Why are Tome Feats a problem?

[CommanderComics]

The general consensus around here is that the Tome Feats did not solve the feat problems of 3E/3.5 and were a failure, but I've never seen it actually explained why they failed. Are they just too much for players to keep track of? Do they not give you the breadth of abilities that feats need to? Something else? Why did they fail to solve the problem?

[angelfromanotherpin]

I remember Frank saying that the feats were so valuable that they stopped being cool customization flourishes and became oppressive to build variety; i.e. the difference between picking the 'right' feat and any other felt very bad.

[Foxwarrior]

At level 11, you have at least four Tome feats which each give four abilities, many of them stacking passives that you may have to go back and double check at random if you want to play your character correctly. Maybe if Tome feats had chosen to each be about one thing that just gets better to stay competitive at higher levels, they'd be less overwhelming to use.
The stated goal of having it so you pick up a feat that makes you good at archery and now you're good at archery didn't work out so well once there were enough Tome feats to choose from that you could add a second good at archery feat in order to be even better, either...

[czernebog]

Having run a low-level game using Tome feats, Tome of Prowess skills, and primary caster PCs (cleric and wizard), there was definitely a problem where player options increased at a pace beyond what my players were happy keeping track of. Everyone at the table was smart and wrote software for their day job, so they weren't strangers to complex systems. But our games were usually on a mid-week evening, when everyone was fatigued from work, and remembering the 12+ actions that you can do in a combat round, and all the modifiers contributing to each, tends to drag.

The general lesson is, if you're thinking of piecing together Tome rewrites of various subsystems to make your own ruleset, keep in mind that they were not written with an eye towards keeping overall complexity within some critical envelope. From this perspective, auto-scaling feats might be fine, but progressively adding more player options every 3 levels isn't.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

The tome feats did solve problems. But not all and they did bring problems of their own.

And for the bad bit it was mostly what czernebog said. They had complexity issues. They did too much stuff. They did too much different stuff under the same feat. They were reliant on too much tracking parts of feats which were unlocked by what and when and for who.

I would still use them in preference to vanilla 3.x feats. I would still even suggest one of the other problems tome feats have is best fixed by doubling down and producing a larger variety and number of tome style feats. Somewhere I still even have the raft of additional tome feats I wrote for my own Tome+ games I used to run... good lord how many years ago? Which have... a bunch of extra tome style feats, items and god knows what. And for all the flaws in those house rules, tome inherited and more directly added by myself, if I had to run 3.x again given no other conditions or limitations I would still prefer to use them rather than going vanilla.

But I don't use tome feats anymore because I don't use 3.x anymore because exactly those documents for my preferred 3.x house rules grew so big It seemed more beneficial to write house rules from the ground up allowing me to get away from a lot of legacy stuff in both vanilla 3.x and Tome.

Now whatever underlying structural issues I face in game, including my own forms of complexity bloat, are all 100% my own fault. It's great!

[Kaelik]

It is true that I would prefer Tome Feats to 3.5 feats, but it is very complex and build determinative, instead of a way to really differntiate characters.

The one thing that I decided from Fiends and Fortresses that I'm not sure how you would port back to D&D, is that there is no reason for people to gain feats as they level. It's probably fine to give level 1 characters three feats (in fact there are rules to do so) and then just leave it at three feats forever.

Also most NPCs and monsters don't need feats. The point of feats should be differentiate in some sense from a traditional X.

Obviously not sure you can port that back to a system where everyone already has feats in every stat block, and the feats and monsters are designed based on that system.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I (unfortunately) never played Tome but it enamored me back before I even knew what the Den was. I've been in love with the idea of scaling character options ever since. I wonder if when building a game from the ground-up with scaling mechanics like this - how do you hit that sweet spot between characters growing at a balanced, reasonable rate without flooding them with options? Do you just have players make a few critical decisions when they make their character and they're more or less locked into progression? Do you let them swap shit out once in a while to let them fix mistakes or prep for a new mission? Do you say "fuck it, we love charop" and just let shit explode?
This is especially relevant since czernebog brought up Tome of Prowess. Between those and Tome feats, how many character options should the players actually have to worry about when levelling up? Given their depth, I would lean towards "as few as possible". I dunno.

