Better saves for all! (3.5 Feat Retool, PEACH)

[Noctis Vigil]

Now, I don't know about you guys, but I've never seen anyone take Great Fortitude, Iron Will, or Lightning Reflexes. They just plain suck. The only time they see use is when they're a prerequisite for a PrC, and that's not right. So this is an attempt to make them scale with your level, thus not totally sucking. Fighters will actually want Iron Will now, because that's what all the SoDs require.

Great Fortitude:
Benefit: You gain a +2 bonus to your Fortitude save, plus an additional +1 for every 4 character levels you have.

Iron Will:
Benefit: You gain a +2 bonus to your Will save, plus an additional +1 for every 4 character levels you have.

Lightning Reflexes:
Benefit: You gain a +2 bonus to your Reflex save, plus an additional +1 for every 4 character levels you have.

Great Agility
Prerequisites: Dex 17, poor Reflex save progression
Benefits: You are much faster than the usual for your race or training. Your Reflex save progression changes to good instead of poor.
Special: This feat must be taken at 1st level.

Great Mind
Prerequisites: Wis 17, poor Will save progression
Benefits: Your mind is much sharper than the usual for your race or training. Your Will save progression changes to good instead of poor.
Special: This feat must be taken at 1st level.

Great Resilience
Prerequisites: Con 17, poor Fortitude save progression
Benefits: Your body is far more resilient than the usual for your race or training. Your Fortitude save progression changes to good instead of poor.
Special: This feat must be taken at 1st level.

[Yitzi]

Seems good. Save DCs are still too high at high levels due to inherent bonuses, but that's really a separate issue.

[Morph Bark]

Make it "plus an additional +1 for every 5 character levels you have". As it is now, you only get an increase if you took the feat 5 levels ago.

[Noctis Vigil]

Seems good. Save DCs are still too high at high levels due to inherent bonuses, but that's really a separate issue.

True, but this will help. +5 at level 20 instead of +2 at any level is a big help.

Make it "plus an additional +1 for every 5 character levels you have". As it is now, you only get an increase if you took the feat 5 levels ago.

Changed, thank you for the catch.

[Lateral]

Honestly, I'd start with +2 and add +1/5 levels onto that. As is, it's even worse than the straight ones until midway through your career.

[Noctis Vigil]

Honestly, I'd start with +2 and add +1/5 levels onto that. As is, it's even worse than the straight ones until midway through your career.

Works for me! done.

[Eldan]

I'd include more than just a straight bonus, myself, as that makes them still a bit boring.

How about, in addition to the bonus, giving one reroll on the save per day? Or 1/day/X levels?

[Lateral]

I'd include more than just a straight bonus, myself, as that makes them still a bit boring.

How about, in addition to the bonus, giving one reroll on the save per day? Or 1/day/X levels?

Be careful with this. Rerolls are very powerful.

[Eldan]

So are feats.

Edit: that made more sense in my head. What i mean is that feats are very valuable.

[Amechra]

Be careful with this. Rerolls are very powerful.

Not really; when you get down to it, they would still be a lot weaker than the Pride Domain granted power (reroll all 1s on your saves; you have to keep the second roll, though; this has no limit on times per day.)

The problem with the "rerolls are too strong" argument is that you have no way to control what the result is, so they only come into play when you have to save your character's bacon.

Compare Luck feats to these with 1 daily reroll added in. Keep in mind that the feats would keep separate pools.

[tarkisflux]

This might be a bit off from where the OP is headed, but it's worth looking at rerolls more closely. They are strong, but so are +5 and +6 bonuses, and these feats are passing those out eventually. If you do an odds breakdown, you can do a simple comparison of rerolls and straight bonuses and see which is actually stronger and under what circumstances.

The results look like this:

• 1 reroll is better than a +2 bonus if you need to roll a 2-17 to succeed without the bonus, about the same if you need to roll an 18-19 without the bonus, and worse if you need to roll a 20 without it.
• 1 reroll is better than a +3 bonus if you need to roll a 2-16 to succeed without the bonus, about the same if you need to roll an 17-18 without the bonus, and worse if you need to roll a 19-20 without it.
• 1 reroll is better than a +4 bonus if you need to roll a 2-12 to succeed without the bonus, about the same if you need to roll an 13-17 without the bonus, and worse if you need to roll a 18-20 without it.
• 1 reroll is better than a +5 bonus if you need to roll a 2-3 to succeed without the bonus, about the same if you need to roll an 4-15 without the bonus, and worse if you need to roll a 16-20 without it.
• 1 reroll is better than a +6 bonus if you need to roll a 2-3 to succeed without the bonus, about the same if you need to roll an 4-7 without the bonus, and worse if you need to roll a 8-20 without it.

where "about the same" is less than 5% different.

