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View Full Version : D&D 3.x Other Thinking about Toughness got me here (PEACH)



Halrax
2021-12-27, 07:15 AM
I have another post planned that tries to improve all the poor or mediocre feats in core 3.5, but at some point I realized these feats should have its own post.

I was thinking about how Toughness is one of the worst feats in the game (except maybe at level one) and how to make it better. Some people like to make feats scale by level or BAB or whatever, but that results in a situation where PCs have to look over all their feats they've already taken when they gain a level to see if those got better, so I prefer flat bonuses. But since Toughness does need to scale somewhat with level, I took a page out of Font of Inspiration's book and came up with this.

Toughness: Gain 5 hp. Can be taken more than once. Each time it's taken the hp gained goes up by 5 (stacking).

So the first you take it, you gain 5, the second time you gain 10 for a total of 15, the third time you gain 15 for a total of 30, etc.

Then I got to thinking about how Improved Toughness doesn't actually improve Toughness or require it (which is weird and nonintuitive), plus the requirement of base Fort save +2 is fairly trivial to meet by the time the feat is worthwhile to take, so then I came up with this.

Improved Toughness: Requires Great Fortitude, Toughness. Gain 10 hp for every time you've taken Toughness. If you take Toughness again you gain another 10 hp.

So now you have a way to increase your hp in a meaningful way if you're into that, plus newer players won't be caught in the trap option of core Toughness. Yes, having multiple feats at low levels (such as human fighter 1) gives you insane hp for that level, but there's a lot more you could be doing with those feats that would be more helpful.

But then I got to thinking, what about the other saves? So I came up with this.

Quickness: Gain +2 to Initiative checks. Can be taken more than once. Each time it's taken the bonus gained goes up by 2 (stacking). (so total bonus is 2/6/12/20/etc.)

Improved Quickness: Requires Lightning Reflexes, Quickness. Gain +4 to Initiative checks for every time you've taken Quickness. If you take Quickness again you gain another +4 to Initiative.

(These replace Improved Initiative. These can practically guarantee going first in a combat assuming one acts in the surprise round, but finding a way to counter or nerf save or dies such as good saves, SR, Uncanny Dodge, Mettle, etc. is important already for Celerity and Celerity doesn't take all your feats for much of your career. So I don't think it's too bad.)

Awareness: Gain 5 ft of blindsense. Can be taken more than once. Each time it's taken the improvement in the radius of blindsense goes up by 5 ft (stacking). (so total radius is 5/15/30/50/etc.)

Improved Awareness: Requires Iron Will, Awareness. Gain 10 ft in Blindsense radius for every time you've taken Awareness. If you take Awareness again you gain another 10 ft of Blindsense radius.

(This one took me a while to come up with. Yes, this is powerful. But it's still blocked by line of effect and getting to any reasonable distance takes a lot of feats. The main benefit is knowing what square an adjacent invisible enemy is in but there's still a miss chance and something like scent isn't that hard to get, plus Darkstalker still exists. My main worry is that I should keep the radius increase linear since area already scales.)

One last note: All of these feats are considered fighter bonus feats.

So, thoughts? Will these feats break the game? Are they as mechanically elegant as I think they are? Will mundanes finally have nice things or will casters just spend every feat on Quickness and win every combat in the surprise round? Should Awareness increase linearly and if so what should Improved Awareness be? (just doubling the radius doesn't seem to fit. Maybe just 10 or 15 ft since that scales with multiple Awareness? Or 5 ft plus 5 ft per 2 or 3 Awareness?) Would anybody ever use these in their games?

I really like them since (among other things) it makes finding feats for monsters with high HD easier (or high level NPC fighters), just have them take Toughness a bunch of times. The developers actually already did this (looking at you, Tarrasque), but this time it's actually worthwhile. Or you can have Quickness for a terrifyingly quick monster (Big Iron intensifies) or Awareness for a monster with ESP.

PEACH!

sandmote
2021-12-28, 10:41 PM
I do not particularly like 3.5e, so please take the following with a gain of salt.

I'd add some more prerequisites to the Awareness feat. 6th level and 15 Wisdom, maybe? Improves Awareness is probably also overkill given the scaling range.

I'm also a bit worried about replacing the Improved Initiative feat just because so many people take it once they got a spare feat slot. Either your idea will get the table to relax about initiative, or everyone's going to be worrying about it way more because some PCs and NPCs will always be going before others. At the very least I would reduce Quickness to +2 each time you take it and Improved Quickness to +1 for each time you've taken the Quickness feat.

