Calm Between Storms - Status Update

[Farling]

Originally Posted by Roadie

If you mix things the combinations rapidly explode. A vigilante with Legendary Vigilantes and Spheres of Might could have 3 feats each from 10 vigilante talents, 1 feat each from the 10 social talents, and 15 one-to-two-feat equivalent martial talents from the Shadow Warrior archetype, for a total of 60+ feat equivalents on a single-class character.

How is any human player supposed to be able to cope with so many different options on their character?

[Phrll]

Originally Posted by Farling

How is any human player supposed to be able to cope with so many different options on their character?

They don't. The use a small number of their favorites and ignore all the rest. Some might be more effective than what they do use but they've never looked into them far enough. D&D 3.0/3.5 and Pathfinder both have this problem when characters hit the mid-teen level and just just gets worse farther up.

[Roadie]

Originally Posted by Farling

How is any human player supposed to be able to cope with so many different options on their character?

A lot of these are going to be effectively passive buffs to prerequisite abilities in play. For example, the Legendary Vigilantes stuff has lot of things that add extra functionality to Spring Attack, Whirlwind Attack, and Vital Strike, as well as various talents that give you a set of the Improved X combat maneuver feats, and Spheres of Might has various talents like 'whenever you successfully grapple, you also deal damage' and 'whenever you attack with an attack action, you can also attack a second creature at a penalty'. You could pretty easily make a character out of all that that just focuses on 4-5 primary gimmicks and combines them in different ways, with maybe a reference sheet for yourself to keep track of how they all stack.

That doesn't reduce the character's complexity in the Hero Lab context, though, since you've got a bunch of things all adjusting the numbers of other things. A wizard, by contrast, could have about the same amount of actual in-play complexity, but less bother to compute since spells are more self-contained and mostly just need an adjusted DC for each.