Are these houserules ok?

[Trandir]

I thought of two houserules and I'd like to have some feedback:
Fighter: they get 4 skill points+Int and the player can pick 2 skills to have as class skills. Also every odd level starting from 3rd you can take a bonus feat that you qualify for that isn't a fighter bonus feat. (I feel sorry for the class)
Sneak attack: no regulation on how many you can do in a round. (To support volley archery) Edit: solved there is greater manyshot for this

[AvatarVecna]

I thought of two houserules and I'd like to have some feedback:
Fighter: they get 4 skill points+Int and the player can pick 2 skills to have as class skills. Also every odd level starting from 3rd you can take a bonus feat that you qualify for that isn't a fighter bonus feat. (I feel sorry for the class)
Sneak attack: no regulation on how many you can do in a round. (To support volley archery)

Fighter stuff is...fine? Eh.

Rogue thing...there's already no limit on how many times you can SA - if you meet the qualifications, you get the dice. The problem archer rogues have is qualifying: getting flat-footed consistently can be difficult, and flanking isn't really a thing for ranged.

[Aotrs Commander]

I thought of two houserules and I'd like to have some feedback:
Fighter: they get 4 skill points+Int and the player can pick 2 skills to have as class skills. Also every odd level starting from 3rd you can take a bonus feat that you qualify for that isn't a fighter bonus feat. (I feel sorry for the class)

Not going to break anything; I did the second part for fighters years and years ago (and more since1).


Sneak attack: no regulation on how many you can do in a round. (To support volley archery)

Eh? There isn't any regulation on how many times you can do sneak attack in 3.5 and PF. (There was in 4E I think, and MAYBE 5E, but you'd have to ask someone that knows). You've always just got it on how many attacks you make which qualify for (which is why TWF rogues are so popular.)

Unless you mean for stuff like Manyshot?




The problem archer rogues have is qualifying: getting flat-footed consistently can be difficult, and flanking isn't really a thing for ranged.

We have gotten around that by adopting (unintentionally, but when we realised, we just stuck with it) a policy of "when target is flanked, it's flanked for everyone, including ranged attacks."




1Current 3.Aotrs Fighter: all features of PF fighter, +1 bonus feat (any) at every odd level (including 1st - 1st level bonus feat can be traed out for +2 skill points/lvl +4 class skills2), some feats have additional effects if you have x levels of Fighter and most recently poll of Action Surges starting at 4th level, granting ability to make move as Swift, extra AoO as immediate, roll with 5E advantage on physical skill/ability check as immediate, effective Iron Heart Surge away stuff and some limited self-heal.


2This is an option, not an automatic feature, because NPC fighters don't usually care about more skills they won't use in a fight.

[Trandir]

Yes it is specifically a buff for manyshot builds. TWF already got SA on every attack

[AvatarVecna]

So...rogues get Greater Manyshot for free when they take Manyshot...okay.

[Kurald Galain]

Also every odd level starting from 3rd you can take a bonus feat that you qualify for that isn't a fighter bonus feat. (I feel sorry for the class)
The fighter already has more feats than it knows what to do with, so adding even more feats isn't really going to help it much.

Consider using this fighter (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/fighter/), particularly its advanced weapon training options (e.g. parry spells with your sword? Sign me up!)

[Trandir]

The fighter already has more feats than it knows what to do with, so adding even more feats isn't really going to help it much.

Consider using this fighter (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/fighter/), particularly its advanced weapon training options (e.g. parry spells with your sword? Sign me up!)

Isn't that the pathfinder fighter?


So...rogues get Greater Manyshot for free when they take Manyshot...okay.

Everyone would get it. But I'm a dumbass and forgot to that part of greater manyshot.

[Aotrs Commander]

Yes it is specifically a buff for manyshot builds. TWF already got SA on every attack

*looks it up*

Actually, yeah, you only don't get your SA specifically on Manyshot, you DO explictly already get it on Greater Manyshot, so I would say leave it as it is; for the level Manyshot comes online, I think it's fine to trade off doing slightly less damage for making more than one attack and being able to move.

