Retraining

[willpell]

Would you regard it as dirty pool to use the Retraining mechanism from PHB2 for tactical purposes? If you're playing in a long campaign and you find out that the Big Bad is like a Dread Necromancer or something, switching out your Favored Enemy: Goblins for Undead would make good strategic sense, but say the character still hates Goblins and has no particular objection to Undead beyond the fact that they're trying to kill him. Would you allow the player to Retrain for this strictly mechanical reason?

[Adamosaur]

Personally, I would only allow it if the PC is very underpowered, and (as a DM) I know that their current fav enemy will be put to no use in the campaign/world.
In the games I've played in, usually there is a good cleric in the group who deals with the undead (/turn and sun domain) or has a cleric battle with the evil lich while the rest of the party tries to provide support or soak damage.

So if you're a DM, only if goblins are not present in the current (or future) lands the PCs will travel to, and as a player...well it's up to your DM, but a means to convince him may be through if your characters 1d8+2 isn't doing well vs DR5 if not DR10.

[willpell]

The undead thing was just an example, I mean in general. Basically would you regard it as abusive to use retraining as a way of gaining more character options than your class normally allows?

As far as I can tell the retraining rule makes it possible to do things like rebuilding your character to qualify for a prestige class that he's not even close to right now, as long as you get started soon enough that one change per level will get you there in time. Like if you wanted to be a Horizon Walker, at level 4 you could replace your level 3 feat with Endurance, and at level 5 you could move skill points out of Spellcraft or something and into Knowledge: Geography, and bam: you're ready to become a Horizon Walker at level 6, when normally that level 3 feat choice made it impossible. This could be done even if you were rolling Spellcraft constantly in the campaign this whole time; you just abandon that skill set in favor of the new one.

Obviously the GM can veto all this, but per RAW it seems completely okay to just utterly rescramble your character one level at a time into a totally different individual.

[Glimbur]

The point of a game is to have fun. If retraining lets you fix mistakes you made earlier in your character's career in order to have more fun, go for it.

The situation of the shifting favorite enemy is somewhat different, but favored enemy isn't that good anyway so I would allow it after a few fights to represent learning how to fight a new foe. If it were a spellcaster that wanted to shift their metamagic feats every time the monster of the week changes, I would be more hesitant.

[Curmudgeon]

Retraining is supposed to represent the benefit of greater understanding through experience. So changing favored enemies is fine ─ once. The same would go for picking a different weapon, with a shift to Weapon Focus. But more than once is just dithering, and you'd be better off making up a different character if you can't figure out how to make the current character work.

[willpell]

If it were a spellcaster that wanted to shift their metamagic feats every time the monster of the week changes, I would be more hesitant.

Monster of the week wouldn't be an issue, but monster of the season or year might be; you can Retrain once per level. So if the spellcaster knows that the gnoll warlord which the party hopes to eventually defeat has a Wand of Silence, he can take Silent Spell at this level, knowing he'll be free to Retrain it after the party has fought the gnoll at least often enough for him to run his Wand out of charges. And then if two levels later he's bought a new wand, you can retrain back.

@ Curmudeon: That attitude entirely ignores the possibility that the character has backstory and continuity you don't want to just throw out, or that his buddies might shoot the new character on sight because he isn't their compatriot of ten levels. Retraining lets you play the same character, and that's not just a mechanics issue. What I'm polling about is how far it's sporting to go with revising the character's mechanical abilities, even if there's no flavor justification, just because you can. In essence it becomes a level of meta-optimization that every character can use to gain more options, like a wizard shifting his spells each day, but much longer-term and more permanent. I'm tentatively inclined to consider this a good thing, but wanted to see what others thought.

[Kol Korran]

my group and me are not all that savvy about optimizing. we do ok, but that's about it. my rule when i DM is "you can't change it if you haven't substantially benefited from it" without any thing special except letting me know. (in the above example- if you have fought many goblinoids allready, then you can't change. but if you fought only a few and it wasn't that important, than sure).

but i also agree to change things for more story relevence (including serious tactical changes) if you can roleplay it appropriately and thematically. this should be a BIG deal.

i will also let you change some mechanics if they prove to be quite bad and hinder your fun.

if it's just for mechanical advantage, you already benefited from your previous choice, and your character is not crippled by it? sorry pal, no go.

[Malimar]

My reaction, as a GM, would be: "Oh, that's clever! Sure, go for it!"


I will expand upon your example as an example of my own: I don't think of Favored Enemy as being about hating one creature any more than any other creature. I think of it as being about knowing how to defeat one creature better than any other creature.

