Feats: success or failiure

[RobbyPants]

Giving them out on level-up means that people have no means of getting things they'd want (the ability to perform stunts, proficiency with exotic weapons, etc.) during adventures when you'd actually want to gain those abilities and instead only between adventures.

What are some potential viable alternatives?

The easy answer is "You get a feat slot each level, but you don't have to cash it in until you choose to".

[erik]

Or can swap out feats with brief retraining montage. Like spell slots

[Mask_De_H]

Giving them out on level-up means that people have no means of getting things they'd want (the ability to perform stunts, proficiency with exotic weapons, etc.) during adventures when you'd actually want to gain those abilities and instead only between adventures.

What are some potential viable alternatives?

The easy answer is "You get a feat slot each level, but you don't have to cash it in until you choose to".

A variant on this is having narrative currency you cash in through foreshadowing to get whatever feat you need, the deciding at the end of the session to bank it or not. FATE does this with stunts and Black Forest's character advancement system was basically this.

[virgil]

The biggest issue with en media res advancement is gaming culture. Character concepts are usually made from the start, and rarely organically change in response to events of the campaign. There's a real a present demographic of people making their level 1 character a "veteran adventurer", and their 'build' is functionally set in stone from that point. I can honestly see players responding to being given a "level/feat" token at the start of the adventure, and spending it the instant they are allowed on what they had planned for their character.

It's certainly something I've run into with After Sundown. Essentially all of my players hated the advancement system, because they had like three stats they cared about, and were loathe to spend resources on anything but those.

[deaddmwalking]

The biggest issue with en media res advancement is gaming culture. Character concepts are usually made from the start, and rarely organically change in response to events of the campaign. There's a real a present demographic of people making their level 1 character a "veteran adventurer", and their 'build' is functionally set in stone from that point. I can honestly see players responding to being given a "level/feat" token at the start of the adventure, and spending it the instant they are allowed on what they had planned for their character.

If feats are extras (outside of your build), then getting those works. For example, throwing a sword is probably not going to be anyone's PRIMARY schtick, but being good at it is fun sometimes. Planning to be able to throw a sword through some guy's face and burning a feat on it FOREVER is wasteful, but getting to use it when an opportunity presents itself is cool.

If a feat is critical to a build, it should probably be granted as a class ability or selectable in that manner (ie, like ranger ranged versus two-weapon fighting). Keep in mind that there are a lot of reasons why you'd want to expand the number of options (like giving Rangers both - they aren't using their bow when they're using two-weapons and vice versa, so it adds flexibility without raw power).

[Pariah Dog]

What are some potential viable alternatives?

Had a DM hand out bonus feats are part of quest rewards or as bonus objectives (though it might be kind of silly that "For stopping the [Team monster] from making off with the [MacGuffin] That Bob the Wizard gets the Extend Spell feat, Dan the Ranger gets Multishot, Jim the Druid gets Natural Spell and Mike the fighter gets Weapon Focus" Although that could possibly be explained away as part of a downtime training montage)

[Josh_Kablack]

You could default to MC Fiat and hand out feats-as-treasure

"For finding and scouting the Goblin War Camp, you learn the ability: Deepwoods Survival"
"While escorting the captured Princess back to town, you gain a point of Courtly Ettiquette"
"For successfully climbing the Barrier Peaks, you gain the ability: Reknowned Mountineer"

Personally I'd prefer to go so far as to make it a minigame and hand out such feats as though the game session were a White Elephant gift exchange -- write out the feats on index cards before the session and let players swipe and swap them around not settling on which one their character keeps until the end-of-adventure accounting happens.

[JonSetanta]

Who came up with the initial concept of 1 feat per level?

Was it me?
Was it Koumei?
Was it someone else?

Maybe it was just a coincidental thought that occurred to some of us at the right time, at the same moment?

[Chamomile]

The problem with giving out feats as treasure is that you already get treasure as treasure. If feats are converted to treasure handed out by the GM, then they don't serve the purpose of "character option you pick out as you level up" and something else has to pick up the slack or else people will riot.

[jt]

You could give out feats every third of a level. Hell, you could replace experience points with them and say you level up when you get five of them or whatever.

The problem with giving out boatloads of feats, however you do it, is that they get irritating to track, of course. You could instead say that gaining a feat lets you update one of your feat slots (rotating out to better ones like ToB maneuvers or 4E powers) to limit it. Or you could say you can have dozens of them but only so many of them ready at a time, like spell slots.

[Koumei]

Who came up with the initial concept of 1 feat per level?

Was it me?
Was it Koumei?
Was it someone else?

Maybe it was just a coincidental thought that occurred to some of us at the right time, at the same moment?

It definitely wasn't me. I was convinced when Frank said "Yeah the Tome Feat idea was a failure, we should have gone with one 'kind of small but meaningful-ish' feat per level", and there was at least one thread showing the kind of feats that would work for that. I don't know if that was before or after you said it was better for the game.

