Skills & Feats
Since this is a 3.5 book, we always have a chapter of Feats. This one also has new skills, but you don’t care because you don’t get more skill points and you can’t afford to buy the skills in Core that you already wanted. It has a few suggestions for modifying existing skills. For those who want to know what’s been happening with the fiction the Eskimos were starving, their young men went to fight the not-Russians, they were all captured, and now the old people have to surrender their wives to the not-Russians so they can hold them prisoner and force the old men to hunt on their behalf.
Appraise now lets you determine how much meat is on a creature – and it’s value.
When you’re hungry enough, anything is food. When you’re hungry enough, no cost is too high
Craft (Alchemy) includes three new alchemical items; one provides a +4 bonus to resist cold, one lets you not die when you freeze to death (but someone has to revive you in a warm place and you might die anyway), and something that does +1 fire damage after it gets wet (including by cutting someone with blood). The costs of the items are too high for what they do. Five ranks in basketweaving now gives you a +2 to using ropes. Ice age people can use Disable Traps to set up a rockfall, but they can’t actually disable traps because fuck you for being primitive. Disguise let’s you hide your scent from people with the scent ability. The Heal skill lets you treat Hypothermia (DC 30) and if you fail, the beneficiary of your healing makes a DC 30 Fortitude save or dies.
Doctor: I don’t know about you, but I like my odds.
If you’re not wearing white, you take a -10 check to hide in snow. That seems a little unfair to me, what with snow blindness and such… What if you’re frosted with snow, but wearing a bright purple suit ensemble.
What’s the point of even being an adventurer if you don’t get to dress for attention
Knowledge (Riddle) is a skill now. It doesn’t say who gets it as a class skill. I looked at all the classes in the book and NONE of them get it. Maybe if you have ‘Knowledge (All)’ you can justify it, but good luck convincing the DM that you can just roll a check to open the gates of Moria. Listen has a big diatribe about sound traveling further, but then gives the same penalty for distance as normal. Inuit will have a dance-off instead of a drag-out fight if they have an audience and don’t want to risk death or maiming, and you can use the Perform skill to win.
Not dance dance! Fight dance!
Spotting takes a -5 penalty, so
effectively you’re only at -5 wearing a Purple suit in a snowdrift. Eskimo only characters can screw up a Knowledge Religion role and then suffer a permanent penalty to Survival for not respecting nature enough. Moving on to Feats!
The first feat is a +1 Luck bonus to all saving throws – the equivalent of a 1,000 gp item (cloak of resistance +1), but it does stack with it. You can take a feat to behead people. Cold Resistance 1/- is a feat. There’s a feat that lets you remove 1 point of non-lethal damage per round by taking a full action to shiver vigorously. If you’re even considering this feat, you have made terrible life decisions and you should let yourself die. There’s a wrestling feat that makes your pins last 2 rounds – not sure if that means you can walk away and they’re still pinned for a round or what happens if they ‘break the pin’ on their turn, but grappling was a mess. There’s a feat to give you a bonus on not getting tired from swimming. There’s a feat that is at least interesting (overpriced, but interesting) that gives you a 0-level spell.
Evil Eye gives you a -1 CHA but doubles the variable numeric effects of Necromancy spells (ie,
chill touch would do 2d6 points of damage, but still only 1 point of STR; undead might flee for 2d4 rounds).
You were going for this look, anyway
There’s a feat that lets you heal while traveling (light activity), one that makes you completely Fearless (I mentioned it before).
Up to this point there have been bad feats, but not RAGE INDUCING feats, but I just hit one.
Remember, if you’re a human and you’re 10th level, you have 4 feats
total. Every single feat has to compete with every other feat to be worth taking. If a feat does nothing, or so little as to be, that’s a problem. And stupid feats like bonuses on swim checks to resist non-lethal damage are dumb and bad for the game, but there’s another type of feat
that is even worse.
Ferocity
Benefit: You continue to function at negative hit points without going further into negatives, up ot one negative hit point/2 levels. Thus a 10th level character can continue to function at -5 hit points[/i]
Someone needs to help me understand what someone was thinking here. As a 1st level human, I can take this feat (even though it has fuckin’ TOUGHNESS as a prerequisite) and it does fuck-all. At 2nd level, if I
miraculously find myself between 0 and -2, I can keep acting normally, but even at that level I’ll
almost certainly risk taking 9+ points of damage from a single hit, meaning my
reward is
character death!!! And at 10th level, if I end up between 0 and -5 (again, no benefit if you’re at 1 hit point or -6 hit points) I’m even
more likely to die.
