Traits you buy just for the Coolness Factor / Pure Awesomeness

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Uh, Dodge, in 3.5? +1 AC against one opponent at a time?

In Pathfinder it's +1 all the time, and Dodge bonuses stack.

As a prerequisite, it leads to some potentially interesting things, but on its own it's not much of a feat.

Yeah, but ErhamDJ was complaining that nothing on the chain was useful, which IME isn't true. Mobility alone generally lets you ignore AoOs without messing around with Tumble/Acrobatics checks.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Yeah, but ErhamDJ was complaining that nothing on the chain was useful, which IME isn't true. Mobility alone generally lets you ignore AoOs without messing around with Tumble/Acrobatics checks.

The biggest issues we had with it were:

1) It wasn't worth the opportunity cost. There was always something so much more powerful as to make it a laughable choice. Unfortunately, new players did not know this. A +1 situational bonus just was not that useful. If your declared dodge target attacked you, it would only matter if your armor class happened to fall into that small range where they didn't always either hit your or miss you. And the monsters in our games were ruthless. The casters' AC was too low for it to matter, and the cleric wasn't going to go with the 13 Dex needed to get the feat. And +1 AC to a wizard is negligible. What percentage of the time was it going to stop an attack aimed at you? Not very often. It was always more useful to take a feat that helped with your main shtick.

2) New players had trouble keeping up with the game since they were new, and often forget to declare who they were dodging.


It also didn't help that its main use was as a prerequisite. That meant you could go months before getting what you had really wanted. The other problem was that by the time anyone could get Spring Attack--which always looked so much more useful to new players than it really was--the casters were dominating and the only way to keep up with them was to take a full attack as often as possible.