This is why I'm writing this post. If'n you don't care? Skip it, and feel no shame. I write too much and I know it.
5e has a problem, and that problem is the Skyrim issue.
5e is by far the most successful edition of D&D to’ve ever lived, and probably the most successful roleplaying game to’ve ever been released. It accomplished this by being blind idiot simple. Seriously. You can teach someone with no roleplaying experience how to play 5e in an hour. You can teach someone with significant roleplaying experience how to play 5e in twenty minutes. Character generation takes longer of course – provided you go through all the options instead of doing the twenty-questions, ‘okay, here’s your first character sheet’ version – but you can take just about any reasonably intelligent person who is passingly conversant with games in general and get them running 5e by the end of a session. Combined with the exposure from stuff like Critical Role or Acquisitions Incorporated, and 5e explodes.
The drawback to this is that 5e is blind idiot simple. The bones are there, but Wizards sold the game by stripping all the flesh from those bones and hawking the skeleton. Nowhere is this more apparent than in higher-level character advancement. In almost all cases, you are done making significant choices for your character by third level. Everything after third level is on autopilot, you’re just handed the next feature on a fixed, invariable list you decide on within the first few sessions of your campaign. Outside of spell selection for arcane casters and Invocations for warlocks, virtually no character actually permits you to make a decision about your character when you level up, outside of ASIs. Every four levels, or slightly more often if you’re a fighter or a rogue, you get to make ONE decision concerning your character.
Thing is…the way 5e is built, that decision is rigged from the start, because 5e generally assumes either standard array or standard point buy. Both of these are designed to ensure you have extremely low ability scores and are struggling to make rolls, and thusly to further ensure that every ASI you get HAS TO BE an ASI, not a feat. You don’t get to pick a cool new power to try and personalize your character just a little bit unless you want to fall drastically behind on the math for your class. If your species and your class align perfectly, you might be able to justify taking one feat once at level 4, and of course variant human gets a freebie at level 1 because Wizards is tired of humans never showing up in games (despite all evidence being that even without it, humans show up all the damn time), but otherwise every ASI you get needs to be an actual ASI, or you end up SOL.
This, as they say, is horseshit. One common solution is Heroic Rolling, where players accept a degree of randomization in their stats so long as that randomization trends upward. The common/popular Critical Role method of “4d6 six times, drop the lowest, mulligan an array lower than 72” is kinda explicitly designed to fish for so-called ‘Heroic’ stat spreads, because Heroic stat spreads can tolerate sacrificing an ASI or two for a cool, character-expressing feat without falling behind the curve.
Thing is, such solutions have issues of their own. Namely, Heroic arrays break the game math over their knee at lower levels, as well as sabotaging the sense of progression one is supposed to feel as they advance. When you take a Heroic array in order to free up the ability to take feats later on and not feel bad, you’re essentially playing with endgame stats from level 1. Some players love this, but having done it a few times myself as well as watching my players obliterate low-level module content in the games I’ve been trying to run, I’m increasingly not a fan of starting with heroic arrays. As a player or a DM.
Just yesterday I rolled an array for a one-shot a friend of mine is running and hit the jackpot – an 84-point array with a lowest score of 10 and one natural 18. Rather than elation, all I really felt was embarrassment and dismay; this was ridiculous, it didn’t really fit the story of the character I was building (a one-shot variant of a character who had previously rolled a 70-point subpar array with a lowest-roll of 4, which I was legit much more excited to build around), and also I was 8+ points above the rest of the group. They’re great folks, the sort who’d say “wow, that’s awesome! Lucky!” than be sour over me being so much stronger than they are, but even then. I actively avoided optimizing the array, stuck the 18 somewhere other than my casting stat out of a desire to not just overwhelm the rest of the group. Because having Legendary Hero stats from level 1 is also kinda horseshit.
Rolling Heroic arrays isn’t the answer. But that doesn’t fix the fact that sacrificing an ASI and sabotaging your own progression for a feat because you’re starved for decision-making feels pretty bad, too. It means that most of the feats in the PHB never see the light of day because they have to compete with actually keeping up with the party. When was the last time you saw someone take Linguist in a game where combat remotely mattered? When was the last time you saw someone remember the existence of Dungeon Delver? When was the last time you saw someone say “you know what, Tavern Brawler is super fun and flavorful”, and then actually take it instead of finishing that thought with “but it’s sadly also super weak and pointless outside really niche-y builds.”
Yeah. Yeah, I’ve never seen it either.
Something needs to change. And no, it isn’t “stop playing 5e and switch to Pathfinder”. Pathfinder has its own issues and they’re a lot frickin’ harder to fix than 5e. Besides, if I was going to do that shit I’d do GURPS instead. Anyways. All that ramble aside, that’s why I’m hashing out the homebrew hack I’m discussing below. If you read all this backstory, thanks and apologies. Let’s talk about actual homebrew now.
*****
OKAY. So. Following a realization made in the huge block of spoiler text immediately above, I’ve started working on a way to enhance progression in my future 5e games. The intent is to give players more options as they go, and more chances to make decisions for their character’s growth and progression beyond whatever subclass they pick at third level and whatever gear they buy at chargen, without dealing with the hazards of Heroic stat arrays. Part of how we do this is a slew of homebrew boons and keystone feats, but those don’t matter to the discussion at hand. Mostly, I’m curious what folks think of reorganizing the way ‘regular progression’ feats work, as follows:
Home Rule 0: Variant Humans are ******** Variant human is dispermitted in my game. Normal ordinary +1 across-the-board human is fine, or approved, non-feat variant human homebrew. Instead, all characters receive a level 1 starter feat. This is encouraged to be a racial feat (the entire genesis of this idea, back in the day, was all of us sitting down and going “shouldn’t racial feats happen when you’re, y’know…born…instead of randomly when you adventure?”), but can also be most any Unrestricted feat one feels fits their character better.
Because I don’t even play Adventurer’s League and I’m sick of everyone and everything being a variant human or half-elf Sharpshooting crossbow fighter. Home Rule 1: No More ‘Either/Or’ Whenever a character attains an ASI, they take the ASI and increase their abilities as per the normal rule. They may also select one feat, as per the normal “replace an ASI with a feat” rule, and take that alongside their ASI. This allows players to start with the weak, anemic arrays enforced by Standard Array/Point Buy and grow over time, becoming better at being adventurers the way they’re supposed to. It also allows them to pick up cool tricks and specialties, also the way any adventurer is generally supposed to, without having to sacrifice that progression.
