Font of Inspiration grants less points than people think

[linklord231]

Moving the Goalposts - Similar to "shifting sands" and also known as raising the bar, is an informal fallacy in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded.

Your specific claim was "All known and provable Feats that stack with them selves [sic] use the phase 'it's [sic] effects stack'."  I provided examples of feats which do not use that phrase, refuting your claim. 

Special: You can take this feat multiple times, gaining two additional wild shapes of your usual type and one additional elemental wild shape (if you have this capability) each time.

It explicitly states you gain +2/+1 each time you take the Feat.

Benefit: You gain damage reduction 1/adamantine or improve your existing damage reduction by 1.

It explicitly states you improve your existing value by +1.

Special: You can gain this feat multiple times. Each time, you gain an extra spell slot at any level up to one lower than the highest level of spell you can currently cast.

It explicitly states you gain +1 each time you take the Feat.

Well yes, that's exactly my point.  They obviously stack, but don't use the magic words "its effects stack."  If what you're claiming is true, then Improved Damage Reduction would give you a non-stacking +1 to your DR because it doesn't say "its effects stack." 

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By the way, it's Catch-22, not Cache-22.  If you're going to harp on me for using an Americanized version of English slang, you should at least see to your own parlance.

[SorO_Lost]

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Moving the Goalposts - Similar to "shifting sands" and also known as raising the bar, is an informal fallacy in which evidence presented in response to a specific claim is dismissed and some other (often greater) evidence is demanded.

Your specific claim was "All known and provable Feats that stack with them selves [sic] use the phase 'it's [sic] effects stack'."  I provided examples of feats which do not use that phrase, refuting your claim. 

Actually what I said was

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All known and provable Feats that stack with them selves use the phase "it's effects stack" or something very close to that.

But thanks for paying attention to only half of it.

You know, yesterday you had the gist of what I was saying about how anything that can be proven to stack has text say it stacks. Which makes a lot of sense since the lack of any text would also remove any proof you could have. But now this morning you're half reading replies from days ago to throw a very minuscule technical language debate at me when clearly you understood it perfectly before. Is this supposed to be some kind of ad hominem like "SorO said 2+2=5 so everything he said is wrong"? Anyway, I've really just repeating what I've said before so I guess we all done here then.

The FoI feat was explicitly stated, IIRC to be a sort of patch/fix for Factotum after some dev realized that the class really didn't have enough inspiration points.

So coming back to fix some wording I realized I missed that post. I just want to add and point out there is a large difference between claiming the author intended some extra points vs a godawful overkill amount of extra points.

Remember, the Factotum only obtains 10 Inspiration over twenty levels. So to scale all seven standard Feat Slots taking FoI means a +70% increase but when deliberately misreading things the +28 points is +280%. Imagine claiming Barbarians are front liners but Breastplate sucks so it should give them a +19 bonus to AC or a Favored Soul's dual score casting sucks so your starting 14s should be flipped to 53s. Maybe a +280% increase would work fine with the Toughness Feat, but the Factotum is a very solid class that does just fine without any terrible logic & bad readings to support it.

[RobbyPants]

Keep the personal insults out of it. Either debate the issue at hand, or don't talk about it.

[RobbyPants]

Benefit: What the feat enables the character (“you” in the feat description) to do. If a character has the same feat more than once, its benefits do not stack unless indicated otherwise in the description. In general, having a feat twice is the same as having it once.

Well he has a rules quote saying the Feat doesn't stack unless it says otherwise.

So people like Soft moved to the language debate of what constitutions saying otherwise. Now language debates are about as tasteless as you can go, but this one is fairly special. All known and provable Feats that stack with them selves use the phase "it's effects stack" or something very close to that. So Soft's little debate is also based on all examples confirming the expectation of the default phasing D&D uses cannot be used to prove him wrong. And I believe that is a form of cherry picking.
Cherry picking (suppressed evidence, incomplete evidence) – act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position

Okay, looking at the text of the RC, I'm seriously not seeing how this applies to quantities. It very specifically says "effects and bonuses"; those aren't quantities.

