Feats: success or failiure

[souran]

So, generally do people think that the 3.x concept of feats was a good idea or a bad idea from a design perspective.

my thoughts in general

1) Having the ability to select features that are nominally class neutral to tailor your character is good

2) the "optimization" minigame really only exists because of feats. Neither 2e nor 5e has no real optimization aspect because players don't make character growth choices that often.

3) "everything is a feat" doesn't work

4) its basically impossible to give "to many" feats. Feats are easy to write, can be included in all kinds of sourcebooks, and do not require the same level of investment as taking a level in a class.

For how much I actually like reviewing, comparing, and design characters through their feats I am not sure if they don't represent a false branch of game design. Are they really worth the complexity they add to the game?

[hogarth]

When 3.0 came out, I liked the idea of being able to differentiate one Big Dumb Fighter from another. E.g. if Fighter #1 has Weapon Focus (bow) and Fighter #2 has Power Attack, that makes them "feel" different even if they're practically identical otherwise.

The big flaw with feats is the huge variation in power levels. I mean, there's a huge variation in spell power levels too, but a cleric or wizard isn't stuck using the same crappy spell forever if they want to use it once.

[Username17]

[Axebird]

The idea of a generic character building resource that trickles in over the course of progression is fine. It's also not really a stunning revelation, and almost everything about the actual implementation of feats, including but not limited to what is or isn't a feat, how many feats you get, and how powerful feats are sucked.

[Foxwarrior]

Rifling through the garbage is absolutely terrible if you're a bit out of practice and don't have a set of good basic feat choices sitting in your head ready to go.

It's good to have character building decisions to make each time you level up though. A pure class-based system with no selectable options after level 3 or whatever is just not enough.

[Dean]

Feats were created with 2E in mind and were really quite a genius idea...for 2E. In 2E the designers had created 3 different "optional" subsystems to allow players to buy special abilities and all of those proved very popular. You could use weapon proficiencies to learn different fighting styles, or master a weapon or learn special attacks. You could use nonweapon proficiencies in little bundles to learn cool cross class skills like alchemy. Then there were characters points introduced in the Players Options series which allowed you to buy things like Ambidexterity or better hit die out of a pool of points your character would get. The idea to combine all of those things into a uniform system that everyone could choose from is definitely a good one. That way you didn't have to comb through multiple books voltron'ing multiple fungible resources to buy the stuff you want. Everyone gets some feats and you use those to make the character you want as you level up. Great idea.

Unfortunately a lot of design decisions added up to making feats much less important than they'd intended them to be. Feats like Toughness, Weapon Focus, and Weapon specialization are complete jokes in 3E but those things were genuinely awesome in AD&D. By doubling monster HP, removing the huge initiative penalties you'd get for casting spells, making the Concentration skill let you take hits and keep casting, and creating longer lasting buffs the game became one of caster supremacy incredibly quickly and piddly changes to your characters to-hit scores or Will saves simply didn't matter. Feats then tried to be redefine themselves in almost every book 3E put out. They tried to be special attacks, special abilities, fighting styles, and so on but that just created a crazy optimization minigame you were required to play if you wanted to count as good. Barbarians have to complete the ubercharging chains and Necromancers must have tainted souls or you've done it wrong.

Feats are interesting because it's a very smart piece of design that would have simplified and improved 2E AD&D massively. It's just that none of those things mattered because the game they were designing those feats for was a thing of the past at the exact moment they published them.

[VladtheLad]

I have been of the opinion that feats should not have been included in 3rd edition at all for quite some time. I can see including them as a reward for class levels gained, but there is no excuse for racial hd to have them.
On monsters they increase complexity and make monsters harder to use without any significant benefit. In my face to face life I am the only dm that actually remembers to check out the feat section to check out what the monsters can do.

So it was an iffy idea that also had a pretty pathetic execution. It could have been an iffy idea with a good execution. I guess that should be your aim if you are trying to fix 3rd edition.

I think most likely class features could completely replace feats, though its pretty hard to actually remove feats from 3rd edition. Still it would be an interesting attempt to see.

