Beating a dead Arcadian Pony

And thus Nemausus falls...

Huh what where who? The city? The deity?

Oh. The layer... right.

If that's your take interpretation on the rules, explain the 3.5 version of Forgotten Realms feats that removed drawbacks previously included in some feats.

Show me 3.5 sources.

What of the Vow feats (BoED)? Yes, the restrictions inherent in the Vows are listed as "special prerequisites" but they are drawbacks notwithstanding. And some list disadvantages in their text as well (for instance Vow of Peace), not just in prerequisite area. Coupled with the fact that IIRC the entry feat "Sacred Vow" has little or no positive effect, I think you've got yourself a pretty good precedent.

Besides, the Vows are the closest thing in current official source to Faction-related feats anyway; it makes sense that there would be some similarity of format.

BoVD is 3.0. BoED is 3.5.

I'm quite sure on this.

Hmmm... by that reasoning, the paladin and cleric are flawed in that the violation of their tenets will cause them to be stripped of their powers until they atone for the sins they committed that caused the loss in the first place. After all, having faith is a fatal flaw, yes?

"A character must have the DM's permission to take an exalted feat. In may cases, a ritual must be performed; often this simply amounts to a character swearing a sacred vow, for example in the presence of a celestial being. A character who willingly and willfully commits an evil act loses all benefits from all his exalted feats. She regains these benefits if she atones for her violations.

Aura of Good: A character with at least one exaulted feat radiates an aura of good with a power equal to her character level (see the detect good spell), as if she were a paladin or cleric of a good deitiy."

- "Feats," Book of Exaulted Deeds, pg. 39

Sounds pretty clear to me that it's a voluntary decision to be boud to the same rules that clerics & paladins play by in matters of faith. Exalted characters are supposed to uphold the tenets of good at all costs. This is a choice made by the character to willing commit himself to restrictions of faith. I don't see how a philosophy would garner such restrictions.

The Vow feats place an extra restriction on a character in order to grant a +4 bonus. However, this is a restriction that the character willingly takes whereas philosophies do not have extracurricular methods of binding someone to their world view. The only inertia should the factions placed on a member, is based on the same mechanism as listed for clerics and paladins. If you read the descriptions of exalted feat you will see that the Vow feats place additional restrictions that if the character violates his vow, which he willingly chose, he loses access to all of his exalted feats until atonement. The restrictions placed in clerics and paladins are nowhere near as severe as these feats are. Then again, the abilities of those two classes do not grant +4 bonuses to any one ability.

One could make the arguement that UA material doesn't count as "precedent" because of it's nature as being a book of optional rules.

Thus, my argument is not about whether a method is viable, but which one follows the 3.5 system as that is the determinant factor based on the agreement that PW has with WotC.

In effect, yes.

My reasoning is that if they have an agreement with WotC to use their material, it should parallel the construction of WotC products as closely as possible. In this instance, as it is the stance of PW to go with the 3.5 mechanics, they should follow the constructions of materials used by the WotC staff in order to comply with the system as much as possible.

Actually, there are materials out there in 3.5 terms that do have these features built in. My templates, albeit untested, did build in the disadvantages of the factions. However if you do no like that method to solve the problem, UA does present traits and flaws. The problem that traits present however is that the benefits and drawbacks are small. Flaws are problematic in that they grant a feat to be taken for each flaw selected.

I chose the template because it allowed me to add in the drawbacks. I created a new line specifically for drawbacks, but they easily could have been part of the special qualities of the template.

I think that what Xan's got going here is an attempt to find a part of the system that has precedent for all of the factors of the abilities. In this reckoning, templates are allowed to have positive and negative traits because they've had both in the past, but feats are not because they are usually just positive effects in exchance for practice.

I still maintain that the system precedented by the BoED Vows would make sense here, albiet with slightly more leniency when dealing with abberations from the vow. (At least at lower levels, that is! ) It's a happy medium in my mind.

But eh, to each his own. Some like the feat system, some like Xan's template system. And none of the systems are perfect right now.

Where? I know of templates that are taken at character creation, and at other times classes or in game rp changes them, such as half-celestial and ect.. Erm. Where? What evidence? Give examples and cite your sources. I have been playing 3rd ed d20 since shortly after it was first published by a couple of months and I have not noticed a tendency to encourage min/maxing anymore than any other comparable game system. What problems have you personally encountered with players min/maxing? And how were those problems of the system and not the players themselves? Yes. D20 and most rpg systems use the average human as their base measure because it is something that all players can relate to. It is the same idea as using a football field as a unit of measure because most westerners will know how long a football field is; they can visualize it.