Home Rule 2: Feat Tiers Feats are organized, broadly, into three lists. Advanced Combat, Restricted, and Unrestricted/Everything Else. Players can take Unrestricted feats any time they could select a feat, including during chargen, and Unrestricted feats can also be trained more easily during downtime/potentially awarded as quest rewards. Anything that isn’t Restricted or Advanced Combat is in this bucket.
Restricted feats can be taken any time a character could select a feat OTHER THAN during chargen. The chief examples of Restricted are Mobile, Resilient, and Magic Initiate, but a few other borderline feats end up in this category as well. The usual rule of thumb is that any feat you’d normally consider taking in standard progression in a RAW 5e game, from a mechanical perspective, is Restricted.
Advanced Combat feats include Sharpshooter, Crossbow Expert, GWM/PAM, Spell Sniper, and other feats which directly impact combat and enhance/empower your attacks, or offer additional attacks in the case of XBXPert or PAM. These feats may only be selected by 10th-level characters or higher, and you can only ever select ONE Advanced Combat feat. These feats represent the effects of hard experience and months/years of intense practice refining your combat techniques to perfection. Combat techniques are not perfected at level 4, nor do you perfect every type of combat technique at once. These feats are so godawful powerful that everybody is generally expected to take one, and finally gaining your Advanced Combat feat is a moment of celebration.
Those are the basic tenets I’m workshopping. Curious what folks think, and what ideas, counterpoints, or modifications y’all might suggest. Thanks for sticking with me this long, and have it.
I like what you’re going for. One thing I tried was to start the PCs with 2 levels in one class and 1 level in another but still count as “1st level” for XP. It forced a certain degree of muliclassing but because they could eventually cap at the equivalent of level 23, it still let them hit level 20 in one of their classes if they chose. It didn’t give the same versatility that you seem to be going for, but it saved me having to do much extra work.
Hm. That's a different notion. I'll admit, I'm working within the strictures of DDB's character sheets, which don't allow class levels whatsoever beyond Standard Progression class levels (I do wish there was an option to toggle "Level beyond 20" for campaigns where you want to go for REAL Ultimate Power) but does permit you to add whatever the flimflam feats you like. Suppose one could create feats encompassing the first few levels of other classes and use those. How'd that work out for ye when you tried it?
Characters got to do more cool stuff faster (and with more HP, Spell Slots, etc.) with absolutely no restrictions to level progression and I got to throw stupidly OP stuff at them because I knew they could handle it. It was a blast.
These rules are good if you know for a fact your players want more options (not all of them do), but they also add some power creep issues and I don't think they get to the root of some of your problems with 5e.
Delaying access to Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter won't fix them. Sure, you can't stack 'em, but they're still broken. On the contrary, the "No More Either/Or" rule makes them even more of a no-brainer because there's no drawback to taking one of them any more. Likewise, players that are inclined towards combat are going to load up on a bunch of the "borderline" feats that weren't broken, but since they weren't clearly superior to an ASI you couldn't just blindly grab them. They're certainly not going to grab something from the "Unrestricted" category instead.
Really, Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter break the game in a way that nothing else really comes close to. On top of being so strong that min/maxers feel they have no choice but to take them, they produce degenerate strategies that make the game less interesting. They take away all of the drawbacks and trade-offs to using ranged weapons. You don't have to worry about having enemies next to you or obstacles blocking your shot or even the range of your weapon.
You might get more mileage out of nerfing those two feats and increasing the relevance of exploration and roleplay mechanics in your campaigns so players don't default to skipping over the feats in your "Unrestricted" category.
The drawback to this is that 5e is blind idiot simple. The bones are there, but Wizards sold the game by stripping all the flesh from those bones and hawking the skeleton. Nowhere is this more apparent than in higher-level character advancement. In almost all cases, you are done making significant choices for your character by third level. Everything after third level is on autopilot, you’re just handed the next feature on a fixed, invariable list you decide on within the first few sessions of your campaign.
You're being pretty unfair to the game's designers here. That's not a drawback or a bug; it's a feature. The problem with the 4e approach where every single character is put together from a huge menu of at will, encounter and daily powers is that it forces a high level of complexity on every player. And while you might love that kind of thing, it turns out a lot of players don't want that. Case in point, the Champion the most popular Fighter subclass on D&D Beyond even though mechanically it's barely any stronger than having no subclass. Most characters don't even use feats (1, 2).
5e starts with a simple baseline for most classes because it lets players opt into additional complexity. The players that want simplicity can play a Champion and ignore feats. The players that want choices can play a Battle Master or Eldritch Knight and layer on feats.
This wasn't some sort of calculated "less quality for more mass appeal" trade-off. 5e had about 2 years of public playtesting. This is what players wanted.
Thing is…the way 5e is built, that decision is rigged from the start, because 5e generally assumes either standard array or standard point buy. Both of these are designed to ensure you have extremely low ability scores and are struggling to make rolls, and thusly to further ensure that every ASI you get HAS TO BE an ASI, not a feat.
That's straight up not true. Either method will produce characters that are objectively extraordinary in the game world even at 1st level; the average for any score is 10 and the average person has 10s all across the board.
There isn't a single stat block in the Monster Manual below CR 20 with an AC higher than 20. The DCs for ability checks and saving throws rarely ever exceed 20 either. Even if a character always picks a feat over an ASI they'll still roll well on things they're proficient at. Class features like Expertise, Bardic Inspiration or Archery fighting style, spells like Guidance or Bless, and the generous amount of magic items in official adventures further stack the deck in the player's favor.
Instead, all characters receive a level 1 starter feat. This is encouraged to be a racial feat (the entire genesis of this idea, back in the day, was all of us sitting down and going “shouldn’t racial feats happen when you’re, y’know…born…instead of randomly when you adventure?”)
Racial traits represent characteristics that adventurers of that race typically have. They're not always something you automatically, genetically get just for being born a member of that race. It's not that every High Elf necessarily knows a wizard cantrip, but the ones that take up adventuring typically have that in their skill set. Racial feats follow similar logic.
Any homebrew whatsoever adds power creep to 5e. Hell, running modules as written adds power creep to 5e since the 5e math is explicitly written on the assumption that the party has never seen, heard of, or imagined the mere existence of a magic item. That’s a different bugbear though. Nevertheless, I’m aware that allowing both feats and ASIs increases character power. So does quite a bit else we do in our games on a regular basis. Part of a DM’s job is accounting for that. Nevertheless, it’s very much something to keep aware of. I do happen to know that my players are big fans of extra complexity and crunch, but I can see the point in letting the ones that don’t off the hook.