I love the fix to toughness though, which is why I'm bothering with a comment. +15 HP at first level (+30 if the DM allows flaws) is a lot, but it doesn't actually help you get better at doing things, so I'm fine with it. It lets a player be the "I'll outlast everyone" sort of PC from 1st level, which is a lot earlier than most PCs can mechanically differentiate themselves from others with the same class. Usually at this point martials pick between being ranged vs melee and casters pick what spell school they specialize in, so I welcome the added option. A problem you're like to see with this is in the "Epic 6" variant ruleset, which tries to force 3.5e d&d back into some semblance of reality. The idea there is that 1st-5th level PCs still have human-level abilities, and this gets broken worse by your version of Toughness than by the Great Cleave feat.

Will mundanes finally have nice things or will casters just spend every feat on Quickness and win every combat in the surprise round? I don't think this forum even considers the "martials vs casters" issue to even be a derailment at this point, so I would like to point out you can't give martials nice things without a big argument breaking out. Some people are adamant that Hit Points, BAB, full casting, and skill ranks are all E6 but even at 20th level you can't let martial class features surpass the abilities of olympic level athletes.

Halrax
2022-01-08, 03:43 AM
I do not particularly like 3.5e, so please take the following with a gain of salt.

I'd add some more prerequisites to the Awareness feat. 6th level and 15 Wisdom, maybe? Improves Awareness is probably also overkill given the scaling range.
Yeah, I'm think making Awareness a stacking 5 ft and Improved Awareness 5 ft plus 5 ft per two Awareness. Since people with high Wisdom won't be taking Iron Will or need Blindsense as much, requiring Wisdom kind of defeats the point and is mechanically inelegant. There's still a 50% miss chance and a very limited range so I'm not too worried about balance. It still requires a lot of feats (even more now) to be useful vs normal stealth, its main use is in melee combat once combat has already started (and the hidden creature still has total concealment and can use sneak attack so it's not that useful.


I'm also a bit worried about replacing the Improved Initiative feat just because so many people take it once they got a spare feat slot. Either your idea will get the table to relax about initiative, or everyone's going to be worrying about it way more because some PCs and NPCs will always be going before others. At the very least I would reduce Quickness to +2 each time you take it and Improved Quickness to +1 for each time you've taken the Quickness feat.
Note that taking Quickness once is worse than Improved Initiative, it requires taking it three times for it to break even with Improved Initiative per feat and with more opportunity cost and diminishing utility. And if there's already a disparity in initiative modifiers then even spending four (!) feats doesn't guarantee going first. But the numbers do seem a bit high even with the opportunity cost. Let's make it +2/+3/+4 etc. (stacking) per Quickness and Improved Quickness gives +3 per Quickness. Breaking even with Improved Initiative now takes 5 Quickness, or if one has Lightning Reflexes then just under it (+11) with 3 feats or just over it (+18) with 4 feats. I think if the rocket tag problem is mostly dealt with via houserules, creative encounter design, and the entire game not being about combat then spending all your feats to (usually) guarantee going first isn't an issue. Remember that not all builds need to include Improved Initiative, it's just a good choice to do so if a feat slot is available. So having the first feat be worse but giving the choice for more investment makes the choice more interesting due to the increased opportunity cost.


I love the fix to toughness though, which is why I'm bothering with a comment. +15 HP at first level (+30 if the DM allows flaws) is a lot, but it doesn't actually help you get better at doing things, so I'm fine with it. It lets a player be the "I'll outlast everyone" sort of PC from 1st level, which is a lot earlier than most PCs can mechanically differentiate themselves from others with the same class. Usually at this point martials pick between being ranged vs melee and casters pick what spell school they specialize in, so I welcome the added option. A problem you're like to see with this is in the "Epic 6" variant ruleset, which tries to force 3.5e d&d back into some semblance of reality. The idea there is that 1st-5th level PCs still have human-level abilities, and this gets broken worse by your version of Toughness than by the Great Cleave feat.
I don't think this forum even considers the "martials vs casters" issue to even be a derailment at this point, so I would like to point out you can't give martials nice things without a big argument breaking out. Some people are adamant that Hit Points, BAB, full casting, and skill ranks are all E6 but even at 20th level you can't let martial class features surpass the abilities of olympic level athletes.
Yeah, this ruleset kind of gets broken in E6 where the number of feats is meant to encourage diversification rather than specialization, but there do exist feat chains for charging builds or tripping builds that are several feats deep and available in E6 so it could work. I kind of threw in the martial vs casters thing as a joke but also about realizing Toughness and Quickness are as useful if not more so for casters as for martials, plus how combat feats were supposedly designed assuming they were taken by fighters which makes it hard for nonfighter martials to use feat chains and makes fighters effectively have no class features compared to casters, though honestly I'm not really sure if that theory's valid. Note on the "semblance of reality" thing is the article "Calibrating your Expectations" on the alexandrian blog that shows how 6th level is the point at which D&D leaves the possibilities of reality, so E6 going to effectively 8th or 9th with feats (5 feats per level) and going beyond the possibilities of physics via these feats isn't that much of a problem for me, though I see how it could be for others.