Could you please be more specific on what type of templates that you are advocating here? After all classes can be considered a kind of template to add on to the base human in order to represent increased power due to gaining experience. Heck feats can be thought of the same way if you'd like.

I don't agree. I think it is done instead to provide a way of describing power levels in terms of a unit that players and DMs are already very well acquainted with. The game designers are not trying to "Sell" anyone anything other than the books themselves. Wotc doesn't care if everyone who buys d20 plays an elf.

Also, many players are willing to take a hit to their character's power in order to build a character that fits their concept. In other words players will build characters in order to roleplay and in my personal experience even systems that are built for what you call min/maxing will have players doing this. The rules are just skeletal. You can read the books all you want but until you sit down and play with other people you will always just be looking at so many bones with no flesh on them and not know what the real animal looks like.

Yes, quite happily thank you. Many courses of action have both benefits and drawbacks. Paths in factions are no different. Yes as they are defined in the current rules. But we are not talking about flaws but built in drawbacks in feats. Uhm, How? I don't see how characters are marginalized if they join after 1st or 30th. No, these flaws that are put in some faction feats are not the flaws from other 3.5 material that are used to gain feats. You still have to use an existing feat slot to take the faction feat and you cannot choose to take the feat with out also taking the flaw. They are flaws in the sense that they are drawbacks to the character, but they are not flaws in terms of the game mechanic named flaws. I have not run into that problem. I don't know of anyone who has run into that problem. In my experience, especially drawing upon my experience in playing games which use mechanics that features both advantages and disadvantages giving points where many flaws are taken during character creation. As a character's power grows a flaw may be marginalized, but it is still there. The fact that the character had to deal with the flaw at some point pays for the corresponding advantage. Also small flaws can come back to haunt the character in surprising ways. "All right Prof Y. E/M boy's field is disabling all electronic devices, including your chair..."

Huh? So this supposedly negates everything I've said?

PS3e can make new feats and new rules to go along with the Planescape setting. If PS3e couldn't your template system and belief points would not be publishable here as well.

Besides how does that make any difference on what I just said?

In 3.5, the only way they have demonstrated a mechanical benefit for being a member in a group is through a prestige class. Not a template, not a set of feats. Really, this logic makes you both wrong.

In FRCS (and updated to v3.5 in Player's Guide to Faerun), there's the Shadow Weave User feat chain. Most of them give you small benefits when using enchantments, illusions, and necromancies, and small drawbacks when using evocations and transmutations.

Overly complicated and stupid rules. Not to mention that three of the feats are gained as bonus feats at level 1 of the Shadow Adept prestige class. :roll:

But hey, it's the Forgotten Realms...

I've already quoted the updated version of 3.5 feats for FR. The penalties are nonexistant.

So, to be a member of the Harpers, you have to take a level in one of their prestige classes?

That penalities are not only listed in 3.5 feats, but that WotC uses them as such and how PW should follow WotC construction given the relationship that's been established for the PSCS and the use of any WotC product to create PS in d20 terms.

Nope.

You seem to be laboring under a misapprehension. Do you think that the planewalker campaign setting requires factioneers to take faction feats? Earlier a major part of your argument seemed to be that the vows in the Book of Exalted Deeds were fundamentally different from, say, the Ring-Giver feats because the vows are voluntary. Of course, both are voluntary.

I say "seemed to be" because, frankly, you're not a very coherent writer. It's extremely difficult to follow what you're trying to say at times. I know you're still learning, and you once said you were dyslexic, but I still thought you should be aware. Just in case you didn't realize.

For example, just as a tip, your post above might have been phrased this way:

"We're arguing about whether or not there are any 3.5 feats with disadvantages. We're also arguing about whether or not WotC uses these feats as disadvantages (I'm actually not sure what the distinction is here; what were you trying to say?).

My point is:
1. if all feats in D&D version 3.5 are entirely advantageous, and

2. if Planewalker has agreed to mimic every aspect of its Planescape conversion after precedents established in the revised version of the game, and

3. if everything in the unrevised version of the game that hasn't yet been officially converted to version 3.5 can no longer be used by Planewalker as an example to model its game mechanics on

Then Planewalker should not include feats with any sort of inherent disadvantage."

That's pretty clear, I hope. Of course, we've established that (1) isn't true, and we haven't established that (2) or (3) are true.

