Paizo's New 'Achievement' Feats

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:33 am

Two samples, as shown by a fellow player. There's an additional section concerning attempts to circumvent the system by meeting the prerequisites under controlled conditions (using a fire spell at low levels during downtime) that's worded "and your GM should feel free to discount these attempts when deciding whether or not you qualify for the feat." (so a vague guideline to say no to 'cheaters')

All Gnolls Must Die [Achievement]
Your name is whispered by black lips throughout the Uwaga Highlands as a bringer of death and pain—few are the gnolls who don’t quake when they hear stories of your deeds.
Requirement: Deliver the killing blow to 20 gnolls, hyenas, dire hyenas, werehyenas, jackalweres, or minions of Lamashtu.
Benefit: As long as you carry some sort of trophy harvested from a gnoll (a necklace of ears, a set of teeth, a magic weapon taken from a chieftain, etc.), you gain a +2 morale bonus on all Will saves. You also gain a +2 competence bonus on attack rolls and weapon damage rolls against gnolls, hyenas, dire hyenas, werehyenas, jackalweres, and minions of Lamashtu.

Flame-Tested Survivor [Achievement]
You have burned in the hottest flames, and your flesh bears the proof—fire holds little fear for you anymore.
Requirement: Knocked unconscious or killed by fire damage at least 10 times.
Benefit: Your history with fire has attracted the attention of a powerful but mysterious guardian spirit from the Elemental Plane of Water. This spirit grants you fire resistance 5, and you gain a +2 bonus on all saving throws made to resist fire effects.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:34 am

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU--

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:39 am

That's an incredible pain in the ass. It's like those quest reward power sites only horrendously annoying because you're keeping track of repeated minor events into the double digits in order to get these things.

-Username17

Gelare · Post by **Gelare** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:46 am

"If you do these stupid and arbitrary things, we might give you this prize at the end. Only we might not, because we reserve the right to jerk you around if we feel like it."

And they said fourth edition was looking like WoW. Can I boot this up on my Xbox or what?

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:46 am

This is a joke, right?

God. What book are these turds culled from?

koz · Post by **koz** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:52 am

Ganbare Gincun wrote:This is a joke, right?

God. What book are these turds culled from?

Welcome to the fail that is Pathfinder. Don't trip on the shitpile on your way out.

TOZ · Post by **TOZ** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:58 am

Gelare wrote:"If you do these stupid and arbitrary things, we might give you this prize at the end. Only we might not, because we reserve the right to jerk you around if we feel like it."

What you fail to realize is that you still have to spend a feat slot on them after meeting the prereqs. You don't just get them automagically.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 1:06 am

Seriously...this is close to the same crap that were "spell-touched" feats.

Elennsar · Post by **Elennsar** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 1:13 am

It would make more sense to have these as some kind of "Heroic Achievements", where you could have up to say, 3(?), and once you meet the prequisites you gained one automatically (you could choose which ones if you got over the total - or maybe you could have as many as you liked, you'd have to figure that out when designing and balance things) - spending a feat slot is..not so good.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 2:05 am

Leress: That's fucking awesome.

Oh, and Spell-touched feats could actually be useful sometimes. These... not so much. Though I like how the prerequisites for "Flame Tested Survivor" involves "being killed by fire 10 times". That's not surviving, that's blowing money on resurrections.

I feel the need to head on over to "It's my own invention" and do a parody :D

Absentminded_Wizard · Post by **Absentminded_Wizard** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 2:47 am

Actually, being knocked unconscious by fire counts for FTS. The funny thing about feats like that, though, is that if anything like FTS ends up giving you something good, getting your ass kicked becomes the path to Real Ultimate Power.

Talisman · Post by **Talisman** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 3:23 am

Good idea.

Bad execution.

Heck, even adding up weird events and spending a feat slot wouldn't be so bad if the feats...y'know...did stuff.

Fire resistance 5, my ass.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 3:48 am

Here is a counter idea I proposed a while ago that I think is better in many ways. I'll put it together so it looks nice.

Wait a sec...

Phone Lobsters Feat Non-Requisites

Before you can write in a new Feat, any Feat, on your character sheet that you normally qualify for you have to write down something "Cool" and hopefully mildly related that your character has done in your last level worth of adventuring.

When I say "Your character has done" lets reword that to "as far as your character chooses to remember it" and "Have to write down something" to "Probably should or people might call you uncreative"...

Example:

"Totally killed some smart mouthed Goblin with one strike of my mighty Axe" = 2nd level Fighter Bonus Feat) Power Attack

"Saw Through an obvious Silent Image Spell" = 3rd level Feat) Iron Will

"Yelled 'Fire Ball!' and dropped a Fire Ball in the resulting suprise round, then won initiative and yelled 'Fire Ball!'..." = 6th level feat) Quicken Spell

* Actually legality or usefulness of example feats is not endorsed.