Insofar as Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter go, I do get the desire to nerf them into the ground, especially from an Adventurer’s League standpoint. I don’t much care for it, though. I like impactful feats, feats that change the way you play instead of just providing a passive benefit you never think about. Crossbow Expert brings an entire class of weapons nobody ever uses back into the game and changes the way you fight with them. Sharpshooter is less strategy-altering but still lets the player feel like their character is truly mastering their weapon – provided they don’t take it at 4.
Yes, I could absolutely say “the ‘Ignores Loading’ benefit of Crossbow Expert no longer applies”. Nobody would ever take the feat, or use crossbows, at that point, but I could say it. I could say that making a Sharpshooter Attack that ignores cover, ignores range restrictions, and allows the character to make a Called Shot for extra damage is an action that precludes using the rest of their attacks in a turn. Again, nobody would ever take the feat if I did that, but I could do it. I would prefer, rather than passive-aggressively removing the feats from my game in a de facto manner by nerfing them to senselessness, allowing players to grow into that power. A level 10+ character should be feeling like kind of a badass, and by that point I’d know the group and their character dynamics well enough to know exactly how hard I can push them.
*** On 5e being over-simplified
I don’t know how much the whole ‘Public Playtest’ thing actually helped 5e. Players are not game developers, especially as a nebulous mass of babbling, contrarian voices shouting for both all the things and none of the things at once. Game design by committee tends to produce functional but bland and tasteless games; game design by headless mob is so much worse. There’s a reason, after all, that every common/successful RPG system out there has one DM.
I get the distinct feeling that any of the really good, elegant design in 5e is the result of someone saying “no no NO, I’M the game designer, I’m going to design a game!” and taking the public playtest data with the giant heaping truckload of salt it deserved, and all the vestigial junk that doesn’t really accomplish anything save being numbers the DM is tacitly expected to ignore (see: encumbrance, overland travel, crafting, wilderness survival, sickness/disease/lingering injury, anything whatsoever in the Exploration/Social pillars outside of ‘make it up as you go!’) is the result of people in the playtest saying “I don’t like that stuff!” loud enough that the game devs forgot why it was in there in the first place.
Players are excellent at spotting problems. They are notoriously awful at solving them.
*** On Standard array and ASI vs. feats
The whole idea of “10 is the average score” is an informed attribute players believe (somehow) because the PHB and the DMG tells them it’s true. Anyone rolling against a skill they have a 10 in is expecting to fail and executing a Hail Mary pass hoping for that nat 20, with or without proficiency. The actual ‘average’ score for something a player actually uses is closer to 14 on the lower end. The game is not written for people with 10s in all their attributes, the game is written for people with at least one +3 that adventure designers are figuring gains a minimum +2 from proficiency on any given task they call for.
The inherent assumption is that any player making a roll against a skill they remotely expect to be taken seriously has at least a +5 in that skill, and that goes up by roughly two per tier of play. Players have skills they get to take seriously with exactly one attribute according to standard array, or two if they devote every ASI they get to tightly focused stat bumps. Everything else, proficiency or otherwise, is increasingly “who knows, I may crit?” It’s why characters are herded so strongly towards skills and playstyles that match their class’s controlling attribute. You’re not allowed to build a really strong cleric with a really good Athletics score and solid martial combat because you want to play up the ‘warrior’ angle of Warrior Priest – not unless you sacrifice Wisdom and become objectively lame at doing the thing everybody expects you to be doing, or unless you roll a Heroic array.
And gods help you if you want to play an ‘off’ race/class combo. The half-orc sorcerer, the gnome ranger, the elven paladin – anything else whose racial attribute bonuses don’t correspond at all to the attributes their class is expecting. High enough Dex can salvage anything because Dex is a bloody superstat, but anything else? Nah. Unless you’re rolling for stats and score a Heroic array, just give it up.
*** On racial feats
I understand and agree that Xanathar’s racial feats represent fantastical abilities that are outside the norm for their species. But a dragonborn doesn’t wake up one day and go “oh shit, my scales are thicc and steely-swole now, and for some reason I now have retractable tiger claws in my fingers! Damn, what was in that ale last night?!”
Some species feats could make sense as an outgrowth of power or the result of study and natural talent being refined through adventure. Many of them don’t make any sense at all save as something the character has always had/done. One can handwave this, of course, but my players have very much enjoyed the chance to display some of these characteristics from the get-go. A few have even woven it into their backstories, letting their choice inspire their tales of why they became adventurers in the first place.
Anyways. Please don’t take this as an attack or dismissal of your post, I just enjoy a solid, meaty debate and you gave me a lot to think about and respond to. Thanks for that, I appreciate it.
I like the ASI being "and" and not "either/or". I think you are putting too much emphasis on stats, the difference between +4 and +5 is 5% on a d20.
I am curious on if you allow the stat bonus some feats give, in theory your system could net +3 to a single stat at lvl 4. Wouldn't every character choose toughness, mobility, & lucky as every class wants to have more HP, movement and lucky is very op, then it kind of becomes here is your list of good feats choose these for combat and these to skill checks.
Part of my problem with feats is some are amazing, others are neat but I would rather have amazing ones instead. For instance Defensive Duelist for a spell caster, cool lots of uses, it's a free shield spell vs melee every turn. But i would rather have Resilience (con), Warcaster, Spell sniper, or Elemental Adept depending on the type of caster.
I do allow the stat bonuses some feats give. Heh, it's the first question everybody who hears about this idea asks me, and my response is typically the same throughout. Most of the +1 to a stat feats are Xanathar racial feats and thus limited by default; the generally-available half-feats all tend to either be super situational or they tend to suck. If someone wants to snag a half-feat and gain a weak bonus effect as well as the +1 to jump their stats by 3 instead of two, who am I to say no? The whole idea is allowing players more freedom to develop their character the way they want to.
As for Lucky, yeah. My mistake. Lucky is in a category of its own, namely the "this is only an option for you if the story of the game says you can take it" category. Supernatural reality-twisting luck is not something you can get by working out or reading books. Well, technically reading books is one way, but not by itself. If I went through with this I would likely add less powerful sub-variants of Lucky, since the basic idea of the feat is cool but the base Lucky feat is so open-ended it feels like a legitimate superpower. Defensive Luck (i.e. you can ONLY use Luck points to force enemies to reroll attacks, or to reroll your own saves), Active Luck (i.e. you have to declare you're using a Luck point BEFORE you roll, without knowing what your normal roll would be), or Focused Luck (i.e. you can ONLY use Luck points on rolls that pertain to a single stat, or to a single type of task) are things I've thought of implementing before, and which would probably fit with this type of feat progression better than regular Lucky.