If you want to make Manyshot better, I myself also gave it PF's Manyshot feature, so you get an extra arrow automatically (but on SA/Crit once) on your first attack of a Full Attack. (In addition to being able to make the double-attack as standard.)





The fighter already has more feats than it knows what to do with, so adding even more feats isn't really going to help it much.

Depends on how many feats you have access to. If you have access to loads of feats, you're still never short of anything to get, especially if half of them don't have to be combat feats.

Even a feat every level is a less spells than a caster gets when they get spells.

[Max Caysey]

I thought of two houserules and I'd like to have some feedback:
Fighter: they get 4 skill points+Int and the player can pick 2 skills to have as class skills. Also every odd level starting from 3rd you can take a bonus feat that you qualify for that isn't a fighter bonus feat. (I feel sorry for the class)
Sneak attack: no regulation on how many you can do in a round. (To support volley archery) Edit: solved there is greater manyshot for this

I'd say that 4 or even 6 skill points per level, including more class skills is a fine way og giving the class some more options - especially outside combat.

The second option, granting more feats seems well op, but be carefull. I would rather that you allowed for multiple application of improved X or somthing like Rapid Shot... That way the fighter can specialize more... that might be more fun.

I don't agree to giving the class Sneak Attack...

[Aotrs Commander]

The second option, granting more feats seems well op

It really isn't. I've been running with feat-per-level fighters for, oh, a good chunk over a decade now and honestly, it didn't do enough. As I have said before, feats are in general weaker than spells, and the fighter gets less feats than casters do spells. A 20th-level fighter, with 3.5-frequency feats and a feat every class level only has 27 feats (30 with PF-frequency); a 20th level wizard has 40 spells per day (and a cleric has 56) BEFORE bonus spells per ability score. A standard-issue 3.5 Fighter at level 20 has only marginally more feats than a vanilla RANGER OR PALADIN has spells and he has LESS feats from his class (11) than they do spells from theirs (12+ ability, so maybe 14?).

(The idea that you can only use spells once per day and feats forever is in practise a non-issue, in the same way the warlock's invocations failed to break the game, because in practical, actual play, the party will rest when the casters are out of resources anyway and you never actually fight enough rounds of combat PERIOD for "unlimited" to functionally matter.)



I suspect that you could nearly give fighters as many feats as casters have spells and still not break the game.

[AvatarVecna]

I suspect that you could nearly give fighters as many feats as casters have spells and still not break the game.

Spells can be used to get feats, while feats can't be used to get spells. Not in an significant capacity, anyway. And certainly there are not very many feats available to a fighter that can be honestly compared to the greatest spells. You'd basically have to invent new feats suited to a higher level of optimization, that gave options the fighter and other non-casters just straight-up do not have currently have. in particular, some methods of non-magic countering magic would be nice - magic is allowed to counter magic and non-magic, but non-magic is only allowed to counter non-magic, and that's part of what keeps things the way they are. If the skill system were expanded (and more forgiving to non-casters than casters), if there were...idk ways to use combat skill to dispel magic, or to cut a hole between planes/locations, it'd at least be something.

There was a thread awhile back to judge what tier a fighter would be if the PF Fighter had every single archetype stacked together without actually giving up anything to get the new features. The result was judged to be high T3, largely because of getting 4th lvl wizard casting and significantly expanded skill access, with 50+ archetypes worth of "stick hit" features having enough overlap to always be relevant but being nowhere near equal to the sum of its parts.

Spheres Of Might has the Conscript, a blatant "fighter but better" that gets 45 feat-equivalents by 20th level. Oh and by "feat equivalent" I mean some of them mimic good feats completely, while others are upgraded versions of existing feats, and most of them are just "existing feat but way better, and also it gets better as you level up". It also can exchange bonus feats for all kinds of neat class features, and as a class in the SoM system it has significantly-improved skill access to boot. As with all the spheres stuff, it's pretty solidly sitting in the "high T4 to low T2" range.