So, a "whenever you want" reroll is only worth about a +5 bonus, and more limited ones are going to be worth less. Since the +5 bonus hits around level 15 with this feat, you're basically giving out the equivalent at some point already. I'm not suggesting that you give rerolls instead of bonuses, I'm just saying you're already passing out similarly strong things. Rerolls are good at keeping you from rolling badly, bonuses are good at helping you roll high. You should pick the one that best fits with which of those goals you'd rather accomplish. If you wanted to do rerolls instead of scaling bonuses, feats that granted daily limited rerolls, that eventually became unlimited rerolls, would be pretty in line with the ones posted above.

[Just to Browse]

I do believe that if you have a 50/50 shot of failing, and you are given a "re-roll if you fail" option, your chances of succeeding on a given save become 75% from 50% (+5 equivalent bonus). Having an original 45% chance gives a 79.75% (~+7 bonus) chance of success, and so on, while having a 25% chance yields a 43.75% (~+4 bonus) with the double roll.

So on the whole, "roll again on if you fail" tends to be quite powerful, and it gets more so as you become more likely to succeed on a save. I'd just keep the flat bonuses, especially because per-day stuff will encourage the 15-minute workday, which is bad.

[Ashtagon]

Be careful with this. Rerolls are very powerful.

Statistically, a reroll works out as about a +5 bonus on a single die roll. That's not quite as good overall as a +2 on every die roll, although still very useful.

[silphael]

Personnaly, I don't think feats should only give numerical bonuses. Maybe add Evasion, and two half of Mettle on it? That would bring it up to the value a feat should have.

[tarkisflux]

I do believe that if you have a 50/50 shot of failing, and you are given a "re-roll if you fail" option, your chances of succeeding on a given save become 75% from 50% (+5 equivalent bonus). Having an original 45% chance gives a 79.75% (~+7 bonus) chance of success, and so on, while having a 25% chance yields a 43.75% (~+4 bonus) with the double roll.

So on the whole, "roll again on if you fail" tends to be quite powerful, and it gets more so as you become more likely to succeed on a save. I'd just keep the flat bonuses, especially because per-day stuff will encourage the 15-minute workday, which is bad.

I think there might be a misunderstanding here. If you have a +5 bonus to start with and have a choice between a reroll or a +5 bonus to add on top of that, you have about 50% chance of success on the check. And you get similarly equivalent odds with the +7 bonus. You're not just taking the bonus you have and getting a reroll, you're taking the bonus you have and comparing your odds of success if you take the reroll or take an additional +5 bonus. The range where your odds are less than 5% different are pretty large.

Rerolls tend to suffer from confirmation bias. They look strong because you watch people actively save themselves with them. You don't notice all the times that they've saved themselves with a static bonus because you don't see it once it's added in. But they're really not very different statistically from getting a new +5 bonus.

The work day stuff is a potential concern I guess, though I tend to think it's a very overstated concern in actual games. I tend to see people hoard defensive abilities like this and rarely use them all during the course of a regular work day to begin with though. It's also not something that they actively get to use either, like most workday abilities, since the qualifying condition is someone else using an ability on them and then the first die roll failing. YMMV of course.

[Noctis Vigil]

Gonna end the arguing here by stating I will not be adding rerolls. If rerolls are desired, I'll write up another set of feats for them. My goal with these was to purely to make these three feats worth taking by making them scale with level, and I believe I succeeded on that. I have no intentions of adding rerolls, as they were never granted by the original feats.

[ericgrau]

I don't understand the mentality behind scaling d20 checks. Whether it's +0 vs DC 10 or +20 vs DC 30 nothing changes even the slightest bit. And properly optimized stats do scale at the same rate of DCs. Scaling makes more sense for damage rolls, hp and such, but for checks with a DC a flat bonus is actually better. The exceptions are base and typed bonuses (rather than untyped), since that's the way modifiers normally keep up with DCs.

So if I wanted to retool the save feats I'd change them all from +2 to +3 and call it a day. Maybe +4. What this does is makes them useful choices more often without making them automatic choices for everyone. It doesn't break until about +5 and higher. Maybe +6 or +7 in moderately high optimization groups. Too high and unless you're in a high optimization game with 1000 damage feat combos, DMM persist, metamagic reducing cheese or other uber feat combos then every character will want the save feats. Once everyone wants a feat regardless of who they are then that's when it's broken (even though it might not be broken enough to auto-win encounters).

The way the OP's idea scales it's unlikely to reach the point where it break things, but players are simply better off taking those feats at higher levels than at lower levels.

True, ditching boring numerical bonuses altogether is another option.

[Just to Browse]

You can also accumulate class abilities, feats, and items that all boost DCs. Saves are less likely to be boosted, and tend to be resistance bonuses that conflict with save-boosting items.