Maybe Joe Ranger does hate goblins, so he spends much of his career studying up on goblins' weak spots and mannerisms and so on, giving him Favored Enemy (Goblins).

Then Joe discovers that he's going to be spending a great deal of time and resources going after a Dread Necromancer, so he checks out all the undead-killing books from the library, studies up on undead weak spots and mannerisms and so on, and allows his special knowledge about goblins to atrophy, thus switching Favored Enemy (Goblins) for Favored Enemy (Undead).

Then, once he kills the Dread Necromancer and can go back to his true passion of huntin' goblins, Joe dumps the undead-killing books, consults his goblin-killing books to refresh his memory, and switches Favored Enemy (Undead) back to Favored Enemy (Goblins).

I think all of that makes perfect sense for a character to do, and I would completely allow it.


I can think of very few circumstances in which I would disallow a character from retraining anything they desire to retrain (within the bounds of the retraining rules, of course), especially if the character has a decent IC justification for it. Broken Vow feats, maybe, because of their "may not take another feat to replace it" clauses (though I might let you Dark Chaos Shuffle them, or possibly replace them with Vile feats if the character becomes a sufficiently terrible person). Maybe feats that reflect a physical alteration to your body, like Dragon Wings/Tail or Willing Deformity.

[Andezzar]

As far as I can tell the retraining rule makes it possible to do things like rebuilding your character to qualify for a prestige class that he's not even close to right now, as long as you get started soon enough that one change per level will get you there in time. Like if you wanted to be a Horizon Walker, at level 4 you could replace your level 3 feat with Endurance, and at level 5 you could move skill points out of Spellcraft or something and into Knowledge: Geography, and bam: you're ready to become a Horizon Walker at level 6, when normally that level 3 feat choice made it impossible.You may be mistaken here. You can only exchange a feat/class ability for a feat/class ability that you would have qualified for at the level where the exchange occurs. Example a Fighter 8 could not exchange his level 3 feat for weapon specialization (greatsword) because he could not get WS (gs) at level three, nor could he exchange WS (falchion), which he got at level 4, for WS (gs) unless he also exchange another feat to get Weapon Focus (falchion) before level 4.

In your example, replacing the level 3 feat with endurance is no problem unless removing the previous feat makes other feats unavailable. Moving skill ranks from spellcraft skill to knowledge: geography will only work if knowledge: geography is a class skill for any of your classes. Note though that you exchange ranks not skill points. If you remove two ranks from a cross-class skill (which have cost four skill points) you will only improve another skill by two ranks even if that skill was a class skill for all of your classes.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

For this specific application, i.e. a Ranger switching his Favored Enemy, I have some very strong opinions:

Rangers get screwed by the Favored Enemy mechanic, in that you're moderately effective against a particular set of foes, but mediocre against everything else. This is in the context of the high-op games I play, of course.

With that in mind, I wouldn't at all object to a Ranger switching his Favored Enemies every adventure to tailor his bonuses to his expected opponents. Such things aren't unheard of, for example a Soulbow (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ex/20060403a&page=2) can get the Bane weapon property for his most often encountered opponent, and he can switch it as often as he likes.

My group has actually houseruled Favored Enemy to give a flat +2 per instance of the class feature all the time, against every foe. Favored Enemy as printed is a holdover from previous editions, in which a Ranger was just as effective in combat as a Fighter or Paladin and it was more about flavor than anything. A bonus against a specific set of opponents on a class that's considerably weaker than others whenever those bonuses don't apply is just poor game design.

[Ashtagon]

Personally, I house rule that you can move any favoured enemy category up one step each day, provided you had a meaningful encounter with an example of that favoured enemy in the previous day. Any other favoured enemy categories must be moved down a step when this is done to ensure the character still has the correct total number of bonuses. This can mean that one category of favoured enemy is dropped, if the new favoured enemy wasn't previously 'favoured'.

[willpell]

You may be mistaken here. You can only exchange a feat/class ability for a feat/class ability that you would have qualified for at the level where the exchange occurs.

No I get that, I'm just saying you could "reroll" a decision that you made at the time which closed off the PrC option. In the Horizon Walker example, if you don't have Endurance at level 2, then you MUST take it at level 3 in order to enter Horizon Walker at level 6. Perhaps at level 3 you had never heard of Horizon Walker and you spent your feat on Power Attack, and spent all of level 4 using Power Attack to great effect. Then you learn that Horizon Walker exists and decide you want it, but whoops - Power Attack has prohibited you from gaining Endurance until level 6, so you'd have to wait another whole level after that to become an HW. (We'll assume you already had the K:Geo for some reason.) By using Level 5 to Retrain your Power Attack into Endurance, you can gain HW at the next level, but it means that your character has given up a skill that was very useful to him all throuh level 4, so it might be considered disingenuous from a continuity standpoint.

