Anybody who has been playing Claire Obscur will recognize the item in the thread title.
These "pictograms" or "runes" once equipped (attuned) give you a stat boost to your attributes, and a passive ability. After completing four battles with a picto equipped, you have learned its passive ability and may unequip it (losing the stat boost).
Consider this... Feats usually give you a stat bonus (+1) and an ability. I'm considering using some feats in a similar fashion.
But the main question is...how long would the character have to keep the picto rune equipped before the permanently learning the passive ability?
Four fights in DnD would not work, especially if the group had multiple items, they would just burn through them.
What would you use as a requirement for learning the passive ability?
Man, I love how the pictos system encourages you to
play the game to get character advancement options, much like the materia system from FF7 or the equipment-ability system from FF9. D&D's advancement is really stuck in a sort of "character build" approach where all your abilities are just presented in a list in front of you and you can optimize in a white room.
So, in D&D terms, a pictos is basically a magic item. And grabbing inspiration from the pictos system means putting a bit of D&D's advancement into magic items. Which is pretty sexy to me - you have to play and see what you find in the world to figure out how your character can be built. That's some engagement!
If we were just to smash them together with the idea that a picto is a magic item that contains a feat, and a lumina is the part of that feat that's not an ability score increase, we could have a pretty literal translation. Attuning to a pictos represents equipping it to one of your three slots. If you have a pictos equipped for 4 combats, you learn its lumina. You can equip 3 luminas. Assume everything else works as standard D&D.
This is basically a power bump for PC's, but it's not one without some guardrails. The DM has control over what treasure goes in the game, so they have control over what feats they turn into pictos, and can choose feats that are interesting rather than the most build-optimal feats (which characters can still take as part of normal progression). Some of the "luminas" of feats are pretty great, so it's still definitely a power bump, but not a super radical one.
Of course, we get a bit of a square peg / round hole challenge in that feats were never really meant to be temporary, and that could introduce some fiddly corner cases. Like, take the Resilient feat. I choose an ability score to increase and get proficiency with. In this system, I could find the Resilient pictos in the world, attune to it, and get the full benefit of the feat...but then, can I swap out my ability score by un-attuning and re-attuning? Or maybe there's 6 different Resilient pictos in the world, one for each ability score? And if I get the saving throw proficiency as a lumina, how does that work? Assigned to one ability score forever? Swappable? And the Skilled feat, or any feat that lets you learn a spell or a weapon mastery, could amplify this problem. And if I start my day attuned to the Fey-Touched pictos and cast
Animal Friendship and then swap out that pictos for the Actor pictos...do I still have
Animal Friendship cast?
Not insurmountable problems, just a weird interaction where the feat wasn't really designed to be a temporary part of the character. Lots of potential GM judgement calls. Something that can be controlled for with some careful forethought, though - answering some of these questions up front, and carefully selecting feats that don't create these problems, and you're probably fine.
All that's well and good as a baseline, but if I didn't want to deal with those downsides, here's what I might do:
- Pictos are magic items you can find in the world. They come with feats embedded into them.
- You can equip a pictos by attuning to it (you have 3 attunement slots, after all!).
- You master a pictos by keeping in equipped for at least 24 hours. Then, someone else can use it (you'll lose its benefits if you unequip it).
- When you would normally learn a feat, you can learn the feat of any pictos you have mastered.
This is a little more heavy-handed than the method above since I as a DM basically take some character build control away from the PC's. If you want the Sentinel feat, you need to find an item in the world that lets you have it, you can't just assume it's part of your build. I kind of
like that, personally, but it could definitely be a problem with some types of players. I'd have the pictos version of the feat locked to certain things (certain skills, certain spells, certain proficiencies), but if someone took the full feat version, they could then make different selections. Gives you a little "try before you buy" action with your feats, which I'm fond of.
