willpell
2013-01-18, 10:31 AM
The 3E rules are incredibly complex, and there are a lot of hard-to-forsee interactions. I'm often tempted to houserule things to make them work more to my preferences, but I'm very hesitant to risk creating more problems than I solve. So I'm looking to crowdsource some trouble spots to watch out for, where a change can have unwanted repercussions. This is intended to benefit others as well, becoming a community resource of sorts. It is emphatically not meant as a way to power up characters, but rather to explain how they would be powered up if a DM were careless in handing out the free candy, so as to avoid such pitfalls.
It's kind of hard to explain broadly what I'm on about, so I'll give an example. I've often found myself building characters who have a "touchy-feely" or "nonlethal force" concept that makes me want to give them Improved Grapple, but it seems wrong to have them take the prerequisite feat Improved Unarmed Strike. It's not a question of getting the feat slots, but rather of whether a "discount" is dangerous for prerequsite purposes. Is there a higher-level feat, a Prestige Class, or something else which becomes available problematically early if you're able to skip having to take IUS before you gain access to IG?
Feel free to list more questions of this sort, as well as to mention any answers to the questions that have been posted. So if, for example, you know of a PrC whose prerequisites include IUS, IG, and two other feats, normally meaning that even humans cannot normally qualify before 6th level, you can tell me what that PrC is here. If many such examples crop up, I'll probably leave things as they are in RAW, but if the only case anyone can come up with is some Forgotten Realms PrC with full Wizard casting, I won't worry about it. So if you've had similar puzzlers on the brain, feel free to bring 'em up, or to share what you know about what's been questioned.
It's kind of hard to explain broadly what I'm on about, so I'll give an example. I've often found myself building characters who have a "touchy-feely" or "nonlethal force" concept that makes me want to give them Improved Grapple, but it seems wrong to have them take the prerequisite feat Improved Unarmed Strike. It's not a question of getting the feat slots, but rather of whether a "discount" is dangerous for prerequsite purposes. Is there a higher-level feat, a Prestige Class, or something else which becomes available problematically early if you're able to skip having to take IUS before you gain access to IG?
Feel free to list more questions of this sort, as well as to mention any answers to the questions that have been posted. So if, for example, you know of a PrC whose prerequisites include IUS, IG, and two other feats, normally meaning that even humans cannot normally qualify before 6th level, you can tell me what that PrC is here. If many such examples crop up, I'll probably leave things as they are in RAW, but if the only case anyone can come up with is some Forgotten Realms PrC with full Wizard casting, I won't worry about it. So if you've had similar puzzlers on the brain, feel free to bring 'em up, or to share what you know about what's been questioned.