Talk:Combat Explorer (5e Feat)

I don't think this feat is balanceable as designed. It's very dependent on the player painstakingly tracking what creatures they have and have not encountered during the campaign, and coming up with an exhaustive list detailing the entirety of their encounters before the campaign (which any savy player will be sure to list as "none"). And after all that, it's going to be useless 95% of the time and utterly broken the other 5%

Response: It is not unique to design around encountered creatures (Wild Shape for an example). With the bare minimum of common sense this feat can easily work on a campaign, specially when it is all DM fiat in the end.

Wild Shape's balance and the balance of this feat are very different beasts, no pun intended. This feat gives you an extremely powerful combat buff (bordering on "auto-win") as long as this moment, right now, is the first time you've ever encountered this creature. After that very first encounter, the feat becomes completely useless for all subsequent encounters. The DM has to either knowingly allow you to curbstomp their dragon boss, or knowingly waste your "first time seeing a dragon" combat on a less important encounter. Wild Shape, on the other hand, gives you access to a combat form that is supposed to be of a specific power level range (CR and creature-type and what-not) as long as you can justify being familiar with it, and I would argue that the "being familiar with it" requirement isn't intended to be a balancing factor at all. For this feat, it's the only attempted balancing factor. —Salasay ♄ 13:51, 22 May 2023 (MDT)

I'm not entirely sure myself. I'm more or less against fiat in any way, shape, or form when it comes to player material, as putting as little onus as possible on the DM is good for running the game, but I'm coming around on it here. For "advantage on all attacks against this creature", maybe not, but if this wasn't mainly for combat, I would have no issue with it. Then again, that's the point of the feat.

I think this thing is stuck in an odd spot. It should likely either be "fiat-y with more exploration effects" or "hard rules with combat effects", but this wants fiat with combat effects. It needs maybe a bit more thought, but I don't know how or if this should be changed. --SwankyPants (talk) 14:16, 22 May 2023 (MDT)

That's a good way to put it—crunch behind a crunch-gate, fluff behind a fluff-gate, and even fluff behind a crunch-gate are all perfectly fine, but crunch behind a fluff-gate is just asking for trouble. (Also, the +10 initiative is almost as worrying to me as the free advantage) —Salasay ♄ 14:21, 22 May 2023 (MDT)