A Rant About Feats

One of the big innovations in character design in 3e (perhaps the big innovation) was the introduction of feats. Suddenly, here was a good way to provide a minor customisation for characters - you could buy off those pesky weapon restrictions, or learn Metamagic, or improve you Will saves, or...

And feats genuinely were a good addition to the game, for a while. Unfortunately, they very quickly proliferated, expanding to several thousand feats throughout the many books for the system. Indeed, pretty much every 3e book (including most of the Dragon magazines in the 3e era) included a handful of new feats.

Which is absurd when you consider that most characters only get 7, ever.

But the problems get worse when you actually look at the feats themselves. Here, you find a huge variety. Some feats provide a small always-on numeric bonus (Iron Will, Skill Focus), others a larger conditional bonus (Combat Casting), while others give some modification to a power the character already has (metamagic, Natural Spell), and still others give entirely new powers or character features (Leadership, item creation).

And, of course, there is also a big discrepancy in the power levels of feats, with no clear guidance as to which you should take. And so a Fighter with Power Attack and Cleave is quite different from one who takes Skill Focus and Toughness.

All in all, it's a bit of a mess. And so, there seems to be a push towards removing feats entirely in 5e, and rolling their effects back in to the classes themselves (or perhaps themes, schemes, or whatever else 5e gives characters).

I think this is a mistake.

See, in my view, characters should be built by making a small number of 'big' choices (race, class), and then should be specialised using a larger number of 'small' choices (skills, feats, powers/talents/whatever). Where possible, these 'small' choices should be spread across the levels, so that at no point does a player have to make more than a few choices, and the number of options within each choice should likewise be limited, so that each choice is manageable.

In order to fix feats, then, I think the solution is threefold:

• Split out the four categories of feats. The "always-on" numeric bonuses remain "feats", while the other three categories get shifted across to the "talents" system. Some of these (notably any "junk feats") just get dropped from the system, of course.
• Tightly restrict the "feat chains" so they're only a couple of entries deep - Toughness leads to Improved Toughness... but there's no Really Improved Toughness.
• Adjust the power level of feats so that they're more or less comparable. Possessing a given feat should give an edge over a character who doesn't have it, but it shouldn't ever be a "must have".

Between those three measures, we get to a point that we can actually write up every feat in the system pretty quickly. It does, however, have a couple of weaknesses:

• Feats become dull. Do you want a +1 to hit, or an extra hit point per level? Not exactly an inspiring choice.
• We have, of course, just pushed off another huge piece of work to the "talent" subsystem. Not that I think that's necessarily a bad thing...