If you'd rather have the normal array of Chonky Caster feats for your character, again - who am I to stop you? I only tier the feats the way I am to try and encourage a sense of progression and rising power, rather than trying to take all the best stuff before level 5. If you feel like you don't need any of the other cool feats out there and only combat feats are worth taking, then either I'm not doing my job as a DM or you're going to take those feats no matter what because that's what appeals to you as a player and you're into the combat game more than the other pillars. Nothing wrong with that, and no reason I should punish you for it, ne?
Not really. Giving players more options (e.g. new spells) isn't power creep unless you screw up and accidentally make a new option strictly better than the alternatives.
Heck, options like the DMG's "Slow Natural Healing" actually weaken the players.
Sharpshooter is less strategy-altering but still lets the player feel like their character is truly mastering their weapon – provided they don’t take it at 4.
Sure, but you can make a player feel that way without making the game less interesting and without making one option so good players feel forced to take it. The Champion subclass for Fighters proves that really well because Improved Critical is borderline worthless but a lot of players go bonkers for the increased crit range.
Yes, I could absolutely say “the ‘Ignores Loading’ benefit of Crossbow Expert no longer applies”. Nobody would ever take the feat, or use crossbows, at that point, but I could say it.
But that's not the part of Crossbow Expert that sucks. The #1 problem with it is no longer have disadvantage when an enemy's next to you, followed by the fact that it turns a toy crossbow into the deadliest ranged weapon. The bit about ignoring Loading is the one thing that actually adds value to the game.
I would prefer, rather than passive-aggressively removing the feats from my game in a de facto manner by nerfing them to senselessness, allowing players to grow into that power. A level 10+ character should be feeling like kind of a badass, and by that point I’d know the group and their character dynamics well enough to know exactly how hard I can push them.
That'd work great if there were a whole slew of comparably game-breaking combat style feats, but like I said the others aren't even in the same league as CE/SS and they certainly don't cover the whole gamut of character archetypes. For example, Spell Sniper is a joke compared to Sharpshooter, and Dual Wielder is worse in almost every way than just increasing your DEX.
The best way to put everyone on even footing is to bring the small handful of feats that are punching way above their weight in line with the other feats.
I don’t know how much the whole ‘Public Playtest’ thing actually helped 5e...Players are excellent at spotting problems. They are notoriously awful at solving them.
You're right about that, but the point of playtesting is to get players to spot the problems, not to ask them how to fix it. Xanathar's Guide to Everything sold like gangbusters precisely because the devs refused to push anything through unless it was hitting really high satisfaction ratings with players. On the flip side, the main reason Healing Spirit is busted is because it was a last-minute addition that didn't go through Unearthed Arcana.
The whole idea of “10 is the average score” is an informed attribute players believe (somehow) because the PHB and the DMG tells them it’s true.
The whole game is built around that assumption. Every single monster stat block has scores assigned based on the fact that there's an absolute scale from 1 to 30 with the average human sitting at 10 and the 20-30 range being reserved for ancient, godlike beings.
What stat block do adventures tell you to use when a random adult civilian might get into combat? The commoner!
Anyone rolling against a skill they have a 10 in is expecting to fail and executing a Hail Mary pass hoping for that nat 20, with or without proficiency.
If you have a +0 on your roll, that's still a 55% chance to succeed on an easy DC 10 task without any training. You only need a nat 20 for DC 20, which is by definition a hard task. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that a person with mediocre abilities and no training is going to fail that task.
The actual ‘average’ score for something a player actually uses is closer to 14 on the lower end.
Which is perfectly fine, because the average AC for a CR 1 monster is about 13, and so is the average DC of spells and monster abilities. The player's rolls will continue to get better all on their own thanks to increasing access to class features, spells and magic items, while the benchmark for "hard" stays fixed at 20.
A Fighter with Archery Fighting Style can already start off with +7 to their attack rolls at first level so the bar isn't set super high or anything. By 5th level they're automatically up to +8, and they might have a +1 weapon at that point for +9. That's already enough to hit AC 20 50% of the time, and again, AC 20 is basically the upper end of the scale until you start fighting CR 21+ creatures.
I understand and agree that Xanathar’s racial feats represent fantastical abilities that are outside the norm for their species. But a dragonborn doesn’t wake up one day and go “oh shit, my scales are thicc and steely-swole now, and for some reason I now have retractable tiger claws in my fingers! Damn, what was in that ale last night?!”
That's a narrative challenge with any kind of progression in the game though. It's not like Fighters literally double their attack speed the instant they kill that last monster and hit 5th level either.
Any homebrew whatsoever adds power creep to 5e. Hell, running modules as written adds power creep to 5e since the 5e math is explicitly written on the assumption that the party has never seen, heard of, or imagined the mere existence of a magic item. That’s a different bugbear though. Nevertheless, I’m aware that allowing both feats and ASIs increases character power. So does quite a bit else we do in our games on a regular basis. Part of a DM’s job is accounting for that. Nevertheless, it’s very much something to keep aware of. I do happen to know that my players are big fans of extra complexity and crunch, but I can see the point in letting the ones that don’t off the hook.
[sic]
*** On 5e being over-simplified
I don’t know how much the whole ‘Public Playtest’ thing actually helped 5e. Players are not game developers, especially as a nebulous mass of babbling, contrarian voices shouting for both all the things and none of the things at once. Game design by committee tends to produce functional but bland and tasteless games; game design by headless mob is so much worse. There’s a reason, after all, that every common/successful RPG system out there has one DM.
I get the distinct feeling that any of the really good, elegant design in 5e is the result of someone saying “no no NO, I’M the game designer, I’m going to design a game!” and taking the public playtest data with the giant heaping truckload of salt it deserved, and all the vestigial junk that doesn’t really accomplish anything save being numbers the DM is tacitly expected to ignore (see: encumbrance, overland travel, crafting, wilderness survival, sickness/disease/lingering injury, anything whatsoever in the Exploration/Social pillars outside of ‘make it up as you go!’) is the result of people in the playtest saying “I don’t like that stuff!” loud enough that the game devs forgot why it was in there in the first place.
Players are excellent at spotting problems. They are notoriously awful at solving them.
I disagree that home-brew inherently adds any more power creep than official products. Balanced is balanced no matter who writes it.
As for your thoughts on 5e being too over simplified: I 100% agree.
First off, Yurei, what is this chargen word that you keep using? It would be helpful if you defined that clearly early on.
I think that everyone who has posted on this thread thus far has made some good points. My own thoughts are that having to choose between feats and ASIs is part of what makes building a character interesting. Letting characters get a feat + a 2 point stat bump Every 4 levels (except Rogues and Fighters) reduces the significance of that choice. It makes more sense to me to just increase the number of ASI/feat opportunities for all players, starting with the free lvl 1 starter feat. Then maybe add another slot for ASI/feat at level 6 and level 12, restricting them to non-combat feats.