[Thaluikhain]

The problem with giving out feats as treasure is that you already get treasure as treasure. If feats are converted to treasure handed out by the GM, then they don't serve the purpose of "character option you pick out as you level up" and something else has to pick up the slack or else people will riot.

Could you go halfway on that? You did a lot of survival-ey things in your adventure, pick one of a short list of selected survival themed feats?

[Judging__Eagle]

I could honestly see Feats being a per session resource; that players spend on different Feats they wish to accomplish in a session.

However, that's not really going to solve the notion that the word "Feat" is wholly inaccurate of a term for how they function. A better system would have every Feat only be able to be 'learned' if a creature can perform a qualifying action, or has some other qualifying prerequisite. You can't Power Attack unless you have 'some' combat training & at least above average strength; however knowing how to Power Attack should not preclude one from being able to Bullrush or Improved Grapple.

Potentially I could see Feats being something that are similar to Book of Gears notions of Magic Item Attunement. Once you've performed a Feat, you can't 'clear' the Feat slot until some sort of timer/action has passed. Often with varying scales of time needed to detune a feat, from a Swift Action to "The next Sunrise/Sunset", or potentially "Until the End of the play Session".

An other factor that's largely overlooked: PCs being granted bonus feats "just because" by the Mister Cavern, is not a great solution; but can act as a solution to "no one would willingly spend a feat on this". Portioning off a bunch of otherwise trash feats from the main list of feats. Which are used as "reward" Feats given out by the MC that a Player can write onto their character sheet once per session/level would make largely ignored feats become part of the gameplay. A WoT d20 capmagin I was in had the MC giving out feats to the PCs every session, in order to keep them viable as the game kicked off. While in the D&D: Online mmo, the PCs start off with a +30 HP Feat as a 1st level "Bonus Feat".

[Chamomile]

The problem with giving out feats as treasure is that you already get treasure as treasure. If feats are converted to treasure handed out by the GM, then they don't serve the purpose of "character option you pick out as you level up" and something else has to pick up the slack or else people will riot.

Could you go halfway on that? You did a lot of survival-ey things in your adventure, pick one of a short list of selected survival themed feats?

That's a good idea. It means you can have tons of total feats while still only offering people a small selection every time they need to select them, it gives people something to pick out, and it does the whole "organic character growth" thing. I've been wondering what to do about feats in 3.X a lot lately and I think I may steal this idea for them.

[TiaC]

The problem with giving out feats as treasure is that you already get treasure as treasure. If feats are converted to treasure handed out by the GM, then they don't serve the purpose of "character option you pick out as you level up" and something else has to pick up the slack or else people will riot.

Could you go halfway on that? You did a lot of survival-ey things in your adventure, pick one of a short list of selected survival themed feats?

That's a good idea. It means you can have tons of total feats while still only offering people a small selection every time they need to select them, it gives people something to pick out, and it does the whole "organic character growth" thing. I've been wondering what to do about feats in 3.X a lot lately and I think I may steal this idea for them.

This has the issue of "Let's not buy food for the wilderness encounter, I want to get better at tracking." and the issue where the most competent character advances faster than the others. Even if everyone gets the same number of feats, the character who has strengths that the adventure plays to gets to enhance their focus, while the others are stuck advancing minor BS.

[erik]

Retrain one feat per day. No cost other than spending an hour sorting out how to do your new feat.

[maglag]

PHB2 did have retraining rules but they took quite a bit of in-game downtime from what I remember.

But heck if spellcasters can just change all their dozens of spells for the day in 1 hour, would probably be fine to allow everybody to change their feats 1/day with 1 hour of warming up or something, plus that makes fighters a lot more interesting since they can now experiment with all those fancy feat chains.

[Chamomile]

This has the issue of "Let's not buy food for the wilderness encounter, I want to get better at tracking."

Only if you decide to give it that problem. You could hardcode it so that you have to make X number of Y skill checks to qualify, but you could also just let the GM offer one of several feat packages based on the adventure's theme. The encounter took place in the wilderness, therefore you get a wilderness feat, regardless of how often you hunted for food as opposed to just buying rations.

and the issue where the most competent character advances faster than the others. Even if everyone gets the same number of feats, the character who has strengths that the adventure plays to gets to enhance their focus, while the others are stuck advancing minor BS.

This problem is trickier, although not unsolvable. You have to divide up your feat packages such that as many builds as possible have at least one good feat in them, preferably several. Your wilderness feat package might have more options that the Ranger and Druid care about, but the Wizard, Rogue, Paladin, etc. etc. need something too.

[JonSetanta]

PHB2 did have retraining rules but they took quite a bit of in-game downtime from what I remember.

But heck if spellcasters can just change all their dozens of spells for the day in 1 hour, would probably be fine to allow everybody to change their feats 1/day with 1 hour of warming up or something, plus that makes fighters a lot more interesting since they can now experiment with all those fancy feat chains.

This is a good idea. Something with less time investment than "it takes a month".