[Chamomile]

People like to pick feats when leveling up and get angry if you tell them not to bother because feats are terrible until they Voltron together into gamebreaking cheese, but the frequency with which individual feats are forgotten belies how little people care about them in practice. Clearly, being able to choose something flavorful and evocative upon level-up is important to people, but equally clearly, no feat system yet designed is delivering.

[OgreBattle]

I've had fun with proficiencies in 2nd edition and ACKS, where they were usually brand new abilities great from the start.

In 3e 3.5 they feel like beggar's coins for warriors to spend on a piddly modifier or to reduce a huge penalty to a little one. In 4e I remember some multiclass feats felt nifty, the powers from some Themes that granted a stunning move or extra action were useful.

I like Tome feats at low levels when they aren't a lot of book keeping.

At the end of the day you the designer should figure out how many 'slots' there are for character creation, decide if you even need feats.

How I'd do it...

1) Class: Gives resource mechanic, level appropriate, most important component
2) Skills: Does everything skill related feats did
3) Trait (renamed feat): Everything else like...
-'Race', being an elf is 1 slot, being dragon blooded multiple
-Multiclassing, use feat slots to gain a limited selection of other class abilities

[jt]

The idea of putting things into little arbitrary rules packages that you can pick and choose from using a universal resource is brilliant. It sounds obvious now, but if you look back at older games (even video games) you see a lot more level-based, point-based, and ad-hoc systems.

3E's feats suffer from being a parallel system (in a game with levels AND skills), and from having no clear idea how big they're supposed to be and what focus they're supposed to have. You can't really let people choose between combat and non-combat options in a combat heavy game like D&D. The rest of the game needs to be designed with some assumptions about player combat effectiveness and any character that doesn't have exactly the intended amount of combat-focus in feat selection causes problems. Feats are inherently a little fiddly since they're a list of dissimilar objects, but the tendency to make them minor situational bonuses in D&D makes it worse. They're also a little inherently dumpster-divey, and having some be much more effective than others because there's no size target makes that worse. Secondary systems are also inherently fiddly, meaning that having feats as a secondary system is doubly fiddly. Maybe feats should be the primary advancement system if they're included at all.

Clearly, being able to choose something flavorful and evocative upon level-up is important to people, but equally clearly, no feat system yet designed is delivering.

I think purely non-mechanical decisions in a leveling system is worth exploring. Customize the special effects on your magic, name the martial arts system you're developing, tell the group what your rogue's favorite bluff is. It's a prompt for players that need an extra roleplaying push and a token decision to make on a dead level. And unlike mechanical decisions it's normal and expected that some of them don't stick.

[erik]

The idea of class-agnostic special abilities that can be selected to make characters more unique is cool, but that's not really what most feats have been by-and-large. The majority of them are bonuses to improve a very specific tactic. And most of those tactics are pretty awful. And a few of them are so strong that you really need to take them to be competitive even if it is an utterly boring selection. Any feat that just gives a +x bonus should be binned outright.

The whole idea of feat chains is understandable but fucked. You have too few to waste on pre-reqs. Each feat should be able to be taken on its own. If they have a pre-req it should just be straight up level-gating.

A lot of maneuvers from feats are things that just should have been available as normal options. It wouldn't be bad for the game if weapon styles and such were just available at certain BAB checkpoints if proficient with the weapons.

I concur that monsters shouldn't have feats without class levels. A Bugbear doesn't need Alertness and Weapon Focus. But a Bugbear barbarian with an oversized greataxe can be memorable.

[dirkformica]

Best thing that's been introduced to RPGs.

[DrPraetor]

Feats fill such a real need in D&D that people like them - they were a huge net good - in spite of being a garbage fire of a design from almost every angle. So if your question is - "were feats a good development" - the answer is yes. If your question is - "were feats a good design" - the answer is, you mixed some cheerios and milk and somehow you started a fire.

The Complete Warlock - which Frank's dad ran when we were kids - had fighter abilities that were, in most ways, a better implementation than feats. They did have a tendency toward fiddly numerical bonuses, which was often unfortunate.