Along with that, not all saves are "Good", and not all characters have decent numbers in their save-attributes. Enemies will be boosting their attack stat, and buying stuff for their attack stat, but defenders have to boost three different attributes in order to bring their defenses to par. There is actually worse scaling on the defensive side, which is why investment of this sort (scaling defensive bonuses) is actually very very important.

[Yitzi]

And properly optimized stats do scale at the same rate of DCs.

They do? A level 20 wizard will have DCs 16 higher than a 1st level wizard even without Spell Focus (8 from casting a spell 8 levels higher, 8 from having an INT score 16 higher: 6 enhancement, 5 gained from levels, 5 from inherent.) A fighter's Will save (the one the wizard will be targeting) increases only 6 from the class, plus 5 from a cloak of resistance; without the new version of this feat there's nowhere to get the other 5 from, so you still end up with a feat tax for everyone except monks.

[Noctis Vigil]

Three more feats have been added to the OP.

[tarkisflux]

I'm curious why you went with a level 1 restriction on those. It doesn't seem justified for the benefit, and I can't see a fluff reason for it. Also, it's unclear how they interact with multiclassing?

[Noctis Vigil]

I'm curious why you went with a level 1 restriction on those. It doesn't seem justified for the benefit, and I can't see a fluff reason for it. Also, it's unclear how they interact with multiclassing?

The premise behind the restriction is that it's an inherent part of you, not trained or learned over time. If I do remove the L1 restriction, I'll be increasing the stat requirements.

As for multiclassing, your base save is high. Always.

[tarkisflux]

That fluff sort of makes sense, but I still don't get the 'why' of its design. It works out to a +2 at level 1, and an additional +1 approximately every 5 levels. Multiclassing shenanigans aside, it's not substantially different from your revised feats mechanically and it is substantially harder to acquire. Do you just not want people to take both?

[Noctis Vigil]

That fluff sort of makes sense, but I still don't get the 'why' of its design. It works out to a +2 at level 1, and an additional +1 approximately every 5 levels. Multiclassing shenanigans aside, it's not substantially different from your revised feats mechanically and it is substantially harder to acquire. Do you just not want people to take both?

Actually, it equates out to a +2 every time someone takes levels in a new class. So if someone goes 5 levels in 4 different classes, they'd have saves of 20 at level 20. I did some of the math out, and managed to get saves into the upper 30s pretty easily with this feat applied. Thus, I gave it several severe limiters.

[Just to Browse]

Actually, it equates out to a +2 every time someone takes levels in a new class. So if someone goes 5 levels in 4 different classes, they'd have saves of 20 at level 20. I did some of the math out, and managed to get saves into the upper 30s pretty easily with this feat applied. Thus, I gave it several severe limiters.

That sort of math can leave multiclassed casters with +0 BAB at level 20, which is not a good idea. It might be RAW, but I believe RAI is that when you enter another class with a good save, you just add effective levels for your good save. So going from Wizard 2 to Wizard 2/Monk 2 will make your save go up from +3 to +4.

If you're using the "+2 every time you get to a new class with a good save", you have bigger problems to deal with.

[tarkisflux]

Actually, it equates out to a +2 every time someone takes levels in a new class. So if someone goes 5 levels in 4 different classes, they'd have saves of 20 at level 20. I did some of the math out, and managed to get saves into the upper 30s pretty easily with this feat applied. Thus, I gave it several severe limiters.

Not quite. It's only an additional +2 if they happen to multiclass into something with a poor save. Otherwise it's just the regular multiclass benefit, and the feat isn't giving them anything at all.

But that explanation brings up another question. You're trying to limit it based on what you expect the actual use/abuse of it to be, but do you actually want people to use it like that? If you don't want that, why even add the feats when you have one that already behaves like the nice case scenario. Or why not make the feat benefit "the poor save advancement of one of your classes is instead treated as a good advancement" instead? Then characters who multiclass around intentionally looking for poor save advancement don't substantially benefit.

And if you do want people to use the feat like that... well, that gets its own "why?". I don't see anything interesting coming out of +30 saves.

[Deepbluediver]

Popping in from the link in the other thread.

I'm a little confused with the Great Mind/Agility/Resilience feats; it's rare that a class with a good wisdom/dexterity/constitution score would actually have a poor save in the related category. Casters have good will saves, melee-meatshields get good fortitude, etc. As I understand it, these could be taken only very rarely for odd build-combos, like Dex-based fighters or battle-sorcerers.

What kind of scenario did you have in mind when you where designing those feats?

[Noctis Vigil]

What kind of scenario did you have in mind when you where designing those feats?

Mostly multiclass/gish builds, which we tend to see a lot of at my table.