What if feats had no direction combat application?

[Artoomis]

Never mind....

 

[MrMyth]

You know what the real problem here is? The Character Builder has trained a whole generation of gamers that if you can't create a whole new character in like 2 minutes, that something is now somehow wrong.

The fact that many of you actually make the complaint that "Ugh, I don't want to have to sift through 1000 feats to find the one I want" is laughable to me.

Just to be clear - I made the same complaint in 3rd Edition, before the CB was even in the picture. (To be fair, I made it much more often those days about spells, and trying to figure out spells what my Cleric wanted to memorize that day - but it did come up with feats as well.)

So I don't think that "wanting to keep char-gen as efficient as possible" is the product of the Character Builder. Instead, rather, it is the result of... players wanting to spend more time playing, and less time doing homework to research what their options are.

How long does it REALLY take to go through the Character Builder to find different feats? Considering that they are already divided up into categories, those that don't apply to your character don't show up, and most of you already know the half-dozen feats you're going to take anyway because of your "feat tax" beliefs... how long does it take to go through what's left? 10 minutes? 30 minutes? Even if it's an HOUR... you usually have what... A WEEK between sessions in which to level up your character? And you can't spend any scanning through the Feat list?

I'm willing to spend time looking through options. I do wish that the ways of doing so were more efficient. Man, my biggest complaint about the Compendium - if I search for feats, it doesn't list their pre-reqs in the list. It would be really, really nice if I could search for "Ranger feats" and then immediately skip over the 90% of them that require other races or builds or ability scores or a parrot animal companion or whatever.

Can I still scan through them anyway? Sure. And the CB has a better, if still imperfect, sorting system... marred, somewhat, by the sluggish performance of the CB in looking through those feats one by one.

But the fact I can spend the time looking it all up doesn't mean I want to. Again, I am simply amazed at some of the responses here. "Just man up and spend an hour looking through feats! Real gamers wouldn't complain about this sort of thing!"

The fact that I can put up with inconvenience doesn't mean I wouldn't rather not have to do so.

What's the point of leveling up a character at all if you DON'T want to spend an hour or so deciding what to do for him? Isn't that supposed to be the FUN part of leveling? Getting to look through all the options available and making decisions on how you want your character to be? You take that away... then the whole reason for the leveling process goes away too. You might as well just hit the "auto-level" button and be done with it.

I admit, this is a slight tangent. I'm not sure if people are actually arguing that they want the feat list reduced to 3 automatic options or whatever. That's not my goal, by any means. I think there are existing feats out there that are unneeded and get in the way. But there is a difference between wanting a more efficient overall list and wanting it stripped down to nothing. I'm not going to say that 2,000 feats is a better total than 6,000 - I honestly don't know.

But I think it perfectly possible to argue for both the removal of the 'feat taxes' while also wanting the feat list to be trimmed down a bit as well.

As it is, I like a diverse array of options. I'd certainly prefer the current options for sorting through those choices were more effective, so I could spend the time actually comparing choices instead of waiting for the page to load a feat only to discover I don't qualify for it anyway.

But while I'm sure this is certainly connected to the overall discussion, I'm not sure you could really claim this is the heart of the problem in any way. It seems relatively tangential, at best.

 

[MrMyth]

What I would prefer to see with 4E is feats being non-combat, boosting skills, or even giving skills new uses something like the skill powers do.

So perhaps one feat would allow someone to make a heal check to transfer a healing surge form one character to another.

Another would allow a character with Nature to grow plants of exceptional strength.

I like this sort of idea - expanding breadth, not depth, basically. Even in combat I can see the appeal - specializing in axe mastery gives you more things to do with axes, rather than simply making your axes hit harder than everyone else.

It is a tricky area to balance, though - I recall this was sort of what they tried to do with Martial Practices. "Here are cool things martial characters can do with their skills!" Except that when you say that it requires a feat, healing surge, etc, in order to be able to make a good forgery... you suddenly are limiting the design space instead of expanding it. Previously, anyone could try to make a good forgery. Now, only people with that exact option can do so.