There's some solid mundane homebrew that's designed with the intention of competing with T1 casters going full force (exponential feat gain, massively expanded feat options from "**** your magic my **** still works" to "I can heal, Mr Miyagi style" to "action economy shenanigans" and more)...and honestly it still probably doesn't actually compete because that particular homebrew project, part of the deal is that your hyper-fighter or whatever can't use magic items. If you use it purely for grabbing existent feats without getting any of the new options, the hyper-fighter gets 180 by 20th lvl (on top of a perfect chassis and reducing damage from every hit by 20). And the other classes in that project are similarly ridiculous.

Of course, all of this is only a problem if you're the kind of fool who thinks two characters of the same level are supposed to be on even footing with each other - that a party of four fighters is supposed to be just as balanced/unbalanced as a party of four wizards, the way the CR system and the chargen system heavily imply was designer intent. Of course, such a foolish opinion isn't universally held...

*glances at that one thread that's been on the front page page for over a month*

[Kurald Galain]

It really isn't. I've been running with feat-per-level fighters for, oh, a good chunk over a decade now and honestly, it didn't do enough.

Yes, that's precisely my point.

If a tenth-level fighter has ten feats now, presumably he has the best ten feats for his build. Giving him five more feats will give him his low-priority picks because he already has all the high-priority picks. It helps, a bit, but not by much really.

[Psyren]

Isn't that the pathfinder fighter?

Yes, and it does everything you're doing and more besides - feats every odd level, more skills (both from Advanced Weapon Training/Advanced Armor Training, and from archetypes like Lore Warden), can craft magic items, alternate capstones, and the Stamina system. If you want Fighter+ without messing with a ToB-style maneuver system, it's one of the best bets out there.

[Aotrs Commander]

Yes, that's precisely my point.

If a tenth-level fighter has ten feats now, presumably he has the best ten feats for his build. Giving him five more feats will give him his low-priority picks because he already has all the high-priority picks. It helps, a bit, but not by much really.

It does mean that, at least, something like the TWF/Shield bash character has enough feats to be getting on with.

(And for me, adding the PF fighter class features on top gives him a little bit more, and the stuff I posted the other day (which seems to have been moved to homebrew, not that that thread was basically done with anyway), it can do a bit more; though really, at the point a fighter has *quick copy-paste feat-list-to-spreadsheet* 1415 feats to pick from my currently approved list (and that's NOT counting stuff like metamagic or psionic feats, and you could pick up the latter just from feats as well), one feels that ought to be enough to be getting on with for the moment. Will I give fighters another 'nother buff later? Maybe, but I'm gonna see how the lastest round affects things in practise WHEN THE INSANITY ENDS before I do too much more.)

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I suspect that you could nearly give fighters as many feats as casters have spells and still not break the game.

In the last campaign I ran, I let characters gain extra feats (among other things) through downtime training, with fighters being able to pick up fighter bonus feats much faster than other characters. The party fighter ended up literally having more feats than the party wizard had spells in his spellbook after said wizard spent all his time adding spells, and indeed it didn't break the game. Rather, that fighter being great at sword and board and TWF and archery and mounted combat and so forth, and then being able to pick up a bunch of non-combat feats like Open Minded and various skill boosters made him feel like, y'know, a competent well-rounded warrior instead of the one-trick pony that melee types tend to be.

[Max Caysey]

It really isn't. I've been running with feat-per-level fighters for, oh, a good chunk over a decade now and honestly, it didn't do enough. As I have said before, feats are in general weaker than spells, and the fighter gets less feats than casters do spells. A 20th-level fighter, with 3.5-frequency feats and a feat every class level only has 27 feats (30 with PF-frequency); a 20th level wizard has 40 spells per day (and a cleric has 56) BEFORE bonus spells per ability score. A standard-issue 3.5 Fighter at level 20 has only marginally more feats than a vanilla RANGER OR PALADIN has spells and he has LESS feats from his class (11) than they do spells from theirs (12+ ability, so maybe 14?).

(The idea that you can only use spells once per day and feats forever is in practise a non-issue, in the same way the warlock's invocations failed to break the game, because in practical, actual play, the party will rest when the casters are out of resources anyway and you never actually fight enough rounds of combat PERIOD for "unlimited" to functionally matter.)



