Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9886690" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Ah, Feats.  A wonderful bit of design.  "Let's create special features that aren't tied to a character class, that you can use to customize your character."  We'd seen some of this with a few NWP's like Blind Fighting, the Style Feats in Complete Fighter, and the crazy combat techniques found in the green DM reference books (The Celts book is truly mad)  Sounds great, until you run into the following:Feats that give you permission to do something.  "Oh, I can't actually follow tracks? I need a Feat?  I can't create magic items, I need a Feat?*  I can't attract an NPC henchman, I need a Feat?"*And not just all magic items, oh no, you need a separate Feat for each type, despite the fact that some items, like Rings or Rods, are super niche, and Wondrous Items can basically do almost anything, lol.A subset of the above, Feats that give you permission to do something you thought you could do already, handily replicating the AD&D Thief problem- oh you thought you could perform research or find NPC's in a city?  Sorry, we just made a Feat for that, with a bespoke subsystem!Related to these are Feats that let you actually do something the game promises you can do- "Improved" Grapple, Disarm, Trip, Bull Rush, etc. etc..  "Hey, we have all these cool new things you can do in combat beside just swing a sword...but the penalties for doing them without the right Feat are so terrible that you might as well not even try."Feats that no one would be happy taking.  I'm not even talking about the "+1 to hit/+3 hit points/+1 to AC/+2 to a saving throw" nonsense- they provided very meager benefits, but at least they were largely static and didn't actively make you a worse character.  No, you know the ones, that give small bonuses for extremely niche situations.  Combat Feats in general.  Because the Fighter gets 11 of these over the course of their career, it was decided to create long chains of prerequisites for some Feats.  If any other character threw all of their Feats at something, they could master one such chain, but because the Fighter had so many, heaven forbid they master two or more chains!  Often, these prerequisites had very little to do with the Feat you were trying to reach- Combat Expertise is easy to pick on since many of the Feats it leads to are actively made worse if you were to use CE with them to lower your BAB!  Sometimes it's nonsensical, like, what does CE have to do with Whirlwind Attack?And sometimes, all the effort required gets you something that isn't even all that great.  Most of the time, even if you are surrounded by foes, you're better off focusing enemies down one at a time as opposed to using Whirlwind Attack, for example.  As the edition progressed, you got super long chain enders that nobody but a Fighter could hope to get, but by the time you get them, the magic system has potentially obsoleted the Fighter!Add to this the fact that, as you pointed out, Feat design was all over the place, and of course, the inevitable power creep, and soon the game was bloated with all manner of Feats, a large percentage of which, I wonder if anyone ever used.</blockquote>

Verification