OTHER POWER SOURCES
The D&D game includes a wide array of supplements that enable you to incorporate different power sources into your game. Rules Compendium doesn’t include material from all these sources, since you need the supplement the power source appears in to use that power source effectively. Here are some general concepts that apply to these power sources with respect to other effects and abilities in the game.

• If an ability provided by the power source functions like a spell, it follows the rules for spells. For example, a psionic power functions like a spell.
• If an ability has a type—extraordinary, spell-like, or supernatural—it follows the rules that apply to that type of special ability. For instance, a warlock invocation is considered a spell-like ability.
• The stacking rules for effects and bonuses apply, regardless of an effect’s or bonus’s source.
• In all cases, any specific rules supplied in the power source’s supplement take precedence over these general rules. Here’s a list of power sources and where you can fi nd more information about them. 

Breath effects (Dragon Magic); draconic auras (Player’s Handbook II); soulmelds (Magic of Incarnum); infusions (EBERRON Campaign Setting); invocations (Complete Arcane, Dragon Magic); martial powers (Tome of Battle); mysteries (Tome of Magic); psionic powers (Expanded Psionics Handbook); Shadow Weave spells (FORGOTTEN REALMS Campaign Setting); utterances (Tome of Magic); vestiges (Tome of Magic).

[linklord231]

All known and provable Feats that stack with them selves use the phase "it's effects stack" or something very close to that.

Now we're getting somewhere!  So we agree that a feat doesn't necessarily have to use the magic words "its effects stack" in order to stack with itself, as long as it gives some kind of indication that it is intended to stack.  The question then becomes, Is the wording on Font of Inspiration enough of an indication that it should stack? 

[zugschef]

There is no such bullshit as quadratic growth of bonuses in 3rd edition. One of the things where the designers really did not fuck it up. Guess why toughness explicitly states that it stacks? Because otherwise it fuckin' wouldn't.

[PlzBreakMyCampaign]

Okay, thanks for that Zug.  I much more appreciate very slow and methodical reasoning like Linklord above. Clear text is a godsend in RAW threads.

Happy New Year! I'm just in to see the highlights every 10 days. Rule lawyering rage? Check! I've seen 2 angles of attack interpretation:

1a) RAW: The text needs to specify its 'stackiness'
1b) RAI: The other said it didn't mega-stack.
1c) RAI: Balance analysis shows that we must avoid FoI inflation madness

2a) RAW: Are other feats good enough precedent to include FoI's mega-stacking?
2b) RAI: The other said it did mega-stack
2c) RAW: Do meta-game numerical bonii count as quantities?

* 1c vs 2c seems to be a matter of opinion. This one seems the most "obvious", atleast to me.
* 1b vs 2b seems easiest to resolve. Which did the author say? One or both (and if so which one last)?
* Next seems 1a vs 2a. I'll be back in 10 days to see about this one.

[SorO_Lost]

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Now we're getting somewhere!  So we agree that a feat doesn't necessarily have to use the magic words "its effects stack" in order to stack with itself, as long as it gives some kind of indication that it is intended to stack.  The question then becomes, Is the wording on Font of Inspiration enough of an indication that it should stack?

Well I suppose you are right, you are finally getting somewhere. One sentence down - ummm... Several - to go.

So people like Soft moved to the language debate of what constitutions saying otherwise. Now language debates are about as tasteless as you can go, but this one is fairly special. All known and provable Feats that stack with them selves use the phase "it's effects stack" or something very close to that. So Soft's little debate is also based on all examples confirming the expectation of the default phasing D&D uses cannot be used to prove him wrong. And I believe that is a form of cherry picking.
Cherry picking (suppressed evidence, incomplete evidence) – act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position

Maybe eventually you'll catch up.

Okay, looking at the text of the RC, I'm seriously not seeing how this applies to quantities. It very specifically says "effects and bonuses"; those aren't quantities.