I suspect that you could nearly give fighters as many feats as casters have spells and still not break the game.

Huh... that’s quite interesting. I guess I stand corrected. And good to know by the way! 😊

[NigelWalmsley]

It really isn't. I've been running with feat-per-level fighters for, oh, a good chunk over a decade now and honestly, it didn't do enough.

The game just doesn't give out enough feats. Everyone should be getting a feat or two per level, and you should just ban any feats that cause problems if you do that. As it is, the marginal cost of a feat is entirely to high for most feats to be justifiable, which is a real shame, because it tends to push people towards cookie-cutter feat selection. If you are going to get three feats in the game, it's really hard to justify picking up something like Educated, even if it's a great conceptual fit for your character.


Spells can be used to get feats, while feats can't be used to get spells. Not in an significant capacity, anyway.

Feats can give you spells if you already have spells. There are actually a bunch of really good feats, it's just that they all require you to be a Fighter already. Which, yes, doesn't solve the problem, but is something to bear in mind when people inevitably tell you that whatever feats you create to fix things are OP. They probably actually aren't, it's just that they are now going to classes that needed the powerup instead of ones that didn't.


If the skill system were expanded (and more forgiving to non-casters than casters)

Many people like the idea of expanding the skill system, but I'm not convinced. I think that you should just buff the classes. The way skill checks work in 3e makes them a bad mechanism for mediating access to high level abilities (see: the Truenamer), and lining things up to do it tends to result in setups that are either stupid at the high end, or leave holes in the skill system at the low end. Use Rope is a very reasonable thing to have as a skill if skills are just supposed to represent the basic range of human competence, but once you start trying to figure out what Epic Use Rope is supposed to do, things tend to get dumb. I favor just giving people class features. It also avoids creating big swings in character power from high Intelligence, or eroding the concept of a Skill Monkey.


There was a thread awhile back to judge what tier a fighter would be if the PF Fighter had every single archetype stacked together without actually giving up anything to get the new features. The result was judged to be high T3, largely because of getting 4th lvl wizard casting and significantly expanded skill access, with 50+ archetypes worth of "stick hit" features having enough overlap to always be relevant but being nowhere near equal to the sum of its parts.

Spheres Of Might has the Conscript, a blatant "fighter but better" that gets 45 feat-equivalents by 20th level. Oh and by "feat equivalent" I mean some of them mimic good feats completely, while others are upgraded versions of existing feats, and most of them are just "existing feat but way better, and also it gets better as you level up". It also can exchange bonus feats for all kinds of neat class features, and as a class in the SoM system it has significantly-improved skill access to boot. As with all the spheres stuff, it's pretty solidly sitting in the "high T4 to low T2" range.

There's some solid mundane homebrew that's designed with the intention of competing with T1 casters going full force (exponential feat gain, massively expanded feat options from "**** your magic my **** still works" to "I can heal, Mr Miyagi style" to "action economy shenanigans" and more)...and honestly it still probably doesn't actually compete because that particular homebrew project, part of the deal is that your hyper-fighter or whatever can't use magic items. If you use it purely for grabbing existent feats without getting any of the new options, the hyper-fighter gets 180 by 20th lvl (on top of a perfect chassis and reducing damage from every hit by 20). And the other classes in that project are similarly ridiculous.

I mean, a lot of that comes down to focusing too much on the wrong parts of the Tier System (specifically, the "breaking the game" bits). You don't actually need to do that much to make the Fighter acceptably balanced with the Wizard. In combat, a Warblade can keep up with a Wizard for most of the game with only modestly higher optimization. Obviously there's still work to be done there, but it's a lot easier than people think. The issue is outside combat. An Ubercharger can do enough damage that a Wizard sits up and notices. But when he's confronted with something as simple as "a wide chasm", he's falling back on "maybe a relevant magic item".

If you want to fix Fighters (here a stand in for "martial characters in general"), you need to do three things:

1. Slightly increase their power (relative to optimization) in combat.
2. Significantly increase the variety of things they can do in combat, both as individual characters and in general.
3. Completely overhaul the way they work outside combat.

