Talk:Awareness (3.5e Feat)

Comments

So the first part of this feat is already covered by the spot skill's action type: "Every time you have a chance to spot something in a reactive manner you can make a Spot check without using an action". So you already get to use it in a reactive way. You don't need a feat for that.

The second part of the feat suffers from "bag of rats" syndrome, where carrying a bag of angry rats will give you a massive spot bonus (because they are all in 10 ft.). 10 ft. is also a really small distance for the bonus anyways, so the abusable part probably won't ever matter.

Good feats generally offer something new and fun for a character. Generally, Alertness (the prereq feat) is considered really terrible for this reason. Here are some ideas:

• Be able to make listen checks at a distance of 30 ft. ignoring up to +15 points of DC modifiers (so you can listen right through a stone wall). This would only be for determining the presence and position of creatures.
• Similarly with spot checks, be able to make them in 30 ft. ignoring concealment and lighting (but not cover). Again, only for presence and position.
• You could make it more abstract and just have the innate ability to always know exactly how many creatures are within a 60 ft. radius. You don't know where, jsut that they exist.

Hope this helps. --Aarnott (talk) 18:23, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not sure why I said this was done. Iw as thinking about it and I came to the conclusion that it was not complete and needed to be changed. I'm thinking that maybe I can have it act as your third Idea., but a smaller range. 30 ft. perhaps. Nazsmith (talk) 16:30, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

The current version needs a bit more detail. Something like: you know the number of creatures in the radius, but not what type of creature they are nor their position.

You may also want to have it work based on query, not automatically. So the player can ask: "how many creatures can I detect around me?", rather than the DM needing to always alert the player. You may also want to consider what happens with squirrels, plants, and bugs. Do they all count? It would be pretty useless because there are spiders pretty much everywhere. Even small animals could trip this up. You could make it give you creatures with CR 1 or higher, which excludes pretty much any harmless creature. --Aarnott (talk) 16:52, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

That is a good point. Perhaps I can change to either a CR or Size requirement? Like, Small or larger? Nazsmith (talk) 17:33, 21 November 2013 (UTC)