[Neo Phonelobster Prime]

Consider the complexity of Tome feats. Then consider the complexity of vanilla spells. Consider the number of each a character might have in a tome/vanilla game.

Tome feats are probably comparable on complexity compared to at least some spells. And even a fighter probably gets less of them than a wizard gets spells.

But I think most people that have used Tome feats seem to agree there was some sort of complexity issue going on that was arguably worse than the one for spell casters.

For me I think it was a solid lesson that locking in a fixed package of future ability progression/accumulation with early choices is in fact demonstrably bad beyond a certain limit. I think that limit is basically character class (maybe a sub class?). Adding in X feats, X spheres, and X armours? Was less than ideal.

Players shouldn't need to be considering high level build progression consequences for their choices at level 1 to not much. And at level Something to the rest should not have to keep referring back to check if all the choices they ever made are going to deliver a new ability or not this level/BAB point/Skill Rank/Collectible Bobble Head.

I don't think TTRPGs experiment enough with or put much real thought into the structure of character progression. Tome feats were a valuable and interesting idea. But I think ultimately the thing we need to learn from them is to hold back and not go over the top with a bunch of front loaded selectable sets of complex character ability progressions.

The last thing we should do is decide to limit character build options to a small number of giant tome feat like sets just because, yeah, we probably need to have as few such sets as possible.

I think tome feats having the issues they had was a mostly unavoidable emergent consequence of trying to patch the difference between vanilla feats and spells and their differing power levels and advancement progressions. What we should get from this is that you probably want to not have such a glaring structural issue in the first place and that you should have a core system that supports smaller feat like options that just do one thing each without them being strictly inferior to, less open to respec than, and also less numerous than another different set of ability options only available to spell casters.

[Thaluikhain]

The one thing that I decided from Fiends and Fortresses that I'm not sure how you would port back to D&D, is that there is no reason for people to gain feats as they level. It's probably fine to give level 1 characters three feats (in fact there are rules to do so) and then just leave it at three feats forever.

Hmmm...while technically giving people lots of feats would mean more possible combinations and thus more variety, giving substantially less would mean that you'd see less of Class A with Feat B (whether or not they have some combination of X, Y or Z).

And you don't have to keep learning new mechanics which change the way your character works every level.

Also most NPCs and monsters don't need feats. The point of feats should be differentiate in some sense from a traditional X.

Keeping them (most of them, at least) nice and simple and straightforward, makes sense.

[Krusk]

In my experience, getting booed out of the room at my home group for trying to use them and similar (tome items)...

They aren't popular because many groups have different levels of player investment in the game. Tome feats are "A lot". RAW 3e lets the player who wants a complex elaborate player pick something like a crafting wizard or summoning druid and a player who doesn't pick a duskblade or beguiler. Sure that druid is probably more powerful, but the beguiler isn't laughably behind the curve.

There's a bunch of other reasons folks are spelling out, but I think for most people, it's the complexity issue.

In drafts of my K20 efforts, I did something similar to Kaelick's F&F pick 2-3 at first level approach. Where they give scaling, class independent abilities, but eventually just wrote the concept of feats out altogether. It turns out if you write pick x from a few class features type abilities, people generally feel like that's enough distinction between fighters.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Most people don't have the teeth to handle real crunch anymore.

[Foxwarrior]

Ah yes, herbivores

[deaddmwalking]

Our game uses Talents which are like Feats, but we like the name better. Generally, we build talents that do something that's easily explained, and that the benefit remains useful as you gain levels. Some talents include 'auto-scaling'. For example, Armor Training increase armor’s max AGI by +2, and reduces Check Penalty by 2; both abilities increase by +1 every 4 levels. Another talent, Blind Fight gives you Blindsense. That's a good ability at every level, so there's no need to have it progress from low-light vision to darkvision to blindsense.