[Aotrs Commander]

The game just doesn't give out enough feats. Everyone should be getting a feat or two per level, and you should just ban any feats that cause problems if you do that. As it is, the marginal cost of a feat is entirely to high for most feats to be justifiable, which is a real shame, because it tends to push people towards cookie-cutter feat selection. If you are going to get three feats in the game, it's really hard to justify picking up something like Educated, even if it's a great conceptual fit for your character.


I do take your point; in fact, I seriously did consider as part of my rules-project makiing level-based feats be a feat per level... but I haven't because I REALLY didn't want to go through everything (for the umpteenth time) and add a feat per level to EVERYTHING.

(What feats do you even give animals? Yes, if everyone gets a feat every level, they have to as well.)

I think the preparation load-out and amount of effort and time (if everyone has twice as many feats, it WILL take longer in real time to get everyone's feats sorted, whether it's me as DM in prep or everyone around the table) is weighed againts that, especially as not everyone has spells, but everyone would have feats. (I'd have to do A LOT of printing to get enough lists and such for people to even look at).

So while that may be something that I might like to do, simple practical concerns (in that it would take too much real-time to add that load on top of everything else), I think, might bog things down more than it would help in the long run.

I can always change my mnd later, of course...

[NigelWalmsley]

I do take your point; in fact, I seriously did consider as part of my rules-project makiing level-based feats be a feat per level... but I haven't because I REALLY didn't want to go through everything (for the umpteenth time) and add a feat per level to EVERYTHING.

Have you considered just not doing that? I'm generally in favor of transparency between PCs and monsters, but it seems totally fine to only apply this to PCs (and maybe important NPCs). The reason you want PCs to have more feats is to support customization and make characters feel unique. Those concerns don't apply at all to Wild Bear #7.


I think the preparation load-out and amount of effort and time (if everyone has twice as many feats, it WILL take longer in real time to get everyone's feats sorted, whether it's me as DM in prep or everyone around the table) is weighed againts that, especially as not everyone has spells, but everyone would have feats. (I'd have to do A LOT of printing to get enough lists and such for people to even look at).

There are resources which give comprehensive listings of feats, and feats are generally not chosen at game time. Maybe your groups are different, but my experience is that "picking a feat" is something that happens between sessions and gets rolled into someone's baseline numbers. There's not a lot of game slowdown as a result.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I do take your point; in fact, I seriously did consider as part of my rules-project makiing level-based feats be a feat per level... but I haven't because I REALLY didn't want to go through everything (for the umpteenth time) and add a feat per level to EVERYTHING.

(What feats do you even give animals? Yes, if everyone gets a feat every level, they have to as well.)

You could perhaps treat these feats more like magic items than as level-based feats. That is, instead of saying "Okay, everyone gets two extra feats at level-up" or whatever, you instead hand out feat picks at convenient or dramatically-appropriate times (at the end of every other session, after defeating a dungeon miniboss, etc.) at a rate that generally aims for a "feat by level" value of two but might vary from one to three based on actual campaign events.

Not only does this give PCs regular improvements between level-ups and also tie the feats they take into actual feats that they perform (e.g. after defeating their first frost giant, a wizard might pick up Fiery Spell and a fighter might pick up Underfoot Fighting), but it lets you treat the amount of feats different creatures get with no more metagame-y-ness than you treat the amount of magic items they get, so animals might get zero or one extra, humanoids a handful, immortal outsiders a bunch, and so on.


I think the preparation load-out and amount of effort and time (if everyone has twice as many feats, it WILL take longer in real time to get everyone's feats sorted, whether it's me as DM in prep or everyone around the table) is weighed againts that, especially as not everyone has spells, but everyone would have feats. (I'd have to do A LOT of printing to get enough lists and such for people to even look at).

So while that may be something that I might like to do, simple practical concerns (in that it would take too much real-time to add that load on top of everything else), I think, might bog things down more than it would help in the long run.