Naturally, you don't have to number every one of your arguments. Constructing your sentence the way you did, however, using many different words ("that," "but," "and how," and "given") to connect the various points of your run-on sentence was a poor choice. It's very messy-looking and directs the reader in several different directions when what you want is to logically move him or her forward, one step at a time. When different clauses fit into a paragraph in the same way, it's best to link them in the same way. I used three "ifs," for example, and linked each part with an "and." This made it easier to follow.

If I'm not mistaken, you're saying it would be okay to model game mechanics on the Star Wars or Wheel of Time RPGs, but not okay to use the Book of Vile Darkness? Or are you just saying that you use non-D&D d20 products as inspiration, but Planewalker shouldn't? Again, you're less than clear.

Stench of the Dead from Unearthed Arcana, the vows in The Book of Exalted Deeds. I know you don't think the first two should count, but your arguments were less than persuasive. As I recall, they all depended on your idea that the fact that taking these feats is voluntary somehow makes them different from the Bleaker or Ring-Giver feats, or on your proposition that Stench of the Dead is only for NPCs, as if that mattered. I didn't really understand what paladins had to do with anything.

I could just as easily rationalize why the "disadvantages" in the Planewaker feats aren't really disadvantageous using the same standards. The insanity points in the Bleaker feats certainly aren't anything that would dissuade me from playing a Bleaker; they're just the mechanic, albeit somewhat of an ugly one, that allows the feats to work. They also add a bit of flavor to a character that's probably going to be played as slightly unhinged in any case. The wealth restriction in one of the Ring-Giver feats is no different essentially from the one in the Vow of Poverty from the Book of Exalted Deeds.

For that matter, Skill Focus is actually a pretty good example. While the description of the feat doesn't spell out the disadvantages of taking it as opposed to basically anything else, the disadvantage is very real nonetheless. There's no reason to limit the argument to disadvantages actually spelled out in the feat description except that it helps your argument. It would help your argument, that is, if your argument was only feats shouldn't explicitly mention any disadvantages they might have. It's not: your argument is a larger one, that feats should only be advantageous to those who purchase them. Or, at least, that you think Wizards of the Coast thinks so.

There's no real reason to limit our discussion to 3.5 feats either, considering how young D&D 3.5 still is. In a few years when all the vile feats are reprinted somewhere, this might be different. Only feats that were actually explicitly revised in the new edition should be exempt from the discussion.

No doubt. It's certainly at least as much a curse as a blessing to be an involuntary werewolf, for example. Nobody's going to argue with you on that one.

What there's no precedent for is the way you're using templates. Templates represent a shorthand, an easy way for the DM to create monsters. Rather than a dozen kinds of half-dragons, the Monster Manual has one half-dragon template applicable to most kinds of monsters. In almost all cases, templates represent a completely different species than the base creature. In the cases where this is not true, the template at least represents some kind of radical physical transformation, as in the voidmind or spellstitched undead.

This isn't true with factions, generally, except in a few isolated cases like the incantifers and prolongers, and the Doomlords. Factioneers remain themselves; they've just learned a new ability. This is no different from any other feat, skill, or class ability in 3e terms. What a Taker learns from devotion to her cause, a rogue learns from practice. This is no reason to change the idea that new abilities are gained by spending feat slots, skill points, or class levels. What you've done is take the 2e idea of factioneers automatically gaining a few lame advantages and disadvantages and made 3e templates out of them, confusing one mechanic (the 2e faction "kits") with a completely different one (templates). You've essentially created an alternate character advancement method, with an alternate kind of experience point system (belief points) to be used alongside the standard advancement system. And you want to put this in the center of the game, as something the PCs commonly do, dramatically changing the dynamic of the campaign by pushing the PCs in two directions at once. Surely, if fidelity to WotC's standards is the goal, we should use only one character progression method at a time?

There's no precedent, to my knowledge, for the way you're using belief/hero/force points either. They're used as bonuses to rolls, or as a way of powering force powers gained through class levels, not as a secondary kind of XP completely independent of the class system that defines the game. If precedents are important to you, this is a damaging point.

You could, and have in the past, argue that it's reasonable to use an old mechanic in a different way. Although I think the particular way you're using templates is aesthetically ugly, a brutal violation of the system instead of a logical extension of it, I do agree with this as a general proposition. What you can't do and remain intellectually honest is argue that it's okay to twist the use of templates but not okay to twist the use of feats, which - as the posters here have shown - Planewalker didn't even do.