Ignimortis
2022-01-08, 05:06 AM
So now you have a way to increase your hp in a meaningful way if you're into that, plus newer players won't be caught in the trap option of core Toughness. Yes, having multiple feats at low levels (such as human fighter 1) gives you insane hp for that level, but there's a lot more you could be doing with those feats that would be more helpful.

Just add that you cannot take any stacking feat more times that (your HD/2, rounded up). That means that technically you can still dump every new level-based feat into something like Toughness, but cannot stack it three times at level 1.

noob
2022-01-08, 05:53 AM
Quickness: Gain +2 to Initiative checks. Can be taken more than once. Each time it's taken the bonus gained goes up by 2 (stacking). (so total bonus is 2/6/12/20/etc.)

Improved Quickness: Requires Lightning Reflexes, Quickness. Gain +4 to Initiative checks for every time you've taken Quickness. If you take Quickness again you gain another +4 to Initiative.


Improved initiative is already considered a good feat unless you are reaching levels of optimisation where most things does not make sense or matter.
So stackable initiative seems quite possibly dangerous for game balance.

sandmote
2022-01-08, 03:52 PM
Whoops; missed there'd been a reply.

Just add that you cannot take any stacking feat more times that (your HD/2, rounded up). That means that technically you can still dump every new level-based feat into something like Toughness, but cannot stack it three times at level 1. Well, still stackable twice at 3rd level, which leaves the aspect I liked. Probably better for balance than what I was thinking.


Note that taking Quickness once is worse than Improved Initiative, it requires taking it three times for it to break even with Improved Initiative per feat and with more opportunity cost and diminishing utility. And if there's already a disparity in initiative modifiers then even spending four (!) feats doesn't guarantee going first. But the numbers do seem a bit high even with the opportunity cost. Let's make it +2/+3/+4 etc. (stacking) per Quickness and Improved Quickness gives +3 per Quickness. Breaking even with Improved Initiative now takes 5 Quickness, or if one has Lightning Reflexes then just under it (+11) with 3 feats or just over it (+18) with 4 feats. I think if the rocket tag problem is mostly dealt with via houserules, creative encounter design, and the entire game not being about combat then spending all your feats to (usually) guarantee going first isn't an issue. Remember that not all builds need to include Improved Initiative, it's just a good choice to do so if a feat slot is available. So having the first feat be worse but giving the choice for more investment makes the choice more interesting due to the increased opportunity cost. My experience is that a player will go through the available feat bonuses for Initiative, pick whichever one works best with their build (admittedly usually Improved Initiative), take it whenever they have a spare feat slot, and then focus on boosting other things for the rest of the game.

A stackable bonus breaks that simplicity, and I don't see what the benefit is, even if simply taking Improved Initiative once is less of an investment. If the rocket tag problem isn't an issue in your game the change doesn't have much impact; if it is an issue its about to be a bigger one.

I suppose I don't see what benefit you get from adding this risk.


Note on the "semblance of reality" thing is the article "Calibrating your Expectations" on the alexandrian blog that shows how 6th level is the point at which D&D leaves the possibilities of reality, so E6 going to effectively 8th or 9th with feats (5 feats per level) and going beyond the possibilities of physics via these feats isn't that much of a problem for me, though I see how it could be for others. I'm glad for the reference on the term's history. My point was more as follows:

Most people on the forum accept the article's point for skills, BAB, and hit points.
Most people on the forum accept that spellcasters start having options that martials can't really respond to around the time they get 4th or 5th level spells.
A large proportion of people find it hard to accept that Olympic athletes are below 6th level when discussing class features for martial classes. There's a lot of long discussions on the forum with people complaining that homebrew given to martial characters as a class feature still needs to be "realistic," and possible for living humans up until 21st level.