It doesn't really matter if you want to split hairs and think multiple +1s are quantities. Think of it like you have two piles of coins. One of those piles is imaginary and is made out of unattached +1s floating about and if they were real you might be able to stack them and climb out of any hole. The other pile is a bunch of Spells/Feats/Special Abilities/etc that grant the effect of X, in this case a bunch of +1s, except they are all made out of neodymium magnets. Nearly every single time you try to stack these coins to pay for a five cent piece of gum they fly off from each other so you learn how to flip them around applying them in specific orders & amounts.

FoI it's self doesn't stack with another FoI Feat, the better one (the +2 upon taking a second time) prevails.

[RobbyPants]

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Now we're getting somewhere!  So we agree that a feat doesn't necessarily have to use the magic words "its effects stack" in order to stack with itself, as long as it gives some kind of indication that it is intended to stack.  The question then becomes, Is the wording on Font of Inspiration enough of an indication that it should stack?

Well I suppose you are right, you are finally getting somewhere. One sentence down - ummm... Several - to go.

So people like Soft moved to the language debate of what constitutions saying otherwise. Now language debates are about as tasteless as you can go, but this one is fairly special. All known and provable Feats that stack with them selves use the phase "it's effects stack" or something very close to that. So Soft's little debate is also based on all examples confirming the expectation of the default phasing D&D uses cannot be used to prove him wrong. And I believe that is a form of cherry picking.
Cherry picking (suppressed evidence, incomplete evidence) – act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position

Maybe eventually you'll catch up.

Okay, looking at the text of the RC, I'm seriously not seeing how this applies to quantities. It very specifically says "effects and bonuses"; those aren't quantities.

It doesn't really matter if you want to split hairs and think multiple +1s are quantities. Think of it like you have two piles of coins. One of those piles is imaginary and is made out of unattached +1s floating about and if they were real you might be able to stack them and climb out of any hole. The other pile is a bunch of Spells/Feats/Special Abilities/etc that grant the effect of X, in this case a bunch of +1s, except they are all made out of neodymium magnets. Nearly every single time you try to stack these coins to pay for a five cent piece of gum they fly off from each other so you learn how to flip them around applying them in specific orders & amounts.

FoI it's self doesn't stack with another FoI Feat, the better one (the +2 upon taking a second time) prevails.

You're equivocating. Gaining an increase of a quantity is not the same as gaining a bonus to that quantity. The verbiage is specific for a reason.

Also, if you're going to start assuming any type of quantity is fair game, no one can ever gain more money than their single largest treasure, because all of their treasure accumulations would overlap if that were the case.

[Solo]

If I may interrupt for a moment, what is the point of this, amusing as it may be?

[SorO_Lost]

If I may interrupt for a moment, what is the point of this, amusing as it may be?

Which part?

If it's me and Link, it's mostly me wondering how long it'll take for him to catch up.
If it's me and Robby, well *shrugs* I'm mentoring. 
If it's me and you, well to give you an opportunity for one liners, but that one isn't as cool/funny as they normally are.

[linklord231]

I was hoping SorO would answer my question with something like "The wording on FoI is not sufficient cause to believe that multiple instances of the feat should stack, because..." but he didn't.  So, here's my reasoning for why I think it is enough:

The author went out of his way to explain what happens when the feat is gained multiple times.  If he wanted it to stack the way SorO thinks it should, all he had to do is say "Special:  This feat can be taken multiple times, to a maximum number of times equal to your intelligence modifier.  Its effects stack."  That would have been easier to understand, and taken fewer words - significant in a medium where wordcount is a real issue. 
So why didn't he say that?  Because he didn't mean that.  He meant for it to stack triangularly, and believed that phrasing it the way he did was enough to indicate that it should stack that way.

[faeryn]

I remember having this discussion with my DM regarding Psionic Talent a while back... neither FoI nor PT are explicit about their effects stacking, but they are both fairly implicit about it... and the rule only requires an implicit statement of stacking, not an explicit statement...

