Boat feats

WiserOdin032402 · Post by **WiserOdin032402** » Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:13 am

Alt title: feat boat

So, I, like the fool I am, decided that I should help my group out and bundle together D&D 3.5 feats into nice packages that do good things for characters, mainly because we have to now play in the last setting where we blew up the material plain's magic and basically fucked all arcane and psionics. Little did I know that I was walking into boats and boat accessories.

There is an excessive amount of boat feats. I'm reading through this and there's seven that are exclusively for skill checks on boats. And there's even more for combat.

Are boats super hardcore in D&D 3.5 or something? Do characters without these feats walk onto a boat and suddenly implode from boats and are unable to do any basic task?

angelfromanotherpin · Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:18 am

Where are you finding these boat feats? Are they from Stormwrack, or from some crazy third-party book, or...?

WiserOdin032402 · Post by **WiserOdin032402** » Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:29 am

I'm using the D&D 3.5 Index Sheets made by Chet Erez, and some of these boat feats are labelled 'DR' and have a number next to them or have that 'DR' crossed out and replaced with 'Storm', so I'm guessing some of these are pulled from Dragon Magazine. The point still stands, however.

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:41 am

Stormwrack, probably.

People always want to do pirate games, and WotC is always willing to disappoint with crappy mechanics.

Krusk · Post by **Krusk** » Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:47 am

To save you effort, all boat feats suck and most sailing is governed by dm handwavery and dc +\- 15 prof sailor checks. Maybe throw in a balance checj now and again. Tell someone to burn a few ranks and move on.

angelfromanotherpin · Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:48 am

Boats aren't particularly significant in 3.x, except in that very few PCs have Profession (Sailor). The feats are filler and can be ignored to no particular loss.

WiserOdin032402 · Post by **WiserOdin032402** » Thu Mar 08, 2018 12:51 am

Oh thank god, I thought the DCs were some unholy 'Oh yes you need to roll a DC 25 balance check to stand upright on a boat in calm waters and you have a -10 penalty if you have 0 ranks in profession: sailor' nonsense.

Back to banging my head against a wall and hoping that combining feats that do little fiddly bullsh- You know what, why are so many feats little fiddly bullshit things?

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Thu Mar 08, 2018 1:00 am

WiserOdin032402 wrote:You know what, why are so many feats little fiddly bullshit things?

Lack of design skill. Some feats (like Weapon Focus) are tiny bonuses that if you forgot you had them, you'd barely notice. Other feats (like Leadership or Natural Spell) are game-changers that transform your character's capabilities. And both cost the same because nobody had the ability or inclination to run a simple cost-benefit analysis to discover that their metrics were fucked.

Have you read Races of War? It does a feat overhaul.

WiserOdin032402 · Post by **WiserOdin032402** » Thu Mar 08, 2018 1:16 am

I have, I rather like it a lot. I've been using it for my home games for a little less than a year now. Previously I was simply going 'Eh 20 feats with one weird bullshit feat per session ought to do'. I haven't gotten my group's big GM to read it yet, however.