I would also support the idea of having different categories of feats so that the really powerful ones cannot happen until level 10. It makes sense that being an expert sniper or a halberd-wielding circle of death doesn't happen until mid-tier.
I do think though, that an issue you are trying to get at, Yurei, with these homebrew rules isn't being directly addressed, which is the incentive/reward system for making fully fleshed out characters. It's not that 5e prevents people from doing so, it's that so much of the game is built solely around combat that less combat-centric builds and playstyles are not rewarded through in-game mechanics. One way to subtly change this would be to make the Ideals, Bonds, Flaws aspect of character creation matter mechanically. For instance, implementation of a Power-Up system for certain non-essential racial abilities and more powerful aspects of combat feats. Players would get Power-Up points to that they can use like charges to be able to activate certain abilities or feat aspects for 1 minute by playing to their Ideals, Bonds and Flaws earlier in the game or in an earlier game session. This would also reward players for choosing feats that fit into a more rounded character since IRL, people do have people/animals/plants/objects they care about, do have flaws and do have goals beyond making money (usually). If their non-combat feat helps them role-play moving towards achieving an ideal, maintaining a bond, or expressing a flaw, it helps them later on during combat.
step 3: assign ability scores using the standard array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 and add racial bonuses
step 4: choose your back ground
step 5: assign special abilities....which are feats and you can start off with which ever ones you feel fit in with your character concept and background but each feat as some prerequisite ability score or skill requirements that need to be met but you cannot take racial feats of ASI's
These basically fill out you life prior to adventuring
step 5: choose your starting class
Feats are removed from class progression and changed to be taken every 4 character levels so you can use them for ASI increases or racial feats.
There is also the ability to "learn" feats as you level up, so you might have your proficiency bonus increase and mean you now qualify for a special ability/feat and you can work that into your story as learning on the job/training etc.
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* Need a character idea? Search for "Rob76's Unused" in the Story and Lore section.
This is why I'm writing this post. If'n you don't care? Skip it, and feel no shame. I write too much and I know it.
5e has a problem, and that problem is the Skyrim issue.
5e is by far the most successful edition of D&D to’ve ever lived, and probably the most successful roleplaying game to’ve ever been released. It accomplished this by being blind idiot simple. Seriously. You can teach someone with no roleplaying experience how to play 5e in an hour. You can teach someone with significant roleplaying experience how to play 5e in twenty minutes. Character generation takes longer of course – provided you go through all the options instead of doing the twenty-questions, ‘okay, here’s your first character sheet’ version – but you can take just about any reasonably intelligent person who is passingly conversant with games in general and get them running 5e by the end of a session. Combined with the exposure from stuff like Critical Role or Acquisitions Incorporated, and 5e explodes.
The drawback to this is that 5e is blind idiot simple. The bones are there, but Wizards sold the game by stripping all the flesh from those bones and hawking the skeleton. Nowhere is this more apparent than in higher-level character advancement. In almost all cases, you are done making significant choices for your character by third level. Everything after third level is on autopilot, you’re just handed the next feature on a fixed, invariable list you decide on within the first few sessions of your campaign. Outside of spell selection for arcane casters and Invocations for warlocks, virtually no character actually permits you to make a decision about your character when you level up, outside of ASIs. Every four levels, or slightly more often if you’re a fighter or a rogue, you get to make ONE decision concerning your character.
Thing is…the way 5e is built, that decision is rigged from the start, because 5e generally assumes either standard array or standard point buy. Both of these are designed to ensure you have extremely low ability scores and are struggling to make rolls, and thusly to further ensure that every ASI you get HAS TO BE an ASI, not a feat. You don’t get to pick a cool new power to try and personalize your character just a little bit unless you want to fall drastically behind on the math for your class. If your species and your class align perfectly, you might be able to justify taking one feat once at level 4, and of course variant human gets a freebie at level 1 because Wizards is tired of humans never showing up in games (despite all evidence being that even without it, humans show up all the damn time), but otherwise every ASI you get needs to be an actual ASI, or you end up SOL.
This, as they say, is horseshit. One common solution is Heroic Rolling, where players accept a degree of randomization in their stats so long as that randomization trends upward. The common/popular Critical Role method of “4d6 six times, drop the lowest, mulligan an array lower than 72” is kinda explicitly designed to fish for so-called ‘Heroic’ stat spreads, because Heroic stat spreads can tolerate sacrificing an ASI or two for a cool, character-expressing feat without falling behind the curve.
Thing is, such solutions have issues of their own. Namely, Heroic arrays break the game math over their knee at lower levels, as well as sabotaging the sense of progression one is supposed to feel as they advance. When you take a Heroic array in order to free up the ability to take feats later on and not feel bad, you’re essentially playing with endgame stats from level 1. Some players love this, but having done it a few times myself as well as watching my players obliterate low-level module content in the games I’ve been trying to run, I’m increasingly not a fan of starting with heroic arrays. As a player or a DM.
Just yesterday I rolled an array for a one-shot a friend of mine is running and hit the jackpot – an 84-point array with a lowest score of 10 and one natural 18. Rather than elation, all I really felt was embarrassment and dismay; this was ridiculous, it didn’t really fit the story of the character I was building (a one-shot variant of a character who had previously rolled a 70-point subpar array with a lowest-roll of 4, which I was legit much more excited to build around), and also I was 8+ points above the rest of the group. They’re great folks, the sort who’d say “wow, that’s awesome! Lucky!” than be sour over me being so much stronger than they are, but even then. I actively avoided optimizing the array, stuck the 18 somewhere other than my casting stat out of a desire to not just overwhelm the rest of the group. Because having Legendary Hero stats from level 1 is also kinda horseshit.
Rolling Heroic arrays isn’t the answer. But that doesn’t fix the fact that sacrificing an ASI and sabotaging your own progression for a feat because you’re starved for decision-making feels pretty bad, too. It means that most of the feats in the PHB never see the light of day because they have to compete with actually keeping up with the party. When was the last time you saw someone take Linguist in a game where combat remotely mattered? When was the last time you saw someone remember the existence of Dungeon Delver? When was the last time you saw someone say “you know what, Tavern Brawler is super fun and flavorful”, and then actually take it instead of finishing that thought with “but it’s sadly also super weak and pointless outside really niche-y builds.”
Yeah. Yeah, I’ve never seen it either.
Something needs to change. And no, it isn’t “stop playing 5e and switch to Pathfinder”. Pathfinder has its own issues and they’re a lot frickin’ harder to fix than 5e. Besides, if I was going to do that shit I’d do GURPS instead. Anyways. All that ramble aside, that’s why I’m hashing out the homebrew hack I’m discussing below. If you read all this backstory, thanks and apologies. Let’s talk about actual homebrew now.
