Heritage Feats- could they have worked?

[Ancient History]

For what it's worth, I'm not engaging with Kaelik any more on this topic, and I deleted my post calling him an idiot because even though I think he's wrong I shouldn't have called him an idiot.

[Kaelik]

For what it's worth, I'm not engaging with Kaelik any more on this topic, and I deleted my post calling him an idiot because even though I think he's wrong I shouldn't have called him an idiot.

So do you want congratulations on your Silver Medal in a two person event in the Special Olympics?

[Wiseman]

What about something like Major and Minor feats? Major feats are scaling feats as usual, and minor feats are more like the achievement feats that we already have at least one thread about. At the end of each session (or the beginning of the next), you earn one achievement base on what you did in the session.

Scaling feats were just a bad idea. I'm sorry I wrote them.

They were created to address the specific problem of feat chains requiring you to continually invest your small and precious number of feats into the same thing or fall behind. Scaling feats address that, but the problem of "Take feat X or be forever behind" is even worse than it is in 4th edition with its feat tax "math fix feats." What's wanted is to get rid of feat trees and big feats. And that needle can only be threaded by large numbers of small, non-stacking feats.

Consider the latest turd polishing by Chris Perkins. He notes correctly that people complain and complain a lot about there being so much content they can't use. Now, we all know that 5th edition's "solution" to that of having basically no content in the game (and bizarrely, of making people get even less feats so that the proportion of that content you can use is still small) is total bullshit. No one likes it, and 5e doesn't sell and no one cares. But it's an established and real problem.

You want to put out 12-40 books of the biggest fantasy game every year. And it is the crunch in those books that sells, because people want crunch. And if that's going to be crunch that anyone is ever going to be able to use, they have to be getting something every single session.

You still won't use most of the crunch content, but it won't feel so stultifying and you won't see so many books where 100% of the feats are things you will never take.

-Username17

I suppose YMMV but they work well enough for my group. But what about the idea of achievement feats as the means to accomplish this goal?

[Zaranthan]

[/edit]I don't know why I argue with Kaelik.

Because on any given day, you've got a better than 50/50 chance that he's taken his meds and actually has something useful to say. But, when you catch him on an off day, it's so frustrating you wish you hadn't tried.

[Kaelik]

I suppose YMMV but they work well enough for my group. But what about the idea of achievement feats as the means to accomplish this goal?

Anything can work for your group, but the point is that mandatory feats, where every Str based attacker that doesn't have Combat School is just objectively worse, and that anyone who takes Blindfighting but doesn't face opponents that it helps against feels significantly worse than other players, is just not as good for the game as tons of little things.

For me, Achievment feats are always dumb, because they encourage people to play the game differently to get the feats, which sucks.

Also, just looking at that thread, most of those were either too weak for me to care at all, thus depriving any joy of getting them, or too powerful to be free, thus heavily incentivizing doing whatever it takes to get them.

[DrPraetor]

The scaling feats are a good idea, but they should replace magic school specialization for fighters, rather than things like spring attack or improved trip - which should be spells for fighters.

So that solves the "Fighters can't have nice things", and the "All fighters are kinda the same" problems, both at once.

As a distinct issue, these advantages shouldn't be so great that only Fighters with the Archery feat ever use bows, or that Fighters with the Archery feat are so archery-dependent that they don't pull out swords when they need to climb on a horseback and charge into combat.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

An improved version of Incarnum feats could serve as a fun way to model a character increasingly adopting a non-standard background. Instead of serving as a half-assed multiclass patch wherein a character gets yet another container for an already limited resource, Heritage/Hybridization/Planar Taint feats could grant basic thematic abilities as well as a point in a customizable pool applicable to either modification of those abilities, or adoption of traits otherwise unobtainable by feats.

As an example, Demon Claws could grant a basic claw attack and 2 points in Abyssal Might. A character might on a given day allocate 1 point towards said claws being one size larger, 2 towards adding some amount of non-resistable Demonfire damage, 3 towards adding an Enervation effect , or 4 towards the character gaining standard demonic immunities/telepathy and improvable summoning.

[Dogbert]

K and I did a lot of polling about what people wanted in their feats. And what they said they wanted - overwhelmingly - was to have small numbers of feats that made a big difference. With years of feedback and playtesting, I can conclusively say that people are full of shit and don't actually want that at all.

"People don't know what they want until you show it to them" --Steve Jobs.

[OgreBattle]

Tome's scaling [combat] feats gave a lot of nice abilities useful for warriors and anyone with full BAB, but as scaling feats are a bad idea then how should a ranger or barbarian acquire blindsense, punch ghosts, using Dex/Wis instead of Str to attack+damage, and so on?

Should it be something that leveling up in a class gives you? Something else?

This also goes into the question of "class ability vs feats":
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52 ... w=previous

What should a feat do?
What is the measure of Balance a feat is judged by?

Should things that classes gain also be replicated by feats, or does that intrude too much into the sanctity of a Class? Some classes are based on giving Feats though, like a Ranger's fighting style.

... though it does feel like folks just want the versatility of a pointbuy system like Shadowrun with 'specialization', but jammed into a level based system with unique names for every specialization they take in a skill.

A large part of it is some folks just want to put "koga ninja style sneaking" as a feat on their character sheet that gives them a +fiddly specific bonus so they can point to it as an example of their wonderful roleplaying and creatively fleshed out character.