Anyway the benefits of this method include such amazing things as...
1) Players try to achieve more individually cool things.

2) Players essentially are encouraged to keep some small log of a few "Cool Things" per level which becomes a useful background and reactive adventure plotting tool for the GM and other players.

3) Players totally do "something Cool" on a regular basis between level advancements anyway. If they don't then this is a tool that will help in recognising that and you can just wave it if you must since its based on an entirely valueless achievement metric.

5) You can apply this tool to starting and advanced level starting characters because since "Something Cool" is entirely a valueless thing you can totally make shit up and it just ends up being some nice little additions to character background.

Edit: 6) "Something cool" has no fixed numbers associated with it, so you can survive 10 fireballs (and that is something cool) or 8, or 1. And no one cares because you could have just written "Got breathed on by Dragon" or "Put Salamander in headlock".

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 3:52 am

And yet, something like this was the feats that Frank wrote for our characters in his games...

-Crissa

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 3:53 am

FrankTrollman wrote:That's an incredible pain in the ass. It's like those quest reward power sites only horrendously annoying because you're keeping track of repeated minor events into the double digits in order to get these things.

Yeah, I can sorta see where they were going with it, giving extra bonuses to organic characters as opposed to generated (which actually isn't a bad idea, because the organics tend to need a boost), but the method by which they did it is just horrible.

Nobody wants to track that shit in game.

"Hey Bill, don't forget to mark down that you got hit by 3 arrows. You only need to get hit by 32 more piercing weapons for the human pincushion achievement."

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 4:35 am

If you're going to have feats that are completely campaign and player specific, they have to be completely campaign and player specific. It probably also helps if they don't completely suck.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 4:49 am

Wait, are these feats, or free bonuses you get for doing stuff in game?

I was under the impression that they were the latter.

If they're just feats, then it's a really fucking dumb idea.

Free bonuses could be a nice way to help out organic characters, but having feats that you have to qualify for by keeping odd tallies of times you've been frozen is fucking stupid. It's not even like the DM is going to be counting anyway.

TavishArtair · Post by **TavishArtair** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 6:05 am

At least the Spell-Touched feats had the decency to make the events one-off things. "Survive being killed by fire" or "wipe out an entire gnoll town" or something is more what they could reasonable use as prerequisites. Not "ten times" or "twenty dudes." That's stupid. I don't know how many gnolls I killed when I ran in with a necklace of fireballs and detonated it on myself, I just know that the damage I did to myself didn't quite kill me forever and it roasted anything in the area.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 6:09 am

Nope. Feats with retarded requirements.

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 9:30 am

PL's way works if you want to turn a generic set of rules into something with fluff attached. Or you could write a set of rules for a specific setting and do the fluff and the rules together.

These feats are a sucky alternative to either of those plans. Hard coded flavour on a generic ruleset.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:09 pm

Mister_Sinister wrote:
Ganbare Gincun wrote:This is a joke, right?

God. What book are these turds culled from?
Welcome to the fail that is Pathfinder. Don't trip on the shitpile on your way out.

Plus Fucking One. Thank you MS for covering that for me.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 12:11 pm

Pretty retarded. Would have been better if such stuff was given as examples for prerequisites for such feats, leaving it up to the GM to find something appropriate.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 9:42 pm

Guys, guys, guys. These are LOW-LEVEL feats, which means they're supposed to fade into the background as your character advances. This is because your character will become too complicated if he gains more than fire resistance 5.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 9:46 pm

You haven't even mentioned the "Heal 1000 points of damage, but every point you deal cancels out two points of healing" one. Or the "Take 1000 damage, but every 5 points of healing you get cancels out a point of damage" one.

Those kind of requirements work in TF2 because the computer keeps track of them! In addition to being painfully artificial, those would be a pain in the ass to track. And several, like the "take a bunch of damage" one, aren't even really "achievements", they're stuff that any character will inevitably do, given enough time. I guess Paizo felt there wasn't enough grinding available.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 9:53 pm

Ice9 wrote:You haven't even mentioned the "Heal 1000 points of damage, but every point you deal cancels out two points of healing" one. Or the "Take 1000 damage, but every 5 points of healing you get cancels out a point of damage" one.

Those kind of requirements work in TF2 because the computer keeps track of them! In addition to being painfully artificial, those would be a pain in the ass to track. And several, like the "take a bunch of damage" one, aren't even really "achievements", they're stuff that any character will inevitably do, given enough time. I guess Paizo felt there wasn't enough grinding available.

Dude, have you ever talked to the devs? You're supposed to farm mobs seven levels lower than yourself to get minimal XP gains but lots of loot for no effort! Now if only the Fail didn't blur together to the point where I don't remember which one did that...