Feats and PrCs--How should they be handled?

[Username17]

Even if you're not interested in selling books for money because you're not financially invested in it, you still need expandability because RPG players want to make their own content. The Tomes are multiple books of tens of thousands of words each, and even if you don't write them, someone else will. By "selling books" we don't just mean the crass exchange of money for product, but in the creation of demand.

The fact is that people are going to want more races, more classes, more selectable character features, more equipment, more selectable class features (like spells), and more DM toys like environments and monsters. And if you don't provide the people with those things, wikis full of fan made content will.

So the game you make needs to be able to handle a new book with the Hadozee, the Buccaneer class, the King of the Sea paragon class, and some rules for boats. It needs to be able to do this, whether it's a commercial product or not. It's just the way fantasy gaming works.

-Username17

[tussock]

The argument I was making before is that if you have 200 feats which scale to all levels of play, that is ten times as many real choices as offering a choice between 10 level-specific feats at every one of your twenty levels. It doesn't matter if the feats are level specific because you literally can't take them at a higher level than they're first offered or merely because you'd be a fool to do so. It's less choices for the same writing effort, and that is bad.

Thanks.

But see, no. People feel disappointed when having to choose between 200 options, because it's not a real choice. That's one of your basic human hardwired things. People are most happy when their choices are restricted to roughly 7 options, and only a little happy at 3 options or 20 options. People can't even fully comprehend sets of around 200. Our brains just don't work that way, there are real limits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic ... _Minus_Two
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

Also, you're gunna seriously be asking players to chose their 1st most favourite thing at 1st level, and their 7th most favourite thing at 18th level. Whut? That is not a satisfying progression.

So fuck the ease of writing and make a game that makes people happy about the choices you're asking them to make, m'kay. If you've got to have big sets, do some thematic or semantic chunking for people. That's how that works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_%28psychology%29

That's part of where prerequisite sets come in handy in early 3e. As you choose your 1st level feats it opens up new, thematic choice sets, but your real choices are still quite restricted and thus satisfying. Then there was thousands and no one is happy.

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But even if that wasn't true, for instance, people pick flaws or disadvantages in games. People can be happy to have picked a smaller penalty from a set of bad things, but they're very rarely going to pick one if there's a nice bonus in the same option set. By chunking off the flaws, they become an interesting choice and make people happy. As are the 3rd level spells for your new 9th level Necromancer. It's the same thing.

[Username17]

Tussock, you are misapplying psychological theory. Probably the same way that the 4e design team did when they erroneously believed that they could present 8 total classes and people would be OK with that. It is historical fact that they were not OK with that. People want choice within their concept, which means that the optimal number of total choices is some quadratic number between 12 and 25.

And remember also that advancements you get on leveling up are not like choices made when standing in line at the grocery store or while scanning a menu - they are like catalog shopping where larger choice sets are a net positive until the catalog becomes physically hard to lift.

-Username17

[tussock]

D&D players. Some people only play Gnome Rangers, as a choice they made from a couple of small sets some decades earlier, are greatly satisfied with, and 4e told them to fuck off and die because that was a bad choice. (!)

But they were satisfied with it, because it came from a small set. Gnome in particular. The same way many people who did enjoy 4e became greatly satisfied with their Dragon Warlord choices and didn't even want a new book of races and classes, and there was almost never any Warlord stuff because of the unique powers per class.

4e's problems in this area should be giving you just three power choices per slot, one of which wasn't a valid option for your build. That choice could never be particularly satisfying. Nor could the feats, with too many per tier. No one really cared 4e's powers and feats, probably not a total coincidence.

3e has "too many skills", people are happier with less points and also less choices. There's more Dex and Int skills, so they get combined over time, not many Cha skills so they get left alone. Just the one Con skill so it's eliminated. That makes people happier.



But I agree, you can totally benefit from presenting 9 strong-guy feats and 7 fast-guy feats and 6 smart-caster feats, like low-level 3.0 D&D did. But not if you make people take their 4th and 5th choices from the same set, like high-level 3e. It's only interesting the first time or two.

Similarly they should have had a nice size set of grunt classes, and caster classes, and "other" classes. 4e's deal of calling out the four roles and four powers but only having 1-3 of each, those are tiny chunked sets which feel unsatisfying for most people.

Prestige classes are that way too. You need a bunch of Fighter paths and also a bunch of Ranger paths and a bunch of Fighter-Wizard paths and also Ranger-Wizard paths or people aren't going to like it all that much. If you're a Monk-Cleric there's only the one prestige path for that so you feel "locked in" and it sucks, your whole character ends up with no options at all. That's all Frank-talk anyway.

Which is why the 2nd and 3rd tier classes should not care at all which class or classes you came from in any way. Mystic Theurge should just give the right level spells from a custom mixed list and you can play one as a Monk-Ranger-Bard if you want. Real options, but you'd still want to carefully theme your options into groups for easy chunking if you had more than 9 of them.


This choice stuff works, successful operations use it. The amazon.com front page gives you 7 lists with 5-6 things in each, and they're not pissing around, they need to make you happy about picking something from a list. Those little 5-item lists are everywhere. Even when you search something specific, they bring up 5-6 very similar items. The searches show about 7 items. Digging into a list shows a few more items, but not too many.

Catalogues? Lastest junk mail here. Groceries. Pages are all boxed off into groups: 8 bin-stuff. 6 deli-meats, 7 packaged meats, 5 buns, 6 locally grown produce, 5 fancy veg, 10 breakfast things (5 in jars or pottles), 10 baking things (5 tins, 5 packets), 10 junk-food (5 sweet, 5 savory), it's all like that, 5 soaps and 5 wipes. Choices that will make people happy.


Fuck, 3.0 PHB feats, 7 fighter trees, 8 metamagic, 8 item creation. The choices people are happy to have made come from small sets like that. 9 spell levels with 8 schools and too many options under Transmutation. It's everywhere.