D&D 3E had some elements of a strong tactical minigame in positioning and ZOC, so feats that let you exploit that minigame with trip attacks and attacks of opportunity and such were generally a net benefit to the game, sufficient to outweigh the annoyance of various flavors of feat taxes that other characters ended up paying. The Complete Warlock, by the way, didn't have trip attacks and stuff, which would've improved the game.

[JonSetanta]

When I began 3e some two decades ago, I was immediately dismayed when I read the feat "Toughness".

+3 HP. That's it.

Then I was downright pissed off when I read the designer's reasoning behind it.

[Username17]

Yeah, the Warlock "Fighter Abilities" and "Thief Abilities" were pretty recognizable as 3e style Feats - at least the stuff like Weapon Focus and off-hand parry. Indeed, the fact that Fighter Abilities and Thief abilities were different under Caltech rules has always stuck me as being a literal and direct predecessor to the fact that 3e Rogues get "Special Abilities" and Fighters get "Bonus Feats." It really does seem like at least one person in the 3e D&D design team played the same D&D variant that DrPraetor and I did in the early eighties, because there are a lot of oddly similar design choices there.

Whether Feats are good or bad really depends on what you think the alternative is. Compared to the original D&D where fighting men had no means of differentiating themselves, they are obviously a massive improvement. The fact that one Fighter has Cleave and another Fighter has proficiency with the Whip Dagger is better than both characters being interchangeable piles of hitpoints and attack bonuses. That being said, there are obviously a lot of ways you could imagine Feats doing the job better than they do.

As a piece of incrementalist change, they are a clear improvement on what came before. As a stand-alone design concept you obviously wouldn't want to emulate them in any particular degree.

Problems of feats include (and are not limited to):

• 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.
• The amount of feats individual characters get is too few for there to be room for there to be shit like Stigmata and Roof Jumper. A fifth level character has two feats, and there just isn't room for shit like that.
• The amount of feats that rando monsters have is too large for that to not be a giant book-keeping nightmare. The Purple fucking Worm has six feats and four of them actually do things.
• Feats that are mandatory for builds (whether directly through prerequisites or indirectly though "feat taxes") hurt the game coming and going. They make creating and advancing a character a chore, they reduce the play space by crowding out the weird and wonderful, and they make character building into a mini-game that you can fucking lose.

-Username17

[Iduno]

You can't really let people choose between combat and non-combat options in a combat heavy game like D&D.

Agreed. "Being able to do cool stuff" should be a completely different currency than "hitting stuff good."

Differentiating fighters by stuff like primarily archer/2-handed/dual-wield is good. That shouldn't take 100% of your character progression. Those should come online to some degree in your first level/few levels, depending on starting power level. Otherwise feats are a "you must be this tall to be a reasonable starting character" like we're playing fucking WFRP. If you have a game explicitly about being a great hero which D&D pretends to), you don't want to spend any of the game killing rats to save up xp to know which end of the sword to hold. If you want that game, at least be up front about it; the right kind of people would eat that shit up. Actually, the feat system as-designed looks like it's a good start for that kind of game.

A feat should be something cool that people brag about "I saw a guy cut an ogre in half" not "I saw a guy who knew how to use 2 daggers almost as well as I can use a sword."

[souran]

Problems of feats include (and are not limited to):

• 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.
• The amount of feats individual characters get is too few for there to be room for there to be shit like Stigmata and Roof Jumper. A fifth level character has two feats, and there just isn't room for shit like that.
• The amount of feats that rando monsters have is too large for that to not be a giant book-keeping nightmare. The Purple fucking Worm has six feats and four of them actually do things.
• Feats that are mandatory for builds (whether directly through prerequisites or indirectly though "feat taxes") hurt the game coming and going. They make creating and advancing a character a chore, they reduce the play space by crowding out the weird and wonderful, and they make character building into a mini-game that you can fucking lose.

-Username17

Before I get into the meat of what I wanted to discuss here with Frank's post, I want to make sure it is clear that I am not saying that feats as presented are not problematic. As I initially said, the thing is that selecting feats and developing a "build" based around those selections is fun regardless of the known issues.

