Is a storm coming RE: skills and feats?

[Baumi]

Don't forget all those Players that don't want to search for all available Feats and Skills and just want to have a simple Character Generation. Those can just pick Backgrounds and Specialities that sound right and these Packages do all the work for them. In 3E and 4E those player always had a information-overflow and needed a GM who help them Pick those things.

Pick and Choose might be a bit more efficient, but in the end, if those Packages are well made, then the powerdifernces will be minimal. They might even give Packages a small bonus just to even the odds like the Background Advantages.

 

[ComradeGnull]

The basic problem is some skills like Survival, give in effect a broad range of abilities from: starting a fire in the wind, fording a stream, making sheter, finding your way in a storm etc. Whilst other skills such as Geographical lore etc are much more constrained, and could just as easily be represented by using Survival with your Intelligence bonus for theoretical knowledge.

There are definitely too many Lore skills in the current play test version. It looks like some of them could easily be combined to make the coverage more reasonable, in which case you wind up with a list about the size of the 3e/PF list. I actually kind of prefer the 4e style where if you know 'Nature' or 'Dungeoneering' or whatever, you also know the associated Lore skill, just as an Int check rather than the relevant attribute.

 

[Li Shenron]

I can see backgrounds used in several different ways:

DM 1: We’re not using backgrounds at all. Just ignore this stuff.
DM 2: Use the background suggested by your class.
DM 3: Choose a background for your character. It can be the one suggested for your class or a different one.
DM 4: Choose a background for your character. You can trade out one skill for a different one.
DM 5: Come up with your own background by choosing up to four skills.

The same approach to backgrounds also applies to themes.

I think the best would be if there is no default and a list of suggestions like this.

If the default was a-la-carte, it may give the feeling that backgrounds and themes are wasted time or at best mere suggestions for beginners like starting packages in 3ed. But they are not, they are tools that can be used creatively, for example they can be used by a DM to actually restrict access to feats (without having to design feat chains by herself) in case there's some fear of powergaming in the group. Or e.g. in the case of themes, they can even be used to represent training exclusive to schools, elite groups, societies etc.

And if on the other hand the default was to use only available backgrounds and (more importantly) themes, clearly it would immediately be house-ruled by the majority of non-beginners groups.

 

[Li Shenron]

There are definitely too many Lore skills in the current play test version.

The point is that they overlap.

The most relevant example is "Local Lore" which is a mix of "Geographical Lore" + "Historical Lore" + "Societal Lore", but shrink in scope to be limited to one relatively small location only.

Another overlap is "Forbidden Lore" which could be a merge of the evil stuff from "Magical Lore" and "Religious Lore".

I think this highlights the fact that skills were better when open-ended. Having a list is very useful for beginners, and for everyone else too when you just don't want to think too much about which ones to pick, but they should try to explain that you can come up with more skills or a different rearrangement. It's a problem only if you refuse them to overlap.

 

[slobo777]

One thing not been mentioned so far is electronic tools.

A decent character generation porgram could present *either* Specialities, or the underlying Feats, depending on user preference.

It could then summarise choices made into a simplified "what you can do and what the numbers are" front- or back- sheet.

That means it should be possible to present many players wanting to make quick RP/Thematic choices with just 4 things to pick. Race, Class, Speciality and Background . . .

Obviously that relies on some other things we have not seen so far. But simply structuring the Backgrounds and Specialities as containers for more detail (i.e. as they have in the playtest) will support this kind of development to occur later.

 

[Baumi]

By the way what I find confusing is that they say that Backgrounds and Specialties are Optional, but when you don't use them (no Feats and Skills at all) the PC's are quite a bit weaker then with them.

If they are trully optional then the adventures/Encounters shouldn't get more Difficult when you are not using them.

 

[Li Shenron]

By the way what I find confusing is that they say that Backgrounds and Specialties are Optional, but when you don't use them (no Feats and Skills at all) the PC's are quite a bit weaker then with them.

If they are trully optional then the adventures/Encounters shouldn't get more Difficult when you are not using them.

That the difficulty doesn't change at least a little bit would be impossible. But it doesn't change that much... If you remove backgrounds, you have a lesser bonus on skill checks, and the DM could just decrease DCs accordingly if wanted, but it is not that huge difference IMHO; you also don't get the Treat, but that is something useful outside encounters, which are the biggest threat to PCs survival. If you take away themes, you give up one feat every 3 levels, more or less, but this is rather a reduction of character versatility (then I personally believe versatility is power, but it's not that big reduction again).

When they say these are optional, it means that:

- the game rules still work, so you don't have to make any changes
- the balance between different classes in unaltered

 

[delericho]

The problem is this: if WotC explicitly gives us the option to pick skills and feats a la carte, then immediately picking them a la carte becomes the norm. Any player with even a passing interest in character optimization will always hand-pick his skills and feats. Want to make a character who used to be a blacksmith? Well, pick the interesting and potentially useful Item Crafting Trait, but drop the crappy Local Lore and Professional Lore for something better. You're just as legit a blacksmith, but your skills are way better. You'd be crazy not to do it, as long as character effectiveness matters even a little in your group.

There's a way to have both, and to have both be viable options, even in the same group.

The way you do it is to first set out the skills and feats separately, and balanced in their own right.

Then, package them up into bundles (specialities and backgrounds), where the "blacksmith" bundle has that Item Crafting trait and Professional Lore skill.

But here's the key thing: provide a (small) "price break" for accepting the bundle, but don't allow any substitutions or alterations from the bundle - you either take it as-is, or not at all.

And so, switching out that Professional Lore for "something more useful" is a no-no - if you want to get rid of that, then you have to choose a la carte... and that means paying more for the individual bits.

(The reason you can do this and have it remain balanced is precisely because the bundles are non-optimised. The char-op people will thus have numerically 'weaker' characters, but can be assumed to have gained more bang for their buck, whether due to system mastery, or because they've consulted the boards, or what-have-you.)

It is, however, important that the designers are conscious of this, and that they don't proceed to create bundles for every conceivable combination of skills and feats! Providing price breaks like this only works if the bundles are reasonably but not perfectly optimised - if you can just select "a bundle of what I would have chosen anyway", then it's potentially a problem.

 

[delericho]

By the way what I find confusing is that they say that Backgrounds and Specialties are Optional, but when you don't use them (no Feats and Skills at all) the PC's are quite a bit weaker then with them.

I believe that that's intentional.

If they are trully optional then the adventures/Encounters shouldn't get more Difficult when you are not using them.

Mearls addressed this in one of the "Legends & Lore" columns ages ago (before Monte joined WotC and took over the column). Basically, his notion is that the modular bits will somehow modify the "XP budget" for designing adventures and/or encounters. So, if you choose not to use the B/S module, the recommendation will be to build weaker encounters to compensate.

I have no idea how that will be reflected in published adventures. Perhaps either "adapting the adventure" sidebars for different module configurations, or maybe they'll indicate that published adventures of level X will use a budget of Y per encounter, and so enable DMs to adjust the level of adventures they buy according to the budget they themselves use?

(It's also possible, of course, that they've changed their approach since then.)

 

[Janaxstrus]

I like having the packages, and the idea of ala carte. I don't like the idea of getting "extras" just for taking a package.

At least for my group, some small amount of system mastery is not only appreciated, it's encouraged.

The way they initially described it handles that, because they leave it up to the DM. As such, I can see a number of ways it's used with DMs, depending on the power level they want to run. It's no different than the DM not allowing rarer classes or races (since we now have a rarity assigned). It's more explicit DM control of the world, and I'm ok with that.