Which feats are "feat tax"?

[The Little Raven]

This.

The 'feat tax' brouhaha is silly. Some opinionated people noticed that the numbers don't add up, but completely ignored the other advantages PCs get. By all reports, epic tier is too easy, not the other way around.

Why not wait and see how the game plays in practice, then decide?

This. The math difference between players and monsters is handled during play with tactics, such as combat advantage, power bonuses, bonuses from other players (leaders in particular), and situational bonuses (certain feats/class features, charging, etc).

This thread was not started to debate the feat tax issue.

The question in the title is "Which feats are 'feat taxes?'" and a perfectly acceptable answer is "None."

 

[bbjore]

While the game does play fine without accounting for the feat taxes, your PCs will just take the feats they need anyways, and miss out on something else. But I do think it is more fun when you take the math into account. Pretty much any PC needs at least an expertise feat and one or two improved defense feats to keep hitting at an acceptable level and the FRW away from being an auto hit. Things like melee training, superior weapons, and armor proficiencies are also necessary for certain builds or to keep the grind to a minimum.

The truth is that what is a necessary feat, will vary from build to build, as will when it is necessary for that build to take a feat. Because of this I think the best option is not to give PCs a specific feat for free at a certain level, but instead just give your PCs bonus feats to spend on whatever they want.
Then you're not tying your players down by what you think is a feat tax, and what level it is necessary at. It lets your players decide which feats are necessary for their build. I think a bonus feat at 1st, 11th, and 21st level are good ways of taking care of expertise, improved defenses, and an epic FRW feat, but I've gone as far as giving my players 6 bonus feats, and didn't see any real power creep. What I saw was my players having room to take interesting feats that added flavor to their character without increasing their combat effectiveness. As a DM I'm fine with that.

Try it yourself, build a 30th level PC normally, and then pick the next three to six feats you'd add if you had the room. Do they really ramp up your PC's abilities that much, or do you find that they would simply give them something interesting to do in a special circumstance that doesn't come up to often. Do you think the game would be more fun if people had those extra feats? If the answer's yes, I say go for it.

 

[Aulirophile]

I print all of my monsters via the monster builder, so I drop their defenses and I've banned standard expertiese. For the new expertiese feats I simply deny the feat bonus to attack if the player takes it.

Still not sure what to do about PC NADs, though... I was leaning towards making any +3 or better neck grant an extra +1 and any +5 or better grant an extra +2.

Assuming two 16s and 12/12 in other NAD feats, at epic the lowest NAD will be 7 behind and the rest will be 2-3. A single Epic NAD Feat to the lowest NAD and Improved Defenses fixes that. If you do this, ban the rest of the epic NAD feats.

Exceptions tend to be Dual-Stat NAD builds (Cha/Wis, Str/Con, Int/Dex) but usually there is some built-in compensation (Font of Life for Wardens, healing an ally to full from zero with a Pacy Cleric, being a Wis/Cha Paladin and being basically immortal by Epic). For them they are going to have a weak NAD, but at least they way it is only one instead of two.

 

[Aulirophile]

This.

The 'feat tax' brouhaha is silly. Some opinionated people noticed that the numbers don't add up, but completely ignored the other advantages PCs get. By all reports, epic tier is too easy, not the other way around.

Why not wait and see how the game plays in practice, then decide?

Yeah, damn those lead developers, having opinions on their game, saying silly things like they give out expertise for free because it improves the game.

House Rules: Bonus Feats Eye of the Beholder

 

[Abstruse]

Guys. This thread was not started to debate the feat tax issue. It was started by a person seeking help making the game more fun in the manner he'd like to play it. If you don't have any ideas that will help the OP, please don't post. I'm only making this post in the hopes that it will curtail any more unconstructive and irrelevant discussion.

