Quote from: pryingeyes;548725I suppose that's a matter of perspective, yes. But if you want your character to be effective in combat (you probably do, unless you're playing an archetype explicitly meant not to be) and if combat in your game has consequences and inevitably or regularly occurs, you're at least somewhat coerced into taking certain feats.

By taking those, you're giving up interesting options that might better define your character or add diversity to play, rather than the bland 'keeping pace' of feat bloat.

In all honesty, I never once felt coerced into taking any feat; either by the system or other players.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;548673I actually agree with this part:

And so rather than present a slew of must-have feats again, we have delivered nearly all the must-have mechanics through class design. By being a fighter, for example, you are automatically expected to become more accurate and hit harder over time, and so the class delivers these increases. In short, if you want to be more accurate with your weapons, choose a class focused on weaponry.

I've never really understood why some people throw fits if their thief can't do as much damage in combat as a fighter.  If you wanted to do as much damage as a fighter, play a fighter.  I'm assuming you chose a thief because you wanted to do thiefy things. It's even richer when they just got done whining about pumping up their thief combat skills to match the fighter, just to turn around and bitch that the fighter is no longer worth playing.

But then again, I've made no secret for my preference of niche protection.

+1 a few dozen times.

Quote from: StormBringer;548747+1 a few dozen times.

This is what I get for posting at TBP. Stormie invades my brain.  GET OUT OF MY MIND MOTHERFUCKER!!!!

Quote from: Drohem;548711The 'problem' of 'Feat Tax' is only a problem if you view feats from an optimization lens.

It's important to understand that when Schwalb there is talking about "Feat Taxes", he is actually using the term completely incorrectly. "Feat Tax" is a 4e player term, and if you're going to talk about it, you should probably actually use their definition for it. Within that context a "Feat Tax" is a feat that you have to take in order to "do your job". The idea is that your character gets one less feat (a "tax" as it were) and is able to function as if the game had met its initial design goals.

Now, you can argue about what a character's job actually is, and what it means to be able to "do that job", and that's fine. The ones that just move numbers up and down to where they are "supposed to be" (the ones Schwalb is acknowledging as "Feat Taxes") are called "Math Fix Feats". Some 4e players regard those as Feat Taxes, others don't. The actual iconic Feat Tax feat is "Mighty Challenge" from Divine Power. What it does is allow Strength based Paladins to make refusing their challenges hurt, allowing them to "do their job" of challenging monsters and having those monsters attack them instead of the other, squishier player characters.

Now, we can certainly discuss whether "gets attacked by monsters" is a valid job for a character to have in the first place (I would submit that it is not). But within the logic of 4e D&D, the Paladin is a "Defender" and his job is to get attacked by monsters and soak that damage. Charisma Paladins already come with the ability to hurt monsters that ignore their challenges, and so the Strength Paladin's lack of a similar ability is a rather glaring idiosyncrasy. But rather than errata that oversight, the 4e design team decided to make the fix a feat. A feat that would be essentially required if one were to attempt to play the character type it was introduced to fix. And that is what 4e players actually mean when they say "Feat Tax".

And that's important, because Schwalb actually has writing credits on Divine Power. The chances are significantly non-zero that he personally literally wrote the actual feat that 4e players actually use when describing the Feat Tax concept. So when he comes out and describes "Feat Taxes" in the much more narrow and arguable sense of just "Math Fix Feats", he is in essence promising to continue the Feat Tax system of stealth fixes into 5e.

It is, in short, very bad news.

-Frank

Quote from: StormBringer;548747+1 a few dozen times.

Ditto with that.

One of my issues with 4e D&D was specifically that equality of ability scores across the classes due to feats like Frank described; they let you swap out the original ability scores for a character's 'prime' ability score.  Basically, every character used their highest ability score modifier for nearly all dice rolls in game play.

Also, the actually issue of Feat Bloat (the number of feats available) was not addressed.  I would like to see a closed feat system where there are a finite number of feats to choose from, and the number of feats that a character has access to reduced.

Quote from: Marleycat;548788This is what I get for posting at TBP. Stormie invades my brain.  GET OUT OF MY MIND MOTHERFUCKER!!!!

Hey, you knew the risks of posting at tBP when you signed up here.  And you should be splitting your time between here and the Citadel anyway.  Obviously the majority of it at the Citadel.