Jonathan Tweet
Adventurer
Yes, and you didn't have to roll dice to see which spells you knew. Much more accommodating.
Why the hate for complexity?
Yes, and you didn't have to roll dice to see which spells you knew. Much more accommodating.
Zardnaar
Legend
I've kind of regressed in some ways. After playing AD&D some of the core mechanics were wonky but the balance and some of the reasons were better than 3E. The more feats, spells, magic items, prestige classes, and combos players can put togather the more things can go wrong and the harder it is for the DM.
Having to find spells also put a bit more emphasis on the exploration pillar. The old adventures often hid treasure here and there so something like a wand of secret door detection was much more useful than post AD&D (xp for gold etc).
I'm probably one of the few who would like a new 3E type game, just not sure if I would want an AD&D 3E or something like 3E but with BECMI level math and some of the complexity toned down and things like feats overhauled. In late 3E (2009 or so) I was plugging a lot of AD&D back into it, then I found it easier to plug parts of 3E into AD&D 2E, less work.
Your guys legacy though I think will be the dumping of THAC0, I can use it don't really miss it. Just find I miss a few elements of AD&D here and here but I still break it out on special occasions and I am much more prone to hack it. I also liked the way magic resistance worked in D&D minis which was a nice mix of AD&D and 3E. Basically a static number like 2E but with a d20 roll a'la 3E.
I think my ultimate edition of D&D would use a lot of elements of 3E but with an OSR playstyle with BECMI numbers or the 4E half a level thing with the 4E or 5E type action economy. BECMI with a few more options and microfeats would be a close way of describing it. It would be grittier than 5E and with AD&D type magic item creation but use things like Fort/Ref/Wll, microfeats, might even go back to class based XP.
I think it would have been a cool thing in 3e to have Greater and Lesser feats, where Greater feats would be the ones that have significant game impact and the Lesser ones would be more flavorful. Perhaps you could alternate them so you'd get Lesser feats at levels 2, 6, 10, and so on and Greater feats at levels 4, 8, 12, etc.
Because there are many feats in 3e that are cool and say neat things about your character, but you'd probably be better off with Improved Initiative or Power Attack.
Celebrim
Legend
Feats in 3e ended up covering a lot of design space.
The issue I ran into most often is that I wanted feats to work something like spells, where as you took more of them of a particular sort, you start to get more exponential returns on investment. This is needed to keep non-caster classes in line with caster classes. Spells have so much impact, that non-casters need a lot of something else to equal out. Feats and skills are pretty much the only tools in the box.
The "Tactical Feat" design pattern of giving you 3 small benefits with a similar flavor had a big influence on my design work with feats. I also wanted them to take up much of the design space that PrC's ended up covering, so that you could use feats to say something defining about your character. So, if you took a feat that required investment in 3 prior feats, that should be equivalent in impact to being able to cast 4th level spells compared to 1st level spells. You should really get something good, especially when looking at the 4 feats collectively.
But just as with spells, there is a real trade off on that complexity, and if anything feats are worse than spells in that feats work like long duration buff spells that have ongoing impact on the game. 5e actually took feats more in the direction I was taking 3e feats before 5e came out, and it really made me want to redo much of the work I'd done on feats once the concept was proved and clear.
But the problem is that in order to support those feats, 5e also greatly limited how many you had access to and even went so far as to make them optional for those that wanted to stay more 'rules medium'. And want I've also discovered is that players like taking feats and that since I level up pretty slowly, feats need to come early and often if they are really to do anything for you beyond something useful but not particularly cool like "Improved Initiative" or "Power Attack".
If you have 10 or 20 feats, that give you 3 small situational bonuses each, then pretty soon you have a ton of fiddly things to keep track of.
Celebrim
Legend
I don't really know the history of the Feat, but I'd always assumed the video games Fallout and Fallout II were highly influential on the design of D&D feats, since that was where I first encountered true Feats in my gameplay.
Have you looked at Iron Heroes, made by some hack named Mearls or something?
Iron Heroes was intended as D&D with little-to-no magic. It had a different set of classes, most of which focused on different ways of fighting (and were also buffed compared to 3e classes, to compensate for not having a Christmas tree of magic stuff). One of the ideas there was "mastery feats".
Essentially, these feats came in a variety of categories, like Power, Finesse, Ranged, Armor, and so on. The feats would be leveled, so you'd have Power Attack 1, Power Attack 2, Power Attack 3, and so on. In order to take a higher-level feat, you needed only the basic feat in that chain, as well as access to that feat level for that feat category. Each class would have different access to feat categories - berserkers would have great access to Fury and Power feats, but suck at Archery feats, for example (I think - I'm writing from memory, and haven't looked at those rules in over 10 years).
There are two issues with comparing feats and spells, particularly high-prerequisite feats to high-level spells. One is the issue you bring up - spells are a limited resource in play, while feats are almost always permanent increases. The other is that high-prerequisite feats channel you into a narrow specialization. There's nothing stopping a wizard from learning both stoneskin, scrying, and confusion as 4th level spells, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a fighter with both Great Cleave, Improved Precise Shot, and Greater Two-Weapon Fighting.
My initial comment was mostly off the cuff so one shouldn't put too much weight on the actual numbers in it. I just think 3e would be cooler if strong feats and flavor feats were siloed off from one another somehow.
Zardnaar
Legend
I'm not 100% sure if the idea of feats came from this but 1989's Complete Fighters Handbook started tinkering with what you could do with weapon proficiencies. This continued in later 2E splat With things like Combat and Tactics and the historical series of books. They were in effect feats or proto feats at the very least. For example the 3.0 TWF/ambidextrous feat tree was more or less lifted as is from the 2E Complete Fighters Handbook.
Its another thing I noticed at the time from late 2E to 3.0, fighters kinda sucked relative to the 2E ones. This was due to changes in NWP to skills and optional rules we used such as high intelligence= more NWP (skills in 3.0), and warriors could use them to get extra weapon proficiencies. We had a high level fighter with multiple weapon specialization, and proficient in 3 weapon styles at level 1 as he had a 16 Intelligence or so.
GMMichael
Guide of Modos
XP for following the Way of the GM.
It would be cool to add more complexity to 3e? Well, now I know on which side of the "hating complexity" table you sit.
Wow. Rockin' my world right here, Celebrim. The first time I saw Perks was in CoD: Black Ops. I'm not sure that D&D got feats from perks, but Interplay was definitely a good group from which to gain...inspiration? :: Dr. Evil Face::
Jonathan Tweet
Adventurer
Feats in 3E derive from Virtues and Flaws in Ars Magica (1987), which derive from advantages and disadvantages in Steve Jackson's The Fantasy Trip (1980).
Well, I mostly want to reduce complexity, but I'm thinking this bit might have been worth it. There were many, many flavorful feats in 3e that few people ever took because things like Improved Initiative, Power Attack, and Spell Focus were too shiny.
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