When I was dealing with the players-get-tons-o'-feats issue, my group handled everything between sessions, like Nigel said: I could handle feat requests or whatever in our group chat or over email with no printouts required, the players would know how much time it would take to get a given feat and record that ahead of time, and then when I'd say "...and it takes you three weeks of downtime to sail across the ocean" they could just check things off and be ready to go immediately.

I assume by DM prep you mean the issue with building NPCs with more feats, and on that front I actually found giving them more feats made building NPCs easier, not harder. More feat slots means more flexibility in picking feats so you don't have to plan level order and such as carefully, and you can have several standard feat packages for various things (just like you might have standard sets of magic items for various things) usable and combinable at various levels because both a 4th- and a 14th-level character can have 5+ feat slots.

[Aotrs Commander]

Have you considered just not doing that? I'm generally in favor of transparency between PCs and monsters, but it seems totally fine to only apply this to PCs (and maybe important NPCs). The reason you want PCs to have more feats is to support customization and make characters feel unique. Those concerns don't apply at all to Wild Bear #7.

No. Actually, the monster/PC level playing field was for me one of the most fundemental changes to AD&D that I took onboard completely, to the point I now "properly" generate stat blocks for Rolemaster monsters, let alone D&D. So with pretty much a very small handful of exceptions for the NPCs that get stuff the PCs aren't allowed, the NPCs and monsters are on the same level as the PCs - anything the one gets, the other does.

My homebrew-campaign world actually went even further, and when I ostensibly replaced the numbers part of the magic item tree for that world with a set, level-based progression, EVERYTHING (including animals) got that progression; I don't even want animals to be essentially less of a threat than they already are.


There are resources which give comprehensive listings of feats, and feats are generally not chosen at game time. Maybe your groups are different, but my experience is that "picking a feat" is something that happens between sessions and gets rolled into someone's baseline numbers. There's not a lot of game slowdown as a result.


When I was dealing with the players-get-tons-o'-feats issue, my group handled everything between sessions, like Nigel said: I could handle feat requests or whatever in our group chat or over email with no printouts required, the players would know how much time it would take to get a given feat and record that ahead of time, and then when I'd say "...and it takes you three weeks of downtime to sail across the ocean" they could just check things off and be ready to go immediately.

With the one and only exception of the one player who likes to have a copy of his character sheet and do stuff in-between session, everyone else does character generation during game-time. (Where they have access to the books, the experts and can be arsed to do it.) Most of my players just aren't that bothered about doing anything out-of-session, to be honest. (But it has literally taken the virus apocalyse for them to stop turning up week-in, weej-out, so I must be doing something right...)




You could perhaps treat these feats more like magic items than as level-based feats. That is, instead of saying "Okay, everyone gets two extra feats at level-up" or whatever, you instead hand out feat picks at convenient or dramatically-appropriate times (at the end of every other session, after defeating a dungeon miniboss, etc.) at a rate that generally aims for a "feat by level" value of two but might vary from one to three based on actual campaign events.

I've long since passed the point of giving the PCs extra stuff, unless very rigoursly monitored, because I did that a few times too many when I was young and foolish. (I have, for example, given the Dark Lord's Black Ops some special training abilities.) But that's as far as I would go. My players don't need the deck stacking more oin the favour with something like extra feats, they're competent enough as if is.

Now, there are places where I might consider doing it (I have a half-germinated idea for an X-Com-ish sort of survival game, which might be functionally best as a slightly-tuned D&D, wherein the "progression" would be essentially in partial levels); but it's not something I'm going to do for our normal weekly, adventure-path campaigns.


I assume by DM prep you mean the issue with building NPCs with more feats, and on that front I actually found giving them more feats made building NPCs easier, not harder. More feat slots means more flexibility in picking feats so you don't have to plan level order and such as carefully, and you can have several standard feat packages for various things (just like you might have standard sets of magic items for various things) usable and combinable at various levels because both a 4th- and a 14th-level character can have 5+ feat slots.

Harder is not the issue - longer is, because going through the feats to pick them specifically for the current purpose just takes time. I don't use (or would want to) use stock batches of feats (generating stuff if half of the fun), aside from instances where I might take the stats of something to level up or fiddle with the feats.