*****
OKAY. So. Following a realization made in the huge block of spoiler text immediately above, I’ve started working on a way to enhance progression in my future 5e games. The intent is to give players more options as they go, and more chances to make decisions for their character’s growth and progression beyond whatever subclass they pick at third level and whatever gear they buy at chargen, without dealing with the hazards of Heroic stat arrays. Part of how we do this is a slew of homebrew boons and keystone feats, but those don’t matter to the discussion at hand. Mostly, I’m curious what folks think of reorganizing the way ‘regular progression’ feats work, as follows:
Home Rule 0: Variant Humans are ********
Variant human is dispermitted in my game. Normal ordinary +1 across-the-board human is fine, or approved, non-feat variant human homebrew. Instead, all characters receive a level 1 starter feat. This is encouraged to be a racial feat (the entire genesis of this idea, back in the day, was all of us sitting down and going “shouldn’t racial feats happen when you’re, y’know…born…instead of randomly when you adventure?”), but can also be most any Unrestricted feat one feels fits their character better.
Because I don’t even play Adventurer’s League and I’m sick of everyone and everything being a variant human or half-elf Sharpshooting crossbow fighter.
Home Rule 1: No More ‘Either/Or’
Whenever a character attains an ASI, they take the ASI and increase their abilities as per the normal rule. They may also select one feat, as per the normal “replace an ASI with a feat” rule, and take that alongside their ASI. This allows players to start with the weak, anemic arrays enforced by Standard Array/Point Buy and grow over time, becoming better at being adventurers the way they’re supposed to. It also allows them to pick up cool tricks and specialties, also the way any adventurer is generally supposed to, without having to sacrifice that progression.
Home Rule 2: Feat Tiers
Feats are organized, broadly, into three lists. Advanced Combat, Restricted, and Unrestricted/Everything Else. Players can take Unrestricted feats any time they could select a feat, including during chargen, and Unrestricted feats can also be trained more easily during downtime/potentially awarded as quest rewards. Anything that isn’t Restricted or Advanced Combat is in this bucket.
Restricted feats can be taken any time a character could select a feat OTHER THAN during chargen. The chief examples of Restricted are Mobile, Resilient, and Magic Initiate, but a few other borderline feats end up in this category as well. The usual rule of thumb is that any feat you’d normally consider taking in standard progression in a RAW 5e game, from a mechanical perspective, is Restricted.
Advanced Combat feats include Sharpshooter, Crossbow Expert, GWM/PAM, Spell Sniper, and other feats which directly impact combat and enhance/empower your attacks, or offer additional attacks in the case of XBXPert or PAM. These feats may only be selected by 10th-level characters or higher, and you can only ever select ONE Advanced Combat feat. These feats represent the effects of hard experience and months/years of intense practice refining your combat techniques to perfection. Combat techniques are not perfected at level 4, nor do you perfect every type of combat technique at once. These feats are so godawful powerful that everybody is generally expected to take one, and finally gaining your Advanced Combat feat is a moment of celebration.
Those are the basic tenets I’m workshopping. Curious what folks think, and what ideas, counterpoints, or modifications y’all might suggest. Thanks for sticking with me this long, and have it.
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I like what you’re going for. One thing I tried was to start the PCs with 2 levels in one class and 1 level in another but still count as “1st level” for XP. It forced a certain degree of muliclassing but because they could eventually cap at the equivalent of level 23, it still let them hit level 20 in one of their classes if they chose. It didn’t give the same versatility that you seem to be going for, but it saved me having to do much extra work.
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Hm. That's a different notion. I'll admit, I'm working within the strictures of DDB's character sheets, which don't allow class levels whatsoever beyond Standard Progression class levels (I do wish there was an option to toggle "Level beyond 20" for campaigns where you want to go for REAL Ultimate Power) but does permit you to add whatever the flimflam feats you like. Suppose one could create feats encompassing the first few levels of other classes and use those. How'd that work out for ye when you tried it?
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Characters got to do more cool stuff faster (and with more HP, Spell Slots, etc.) with absolutely no restrictions to level progression and I got to throw stupidly OP stuff at them because I knew they could handle it. It was a blast.
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These rules are good if you know for a fact your players want more options (not all of them do), but they also add some power creep issues and I don't think they get to the root of some of your problems with 5e.
Delaying access to Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter won't fix them. Sure, you can't stack 'em, but they're still broken. On the contrary, the "No More Either/Or" rule makes them even more of a no-brainer because there's no drawback to taking one of them any more. Likewise, players that are inclined towards combat are going to load up on a bunch of the "borderline" feats that weren't broken, but since they weren't clearly superior to an ASI you couldn't just blindly grab them. They're certainly not going to grab something from the "Unrestricted" category instead.
Really, Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter break the game in a way that nothing else really comes close to. On top of being so strong that min/maxers feel they have no choice but to take them, they produce degenerate strategies that make the game less interesting. They take away all of the drawbacks and trade-offs to using ranged weapons. You don't have to worry about having enemies next to you or obstacles blocking your shot or even the range of your weapon.
You might get more mileage out of nerfing those two feats and increasing the relevance of exploration and roleplay mechanics in your campaigns so players don't default to skipping over the feats in your "Unrestricted" category.
You're being pretty unfair to the game's designers here. That's not a drawback or a bug; it's a feature. The problem with the 4e approach where every single character is put together from a huge menu of at will, encounter and daily powers is that it forces a high level of complexity on every player. And while you might love that kind of thing, it turns out a lot of players don't want that. Case in point, the Champion the most popular Fighter subclass on D&D Beyond even though mechanically it's barely any stronger than having no subclass. Most characters don't even use feats (1, 2).
5e starts with a simple baseline for most classes because it lets players opt into additional complexity. The players that want simplicity can play a Champion and ignore feats. The players that want choices can play a Battle Master or Eldritch Knight and layer on feats.
This wasn't some sort of calculated "less quality for more mass appeal" trade-off. 5e had about 2 years of public playtesting. This is what players wanted.
That's straight up not true. Either method will produce characters that are objectively extraordinary in the game world even at 1st level; the average for any score is 10 and the average person has 10s all across the board.
There isn't a single stat block in the Monster Manual below CR 20 with an AC higher than 20. The DCs for ability checks and saving throws rarely ever exceed 20 either. Even if a character always picks a feat over an ASI they'll still roll well on things they're proficient at. Class features like Expertise, Bardic Inspiration or Archery fighting style, spells like Guidance or Bless, and the generous amount of magic items in official adventures further stack the deck in the player's favor.
