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[harpy]

I'm trying to understand when the game was being laid down why the designers thought that Shot on the Run and Spring Attack were so valuable that they required such heavy investment in feats.

Wait! I'm parsing out Spring Attack's negation of attacks of opportunity... that I get, it's the basic function of both feats, being able to move, attack and move that seems not worth some investment.

In both instances you are only gaining one attack, which after 5th level becomes more and more of a liability. So in and of itself I'm not seeing how their value as feats warrant such heavy prerequisites.

In some ways it seems as if "simulationist" ideas kicked in and it seems that it could only seem realistic if you already had dodge, mobility, etc. to pull off these stunts, so that ultimately it was encoded in the game this way not out of some sense of balance, but just for flavor.

The odd thing is that the value of the feats diminishes over time, but it only kicks in as a ability just around when the feats begins to slip in value. The earliest you can get them is at 4th level, and by 6th level iterative attacks kick in and the maneuvers become less useful.

The one other equivalent feat in 3.5, Flyby Attack, doesn't have any other prerequisite other than needing to fly, which make sense. It fits and works for what it does.

In Star Wars Saga they gave us "Running Attack" with just the simple Dex 13 prerequisite. It applied to both melee and ranged attacks and simply allowed you to move, attack, and move all in the same round. No attack of opportunity bonuses, though, which is fine.

The only thing we saw come of that restructuring of the 3.5 feats was that it improved combat, it made things more fun. Combat became mobile, shifting and allowing for more interesting use of terrain. There were no broken loops going on and right from level one you could have a cool exception based rule to show off to the rest of the players.

We also quickly found that being able to pop out from behind cover, fire and then hide again wasn't that great. PCs and NPCs quickly just adjusted and made ready actions for when someone was popping out behind cover.

It seems to me that if they had just let there be a "running attack" feat for 3.5, and then had a separate feat for ignoring AoO then the system as a whole would have been more enjoyable.