Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana: Get Better At Skills With These Feats

The latest Unearthed Arcana from Jeremy Crawford and again featuring guest writer Robert J. Schwalb introduces a number of feats which make you better at skills. Each increases the skill's primary ability score, doubles your proficiency bonus, and gives you a little bonus ability. "This week we introduce new feats to playtest. Each of these feats makes you better at one of the game’s eighteen skills. We invite you to read them, give them a try in play, and let us know what you think in the survey we release in the next installment of Unearthed Arcana."

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[doctorbadwolf]

Agreed. It's basically an Expertise feat, duplicating the effects of Expertise on a single feat.

Which I wholeheartedly approve of, by the way, as long as they add a clause to prevent it stacking with regular Expertise.

This. Add a caveat that you can't ever get more than twice your proficiency bonus to a given thing, and the worry over game breaking hyper-specialization goes away, and these feats stay within bounded accuracy and other basic game assumptions.

OTOH, I'd rather these feats give multiple benefits, and ditch expertise, to look more like Athelete.

 

[Li Shenron]

There are so many people in this thread who don't understand bounded accuracy or what it is meant to do. When you start adding bonuses like this, it breaks the parameters of the game. Specialized characters become even more specialized. The result is that Clerics are better Clerics, Rogues are better Rogues, and the average party is objectively more powerful than it was before. Instead of improving orthogonally by spending an ASI on a secondary ability score or a less specialized feat, everyone gets better at what they already do best.

That's called power creep, and if you keep piling it on, then the game breaks.

I could see that happen if you stack attack bonuses or AC/ST bonuses or spellcasting DC bonuses. For example, if you have feats that grant an attack bonus with ranged weapons, and another that negates cover, and then you have an archery fighting style for more attack bonus, an then +s bows and arrows, then maybe a spell for more +s... most of these are already in core by the way.

Skills don't work the same way tho. Perhaps the root cause is in the d20 system. Swinginess in attacks and spells is ok because you'll do plenty of attacks and spells in each combat. A single skill not so much, except maybe Perception and Stealth, which by the way are mostly contests, which is very different from skills vs fixed DC. It is this latter kind of skills that doesn't fit well with bounded accuracy. Because at low levels you want climbing a tall fence or yard wall to be a reasonable challenge with a chance of failure. But at high levels you want the expert climber to climb a tower as a challenge, and the mere castle wall to be a pushover for the expert, but not for the others. The d20 is just too swingy, but since the won't change a core rule, they just try to give some options to mitigate the problem.

 

[Demetrios1453]

I'm not sure whether you have understood the wording of that feat. A player can attempt to demoralise an enemy without the feat. This would usually take an action I believe, and might get the creature to back off, or a number of other effects.
With the feat, it only requires an attack, allowing a character with multiple attacks to inflict the Frightened condition on more than one creature, or hit one and scare another etc.

This is something I'm noticing about some of the complaints - some people are overlooking the fact that many of the extra abilities are defined as becoming bonus or attack actions, when without the feat they would be regular actions. So those that are missing this are thinking that these particular extra abilities are only going to be able to be available to those who take the feat (and denied to those who have the skill but not the feat), when in reality what would be changing is that what would be done as a regular action in those cases would instead become available as a bonus or attack action. It's obvious that the wording in the descriptions isn't the best and needs to be tightened up to stress the extra abilities aren't limited to those who take the feat, but it is the action economy that is being changed...

 

[Chaosmancer]

And because my houserule idea is applied at character creation, it obviates the issue of someone with expertise potentially losing out of the benefit from the feat. The player simply has another expertise slot to put elsewhere and takes this free feat instead. Win-win. I'm liking it more.

But don’t you think most characters will already do that?

I mean, I never liked the idea of plotting your entire character from 1 – 20, but I simply can’t resist planning most of the time, so if I knew at level 4 I would want to grab the sleight of hand expertise feat, I’d simply put my current expertise somewhere else so they wouldn’t overlap.

