[Ro3 5/15] Traits? lol wut?

[GX.Sigma]

Rule-of-Three 5/15/2012

we're looking at making it so that all of the backgrounds deliver an equal number of skills and traits,

We imagine that traits cover a pretty broad swath of different abilities, mostly tied to your character's unique history. A simple expression of this would be a few extra languages, which opens up more roleplaying possibilities for the character. A more specialized trait would be one that allows a knight to always be able to get lodging and aid from a noble house that recognizes his or her own noble claim.

So apparently there are things called traits in D&D Next, and it seems like Rodney didn't know that we didn't know that yet. They look like little roleplaying-related feats that backgrounds give.

Beyond that, little new information. Anyway, Ro3 discussion thread.

 

[hafrogman]

*shrug* To me it sounds a lot more like:

Q: Pathfinder has traits, will DDN have traits?
A: Maybe. We'll look into it later, but here's some spitballed ideas.

Sounds like the perfect opportunity for the potential new meme: "That's not [-]RAW[/-] core, but it would make a great [-]house rule[/-] module".

 

[mach1.9pants]

Whoops? Or planned leak to make us feel happy?

Anyway I really like these ideas

 

[Miyagi]

Shades of Iron Heroes?

I think these traits are like the ones originally from Mearls' Iron Heroes. If that is the case, I really hope they clean up the design - some of those traits were things like "you speak three more languages!" and others were more like "You're really big and strong! (Add some cool combat effect here)".

Not good. If they decide that traits are only about, say, character interactions that don't involve stabbing, or exploration, or something, then they could be great. In Iron Heroes, it was a great idea gone terribly wrong - in practice, it was like having beginning character feats of wildly different power levels, and some that made no "power" difference at all in combat - which, of course, meant that they were a straight power-down for characters who chose such traits.

The description in Ro3 looks great - the best outcome for this kind of thing would be to differentiate characters in ways that have little or no impact on major game mechanics.

 

[Somebloke]

Anyone else get unpleasant flashbacks to the 'Oh, you can be anything, never mind optimisation' hype of 3e?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Hmmh,

in the next answer, it is clarified, what traits are. Also we had some blog, i guess, which hinted, that feats are combat related, and traits are non combat related feats.

So it seems as if the division between combat and non-combat for feats is in the current rule draft. Which probably makes me happy. I want to test it.

 

[Daztur]

So basically feats = combat feats, traits = non-combat feats. That seems like a sensible sort of siloing. I just hope that they don't try to silo combat and non-combat magic too strictly. Some big "the stars are right!" rituals are awesome but I'd like the nuts and bolts utility stuff to be usable in combat, as I love figuring out in-combat uses of spells like Enlarge, Control Normal Fires, etc. etc. etc.

 

[Frostmarrow]

This is only natural. Two backgrounds can look almost exactly alike on paper. That is until we add some flavor in the form of traits to the packages. This is due to skills being few and broad in scope. If a noble and a beggar have similar skillsets when pigeonholed into the limited list of skills we need to have something to differentiate the two.

 

[Steely_Dan]

I's all starting to sound a bit messy, so now after choosing race and class, you have to choose a background/skills, a theme/feats, and a trait.

I really hope all of that is optional, and that they return to the option of being able to pick a race, pick a class, and off you go.

 

[Incenjucar]

They mentioned getting languages instead of skills in your backgrounds before. This is just naming those. So you'll have some backgrounds with 4 skills, and other backgrounds with 3 skills and some traits. Don't go making up fictional systems guys.