I don't mind, and as someone said "none" is an acceptable answer. I haven't run a 4e game in about a year and a half, and I had a lot of problems last time with players who knew how to optimize dominating the game. I also love unique characters. If I've got two Dex/Cha build rogues in the group, the only thing that's really going to define the characters are their choices of powers (which are going to be very similar) and their choices of feats.

While building pregens for the newer players (who are mostly hipsters who think playing D&D is ironically cool instead of the geeks who just think it's fun), I noticed there were a bunch of feats I was taking pretty much regardless of build just to get the mechanical advantage regardless of the build type I was going for. I was passing on poison-based feats for the Assassin (who was a poisoner) so I could take Unarmored Agility because that boost to AC was too much to pass on. Then I noticed any character that was in cloth armor gave me the same problems. Then I looked over every other build I was doing and saw the same thing - Take that +1 to attack or take something that supporting the character build.

Just so everyone knows, I'm not worried about Paragon or Epic tiers now. I'm starting them at 2nd level (it would be 1st but the opening adventure I wrote would get me a TPK in under three rounds of the first encounter), so by the time I get to Paragon in several months, I'm going to know the group, their characters, and their playstyle to write for them effectively. It's those first three or four levels I'm worried about where I'm writing for the group blind or using published adventures, and those early levels where they're going to be sacrificing things that would define their character for things that they "need" to stay effective in combat.

Plus, the more effective the characters are, the less I have to use the kid gloves to avoid a TPK.

 

[eamon]

I've suggested some fairly general anti-feat-tax house rules before.

In essence:

1. All Expertise, the Robust Defenses feat, and all Epic X defense feats are banned. Instead, PC's get a free +1 boost to attacks and non-AC defenses at levels 5,15 and 25. Non-AC defenses get an additional +1 bonus at level 1.
2. At levels 4,8,14,18,24,28 players raise all ability scores by 1 rather than choosing from just 2.

The idea here being that NAD's are too low even at level 1; and further as levels rise, the "lowest" NAD suffers disproportionately since it corresponds to an unraised ability score. It's not just the NAD, however: racial powers and other non implement/weapon powers also fall behind the curve, as do skills. Aligned builds that have a primary/secondary ability of the same defense pose additional problems, and split-primary builds are almost entirely unworkable. Then there's light armor builds without an Int or Dex primary or secondary. Almost all of these things suggest that the real problem isn't the NAD scaling, it's ability score scaling.

In some sense, D&D inherently causes imbalance since ability scores diverge as levels rise. Fixing this is a fairly simple, general solution: it fixes NADs, odd light armor builds, MAD dependent builds, racial powers, skill divergence, etc.

A slight tweak allows for easy implementation in the character builder too:

• Ban Expertise etc. Instead of raising attack bonuses/defenses, decrease monster defenses by 1 at levels 5/15/25, and monster attacks vs. NADs at levels 1/5/15/25.
• require players to forgo the normal +1 to two stats levelling process, and instead house rule all abilities to rise by one. The character builder will happily let you enter any ability score, so people can continue to use it.

Note that these changes effective grant people 2-3 extra feats throughout the PC's lifetime and make them slightly more flexible. In general this means you'll want to make monsters a little meaner. Any DM will need to adapt his monster repertoire to the overall level of party optimization, but a good starting point is to consider all monsters to be 1 level lower (i.e. make em 1 level more powerful) but remove 1 hp/level (2 for elites, 4 for solos).

These changes avoid punishing players that optimize poorly - in normal D&D, such players may forgo expertise (this leads to problematic intra-party imbalances), or have poor ability score distributions, or raise scores inefficiently at levels with choice. These choices are all false opportunities for personalization: to the novice they look like choices, yet one option purely superior. Those kind of choices simply make it easy for casual players to shoot themselves in the foot; and as far as I can remember I've seen that happen in every single party I've played in so far - there's always someone who violates these basic charop principles and ends up with a less powerful character for no good reason. In a game as combat-focused as 4e is, that's a problem.

