Please help me with the house cat argument

[SorO_Lost]

I can't help but notice the Common has no Feats, and when someone brings them up the replies are zomg brokenz!
It's like the cat must win, you have money on the line

Worse, the Commoner has no Race.
If he is a Dwarf, he has an extra hit point for another round to kill the cat.
If he is an Elf, there is no auto fail Hide/Move, increased AC, and a shortsword/longbow. (btw the penalty for distance lessens as you move towards them)
If he is a Gnome, again that extra HP buys another round for the Commoner and he can talk to the cat.
If he is a Halfling, +2 AC & +2 to attack rolls when chucking a marble kept in a pocket at the cat. Do you like the odds now?
If he is a Half-Orc, Throg smash puny kitty! +1 attack/damage for one hit bleeding out.
If he is a Human, hell give the Human the worst combat Feat ever (toughness) and he still wins and he still has an unused Feat.
Half-Elves are screwed. They deserve it anyway.

[FlaminCows]

Its not that the Commoner has no feats, its that we are using the "typical example" for comparison and the DMG says that most NPCs take noncombat feats like Skill Focus.

[awaken_D_M_golem]

If I understand correctly, on a critical hit with its claw, the cat rolls 2d2-8 then applies the "minimum 1" rule, meaning he still only deals 1 point of damage.  For the bite attack, its 2d3-8.  So, critical hits don't help the cat at all. 

If the commoner can take the cloak of the obyrith feat (Fiendish Codex I, p85), he gains damage reduction 1/lawful.  This makes him cat-proof. 

If the commoner can take the deformity (tongue) feat (Heroes of Horror, p121), he gains blindsense out to 30 feet.  Hide and move silently automatically fail against blindsense. 

Deformity (tongue) requires willing deformity (Heroes of Horror, p125), so fitting that and cloak of obyrith on the same commoner requires 1 more feat than a 1st-level human gets.  Fortunately, swearing service to an elder evil gives a bonus vile feat (Elder Evils, p10), and both deformity (tongue) and willing deformity are vile feats. 

Sure, you have to have the taint of a demonic ancestry in your blood, grotesquely mutilate yourself, and pledge yourself to the destruction of all that lives, but that's a small price to pay to run off a stray cat.  And hey, once Atropus unmakes the world, there won't be any cats.

  ... when Commoner > Housecat, it's a sign of the cthulhu apocalypse (literally).

[FlaminCows]

When you start thinking about what feats to put on a commoner, the real question becomes why doesn't the commoner re-train his Commoner level to any other class? The only reasonable answer is some hidden power that only Commoners can use.

Conclusion: all Commoners are using the Chicken-Infested flaw. All of them.

[SorO_Lost]

Its not that the Commoner has no feats, its that we are using the "typical example" for comparison and the DMG says that most NPCs take noncombat feats like Skill Focus.

Endurance & Track as well.

Toughness is barely combat based. I mean honestly, you have 3.5HP and a 10ft fall has a 50% of knocking you out leading to your death one minute (or less) later. Toughness is about surviving. Kind of like Endurance... [/pointlessness]