I know we call it Dumpster Diving for a reason, but even when you’re wading through garbage you can curse the gods for adding literal shit that doesn’t belong there!
There’s a feat that lets you give up your entire turn to MAYBE make an enemy attack someone else on your team. Firearms Proficiency – but we knew that since those are exotic weapons… You’d think that they’re EASIER to use than bows and arrows and that’s why they caught on, but not in D&D world! Since you can get Cold Resistance 1, you can get Fire Resistance 1, too. You’re going to feel so smart when you only take 47 points of damage from a fireball instead of 48 (and the fact that you’re even being hit with a fireball is probably proof that the DM is going easy on you). There’s a feat that lets you snuff non-magical fires with a touch – that’s bizarre and weird and probably not worth a feat, but it is giving you a 3rd level spell (
quench]) so that’s something. Too bad it requires a +7 BAB for some reason…
It’s still a pretty big investment so you don’t have to pour water (or snow!) over a fire, or put a shoveful of dirt on it
There’s a feat that lets you curse to give ONE of your opponents the Shaken condition. There’s another wrestling feat that keeps your opponent from drawing a weapon in a grapple. There’s a feat that lets you eat multiple meals – but it doesn’t appear that eating more provides any benefit. If you’re trying to eat more than a giant or win a Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest it might be helpful, but you’re probably playing D&D wrong. You take a feat like this and you’re TRYING to make everything into an eating contest.
There’s a feat that gives you another +1 for higher ground (+2 total). There’s a super-specific feat that works when wielding a longsword against an opponent who is lower-level, and no more than 1-size larger than you – if you meet the criteria you can get a +1 dodge bonus to AC with an opposed Dexterity check and if you hit on your next attack they’re shaken for 1 round. That’s a lot of figuring for a marginal benefit…
Is it just me, or are people who are pathologically opposed to fun drawn to being game designers?
There’s a feat that lets you deal grapple damage with a successful trip, the eponymous Hot Blooded feat. The sequel to the cursing feat lets you give everyone within 10’ the shaken condition. There’s a feat that lets you throw axes like they were made for being thrown – this is automatically worse than
Throw Anything which appeared in both Sword and Fist (3.0) and Complete Warrior (3.5). There’s a feat that doesn’t require Hurl Axe as a prerequisite that makes your thrown weapons boomerang back to you. It’s specifically called out as a supernatural ability.
I’ve had a long time to accept an infinite supply of axes. I also gave up on saving the princess at some point and realized I was young and could find someone new.
I’ve mostly run out of rage, so I can’t get a rage-boner for
Hypothermic Sleep – in fact, I’m starting to make excuses for it. So there’s a feat that gives you Cold Resistance 1 all the time and it’s dumb, and it requires Toughness as a pre-req. This feat gives you cold resistance 1
but only when you’re asleep which seems like it’s worse in every possible way, but it has
cold-blooded as a pre-req and
not Toughness. Since you might get cold-blooded for free, you’re aren’t setting two feats on fire, but I feel like the book should have known that this was totally not worth it – if they think Cold Resistance 1 is worth a feat, and this only works when you’re asleep you’d figure they’d at least consider it worth Cold Resistnace
3!
Ice Hearing is a supernatural feat that lets you hear people up to a mile away on the ice. There’s a +10 to balance checks on Ice. There’s a feat to reduce the armor penalty you take from armor, and while that’s pointless and dumb, at least you don’t have to take it for a specific TYPE of armor. You see, I’m making excuses for bad rules.
This seems relevant, but I don’t know how to stop it
There’s a feat that gives you a bonus equal to your ranks in Tumble to avoid being tripped. They also have a word-for-read reprint of
Improved Disarm and a feat called
Improved Draw which is really
Quick Draw but it has a Dex requirement and not a BAB requirement. There’s a feat that lets you knock down opponents when you inflict non-lethal damage.
Possibly one of those things that should just be a thing, but since we have feats, we gotta use ‘em
There’s a feat to allow you to do double damage against a charge with weapons that don’t normally work that way. Here’s a good candidate for feat that is trying to be way too specific.