We divide talents into tiers; those available at 1st level, those available at 5th level, and those available at 9th level. Characters get +1 Talent per level (and maybe more at 1st level). This ensures that you're usually adding one special ability that is not related to your class progression, which is a manageable number. No talents have pre-reqs (other than level) or build on a prior talent. We don't like chains like 'Mobility + Spring Attack + Whirlwind Attack'. If Mobility is worthwhile, it's a Talent on it's own. If it isn't worthwhile, we try to add some additional riders to make it worthwhile.

As an example, we have a talent - Keen Senses: You gain Low-Light Vision. If you already possess Low-Light Vision, its range becomes triple the normal range rather than double. In addition, you only suffer a -1 penalty to Perception per 60 feet be-tween you and the target, and half the normal penalty due to barriers - that originally only reduced penalties for observation, but it wasn't good enough. We had a separate talent for Low-Light Vision; we rolled them together to make something that we think is worth taking. We did the same thing with Quick Draw - not only does it let you draw a weapon very quickly, it also lets you reload a weapon very quickly. We decided that either one by itself wasn't worth a Talent, but getting both might be.

Basically our philosophy is to make Talents something that is significant to a character - something that they will use often and will have a meaningful impact on their abilities - and allows them to customize the character versus other characters of the same class. Each one needs to be simple enough to understand and use, but provide enough benefit to make valuable against all the other potential choices. When talents don't get picked, we look for ways to make them marginally better until they are viable.

Every time you gain a level, you can replace a Talent you had that doesn't necessarily make sense anymore. If you decided on a 'complete rebuild' it might take you several levels to swap out all the talents, but for us that seems to make sense - learning a completely different style that involves many different feats ought to be something that you 'work towards'. Of course, if you really wanted to do a complete rebuild, there's probably no reason not to let someone retire/bring in a new character.

[Lord Charlemagne]

From my archive binge of the gaming den, Tome feats ended up generally being considering a failure since they didn't really solve the problem with feats in 3rd edition. There still ended up being feat taxes that every martial character took to make their math work, still ended up eating a lot of text to write up all the abilities, didn't really remove build paths, and they still required a lot of remembering stuff to keep track of everything since each feat was 3-5 real abilities.

Scaling feats ended up working really poorly with classes that bonus feats since each scaling feat was written to be 3-5 abilities, meaning every time a bonus feat was given as a class feature, it was actually granting 3-5 class abilities. That works perfectly fine if a class gives a single extra tome feat, but past more than a single extra one, things would break down since a character would then just math stack themselves with feats to punch through all enemies really quickly with very strong defenses as well, especially when used in combination with the strong combat tools provided to tome martial characters by their actual class features (ignoring the fact that some of the class features found on tome martials are potentially very problematic in play themselves).

There is also the fact that by having all the themed abilities grouped together, if you want this one ability from a tome feat, you had to take it with the 2-4 other features that came packaged with it, meaning plenty of characters would end up with a list of features they would probably never use unless they stacked everything to focus on 1 or 2 things, which would could easily give game warping out puts on numbers if using all of the tome feats available on the gaming den. This is probably one reason why the idea of 1 feat a level became more popular for people who like to do a lot of character customization, since while it still has a lot of book-keeping, there is a lot less straight-jacketing of a build while also making it easier to dance around hitting the stupidly large number threshold.

[Aryxbez]

I question the argument of it being hard to look back at your [Tome] Feats, Armor, Spheres?, because they all scaled at the same rate (Roughly every 5 levels). So you knew at 1st/6th/11th/16th you were going to get a thing, so it wasn't really hard to remember looking back at those toggles. Though I've not see what it would look like with Tome of Prowess, I'd always liked the idea of that, so I could see that adding to the complexity.

Lord Charlemagne I think brings up a good point of it breaking the RNG however. It took me a class like the Soulborn, to realize how much they broke the RNG, and how that was problematic.

I stand by that [Tome] Feats were a good idea, and in a game where I only get 7 feats, I would want feats to be more robust, and work something like that. The fact it failed at its stated goals evidently, is saddening and a worthwhile discussion to a better version of such feats. I had seen the issue where most non-casters would take Blitz, Combat School, among a couple others, so that you could hit hard, and apply 2-3 Status Effects each round on a foe.

