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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6904528" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>For the most part, your Feats fall into a common problem seen in people homebrewing feat creation - they are too narrow to be interesting. Often in my game there are things I call 'NPC Feats', where it might make sense for an NPC to take them, but it doesn't make much a lot sense for a PC to do so. They are intended to create flavor and not gameplay.</p><p></p><p>Your move to make feats extra traits that a person has someone alleviates this problem, but doesn't really deal with the main issue in the feats design - pregnancy is something that occurs only every few years at most and is only one sort of specific challenge. Not only must the campaign now feature dynastic play to make it interesting, it must go on for much longer than most campaigns actually cover. Rarely do you actually have campaigns that cover even 9 months of in game time.</p><p></p><p>And if NPC's could choose their own traits, they still wouldn't likely invest their 'build points' in those sorts of feats. They'd probably take Great Fortitude.</p><p></p><p>I think the solution is tie your mechanics more directly to mechanics that already exist - fortitude saves, endurance checks, heal skill, and so forth. This is important because you want pregnancy and so forth to be core to play, not something tangential that ignores all the normal advantages a PC gains through play. Yes, it makes your feats slightly superfluous, but to be frank they are mostly going to be anyway.</p><p></p><p>Once you've tightly tied your mechanics to the available generic mechanics, you could probably consolidate all your feats into 3-5 uber-Feats that gave whoever took them broad and powerful advantages in particular areas - chance of survival, fertility and fecundity, health of the child, midwifery ect. These feats should be specific, but in their specific area much more powerful than feats like Skill Focus or Great Fortitude or Endurance. As a suggestion, take feats that cover three related areas and combine them into single feats offering three advantages similar in design to the 'Tactical' feats seen in some late 3.5 design. You could then make these feats 'Traits', which would then compete for attention with all the other traits in your game. They might likely be still mostly 'NPC traits', but they'd at least then be clearly desirable traits you could imagine NPC's 'taking' or prizing. Indeed, they might become a trait the PC might prize in an NPC spouse, or in an NPC retainer (in the case of 'midwifery' and dynastic campaigns). If your campaign goes truly dynastic, where children are as important or more important than having cool magic items and each player is effectively playing a household rather than a character, then those NPC traits might start moving into PC traits.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6904528, member: 4937"] For the most part, your Feats fall into a common problem seen in people homebrewing feat creation - they are too narrow to be interesting. Often in my game there are things I call 'NPC Feats', where it might make sense for an NPC to take them, but it doesn't make much a lot sense for a PC to do so. They are intended to create flavor and not gameplay. Your move to make feats extra traits that a person has someone alleviates this problem, but doesn't really deal with the main issue in the feats design - pregnancy is something that occurs only every few years at most and is only one sort of specific challenge. Not only must the campaign now feature dynastic play to make it interesting, it must go on for much longer than most campaigns actually cover. Rarely do you actually have campaigns that cover even 9 months of in game time. And if NPC's could choose their own traits, they still wouldn't likely invest their 'build points' in those sorts of feats. They'd probably take Great Fortitude. I think the solution is tie your mechanics more directly to mechanics that already exist - fortitude saves, endurance checks, heal skill, and so forth. This is important because you want pregnancy and so forth to be core to play, not something tangential that ignores all the normal advantages a PC gains through play. Yes, it makes your feats slightly superfluous, but to be frank they are mostly going to be anyway. Once you've tightly tied your mechanics to the available generic mechanics, you could probably consolidate all your feats into 3-5 uber-Feats that gave whoever took them broad and powerful advantages in particular areas - chance of survival, fertility and fecundity, health of the child, midwifery ect. These feats should be specific, but in their specific area much more powerful than feats like Skill Focus or Great Fortitude or Endurance. As a suggestion, take feats that cover three related areas and combine them into single feats offering three advantages similar in design to the 'Tactical' feats seen in some late 3.5 design. You could then make these feats 'Traits', which would then compete for attention with all the other traits in your game. They might likely be still mostly 'NPC traits', but they'd at least then be clearly desirable traits you could imagine NPC's 'taking' or prizing. Indeed, they might become a trait the PC might prize in an NPC spouse, or in an NPC retainer (in the case of 'midwifery' and dynastic campaigns). If your campaign goes truly dynastic, where children are as important or more important than having cool magic items and each player is effectively playing a household rather than a character, then those NPC traits might start moving into PC traits. [/QUOTE]
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