Giving out More Feats

I'd love to give out more feats, or at least offer players more choice and customization.

That said, the feat system would need an overhaul first. I would basically chop all the feats in "half" and then recost/rebalance them so the bigger offenders are brought back in line.

It's certainly doable, and I think would make a great addition to 5E.

Xeviat said:

I'm not sure if everyone is noticing that I'm saying breaking the feats in half (removing the +1 stat portion of those feats). So a 2 feat combo wouldn't fully come online until 8th or 12th level, depending on if I give out feats on the 2's or 3's. 8th is earlier than 16th, though. As it stands now, someone could have a 2 feat combo at 4th level if they were a human and they gave up their first ASI, but I've never seen anyone do that; I did see a Goliath Barbarian give up his first ASI for Great Weapon Master, but that player was convinced it was needed to give his Barbarian a damage boost.

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Are you limiting this to only those feats that give +1 to a score? Those feats tend to be the weakest, so I think it'll be fine.

In fact it leaves you with this list:

• Athlete
• Actor
• Durable
• Heavily Armored
• Heavy Armor Master -- This one is actually really amazing at low levels
• Keen Mind
• Lightly Armored
• Linguist
• Moderately Armored
• Observant
• Resilient -- Also a popular feat and often considered very powerful (I disagree; I think it's extremely well-balanced against +2 ability score)
• Tavern Brawler
• Weapon Master

Now, if you are thinking of breaking existing feats in half, that's tantamount to just creating a whole new feat system; you can probably find something like this done already.

I'd add skilled to that list. I'm all for making the additon of skills easier to do.

We've toyed around with this idea in our groups a time or two. Typically, I break -all- the feats down into smaller, bite-sized portions (that we've come to call talents). In example, Sentinel is broken into 3 talents, since it vaguely gives 3 effects, each about as important as the last. Then, I give a 'talent' slot at every odd level. So by level 5, they can have Sentinel without sacrificing an ASI.

The table seemed to love it, and I didn't have to really adjust combat difficulty per encounter (moreso than I already do with 5E).

A little off topic, but I still felt like posting:

In one campaign where my players were very much into character development (meaning they went off my railroad all the time), I cooked up customized feats for all 3 characters. They were minor feats in terms of combat prowess, but quite major in roleplay. One character could shed dim light of one color of his choice in 10 ft around himself. Useless for adventuring but the player loved it. Another player could improve rations such that once per day the ration would grant a +1 hp, with the sidenote that the ration took 10 actions to eat (i.e. not during combat) and could not be safely fed to someone who is unconscious. So, again not very useful during combat, but this player was into helping others and this gave him a roleplaying feat that was much appreciated.

I just printed the feats and gave it to them when they leveled up one time. It was in addition to the regular rules.

Just an idea.