@ Biffonacius: When you say Rangers were good at fighting in earlier editions, do you mean 3.0 or much older than that? Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with the Ranger as-is (except that only having two combat styles is a bit boring, I would have given him at least four to choose from), but I am admittedly very low-op and don't have much actual play experience, so I'll acknowledge that you probably know what you're talking about here and I almost certainly don't. I have always liked the 3.0 ranger a little bit more than the 3.5 though; turning him into more of a skillmonkey seems appropriate, but losing that HD size hurts.

[Andezzar]

Retraining may bend or break continuity. That is precisely the point of the option. You get some continuity issues for a mechanically better character. The introduction to chapter 8 explicitly lists new/newly found available options as one reason to retrain. Think about the other options for the player, he can either stick with the old feats, and be unhappy with them, throw away the character to make a new one that is eerily similar except for the feat choice, or leave. Replacing feats IMHO is less of a continuity issue than exchanging a valued party member for a complete stranger in the middle of the adventure, even if the feat has been used extensively before the switch. The character is simply changing tactics.

@Ranger: He was talking about 2nd and possibly 1st edition.

@Favored enemy: The "I'm good at fighting X because I hate X more than any other creature" explanation was part of second (and possibly 1st) edition. 3.5 makes gives no reasoning why a ranger is particulary adept at fighting certain creatures. In the context of 2nd editon I always found that rule particularly weird, as rangers had to be of good alignment. Exceptional hate does not strike me as a trait a good character should aspire to have. Also it makes Favored enemy: any of the PHB races morally questionable even though a character could have plenty of reasons to know weak spots when fighting such enemies.

[Ashtagon]

Re. the PHB2 retraining options

I don't allow it. They give the example of Robert the warrior wanting to retrain levels of fighter into knight, the DM disallowing it, so Robert's character sheet gets binned and the party finds Bertor the knight mysteriously slumming it in the next village.

I'm cool with that. But, rather than binning the old characters, I'd suggest they become recurring NPC characters, in order to add some extra flavour to the campaign background.

[Andezzar]

Changing your class levels is not retraining but rebuilding. This has much more impact on continuity IMHO. In that case retiring one character (who remains in the game world) and adding a new one to the adventuring group may create more verisimilitude than "Haha, I can no longer swing a sword but I can now alter reality with a thought (and some words and gestures)."

[Fitz10019]

I'm in favor of retraining, generally, because I want the game to be fun now, at each character's current level. I don't want a character to take have a feat he's not really interested in, just because it's a pre-req for that feat he really wants later, let's call them Preq-feat and Goal-feat. I'm okay if he takes an amusing feat that will be fun now, and later at the next feat choice, retrain the amusing feat into the Preq-feat, and then take the Goal-feat.

One example would be a Bard taking Extra Music at level 1, and getting a lot of fun use out of it. Later at level 3 he retrains Extra Music into Power Attack, and takes Cleave. Maybe he has no interest in Power Attack, but he really digs Cleave. Now that he has 3 songs a day from his class levels, the first feat is less useful, less fun.

Another would be a Rogue taking Point Blank Shot at level 1, and retraining it to Two Weapon Fighting when he is finally allowed to take Weapon Finesse at level 3 and starts doing melee.

In those examples, it's the plan, not fixing a build's mistake. I appreciate the 'fixing' perspective, but mine's a little broader. For me as DM, it also helps assuage guilt when characters die. The players were already enjoying their characters when the characters died.

For me...

Okay: Class feature specifics (favored enemy), spell selections, feats, skill point assignments

Not okay: class levels

[prufock]

I'm not against retraining. It's a little hard to justify thematically that you just suddenly "forget" how to do something (like when you lose a feat or spell), but most of the time I can just rationalize it as "refocusing your efforts" or something vague like that.

Rebuilding is a little more difficult to explain, but I'm usually okay with it if it makes thematic sense - sorcerer lagging behind because of those 2 fighter levels? You start focusing more on building your arcane power, and to heck with hitting things with a stick. You need 1d6 sneak attack to get into a PrC? You do a bit of study on anatomy and you're golden. But complete 180 turns... why not just start a new character?

Race and templates are the most difficult to consider. Generally, I would want these to be resolved in game, but I would work with the player. For instance, if the player isn't satisfied with his race choice, we can work in some sort of Polymorph Any Object to change it permanently. Or we can have the character killed off and then raised with Reincarnation.

In other words, as long as something is not a rules abuse and will enhance the player's fun without completely shagging up in-game consistency, I'll try to work it in.