You move past an attacker, putting enough distance between you and your enemy that the attacker must begin his assault all over again. To rub it in, you turn and mock your opponent, proving you could have inflicted far worse armor
This is like the longsword feat, but you have to have a shortspear, the opponent must still be lower level than you and not more than one size larger, you get the +1 AC if you win the opposed Dexterity check and they’re frightened for 1 round if you make an Intimidate check equal to their AC. Nothing about action, or being able to use it again and again. There’s another one for an axe, and your opponent is stunned if you hit. There’s one where you can make your opponent kneel with a grapple check (give you a +2 to attack bonuses), There’s a feat that lets you panic your opponent if you hit with an unarmed strike.
The next feat gives a +1 bonus to your saves.
I thought the Matrix was resetting for a minute
This feat is ‘Lucky’, the first feat was ‘Arnagneq’ which is why it was listed first alphabetically. I think writing ‘Arnagneq’ on your character sheet is way dumber than writing ‘Lucky’, but that’s because I’ve only been working on 7 languages in Duolingo and Inuit isn’t one of them, so ‘Arnagneq’ gives me no clue to what it’s supposed to do. I don’t know if the author started out with Lucky, but then tried to make it more thematically named but forgot to get rid of the base feat – trying to figure it out will surely drive me mad. Fortunately, I’ve gotten really good at NOT trying to figure out why the world works the way it does.
The next feat is a +4 versus save. Now, this book has a feat that makes you IMMUNE to fear, so you might wonder what’s the point. Well, the one that makes you immune to fear normally requires a Wisdom 8
or lower and this one doesn’t, but if being fearless is worth a feat, I find a +4 bonus to be…disappointing.
Being an orphan (like every PC ever) is now a feat that gives you a +4 to a single skill; if you were thinking of taking
Combat Casting, you should take this instead (unless that’s a pre-req for something else you need).
Pack Feats
These are general feats, but they have four feats in a row that are all Pack x and are basically teamwork feats. Three of the feats are hot garbage, but one of them allows you to ignore AoO when you have allies nearby. It doesn’t look like each of your comrades needs to have the feat – if you have it you get the benefit just by having party members around. In terms of design space, feats that provided a benefit to your team are a space that really could benefit from further exploration – or at least, they could if the edition were still alive. A feat that gives me an additional +2 to flanking attacks probably isn’t worth it, but a feat that lets all of my party get a benefit might be. In
this book there are 77 feats – more feats than every player will get
combined if you play the game all to level 20 (not that you’d want most of these) so feats that let you effectively GIVE FEATS to your companions would be really cool. So there’s a kernel of a good idea here that I wanted to explore.
Exploring packmates in an overtly sexual way is apparently a trilogy you can get from Amazon. I’d be willing to buy the Kindle Bundle if someone else reads and reviews THAT
The next feat is a metamagic feat that has some interesting implications. It requires a DC 30 survival check; if you succeed you get a bonus on all numerical effects equal to the amount you exceeded the DC. Ie, if you rolled a 36, all of your cure spells would do +6 extra healing; your fireball would do +6 extra damage. The high DC makes it difficult to use, but with an item in the last chapter giving you a +5 bonus on Survival checks completely unrelated to gathering herbs, this could
potentially lead to shenanigans.
Confession time – I didn’t really mean to make an observation on every feat. It’s just every time I decide I’m going to skip things I see something so heinous that I can’t not talk about it. The next
two are so, so, so bad. The first just gives you DR 1 versus poison – since most poison doesn’t even do HP damage, and that’s not enough to care about you would never take this feat – it’s probably worse than Cold Resistance 1
while sleeping. But the next feat is wrong and bad is every way that it is possible for a feat to be wrong and bad.
Redheaded (General)
You are a redhead. As a result, you are considered devious and sneaky.