[Aryxbez]

Pardon the Double Post, I blame Discord habits, but also the fact this is slightly a tangent of the main topic, so I thought it might be proper to have its own post.

Our game uses Talents which are like Feats, but we like the name better.
We divide talents into tiers; those available at 1st level, those available at 5th level, and those available at 9th level. Characters get +1 Talent per level (and maybe more at 1st level).

Interesting, what's' the new game, sounds like a completely new Fantasy Heartbreaker? It sounds like a similar complexity at level 9th: This game has 9-10 Talents/Feats.
In [Tome] You'd have 4 Feats, each with a +0/+1/+6 ability, and Armor with a +1/+5/, For 13 Abilities (though some of which is passive, so it's already written down and not needed to be referenced further).

Every time you gain a level, you can replace a Talent you had that doesn't necessarily make sense anymore. If you decided on a 'complete rebuild' it might take you several levels to swap out all the talents, but for us that seems to make sense - learning a completely different style that involves many different feats ought to be something that you 'work towards'. Of course, if you really wanted to do a complete rebuild, there's probably no reason not to let someone retire/bring in a new character.

In my early DMing, I may've preferred some verisimilitude reason for a PC to respec so drastically, but ultimately it's far too easy in games to make a series of bad choices. It's better to just let the player respec completely, so they can have a better time NOW, rather than forcing them to "wait it out" and still enjoy the story they've built with their character. All you're really doing at that point, is just taking away their attachment from the game, and possibly undermining the party's ability to be effective, by forcing them to wait out playing the actual character they would've made, had they known better, or the rules knowledge they simply didn't have then.

[deaddmwalking]

Interesting, what's' the new game, sounds like a completely new Fantasy Heartbreaker? It sounds like a similar complexity at level 9th: This game has 9-10 Talents/Feats.
In [Tome] You'd have 4 Feats, each with a +0/+1/+6 ability, and Armor with a +1/+5/, For 13 Abilities (though some of which is passive, so it's already written down and not needed to be referenced further).

It is our Fantasy Heartbreaker. We've been developing it since 2008 - we still add spells and make minor tweaks here and there, but it's been in a stable form for a long time. Class levels max out at 12; in a lot of ways our game would be equivalent to D&D from level 3-15 - characters start with a few more abilities and they get them a little faster. In terms of complexity, I think it's less than you're assuming. There are some talents that permanently modify your character (like Blind-Fight giving you Blindsense), and when you write Blindsense into your SQ you don't really have to think about it. There are others that you use frequently and require an action to use (like Cleave, or Retributive Strike), but the actual benefit is really simple (make an extra attack under the right circumstances). Complexity has a lot to do with the number of choices you have to consider at one moment. By having some abilities as 'always on', others as 'situational' and some as 'activated', you always have options but you probably don't have an overwhelming number.

In some ways it's really no more complex than spells (which a character can easily have a similar number of). It's always possible that you'll forget what spells you have, but you'll probably review it often enough to see if there's something helpful when you run into a spot of trouble.

In my early DMing, I may've preferred some verisimilitude reason for a PC to respec so drastically, but ultimately it's far too easy in games to make a series of bad choices. It's better to just let the player respec completely, so they can have a better time NOW, rather than forcing them to "wait it out" and still enjoy the story they've built with their character. All you're really doing at that point, is just taking away their attachment from the game, and possibly undermining the party's ability to be effective, by forcing them to wait out playing the actual character they would've made, had they known better, or the rules knowledge they simply didn't have then.

I think we'd probably allow that under the circumstances, but that's pretty drastic and we don't want to encourage it. But we do want to make it a rule that you can adjust your character! Allowing for the swapping of one Talent each time you gain a level (in addition to gaining your new one) generally strikes the right balance. If you're an archer at low levels but you find that you want to move away from the bow at higher levels, having one or two talents you haven't swapped out yet isn't necessarily a problem - they'll still probably come up at times. Like it's possible that all of your choices will be bad and you won't use any of them, but that's improbable. It's more likely that you feel that one Talent you thought would be cool just doesn't come up as much, or you decide that something else fits the character better as you develop, but needing to change 3 or 4 or 5 things at once is still pretty drastic.