In particular, it's worth noting that the suggestion to raise NAD's by 1 at level 1 is not frivolous; the average monster AC attack is just 1.5 higher than the average monster NAD attack, yet even at level one PC NADs are commonly at least 3 lower on average, usually 4 lower on average, and 5 lower on average some defenders - and that's at first level, before NAD decay and the various feat-related means of increasing AC that NADs don't have.

 

[Lord Ernie]

In my campaign, I've handed out a set of free feats for the following reasons:

1. Even out the combat math. Players with good attacks at level 1, who increase their attack stat at every turn, should have just about the same chance to hit and get hit by an even level monster all the way to level 30 (note that this isn't opinion, it's part of 4E design). This is not true, however, because you need some feats like "Improved Defenses" and the Expertise feats for this to work out. This is the classic definition of 'feat tax'.
2. Even out the playing ground between PC's, to a degree. It's fine for an optimizer to be somewhat ahead of the rest of the party, but when at higher levels, the difference can become overwhelming (like a +3 difference in attack due to expertise feats), this becomes a problem. Note that I'm pretty much the biggest optimizer in my group when I play (I switch between player and DM state every few sessions).

To all those saying that feat taxes don't exist, because ths system runs fine without it: this is true, to a certain extent. Good use of tactics and smart use of the right powers, or simply a certain attitude towards combat/the rules in general can make this issue seem unimportant. However, as I said before, a mostly stable chance to hit/get hit is part of 4E design (e.g. it's part of the reason AC and NADs increase at the same rate by level, for everyone).

So, for the above-mentioned reasons, I've implemented the following houserules in my campaign:

• Expertise feats do not take up feat slots. This allows any character to have the appropriate expertise feats avaiable, whether they use a simgle or multiple weapon/implement types.
• At level 11, everyone gets Paragon defenses for free. At level 21, everyone gets Epic Defenses for free. Improved defenses is still open for those who want a +1 on top of that, and the Superior Fort/Ref/Will feats are open for those who want specialized bonuses.

This does not get rid of all the feat taxes (melee training, for non-strength based melee classes, for example), but it does so for the most part.

 

[TerraDave]

Yes, as someone who has houseruled way too much over the years, we are allowed to say that the best option may be to not house rule.

This.

The 'feat tax' brouhaha is silly. Some opinionated people noticed that the numbers don't add up, but completely ignored the other advantages PCs get. By all reports, epic tier is too easy, not the other way around.

Why not wait and see how the game plays in practice, then decide?

From what I recall, when PHB II came out, people saw those feats as "must take", and claimed that they were needed to plug a whole in the math. (as has been elaborated on above).

Since then, a bunch of new feats came along, people got more experience with high level play, and monster math was tweeked. The "tax" sort of went away.

 

[TikkchikFenTikktikk]

If you post any restrictions/freebies/house-rules on your "looking for players" poster, you'll tend to not get any new or more casual players but will get char-op geeks (in my experience).

Also, if you impose too many restrictions/freebies/house-rules at the character creation session, any new or casual players that showed up are likely to not come back.

I'm not suggesting you go one way or the other with regards to feats, but sharing this as a FYI.

(I have never given out free feats nor banned them in any of my games, for the record.)

 

[Mengu]

If you post any restrictions/freebies/house-rules on your "looking for players" poster, you'll tend to not get any new or more casual players but will get char-op geeks (in my experience).

Also, if you impose too many restrictions/freebies/house-rules at the character creation session, any new or casual players that showed up are likely to not come back.

I'm not suggesting you go one way or the other with regards to feats, but sharing this as a FYI.

(I have never given out free feats nor banned them in any of my games, for the record.)

When I tell my players, these feats are free, those feats are banned, they care a lot less than when I post those as house rules on a message board. Players just want to play, and their only expectations are a roughly even playing field and a good time. On message boards, people worry about micro balance, and how someone's proposed house rules might sneak into their basement and ruin their games.