It all gets a bit into how much you want things codified. How exceptional can my plants be normally? Are their rules for it? Does the DM decide based on my nature check? And if you have an ability that explicitly says you can make plants of X size, does that mean those without that ability are unable to do so?

Anyway, I do still like the idea at heart, but it is definitely a tricky design space to work with.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

But the fact I can spend the time looking it all up doesn't mean I want to. Again, I am simply amazed at some of the responses here. "Just man up and spend an hour looking through feats! Real gamers wouldn't complain about this sort of thing!"
...

I admit, this is a slight tangent. I'm not sure if people are actually arguing that they want the feat list reduced to 3 automatic options or whatever. That's not my goal, by any means. I think there are existing feats out there that are unneeded and get in the way. But there is a difference between wanting a more efficient overall list and wanting it stripped down to nothing. I'm not going to say that 2,000 feats is a better total than 6,000 - I honestly don't know.

What I want is to spend somewhere between 5 minutes and an hour (depending on how important the particular choice), picking between several viable and interesting options. Filtering through the substandard (however defined for any given player) is nothing but busywork. We may have to put up with a certain amount of it because one players' substandard is another players' goldmine, but that doesn't make it a positive thing--merely necessary.

But generally, one of my contentions is that the longer the list gets, the more busywork you inevitably get, in return for less and less actual choices that any player will find interesting--either with making the pick or then later in play. It is the classic diminishing return. The busywork is only rewarding to those who enjoy "putting in the work" to gain advantage (social, mechanical, whatever). I don't care if we sacrifice some of their pleasure.

It is a tricky area to balance, though - I recall this was sort of what they tried to do with Martial Practices. "Here are cool things martial characters can do with their skills!" Except that when you say that it requires a feat, healing surge, etc, in order to be able to make a good forgery... you suddenly are limiting the design space instead of expanding it. Previously, anyone could try to make a good forgery. Now, only people with that exact option can do so.

It is rather tricky. I think the key to this kind of design is to have the courage of your design. If you are going to do this, then do it. Accept that, for the reasons you listed, trade offs will have to be made in other areas. There may be particular flavor ideas or mechanical representations or whatever that--while acceptable in a toned down format--simply don't cut it in such a design. So don't include those.

There may also need to be mechanical and other system support to mitigate such issues. You might have default abilities that aren't quite as good as the increased breadth, but still allow a certain amount of forgery. Or you might give most characters several "picks" to give the party a solid breadth, and then let them hire NPCs for the other stuff. Or any number of things. So again, you can't do this halfway, because doing it right will have ramifications throughout the design.

Really, there are several, mutually exclusive, ways that feats could go, but I find that all of them have the characteristic that they are pushing things into a more robust design that does have the courage of its convictions. Feats keep trying to be "little extras that you get a bunch of" and "mechanically significant", and keep running into the compromises between those two positions. If that is the actual design intent, then have the courage of that conviction and get rid of them, replacing them with class or multi-class options, themes, or other ways to package abilitiy in a class-based system.

Not that I'm probably arguing with you at all in this post ...

 

[MrMyth]

What I want is to spend somewhere between 5 minutes and an hour (depending on how important the particular choice), picking between several viable and interesting options. Filtering through the substandard (however defined for any given player) is nothing but busywork. We may have to put up with a certain amount of it because one players' substandard is another players' goldmine, but that doesn't make it a positive thing--merely necessary.

But generally, one of my contentions is that the longer the list gets, the more busywork you inevitably get, in return for less and less actual choices that any player will find interesting--either with making the pick or then later in play. It is the classic diminishing return. The busywork is only rewarding to those who enjoy "putting in the work" to gain advantage (social, mechanical, whatever). I don't care if we sacrifice some of their pleasure.