Basically, I don't consider it a good use of additional extra time and effort on my part at the moment to increase the number of feats. (Hell, the fact when we start again we'll functionally be playing a new edition with lots of changes it alreay enough load on the players, to be honest.)

(I mean, look, what started out as me wanting to port the Pathfinder Soulknife over has snowballed into seven month's (and counting) work and expanded my house-rules to hundreds of pages; there are SOME limitations I have to set for myself somewhere, lest everything become a litany of ever-increasing tasks that will never be finished...)

[PairO'Dice Lost]

With the one and only exception of the one player who likes to have a copy of his character sheet and do stuff in-between session, everyone else does character generation during game-time. (Where they have access to the books, the experts and can be arsed to do it.) Most of my players just aren't that bothered about doing anything out-of-session, to be honest. (But it has literally taken the virus apocalyse for them to stop turning up week-in, weej-out, so I must be doing something right...)

Oof, that must take quite a while. Next session, I think I'm gonna thank my group for doing as much as possible between sessions and save game time for gaming.


Harder is not the issue - longer is, because going through the feats to pick them specifically for the current purpose just takes time. I don't use (or would want to) use stock batches of feats (generating stuff if half of the fun), aside from instances where I might take the stats of something to level up or fiddle with the feats.

Basically, I don't consider it a good use of additional extra time and effort on my part at the moment to increase the number of feats. (Hell, the fact when we start again we'll functionally be playing a new edition with lots of changes it alreay enough load on the players, to be honest.)

That's fair, especially if your custom system has other customization dials your players can use in lieu of feats. I tend to keep pretty much every NPC I've ever made in a big ol' library to reuse as needed, so I only need to make a comparatively small percentage of NPCs from scratch for a given campaign and having more customization options per NPC is always better so that reused NPCs can be tweaked as needed to fit the new setting or required role.

[bekeleven]

My solution to all mundanes is build a generic class that does all of their jobs better (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?332829-The-Professional-Generic-Mundane-Base-Class-3-5) and let players build the classes themselves.

Neither of these changes change the tier of their base classes. That's fine if your party doesn't optimize too hard. If they start an arms race and the non-casters fall behind, you can look into more drastic measures.

On the subject of feats vs. spells: I have a homebrew class with medium BAB, 1 good save, D8 HD, 4+Int skills, and 5th-level casting. One of its ACFs is, "You can't cast spells. You have full BAB, all good saves, 6+Int skills and a D12 HD." This ACF reduces the power of the class.

[Aotrs Commander]

That's fair, especially if your custom system has other customization dials your players can use in lieu of feats. I tend to keep pretty much every NPC I've ever made in a big ol' library to reuse as needed, so I only need to make a comparatively small percentage of NPCs from scratch for a given campaign and having more customization options per NPC is always better so that reused NPCs can be tweaked as needed to fit the new setting or required role.

All my quests back to the back-end of AD&D are pre-prepared (I was functionally running adventure paths before the phrase existed), so I have a default library. In addition,m as I loathe trying to run monsters out of a book, whenever a campaign calls for a monster without giving stats, the stat block goes into the quest, and then into the Generic Bestiary for future use.

(But it means that when I do a rules update - such as to slightly change the way the stat blocks are formatted, or to go to PF CMD from BAB/GRAPPLE I have both that and my entirely-custom bestiary to go through to fix.)


I'm sure someone is wondering "well, can't you just not do that?" To which my onlt reply can be that this morning, I had to search through approximately 10-15 years of CD backups to find a file on one from 2002 dating back to 1999 to find double-check the default load out of a scifi fighter to then check against the variant version because I'm currently I'm currently working on updating said fighter to 3D printing from the fold-flat cardboard model that itself dates from at least 1997 and apparently at the time I did not bother to create a list of standard loads for anything other than the Aotrs starfleet (and I have, after spending 2.5 hours on it last might beyond my designated cut-off hour go back an extend the weapon pd, because it actually isn't sufficiently long enough to accomodate the known missile size from one of my ground vehicles. Which proves both that I am, if anything, still not OCD ENOUGH about this stuff...