Gargoyle
Adventurer
I am aware that I am looking at this from a particular point of view, with a big dose of speculation, so bear with me.
Feats seem to have evolved, or devolved depending on your opinion, into spells.
Like a spell, feats:
Are small packages of rules that supersede other RAW.
Have levels, with higher level spells being more powerful.
Sometimes require material components or equipment.
Unlike spells, feats:
Are usually not magical in nature.
Sometimes have prerequisites in addition to being of a certain level.
Are usually always active or usable at will.
Do not need to be prepared or selected...it isn't a Vancian system, not completely anyway.
In addition:
Spellcasters don't get as many feats as non spellcasters, making feats fit the design space of spells for non-magical classes.
But even with the differences, the lines are often blurred...notice the liberal use of words like "sometimes" and "usually" above..so even the differences aren't always true. Feats are becoming very much like a variant spell system. Just as powers like powers gobbled up and ate feats in 4e, feats are taking over the design space of powers in Next.
And so, if you agree to think of the feat system as an alternate spell system, what if you created a list of magical feats and used that for your spellcasting prestige classes? What if a necromancer is simply a specialization aka "list of feats" that includes feats like Animate Dead, Raise Ghoul, and Skeleton Army? There would probably be feats in that specialization that more resemble class features too, but it seems easier to design a spell as a feat when they are pretty much the same thing, and easier to design a prestige class or paragon path as a list of feats than creating a full blown class description. Since spellcasters get fewer feats, you could make their feats more powerful and requiring harder prerequisites (must be able to cast 7th level spells, etc).
Not sure I care for it...but it seems the direction we are going, with fewer types of design elements, and getting more out of them to get to the same place, for instance, no prestige classes or themes (not really) or paragon paths, just a background, class, and feats to make your necromancer, arcane archer or Knight of the Great Kingdom. And it might be fine or even great.
But to take it a step further, perhaps this is the type of treatment we can expect even for the sorcerer and warlock. Using wizard traditions and multilevel feats might work well for modeling some of their spells and abilities like eldritch blast that are at will, and if they design such things as feats instead of class abilities, it makes it easy to build new classes from them. Furthermore, and this is certainly blasphemy to some, collapsing the rogue and ranger into one class might be feasible, since they are both basically lists of class abilities that could be feats.
I'm speculating a lot of course, and I really don't mean to sound like an alarmist. But it seems we're heading in a direction that might seem elegant from a design standpoint, and cheaper to produce since a list of feats takes less room than a class description (especially when some feats will be used by multiple specializations), but may actually be less than satisfying for those who want entirely different mechanics for their favorite class, or even heresy to those who want more of a traditional class system with a different class for each archetype.
It will be interesting to see what they do with prestige class archetypes and the "rare" classes like warlocks, etc. It might be awesome, but even if it is, I suspect some will hate it.
Feats seem to have evolved, or devolved depending on your opinion, into spells.
Like a spell, feats:
Are small packages of rules that supersede other RAW.
Have levels, with higher level spells being more powerful.
Sometimes require material components or equipment.
Unlike spells, feats:
Are usually not magical in nature.
Sometimes have prerequisites in addition to being of a certain level.
Are usually always active or usable at will.
Do not need to be prepared or selected...it isn't a Vancian system, not completely anyway.
In addition:
Spellcasters don't get as many feats as non spellcasters, making feats fit the design space of spells for non-magical classes.
But even with the differences, the lines are often blurred...notice the liberal use of words like "sometimes" and "usually" above..so even the differences aren't always true. Feats are becoming very much like a variant spell system. Just as powers like powers gobbled up and ate feats in 4e, feats are taking over the design space of powers in Next.
And so, if you agree to think of the feat system as an alternate spell system, what if you created a list of magical feats and used that for your spellcasting prestige classes? What if a necromancer is simply a specialization aka "list of feats" that includes feats like Animate Dead, Raise Ghoul, and Skeleton Army? There would probably be feats in that specialization that more resemble class features too, but it seems easier to design a spell as a feat when they are pretty much the same thing, and easier to design a prestige class or paragon path as a list of feats than creating a full blown class description. Since spellcasters get fewer feats, you could make their feats more powerful and requiring harder prerequisites (must be able to cast 7th level spells, etc).
Not sure I care for it...but it seems the direction we are going, with fewer types of design elements, and getting more out of them to get to the same place, for instance, no prestige classes or themes (not really) or paragon paths, just a background, class, and feats to make your necromancer, arcane archer or Knight of the Great Kingdom. And it might be fine or even great.
But to take it a step further, perhaps this is the type of treatment we can expect even for the sorcerer and warlock. Using wizard traditions and multilevel feats might work well for modeling some of their spells and abilities like eldritch blast that are at will, and if they design such things as feats instead of class abilities, it makes it easy to build new classes from them. Furthermore, and this is certainly blasphemy to some, collapsing the rogue and ranger into one class might be feasible, since they are both basically lists of class abilities that could be feats.
I'm speculating a lot of course, and I really don't mean to sound like an alarmist. But it seems we're heading in a direction that might seem elegant from a design standpoint, and cheaper to produce since a list of feats takes less room than a class description (especially when some feats will be used by multiple specializations), but may actually be less than satisfying for those who want entirely different mechanics for their favorite class, or even heresy to those who want more of a traditional class system with a different class for each archetype.
It will be interesting to see what they do with prestige class archetypes and the "rare" classes like warlocks, etc. It might be awesome, but even if it is, I suspect some will hate it.