Admittedly, I don't think that all new options inherently leads to more busywork. It really depends on how focused the design is. And again, I think this is an area where really robust filters/searching/etc in the CB and Compendium could make a big difference.

But I do think that the design space is often limited, and that is part of the problem. Keeping each new feat interesting and flavorful gets harder and harder. And this leads to some of the really complicated and conditional ones. A feat that means you don't grant combat advantage for being flanked when fighting with a shield and adjacent to other allies with shields while underground and near a tunnel wall and fighting goblins.... sure, it might be appropriate for a dwarven veteran or the like. But just has way too much going on to be of use.

That's the real problem, I think. Keeping new options distinct. If you can't do so, honestly, don't bother with the feat. If they stuck to that rule, and had a solid ability to sort through the options, I think that would make a huge difference.

It is rather tricky. I think the key to this kind of design is to have the courage of your design.

...

So again, you can't do this halfway, because doing it right will have ramifications throughout the design.

I think that is really the core point. You need to, from the start, have a focused idea of what you are aiming at and how that will interact with the rest of the game. Doing it halfway - like with Martial Practices - just won't quite work.

I think that is also part of what ended up hurting feats. Early on they said, "Hey, we want them to grant this much power, and help with defining elements like race, class, builds, etc." But as that got less and less focused, things got more erratic. And then we had an abrupt shift to reducing pre-requisites and boosting power levels and removing tiers.

And really, any of these approaches might be able to work on their own. But tossing them all in alongside each other is a large part of the current mess. Lack of focus, or shifting direction but only doing it halfway - those are the real culprits here, I'm thinking.

 

[Calzone]

The CharOp people would scream to high heaven, attack bonuses and damage would have to be readjusted somewhat (proficiency bonuses OR damage dice, for example), the cries of "sameness" would be heard web-wide and numerous people wouldn't notice.

I just started reading, but I wanted to address this before I got too far in. I find it a little difficult to believe that "sameness" is much of a possibility, given the 20+ classes, most with several features to choose from, multi classing, hybrid classing, the thousands of available powers, backgrounds, themes, weapon, armor, and equipment choices, etc.

All of this and we haven't even gotten into the core character differentiator, character background and roleplaying. CharOp may well be upset, but I think cries of sameness might fall flat on their face

The biggest thing I dislike about 4e (and I really like it overall) is option bloat. I have a small group and we tend to play a bunch of one-offs as we explore different concepts. What that means is, we end up needing to generate a whole bunch of characters, often one per play session, and the hour+ it takes to roll up a new interesting character is just too much. It's such a problem to me that I've been working on a home brew 4e mod to simplify character generation while still preserving a degree of player choice.

One of the options I've looked at as an alternative to feats is giving the players what I'll call backgrounds, for lack of a better word. Players choose 2 backgrounds, phrases that describe a part of their characters nature or development, such as "heir apparent" or "student of a grandmaster Druid". Whenever they can tie in their background with a non-combat die roll, they get +2 to the roll. I also give out "bennies" the players can spend for things like action points and rerolls. One of the things they get a Benny for is me introducing complications to the game due to a character's background. One of the things they can spend a Benny on is to use their background for a minor benefit in the narrative. As an example, one could spend a Benny to invoke their "heir apparent" background to get an invitation to the duke's ball.

The important thing is I don't have a list of backgrounds for players to choose from, they make up their own. The broader the background, the more often they can get bonuses from it, but the easier it is for me to introduce complications due to it. Also, their background has a direct impact on the game world as they spend bennies to draw on their past past experiences.

 

[Herschel]

I just started reading, but I wanted to address this before I got too far in. I find it a little difficult to believe that "sameness" is much of a possibility, given the 20+ classes, most with several features to choose from, multi classing, hybrid classing, the thousands of available powers, backgrounds, themes, weapon, armor, and equipment choices, etc.

That hasn't stopped a large number from complaining about it anyway because alll the pre-essentials classes had at-wills, encounters, utilities and dailies.

 

[Ryujin]

Spamming reported.