That said, looking at Frank's list it seems like most of the concerns do not require huge shifts in order to mitigate the concern. If you had a design team able to do honest analysis of their own game, you could fix these fairly easily

item 1) Clearly a number of feats need to be able to be purchased (I am thinking especially ones related to proficiency). Additionally, feats should often be rewards in the same way as magic items. If you defeat the monster that is terrorizing the horsemen of the fake magical plains they teach everybody "mounted combat" etc.

item 2) Is a matter of both acquisition rates as well as well as which buckets various feats need to fit into. Increasing the acquisition rate of feats is pretty obvious and needed (considering that every edition since 3rd has done so). However, I think that it also is pretty clearly in need of separation into categories that don't require you to trade killing power for character development. If you had one acquisition rate for "stunt" type feats (cleave, two weapon fighting, whatever) and a second rate for "trait" type feats (skill focus, things that let you denote your character is a pirate, or stigmata, or roof jumper etc) it would make those secondary ones not pointless.

item 3) I don't have a good answer for this. Monster complexity is kind of a pain in the ass. However, most of the monsters have feats that let the monster do the same things it always has. The purple worm has improved bull rush, awesome blow, cleave, and power attack. Power attack and cleave are going to be fairly standard at most tables. Improved bull rush and awesome blow let the purple worm do...exactly what the purple worm has always done, run over people and then eat them. If you wrote a purple worm without feats it would have special attacks that mimic awesome blow and improved bull rush. My point is that monsters who are not mooks are always complicated.

item 4) This is really a matter of how the feats get written. Certainly feats should focus on expanding capabilities. For instance, I personally think that the pathfinder feats "cornugeon smash" and "dreadful carnage" are reasonable examples of what feats ought to do for a character. Your attacks demoralize foes. I think that the entrance points are completed messed up (cornugeon smash should be a level 1 ability and dreadful carnage should come on line at between 5-8). Writing more like this and less like weapon focus is mostly about discipline on the design team.

Looking at these responses a fair bit of this is "do it just like you did before, but make it suck less" and that isn't exactly a solution, but I also think that a lot of the concerns Frank lists amount to "the core conceit is a good one, but there a bunch of stuff that sucks and I don't like the sucky part" which is an indictment of execution and not concept.

[deaddmwalking]

This touches on the subject of good TV shows - it's possible to keep going long after things stopped being good.

It totally makes sense that in an RPG, you'd want to continually create content. At the same time, you have to realize that having more content available means that each player is going to interact with a smaller percentage of the content. When you release a new class three years into the game, players that are already playing a character can't use it without giving up the character they've been playing up to that point.

The number of 'revisions' to the game become burdensome. If you're using DMG suggestions for creating a city, there are no Warlocks, there are no Beguilers, there are no Scouts, etc.

Feats are very easy to write and therefore it is easy to add new content to the game. There's a demand for it.

But adding more content after the game is released is ALWAYS going to create a situation where the content isn't easily accessed unless you simultaneously revise the initial rules. If you release a game with 'Combat Feats', and then you decide to release 'Skill Feats', you need to give access to the skill feats to all of your initial base classes (ie, if that is choose one of each at each level, base classes suddenly get a bunch of skill feats they didn't have before).

I think it's also important to recognize that a fair bit of the problem with feats became that it locked out content... In Monty Python's Holy Grail, the Black Knight throws his sword through his opponent's visor. Before a 'throw weapon' feat, is it even possible to throw a great sword (no range increment)? If it is possible, what penalties are assessed? If there aren't clear guidelines, the moment a feat is published it is very easy to say 'do you have the feat, no, then you can't do that'. Feats were not intended to make things impossible to do - they were supposed to make those things EASIER to do. A blanket rule like 'you can attempt to do anything you could do with a feat with a -10 penalty' isn't really crazy - but it means that EVERYONE can cleave (just not very well), but since not every feat is understandable that way, it doesn't really work. Really what just every feat needs is a 'normal' description, and if it didn't exist before, you're adding a rule. Shield Proficiency explains how not having it works - Silent Spell needs something like that... Normal: Attempting to mask your verbal components requires a Stealth Roll at a -10 penalty; anyone within sight (or listening distance) is entitled to make a perception check...