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Any homebrew whatsoever adds power creep to 5e. Hell, running modules as written adds power creep to 5e since the 5e math is explicitly written on the assumption that the party has never seen, heard of, or imagined the mere existence of a magic item. That’s a different bugbear though. Nevertheless, I’m aware that allowing both feats and ASIs increases character power. So does quite a bit else we do in our games on a regular basis. Part of a DM’s job is accounting for that. Nevertheless, it’s very much something to keep aware of. I do happen to know that my players are big fans of extra complexity and crunch, but I can see the point in letting the ones that don’t off the hook.
Insofar as Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter go, I do get the desire to nerf them into the ground, especially from an Adventurer’s League standpoint. I don’t much care for it, though. I like impactful feats, feats that change the way you play instead of just providing a passive benefit you never think about. Crossbow Expert brings an entire class of weapons nobody ever uses back into the game and changes the way you fight with them. Sharpshooter is less strategy-altering but still lets the player feel like their character is truly mastering their weapon – provided they don’t take it at 4.
Yes, I could absolutely say “the ‘Ignores Loading’ benefit of Crossbow Expert no longer applies”. Nobody would ever take the feat, or use crossbows, at that point, but I could say it. I could say that making a Sharpshooter Attack that ignores cover, ignores range restrictions, and allows the character to make a Called Shot for extra damage is an action that precludes using the rest of their attacks in a turn. Again, nobody would ever take the feat if I did that, but I could do it. I would prefer, rather than passive-aggressively removing the feats from my game in a de facto manner by nerfing them to senselessness, allowing players to grow into that power. A level 10+ character should be feeling like kind of a badass, and by that point I’d know the group and their character dynamics well enough to know exactly how hard I can push them.
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On 5e being over-simplified
I don’t know how much the whole ‘Public Playtest’ thing actually helped 5e. Players are not game developers, especially as a nebulous mass of babbling, contrarian voices shouting for both all the things and none of the things at once. Game design by committee tends to produce functional but bland and tasteless games; game design by headless mob is so much worse. There’s a reason, after all, that every common/successful RPG system out there has one DM.
I get the distinct feeling that any of the really good, elegant design in 5e is the result of someone saying “no no NO, I’M the game designer, I’m going to design a game!” and taking the public playtest data with the giant heaping truckload of salt it deserved, and all the vestigial junk that doesn’t really accomplish anything save being numbers the DM is tacitly expected to ignore (see: encumbrance, overland travel, crafting, wilderness survival, sickness/disease/lingering injury, anything whatsoever in the Exploration/Social pillars outside of ‘make it up as you go!’) is the result of people in the playtest saying “I don’t like that stuff!” loud enough that the game devs forgot why it was in there in the first place.
Players are excellent at spotting problems. They are notoriously awful at solving them.
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On Standard array and ASI vs. feats
The whole idea of “10 is the average score” is an informed attribute players believe (somehow) because the PHB and the DMG tells them it’s true. Anyone rolling against a skill they have a 10 in is expecting to fail and executing a Hail Mary pass hoping for that nat 20, with or without proficiency. The actual ‘average’ score for something a player actually uses is closer to 14 on the lower end. The game is not written for people with 10s in all their attributes, the game is written for people with at least one +3 that adventure designers are figuring gains a minimum +2 from proficiency on any given task they call for.
The inherent assumption is that any player making a roll against a skill they remotely expect to be taken seriously has at least a +5 in that skill, and that goes up by roughly two per tier of play. Players have skills they get to take seriously with exactly one attribute according to standard array, or two if they devote every ASI they get to tightly focused stat bumps. Everything else, proficiency or otherwise, is increasingly “who knows, I may crit?” It’s why characters are herded so strongly towards skills and playstyles that match their class’s controlling attribute. You’re not allowed to build a really strong cleric with a really good Athletics score and solid martial combat because you want to play up the ‘warrior’ angle of Warrior Priest – not unless you sacrifice Wisdom and become objectively lame at doing the thing everybody expects you to be doing, or unless you roll a Heroic array.
And gods help you if you want to play an ‘off’ race/class combo. The half-orc sorcerer, the gnome ranger, the elven paladin – anything else whose racial attribute bonuses don’t correspond at all to the attributes their class is expecting. High enough Dex can salvage anything because Dex is a bloody superstat, but anything else? Nah. Unless you’re rolling for stats and score a Heroic array, just give it up.
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On racial feats
I understand and agree that Xanathar’s racial feats represent fantastical abilities that are outside the norm for their species. But a dragonborn doesn’t wake up one day and go “oh shit, my scales are thicc and steely-swole now, and for some reason I now have retractable tiger claws in my fingers! Damn, what was in that ale last night?!”
Some species feats could make sense as an outgrowth of power or the result of study and natural talent being refined through adventure. Many of them don’t make any sense at all save as something the character has always had/done. One can handwave this, of course, but my players have very much enjoyed the chance to display some of these characteristics from the get-go. A few have even woven it into their backstories, letting their choice inspire their tales of why they became adventurers in the first place.
Anyways. Please don’t take this as an attack or dismissal of your post, I just enjoy a solid, meaty debate and you gave me a lot to think about and respond to. Thanks for that, I appreciate it.
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I like the ASI being "and" and not "either/or". I think you are putting too much emphasis on stats, the difference between +4 and +5 is 5% on a d20.
I am curious on if you allow the stat bonus some feats give, in theory your system could net +3 to a single stat at lvl 4. Wouldn't every character choose toughness, mobility, & lucky as every class wants to have more HP, movement and lucky is very op, then it kind of becomes here is your list of good feats choose these for combat and these to skill checks.
Part of my problem with feats is some are amazing, others are neat but I would rather have amazing ones instead. For instance Defensive Duelist for a spell caster, cool lots of uses, it's a free shield spell vs melee every turn. But i would rather have Resilience (con), Warcaster, Spell sniper, or Elemental Adept depending on the type of caster.
I do allow the stat bonuses some feats give. Heh, it's the first question everybody who hears about this idea asks me, and my response is typically the same throughout. Most of the +1 to a stat feats are Xanathar racial feats and thus limited by default; the generally-available half-feats all tend to either be super situational or they tend to suck. If someone wants to snag a half-feat and gain a weak bonus effect as well as the +1 to jump their stats by 3 instead of two, who am I to say no? The whole idea is allowing players more freedom to develop their character the way they want to.
