NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="suden" data-source="post: 6533111" data-attributes="member: 50959">The problem is an optimizer would match the penalty to irrelevant stats to basically get a feat for free. Building a dragonborn paladin? -2 dex means nothing to a plate class, so the feat is clearly a better deal. -2 str for a halfling? Unless you have a dm who rigorously enforces encumbrance, it's meaningless. And even in that situation, it is eliminated by a bag of holding. On the flip side, elves lose out, -2 con is a serious penalty for any class and not a fair trade for a feat. The game I am playing in right now, our tank is an unarmored wood elf barbarian. That is already a somewhat suboptimal choice compared to human (for the feat) or one of the +str classes, but not so suboptimal as to make it unplayable or a detriment to the group. And the player is having a blast, running around the battlefield with his wiry little elf, tanking cyclopes and doing it well. He never would have made an elf barbarian if it required a con penalty. Of course, with your proposed system, a player could simply choose to not take the optional penalty with a feat, but since feats have been proven so strong, if you added the option most people would take it. Unless they wanted to play an elf. A human has to give up four points in stats to take a feat. And at later levels, everyone has to give up two stat points to take a feat. I think if you wanted to add an option to allow a demi-human to pick up a feat at level 1, you should instead require them to give up all their racial stat bonuses. So if a half-orc wants to get a feat at level one, they don't get the +2 str or +1 con. That would still allow a lot of flexibility for class/race combos, but make players pay a real price if they want the extra feat.</blockquote>

Verification