Guidelines for Creating New Feats

[Esteban]

(I posted this under 'House Rules' but wasn't sure if that was the appropriate forum)

I’m creating some feats and wanted to know if there were known guidelines for doing this. In other words, are there limits to how many skill bonuses a feat should provide? If a feat provides a skill bonus is there a limit on how big a skill bonus should be? How high should an AC bonus be when provided by a feat? How high should an offensive bonus be?

I’ve seen feats that seem overpowered; I’ve also seen feats that are basically worthless. Creating a feat that comes down somewhere in the middle seems to be something of an art form. Any hints or suggestions on creating balanced feats would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[Samothdm]

Cool avatar pic! I remember that from Dragon #89. Or was it #86? There was a whole series of those chess-style paintings by the same artist, Dennis Beauvais, I want to say, that were on #83, #86, and #89 and then he did another non-chess painting on #92.

Anyway, there was a good article about feat design in Dragon issue #275 if you have access to that.

Other than that, I've seen some online - there was a workshsop at Silven Crossroads, I believe. What kind of feats are you looking to design, specifically?

 

[Kalendraf]

One simple test for determining if your feat seems balanced or not is this to consider this....

If you were a player, would take this new feat instead of other feats. If you find that every time a character has a chance to take this feat, they would, then it's probably too good. On the other hand, if barely anyone would ever choose to use it, then it might be too weak.

The other thing that is required is playtesting. Sometimes a feat looks weak, but in combination with other feats, spells, skills, etc, it becomes broken. The reverse case can happen too, but that is far less likely.