As for Lucky, yeah. My mistake. Lucky is in a category of its own, namely the "this is only an option for you if the story of the game says you can take it" category. Supernatural reality-twisting luck is not something you can get by working out or reading books. Well, technically reading books is one way, but not by itself. If I went through with this I would likely add less powerful sub-variants of Lucky, since the basic idea of the feat is cool but the base Lucky feat is so open-ended it feels like a legitimate superpower. Defensive Luck (i.e. you can ONLY use Luck points to force enemies to reroll attacks, or to reroll your own saves), Active Luck (i.e. you have to declare you're using a Luck point BEFORE you roll, without knowing what your normal roll would be), or Focused Luck (i.e. you can ONLY use Luck points on rolls that pertain to a single stat, or to a single type of task) are things I've thought of implementing before, and which would probably fit with this type of feat progression better than regular Lucky.
If you'd rather have the normal array of Chonky Caster feats for your character, again - who am I to stop you? I only tier the feats the way I am to try and encourage a sense of progression and rising power, rather than trying to take all the best stuff before level 5. If you feel like you don't need any of the other cool feats out there and only combat feats are worth taking, then either I'm not doing my job as a DM or you're going to take those feats no matter what because that's what appeals to you as a player and you're into the combat game more than the other pillars. Nothing wrong with that, and no reason I should punish you for it, ne?
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Not really. Giving players more options (e.g. new spells) isn't power creep unless you screw up and accidentally make a new option strictly better than the alternatives.
Heck, options like the DMG's "Slow Natural Healing" actually weaken the players.
Sure, but you can make a player feel that way without making the game less interesting and without making one option so good players feel forced to take it. The Champion subclass for Fighters proves that really well because Improved Critical is borderline worthless but a lot of players go bonkers for the increased crit range.
But that's not the part of Crossbow Expert that sucks. The #1 problem with it is no longer have disadvantage when an enemy's next to you, followed by the fact that it turns a toy crossbow into the deadliest ranged weapon. The bit about ignoring Loading is the one thing that actually adds value to the game.
That'd work great if there were a whole slew of comparably game-breaking combat style feats, but like I said the others aren't even in the same league as CE/SS and they certainly don't cover the whole gamut of character archetypes. For example, Spell Sniper is a joke compared to Sharpshooter, and Dual Wielder is worse in almost every way than just increasing your DEX.
The best way to put everyone on even footing is to bring the small handful of feats that are punching way above their weight in line with the other feats.
You're right about that, but the point of playtesting is to get players to spot the problems, not to ask them how to fix it. Xanathar's Guide to Everything sold like gangbusters precisely because the devs refused to push anything through unless it was hitting really high satisfaction ratings with players. On the flip side, the main reason Healing Spirit is busted is because it was a last-minute addition that didn't go through Unearthed Arcana.
The whole game is built around that assumption. Every single monster stat block has scores assigned based on the fact that there's an absolute scale from 1 to 30 with the average human sitting at 10 and the 20-30 range being reserved for ancient, godlike beings.
What stat block do adventures tell you to use when a random adult civilian might get into combat? The commoner!
If you have a +0 on your roll, that's still a 55% chance to succeed on an easy DC 10 task without any training. You only need a nat 20 for DC 20, which is by definition a hard task. It shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that a person with mediocre abilities and no training is going to fail that task.
Which is perfectly fine, because the average AC for a CR 1 monster is about 13, and so is the average DC of spells and monster abilities. The player's rolls will continue to get better all on their own thanks to increasing access to class features, spells and magic items, while the benchmark for "hard" stays fixed at 20.
A Fighter with Archery Fighting Style can already start off with +7 to their attack rolls at first level so the bar isn't set super high or anything. By 5th level they're automatically up to +8, and they might have a +1 weapon at that point for +9. That's already enough to hit AC 20 50% of the time, and again, AC 20 is basically the upper end of the scale until you start fighting CR 21+ creatures.
That's a narrative challenge with any kind of progression in the game though. It's not like Fighters literally double their attack speed the instant they kill that last monster and hit 5th level either.
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I disagree that home-brew inherently adds any more power creep than official products. Balanced is balanced no matter who writes it.
As for your thoughts on 5e being too over simplified: I 100% agree.
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First off, Yurei, what is this chargen word that you keep using? It would be helpful if you defined that clearly early on.
I think that everyone who has posted on this thread thus far has made some good points. My own thoughts are that having to choose between feats and ASIs is part of what makes building a character interesting. Letting characters get a feat + a 2 point stat bump Every 4 levels (except Rogues and Fighters) reduces the significance of that choice. It makes more sense to me to just increase the number of ASI/feat opportunities for all players, starting with the free lvl 1 starter feat. Then maybe add another slot for ASI/feat at level 6 and level 12, restricting them to non-combat feats.
I would also support the idea of having different categories of feats so that the really powerful ones cannot happen until level 10. It makes sense that being an expert sniper or a halberd-wielding circle of death doesn't happen until mid-tier.
I do think though, that an issue you are trying to get at, Yurei, with these homebrew rules isn't being directly addressed, which is the incentive/reward system for making fully fleshed out characters. It's not that 5e prevents people from doing so, it's that so much of the game is built solely around combat that less combat-centric builds and playstyles are not rewarded through in-game mechanics. One way to subtly change this would be to make the Ideals, Bonds, Flaws aspect of character creation matter mechanically. For instance, implementation of a Power-Up system for certain non-essential racial abilities and more powerful aspects of combat feats. Players would get Power-Up points to that they can use like charges to be able to activate certain abilities or feat aspects for 1 minute by playing to their Ideals, Bonds and Flaws earlier in the game or in an earlier game session. This would also reward players for choosing feats that fit into a more rounded character since IRL, people do have people/animals/plants/objects they care about, do have flaws and do have goals beyond making money (usually). If their non-combat feat helps them role-play moving towards achieving an ideal, maintaining a bond, or expressing a flaw, it helps them later on during combat.
That also confused me but I'm pretty sure from context it's "character generation".
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shameless self promotion .....
I revamped character creation in my 5e homebrew players handbook (available on drivethru rpg/dm's guide for pay what you want so have it for free! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/13412/Rob-Masters)
basically i boiled it down to:
step 1: decide on the concept for your character
step 2: choose your race
step 3: assign ability scores using the standard array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 and add racial bonuses
step 4: choose your back ground
step 5: assign special abilities....which are feats and you can start off with which ever ones you feel fit in with your character concept and background but each feat as some prerequisite ability score or skill requirements that need to be met but you cannot take racial feats of ASI's
These basically fill out you life prior to adventuring
step 5: choose your starting class
Feats are removed from class progression and changed to be taken every 4 character levels so you can use them for ASI increases or racial feats.
There is also the ability to "learn" feats as you level up, so you might have your proficiency bonus increase and mean you now qualify for a special ability/feat and you can work that into your story as learning on the job/training etc.