Assuming I was the player am aware that this feat exists.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Dang, double post.

Nothing to see here

 

[Mistwell]

Agreed. It's basically an Expertise feat, duplicating the effects of Expertise on a single feat.

Which I wholeheartedly approve of, by the way, as long as they add a clause to prevent it stacking with regular Expertise.

This. Add a caveat that you can't ever get more than twice your proficiency bonus to a given thing, and the worry over game breaking hyper-specialization goes away, and these feats stay within bounded accuracy and other basic game assumptions.

There is already a rule in the PHB that prevents that exact stacking. It says, "Occasionally, your proficiency bonus might be multiplied or divided (doubled or halved, for example) before you apply it. For example, the rogue's Expertise feature doubles the proficiency bonus for certain ability checks. If a circumstance suggests that your proficiency bonus applies more than once to the same roll, you still add it only once and multiply or divide it only once."

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Some more specific thoughts I have, beyond how bland a lot of these are, and the fact that they would be imporoved, IMO, but ditching double proficiency and structuring the feats more like Athelete.

Arcanist: You have to be kidding me. Literally just look at what Arcana does in 4e, and you get more interesting things than Prestidigitation and Detect Magic.

Naturalist: I'd rather not have spells be the benefits to these skills. Even if you are mimicking spell effects as semi-mundane effects, Nature doesn't need to be a magical skill, as such, and even if it is, the magic skills should work differently than spells. Give it ritual-style benefits. These feats are just...filler, IMO. they had a few good ideas, and wanted to do one article. Hopefully the feedback we provide gives them some better ideas for revision on the boring feats.

Silver-Tongued and Menacing: Why not just make it a bonus action? Bonus action or as part of attack action? The idea is obviously to benefit those who get extra attack, and let them use one attack to do this, while the other is an attack, and then out of combat they can use the abilities like normal. But it would be clearer if it was a bonus action, IMO, and make a rather small difference in power. This is a good case for having multiple benefits instead of double proficiency, as well. These could improve with level! "At or before level 4, you gain [benefit]. At level 6, you gain [other benefit]."

As they stand, though, they work fine and will add to the game without raising the general power level. These aren't more powerful than other feats.

Survivalist. <heavy sigh> This is the most boring feat in the game. I can't even fathom wanting this feat, ever.

The rest I like, and I think with some feedback and revision, the next iteration of this could be really, really good.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

There is already a rule in the PHB that prevents that exact stacking. It says, "Occasionally, your proficiency bonus might be multiplied or divided (doubled or halved, for example) before you apply it. For example, the rogue's Expertise feature doubles the proficiency bonus for certain ability checks. If a circumstance suggests that your proficiency bonus applies more than once to the same roll, you still add it only once and multiply or divide it only once."

I'm on my way out the door, so maybe I'm just not reading carefully enough, but I don't see how that helps.
And even if it does, some things need to be repeated, because they aren't clear when reading a particular option. This is such a case.

 

[cbwjm]

Ah, still low level, then. Expertise works fine until you hit around +4 proficiency bonus, then it become apparent that it's breaking down the bounded accuracy assumptions. Especially on opposed skill checks.

The difference is already pretty apparent between the unskilled, skilled, and experts.

At higher levels it still won't be an issue, there will be more of a gap between the three groups but I don't see that as a problem. I like that we have specialists and it is going to be fine for the rogue to be so good at stealth at later levels that they can essentially walk behind some guards while whistling a tune and without being seen. I want to have characters that excel in areas and see them show off their superior skills. I find it makes the game more fun and allows the players to have their PC stand out in certain situations.

 

[cbwjm]

And because my houserule idea is applied at character creation, it obviates the issue of someone with expertise potentially losing out of the benefit from the feat. The player simply has another expertise slot to put elsewhere and takes this free feat instead. Win-win. I'm liking it more.

I do like your idea, but just thought I'd throw out another option. You could also allow the rogue/bard to retrain their expertise that they got from their class ability to something else.