That said... I do actually see and agree with both sides of the argument both for and against it stacking... Stacking can result in some insane amounts of bonus IP/PP (given the greater versatility of IP, it had an explicit limit applied to attempt to keep it in check). The limit on FoI being taken only a number of times up to your Int Mod is a good idea in theory, but in practice it really is irreverent, it really does not take much to keep your Int Mod up above the total number of feats you can have at any given level, therefore allowing you to take FoI every time you gain a new feat if you really want to.

The argument that "prior instances of the feat are ignored if it doesn't stack" is an absurdity. The very logic that makes up that arguement can be used with stacking as well. If you can retrain an earlier non-stacking FoI to a new FoI building from your later FoI application, then you could do the same thing with a stacking FoI. There is no valid arguement there, if you want to make that argument then you have to accept the ramifications that such an argument would apply to both stacking and non-stacking, there is no validation for it to only affect one type. It simply doesn't work that way. If you retrain your 1st Font you're 2nd Font becomes the 1st Font so you're new "3rd" Font is actually just your 2nd Font again. The Retraining rules support this order of things as well since if you retrain out of a feat that is a prerequisite you must retrain out of the requisite feat/class (if possible) or you lose the benefit of the requisite. Training back into Font would simply put the prerequisite (for the special benefit of the feat) back in place thus giving you back the +2 from the 2nd Font (which would have become a +1 otherwise)

[Satori]

The FoI feat was explicitly stated, IIRC to be a sort of patch/fix for Factotum after some dev realized that the class really didn't have enough inspiration points.

So coming back to fix some wording I realized I missed that post. I just want to add and point out there is a large difference between claiming the author intended some extra points vs a godawful overkill amount of extra points.

Remember, the Factotum only obtains 10 Inspiration over twenty levels. So to scale all seven standard Feat Slots taking FoI means a +70% increase but when deliberately misreading things the +28 points is +280%. Imagine claiming Barbarians are front liners but Breastplate sucks so it should give them a +19 bonus to AC or a Favored Soul's dual score casting sucks so your starting 14s should be flipped to 53s. Maybe a +280% increase would work fine with the Toughness Feat, but the Factotum is a very solid class that does just fine without any terrible logic & bad readings to support it.

Yes, and the Only gets 10 is clearly one of the things that they later realized was a huge error.  Seriously, given the abilities and their costs, ten is piddly.  a 300% increase sounds quite right to me.

Honestly, in actual play i'd swap out the INSP point gain for the table either the totemist or the incarnate uses for Essentia point gain, and let the poor factotum player actually get to use his superpowers.

Because having super powers that you don't get to use is a F-you that makes the game unfun.

[Kaelik]

Who cares, it's garbage design no matter what he intended to write and no matter what he wrote.

If for some goddawful reason you want to punish yourself/your party/your DM by playing a Factotum in the first place, you have to houserule a bunch of things to make the class even remotely functional and make up completely on your own a definition of encounter (if you aren't smart enough to define encounter out of the Factotum IP descriptions in your necessary houserules).

So if you already have to do all that, you might as well just decide how much IP is appropriate for a Factotum (certainly more than he has at any or every level) and then give him that much IP, and move on with your life letting him actually spend feats on all the other things that will actually make his character interesting instead of brutal IP stacking. (that under the definition that doesn't make the feat useless, makes every other feat worse by comparison, since each new feat of FoI is worth more than the feat before, making it so that you never ever want to stop taking it once you've taken it a few times).

[PlzBreakMyCampaign]

I thought I had asked this before, but what about preparing metamagic on an SLA or other factotum abilities require houserules? Plenty of things basically require 3e to have house rules (thought bottle, incantrix, etc), but I don't think factotum is an offender. I'm interested, though.

Psionic Talent

This needs highlighted. The language is exactly the same. So the question becomes: Is Psionic Talent an even worse feat than we thought before, ie taking it twice only gives 2+1pp rather 2+3pp?