By helping to define the things that you can do WITHOUT the feat, feats would have actually increased the play space even for people who didn't take them.

[Username17]

You can't really let people choose between combat and non-combat options in a combat heavy game like D&D.

Agreed. "Being able to do cool stuff" should be a completely different currency than "hitting stuff good."

This is the kind of insight people have all the time and think it's profound and actually just leads to the kind of reductionism that created 4th edition D&D.

The truth is there are lots of ways people choose between combat and non-combat options in D&D that are completely fine. A Wizard prepares comprehend languages or color spray. A character decides to spend a handful of coins on extra arrows or a length of rope. And so on and so on.

It's not acceptable for a combat ability that you need to be forfeit in exchange for a non-combat bonus of some kind. But there is a lot of table time, and it will be divided in different ways. Much of it will be in combat minigames, but it won't all be. I rather suspect that being the character who remembered to bring the silk rope could easily end up being more important at the table than having one more masterwork arrow.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

This is the kind of insight people have all the time and think it's profound and actually just leads to the kind of reductionism that created 4th edition D&D.

Well, it's just the "every player should have something to contribute in every sufficiently long minigame" problem again, from another angle. I think the problem with Combat and Skill feat groups (or Combat, Spelunking, Stealth, Investigation, and Diplomacy feat groups, for a less combat-focused version that is maybe too complicated) is not if it tries to separate combat and non-combat, but maybe if it tries too hard.

One of the good things about RPGs is that if you're a bit creative, things can bleed from one minigame to another. Those arrows could be used to shoot a little ladder into a wall for someone's animal familiar to climb. The silk rope could be used to tie up a troll so it doesn't rejoin the fight. Fireball can be used to open doors or as a signal flare. Speaking to trees can be used to deny those sneaky elves their stealth advantage in the forest. And just generally, non-combat abilities can be used to make you enter combats in a more favorable way. If you deny all that in order to enforce a non-combat/combat divide, then you have 4e D&D.

That said, I think the generally more effective way to ensure reasonable usefulness in all the various minigames is to have people select packages that contain useful parts for all the various minigames.

[OgreBattle]

The purple worm does all the things you expect a gigantic monster thirsty to swallow adventurers to do, the many feats it has is more to make up for inadequacy of the basic 3rd ed combat engine, those are all things that should just be baked into core mechanics

awesome blow, cleave, improved bullrush- because 3rd ed doesn't have rules for a much bigger heavier force acting on a smaller target to send them flying, tear right through 'em, etc.

[zugschef]

I still don't get how they got the idea that power attack and weapon finesse should be feats.

[OgreBattle]

I still don't get how they got the idea that power attack and weapon finesse should be feats.

Question I got following that is "should something sa crucial as an attack bonus even be tied to attribute modifiers that can vary by -1 +5 from lvl 1 and get zanier as levels go by?"

[deaddmwalking]

I still don't get how they got the idea that power attack and weapon finesse should be feats.

Question I got following that is "should something sa crucial as an attack bonus even be tied to attribute modifiers that can vary by -1 +5 from lvl 1 and get zanier as levels go by?"

Actually, attack bonuses don't have to be crucial. Like, if you have 'I only miss on a 1' for your attack bonus, having 'I only miss on a 1, but my attack bonus is five higher than yours' isn't really a benefit... What it lets you do is stack bigger penalties (for example, for extra damage) - at least if an exchange is available.

If defenses scale with attack bonuses, a +5 may change your hit probability from 50% to 75%, but if defenses scale more slowly, it may change your hit probability from 90% to 95%.

I think that, in the abstract, a game should assume (ie, math hammer so that it is true) that most people hit (and get hit) on most attacks. Multiple rounds of everyone missing are not interesting - spending a limited resource to avoid a hit or quickly recover a few hit points during a fight is more dynmaic than a 'only hit on a nat 20' AC.

[DenizenKane]

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?