Li Shenron
Legend
While 'feat' was perhaps always a poor fit as a name, these new super-feats make the fit all the poorer. They're really more like … specializations, or something, when presented as they are here. The only reason to retain the name feat is as a legacy.
Y'know, I wouldn't mind seeing these feats renamed as "Themes", because they seem to be covering the same design space as 4e's Themes.
Definitely. If a new feat is roughly a grouping of 3 old feats, a new feat is pretty much what a Theme/Specialty was before.
Essentially, we don't have "feats" anymore. We have Specialties, just like we had before anyway. Thus it would be more representative to call them such.
All of this pleases me greatly, since day one I have requested Feats be strictly optional in the surveys, and remove feats from class features (bonus feats), so this is exactly what I want.
Hmm. Looks pretty good. I begin to think that maybe, just maybe, 5E will be the edition that redeems the feat mechanic. It's always had great potential and wretched execution, such that I became convinced WotC would never get it right and it was better just to get rid of it. But this is starting to look like something worth having in the game.
Comments like these make me think that people are looking at the labels instead of understanding what is the real thing under the label.
"Feats" were small building blocks to customize your character. With rare exception, 1 feat = 1 bonus or 1 special action or ability.
The new feats are just not feats in the same sense. They are bundles of bonuses and/or abilities, like Theme/Specialties, like Races, and like Backgrounds. Therefore saying "5e redeems the feat mechanic" is nonsense, because this is not the feats mechanic... there is only the name/label left. The feat mechanic is gone.
Now you are totally entitled to like that the feat mechanic is gone, of course.
BTW, I wonder if we still need a Background system at all. "Feats" are now going to be bundles of anything, thus can serve the same purpose as Backgrounds, which won't cover skills anymore and as such will have a free-form similar to Feats, and possible the same magnitude.