I seem to recall there being very specific language about pp stacking in your pool, but not if pp from the same source stacked. There isn't much precedent for that: 2 of the same class via variants isn't allowed, 2 of the same race removes the previous benefits rather than piling on more (think reincarnation), etc.

[Kaelik]

I thought I had asked this before, but what about preparing metamagic on an SLA or other factotum abilities require houserules? Plenty of things basically require 3e to have house rules (thought bottle, incantrix, etc), but I don't think factotum is an offender. I'm interested, though.

A cursory search of this thread shows no one talking about metamagic requiring houserules, so I'm going to assume this is directed at me.

I'm not claiming that the metamagic being applied to SLAs requires houserules (it may or may not, but I haven't looked at it).

What I'm saying is that the Factotum's entire inspiration mechanic is garbage writing that requires houserules to function at all, much less in a way that wouldn't cause the entire game to become literally the dumbest thing ever.

I mean, by RAW, you rest for 8 hours and then wake up, and prepare divination, how much IP do you have? And if the answer is "It depends on what you did yesterday afternoon" do you see how incredibly dumb that is?

Next step, you walk up to a locked door, how many IP do you have now by RAW?

Next you find another locked door, how many IP?

Then you leave the town (because you were just wandering around town) and go to a dungeon an the door is locked, IP?

Then you run into a monster, IP? Then the monster getting murdered alerts enemies some of whom run through the complex alerting other enemies and some who come straight into the room and fight you, IP?

Finally, after murdering everything in the complex, the party rests, and you wake up tomorrow, IP?

And how are any of those answers RAW and not "just whatever I feel like, because the Factotum class doesn't give any fucking direction at all on when the Factotum gains IP."

And even if the Factotum class did give any fucking help at all, you'd still have a bunch of Factotums just storing up larger and larger piles of IP and/or bag of rats/locked door tricking themselves into unfathomably huge piles of IP so that they can defeat the BBEG with 847 consecutive standard actions from banked IP.

[faeryn]

I thought I had asked this before, but what about preparing metamagic on an SLA or other factotum abilities require houserules? Plenty of things basically require 3e to have house rules (thought bottle, incantrix, etc), but I don't think factotum is an offender. I'm interested, though.

A cursory search of this thread shows no one talking about metamagic requiring houserules, so I'm going to assume this is directed at me.

I'm not claiming that the metamagic being applied to SLAs requires houserules (it may or may not, but I haven't looked at it).

What I'm saying is that the Factotum's entire inspiration mechanic is garbage writing that requires houserules to function at all, much less in a way that wouldn't cause the entire game to become literally the dumbest thing ever.

I mean, by RAW, you rest for 8 hours and then wake up, and prepare divination, how much IP do you have? And if the answer is "It depends on what you did yesterday afternoon" do you see how incredibly dumb that is?

Next step, you walk up to a locked door, how many IP do you have now by RAW?

Next you find another locked door, how many IP?

Then you leave the town (because you were just wandering around town) and go to a dungeon an the door is locked, IP?

Then you run into a monster, IP? Then the monster getting murdered alerts enemies some of whom run through the complex alerting other enemies and some who come straight into the room and fight you, IP?

Finally, after murdering everything in the complex, the party rests, and you wake up tomorrow, IP?

And how are any of those answers RAW and not "just whatever I feel like, because the Factotum class doesn't give any fucking direction at all on when the Factotum gains IP."

And even if the Factotum class did give any fucking help at all, you'd still have a bunch of Factotums just storing up larger and larger piles of IP and/or bag of rats/locked door tricking themselves into unfathomably huge piles of IP so that they can defeat the BBEG with 847 consecutive standard actions from banked IP.

This makes me question if you've even actually read the factotum's abilities... and upon re-reading it, the factotum is anything but broken... the base amount of IP is perfectly fine as well... Seriously how many of ya'll have been consistently missing this line:

At the beginning of each encounter, he gains a number of inspiration points determined by his level (see Table 1–1).

