ft.
Melee [5 ft.] longsword +3 (1d8+2/19-20) or
Melee [5 ft.] morningstar +3 (1d8+2) or
Ranged [80 ft.] light crossbow +1 (1d8/19-20)
Base Atk +1; Grap +3
Atk Options smite evil 1/day (+2 to hit, +1 to damage)
Spell-like Abilities (CL 1st) at will-detect evil
-
Abilities Str 14, Dex 10, Con 12, Int 10, Wis 13, Cha 14
SQ aura of good (faint, as 1st-level cleric)
Feats Improved Initiative [HB], Mounted Combat [L1]
Skills [ACP -6] Concentration +2/1, Diplomacy +4/2, Handle Animal +3/1, Heal +2/1, Knowledge (nobility and royalty) +1/1, Knowledge (religion) +1/1, Profession (farmer) +2/1, Ride +2/2, Sense Motive +3/2
Possessions [150 gp] scale mail (50 gp), heavy wooden shield (7 gp), longsword (15 gp), morningstar (8 gp), light crossbow (35 gp), 20 bolts (2 gp), adventurer's pack* (19 gp), hooded lantern (7 gp), wooden holy symbol (1 gp), 50-foot hemp rope (1 gp), 5 gp.

* An adventurer's pack contains the following items: a backpack, a belt pouch, a sack, a scroll case, a flask, a bedroll, a winter blanket, flint and steel, two candles, two torches, two flasks of oil, one day's trail rations, a fishhook, a waterskin, soap, a small steel mirror, a sewing needle, a whetstone, a signal whistle and a piece of chalk.​

Improved Initiative is his human bonus feat [HB], and Mounted Combat is his 1st-level feat [L1]. Bonus feats from classes can also be marked. [F1] could denote the bonus feat that a fighter got at 1st level, for example. The paladin above has one rank in Concentration, two ranks in Diplomacy, one in Handle Animal, and so on.

 

[hands_miranda]

While that covers the feats, it doesn't do anything to record how you got your skill ranks (important for some feats) or the order that you took your class levels in. For someone who's trying to a relatively even split of levels between two classes, this becomes important to figure out.

I'm not knocking the system as impossible, but it is a mess to integrate into an existing campaign. You almost have to have a level up log where you make a note of all the choices you made for the character at that level. You could probably come up with a one page sheet that would go over 10 levels, so most characters would only have 1-2 extra pages on them if you use this option. But your method is not sufficient for all characters, since it glosses over other level up choices beside feats.

Raymond