Prerequisite Must be a redhead, cannot be good aligned
Benefit You receive a +1 competence bonus to Intelligence checks
The next feat lets you ignore part of the AC bonus your opponent gets from Cover. They offer a feat that allows you to provoke an AoO against you; you deal whatever damage the opponent does to you plus your weapon damage if you succeed on an attack roll. It’s not overtly supernatural, so I don’t know how your longsword dealing 1d8+5 damage does 42 damage if you take 6d6+24 from a giant. So even though it’s implemented poorly, it’s at least INTERESTING. The next one is also interesting – you can spend an action to force pull ammo back to your quiver, and it deals it’s weapon damage AGAIN when it pulls itself out of the opponent’s flesh. There’s a feat that (usually) lets you see invisible creatures. There’s a feat that gives you a watermark so copies of you (like a doppelganger) are never perfect, but it totally doesn’t make sense to me that pulling off your shirt to reveal a 3rd nipple proves you’re really YOU if someone didn’t already know that about you. There’s a feat that lets you cast
augury 1/day. You could even get it at 1st level if you have two starting feats. There’s a feat that lets you take a single animal’s form – it requires a BAB of 5+ and is useable once per day. As far as feats go, I approve – it’s cool enough that writing that on your sheet is better than Weapon Focus.
And….
Whoa!
There’s ANOTHER feat that gives you a +1 luck bonus to all your saves, but this one requires that you have a WIS of 8 or lower. That’s
three different feats that give you a +1 luck bonus to your saving throws.
You know how you can negate a hit against your mount with the ride skill? Well you can do the same thing to prevent an attack against you if you’re wearing skis – your balance check becomes your AC. If there’s some way to ski EVERYWHERE this has some potential.
I mentioned it before, but if you and three adjacent companions all have shields, people can’t use the overrun action to trip you. There’s never been a case where someone used the overrun action to trip someone who was adjacent to three companions with shields and if you tell me otherwise, I won’t believe you. There’s a ride by attack feat for skiers (slide-by-attack). There’s a feat that makes you better at fighting in snow (but not enough better to justify its existence). There’s a feat that lets you walk on the surface of snow without falling in (like an elf!). There’s a feat that if you have deflect arrows, you can use it to throw a spear back at an opponent. There’s rapid shot for spears. There’s a feat for swimming faster (but it doesn’t give you a swim speed). There’s a wresting feat that keeps you from provoking attacks of opportunity. There’s a Viking themed feat that lets you jump out of a boat, make an intimidate check, and possibly panic people for 1 round. Again, niche. When charging with two friends you can panic enemies. There’s a feat that lets you choose a totem animal. You won’t eat the animal, and you get a +1 ability score and a bonus to a skill. None of them provide a bonus to Intelligence or Charisma, but all the physical ability scores and Wisdom are available options. There’s a feat that lets you run on the bottom of a river (gain
waterbreathing and
freedom of movement. If you intend to use it in ways other than intended, it’s a really good feat.
I’d be alive today if I could’ve activated Freedom of Movement once per day
There’s a feat that gives you
fog cloud once per day, one that lets you cast
cure light wounds on yourself. There’s a wrestling feat that lets you use a grapple check to trip your opponent. There’s a feat that lets you turn your opponent’s natural 1 into an automatic disarm, but you have to have a shield and you have to drop it. There’s a metamagic feat that makes your spells able to go anywhere the wind does (so if a bird could potentially get there, so can your spell). At the cost of +2-levels you could send fireballs from your palace to rain down on the enemy kingdom.
And there’s ANOTHER feat that gives you a +1 luck bonus to all your saving throws. This one is the best because you just have to be the youngest child, not dumb or gullible or have bumped Charisma.
The last feat is like the Ugly-Necromancer one; you lose 1 point of Charisma and evil spells increase their numeric effects by +50%. I think +50% is harder to do with dice than double, but it applies to all numeric effects, not just VARIALE effects. So
protection from good gives you a +3 bonus to AC and +3 resistance bonus on saves.
And that’s the feats section.
There’s a lot of crap, but there really are a few things that could become character defining abilities. The main issue is that getting the decent feats accepted in a game is a major uphill battle. Since the quality and power-level are inconsistent, few GMs will issue blanket permission for content from third party books into their game. Most of these feats are bad – even REALLY bad – but reading seventy + feats and then deciding which ones are good enough
but not too good is a lot of work. If a player wants a -2 Charisma to make their Evil Necromancy spells more effective and to spend a spell-slot 2-levels higher to cast it with a range of unlimited, I’d have some concerns. I don’t have a specific concern – but I can see how combining those things starts building toward bad stuff. Pretending you don’t have an ultimate plan and then springing campaign destruction isn’t cool.
This is bad news
I’ll be in Vegas for a work training trip all next week – it’ll probably be next week before I look at the chapter on Magic spells.