[Kenjyo]

The general consensus around here is that the Tome Feats did not solve the feat problems of 3E/3.5 and were a failure, but I've never seen it actually explained why they failed. Are they just too much for players to keep track of? Do they not give you the breadth of abilities that feats need to? Something else? Why did they fail to solve the problem?

Long time lurker here, having DM'd a bunch of Tome games/campaigns, since 2008, the most reccurring critique it's "too much to keep track", this seems to happen on the feats that put out various, unrelated powers. Never had a player forget something of Whirlwind or Blind Fighting, but many who did forget things about Elusive Target or Blitz.

Taking these as examples you can see that Whirlwind is constructed on doing one thing, and Blind Fightning is a countermeasure/senses so it's pretty passive. Blitz and Elusive have their passive powers (and those seem to be the interesting parts of them for my players), but I can't remember the last time in a game someone used the extra d6 on Blitz, or Diverting Defense on Elusive.But that was before I started using a ruling in ToP that limits Scaling Feats.

After adopting this ruling on Scaling Feats, last year or so, I did feel a change on their approach. The limitation of 4 Scaling Feats made them verify and use more often their powers. This shift does point me to them being overwhelmed, and their feedback on the Tome Feats was that they behave like "A Universal Archetype", the PF kind, and "That limiting them made them more special, like a uncommon style that their character mastered", like well... a Feat Chain.

I think that's my two cents on this topic, I hope it's useful somehow.

[Sigil]

I think that if the concept were revisited there's some things you could do to mitigate problems if you wanted to start over and still have Tome style scaling feats:
* Tag the feats, you can only have one feat with a given tag (so you cant, for example, have two [Archery] feats).
* Really go hard on editing the feats for clarity and conciseness. Each new tier of a feat should explain itself in a concise enough way that putting all of your feats on your character sheet verbatim is feasible.
* A character sheet. You absolutely need to provide the end user a character sheet that makes recording this info simple and easy so it can be tracked and not forgotten. This is a problem for all feats not just Tome ones. Tome feats should have a dedicated space that makes this recording easy.
* Tend towards providing new uses for actions and new abilities instead of numerical bonuses. It's relatively easy to remember that your dude can take an action to stun a guy now vs getting a +3 bonus to something.
* Potentially limit their quantity, if you also have normal feats probably also call them something else and hand them out separately.

[Foxwarrior]

If Tome Feats focused on adding new abilities and not passive bonuses, tagging the feats probably wouldn't be necessary. Being able to rapid shoot and to heavy shoot with a bow would probably be fine if those don't stack together into the same turn. The idea of tagging the feats does still call to me though, I do see some appeal to having each athletic character be good at some kind of ranged, some kind of melee, and some kind of acrobatics, with a different kind for each character.

[Hicks]

Tome feats never bothered me or failed for me or the groups I ran. A core only sorcerer is more mechanically complex with open ended abilities than a tome fighter with tome feats and tome armor and tome items. But then again... I've built and played a lot of sorcerers and full casters over the years. I guess that the "downfall" that I don't experience is that Sorcerers need to be meticulously designed level by level for their spells known, and tome feats make optimizers do that for literally every class as well because the synergy between tome feats is so high that the opportunity cost to not do that was so great.

[JonSetanta]

They're not a problem. The auto-scaling was though.

Over the years there's been a general consensus to do two things:

1. A bonus feat per level for everyone.
2. Require that each Tome feat be split into portions, each portion a different feat unto itself.

[Kaelik]

1) they aren't a problem just the fundamental thing that makes them a tome feat is the problem. Okay so they are a problem!

2) there is nothing like a Consensus on 2. In fact every time it's been mentioned the consensus is that sucks and would be terrible. Tome feats are balanced on a specific theme and sometimes have minor or bad effects to balance off better ones. They are heavily reliant on pre reps before you get abilities. No one wants half of their feats to have "level 11" as a pre req. When people do end up doing feat per level they don't use broken apart tome combat feats, they use an entirely separate list as frank and koumei bith wrote.