[deaddmwalking]

Part of what I think creates a problem is how low things were set for 1st level.

There are a lot of people that just hate playing at 1st level because characters feel so incomplete. On the other hand, starting above 1st sometimes feels like 'cheating'.

There's no reason that low-level characters could have 'more' to start with and the balance level having been set higher. Like the review of Ice Age, if 1st level is a 'basic land' it was set so low that there isn't anything to 'give up' in favor of something else.

A 1st level character probably ought to have extra hit points and extra abilities (such as background, racial and/or heritage feats). This would also allow 'extra room' for players that want to start even LOWER.

For example, if you want to start a campaign with a child (low-level street urchins), you can't start any lower than 1st level in any meaningful way. But if a 'standard human adult' had more to start, you could potentially remove some of that to start below the ground floor.

Figuring out how to get there seems a little tricky. Extra HD (such as racial levels) don't play nicely with the other systems. A straight up '1st level characters get X, Y, Z' can work, but since it is a patch to the existing system, it's a straight power up and there is a lot of resistance to it.

I'd be curious how other people might ramp up some of the background abilities/feats so a 1st level character had more of the 'schtick' that you don't start seeing until 3rd or 5th level.

[TheFlatline]

I think the solution is to handle feats exactly the way Wizards handle spells. You can only "equip" (actualize, incorporate, whatever) 2 fighter abilities of your highest level plus however many of lower levels, but you can go on training journeys and write as many feats as you want on your feat-sheet.

Not a terrible concept. Spycraft did something similar in 1st edition in the... I think it was African Alliance book where they specifically tried to make a James Bond inspired class. Which is difficult because the fucker can do everything, just not at once.

So they came up with an ability called I think virtual feats. At the beginning of every mission you got X number of virtual feats that you could activate and "gain" a feat at any given point during the story. They'd last until the end of the mission and then reset.

Which is how Bond can fly planes, ski, and is a world class marksman, a world class fencer, and all the other weird bullshit Bond is capable of, but only for one movie at a time.

I remember that it excited a lot of people early on when the concept was announced but I never liked the supernatural aspect of the default campaign setting of Spycraft 1st ed, so I skipped it.

[RadiantPhoenix]

"Fighter spells" sounds like a reasonably interesting idea.

[Wiseman]

"Fighter spells" sounds like a reasonably interesting idea.

Wasn't that what Bo9S was supposed to be?

[JonSetanta]

5e doesn't sell

Not to actually support WOTC and their stupid decisions, but the 30+ people I see playing 5e every wednesday evening at the LGS with multiple DMs says otherwise.

I just wish the books would stop falling apart at the binding.
I didn't actually buy one because of this.
I just, eh, got a copy of the PDF.

[Dogbert]

Meanwhile, in Exalted...

[Dogbert]

Not to actually support WOTC and their stupid decisions, but the 30+ people I see playing 5e every wednesday evening at the LGS with multiple DMs says otherwise.

The amount of people playing 5E != the amount of people BUYING 5E. As of one year ago, amazon had not even finished selling the first batch of 5E PHBs, and the thing WotC passes for "release schedule" doesn't exactly scream "budget increase." Even if surveys couldn't be manipulated to say whatever the hell you want them to and even if 5E really was the most widely played game in Roll20, only a tiny fraction of 5E's playerbase are actually putting their money where their mouth is.

If their sales numbers were even half those of 4E, we'd already be hearing it in terms of concrete numbers, from Mearls' mouth.

[K]

The Heritage feats that work are the ones that hand out level-appropriate abilities. For example, the Fey Heritage line has a feat you can take at 6th and another at 9th for actual spells that people might cast at those levels. (Half the abilities don't even need saves, so you are only partly punished for not having a good CHA.)

Of course, setting any number of feats on fire to get a handful of things that don't Voltron your class makes heritage feats too expensive, and that's entirely a problem.

So to make heritage feats workable at all, you need to make Voltron feats a separate resource pool or ban them outright, then hand out customization feats as well.

Not only that, but you need to streamline the bookkeeping. People forget all the things they can do very quickly when the list is above 8-9 things, so lots of tiny abilities has the same problems as a few really large and complex feats.

I think the solution to that problem is to force people as they level to replace old feats with upgraded versions or replace old feats with new level-appropriate feats, so the guy with Spell Penetration at 1st level is either using a more dramatic version of that feat at 10th level or has replaced it with another thing appropriate for his level.

[ishy]

Tome's scaling [combat] feats gave a lot of nice abilities useful for warriors and anyone with full BAB, but as scaling feats are a bad idea then how should a ranger or barbarian acquire blindsense, punch ghosts, using Dex/Wis instead of Str to attack+damage, and so on?

Should it be something that leveling up in a class gives you? Something else?

This also goes into the question of "class ability vs feats":
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52 ... w=previous

What should a feat do?
What is the measure of Balance a feat is judged by?

Should things that classes gain also be replicated by feats, or does that intrude too much into the sanctity of a Class? Some classes are based on giving Feats though, like a Ranger's fighting style.

Feats should be optional and make your character your own. So things like: you can now participate in ranged combat / fighting ghosts instead of playing smash bro's while others deal with that, should not be feats but baseline (or class or perhaps item) abilities.