10 IP per day at Lv20? I think not... try 10 IP per ENCOUNTER.... suddenly that limited supply has become so much larger... it only seems small if you like abusing extra standard actions... which have a cost of 3IP for balance reasons, you're not supposed to gain extra standard actions every round. Considering the near limitless power a Factotum can have with those IP points, it's only right that they must consider the cost of their actions and spend them sparingly to avoid running out before the end of the encounter. And FoI still would help provide an extra buffer of points for the factotum for the unexpected and mistakes.


Regarding the question about Metamagic on a SLA for factotum, I presume that's in relation to the fact that the Arcane Dilettante ability is a Spell-Like rather than actual spell casting, even though it grants the factotum actual spell casting... the answer is no you do not need houserules for it, the ability provides a specific rule regarding itself and metamagic:

If you wish to enhance a spell with a metamagic feat, you must apply the feat when you prepare the spell. In addition, you must be capable of using a spell of the modified spell’s level.

Additionally you do not spend IP to prepare your spells, only to cast them.

[Samwise]

What I'm saying is that the Factotum's entire inspiration mechanic is garbage writing that requires houserules to function at all, much less in a way that wouldn't cause the entire game to become literally the dumbest thing ever.

I mean, by RAW, . . .

Do those same questions baffle you when applied to Barbarian rage or Tome of Battle Maneuvers? Skill Tricks must be completely unusable as well.

If by RAW you have THAT much trouble defining an "encounter", then you probably shouldn't be playing this game in the first place, no matter how broadly the term is used without any specific RAW definition.

[Kaelik]

This makes me question if you've even actually read the factotum's abilities...

So... Look, if it's so easy, then how about you answer my questions. And I'll tell you every time you are definitely wrong based on your own previous answers, and I'll ask you for a rules cite on all the times you say he does and doesn't gain IP.

Just FYI, he wakes up in the morning and prepares Divination because he wants to cast it. So if your answer is "Zero because no encounters yet!" then say that so I can point out how stupid that is. (that that would be the rule, not that that would be your answer, it's as good as the other answers, 10 because he's in the "encounter" of wanting to cast Divination, and 567, because he's been saving up.)

Do those same questions baffle you when applied to Barbarian rage or Tome of Battle Maneuvers? Skill Tricks must be completely unusable as well.

If by RAW you have THAT much trouble defining an "encounter", then you probably shouldn't be playing this game in the first place, no matter how broadly the term is used without any specific RAW definition.

Are the Barbarian's Rage mechanics and the ToB mechanics that also poorly written garbage? Sure. But at least ToB has the two classes that aren't extra stupid always prepare all their maneuvers well before encounters, such that you could play the entire class ignoring the dumb encounter rules completely and never need them. At least the Barbarian usually has a Rage last long enough that it doesn't need to address the dumb encounter rules. Both of those are better than the Factotum which always needs you to decide the start of an encounter (unlike the Barbarian and Warblade and Swordsage) and on top of that needs you to decide if minor things like "wanting to cast Divination right now" and "approaching a door I want to unlock" count as encounters.

And on top of that, neither Barbarians nor ToB classes have the Factotums dumb mechanic of stacking huge piles of IP on top of each other over and over and over until they get to 9000, so if you err on the side of declaring almost everything to be an encounter, swordsages and warblades and barbarians are mildly more powerful, but really not even as powerful as Wizards or worrisome at all, where as every single time you accidentally declare and Encounter when you shouldn't, you add some points to the pool of whoopass he can stockpile for hours, days, adventures, years, or whatever, until he alpha strikes the BBEG with literally the dumbest alphastrike in the entire game.

I mean, think about the last adventure you DMed, how often would you have told a Barbarian he can't rage again (never) how often would you tell a swordsage/warblade that their unprepared maneuvers come back (never, maybe if they literally woke up to the sound of an ally being eaten by a monster) how many times would you would you tell a Factotum that he gains IP (some nonzero number).