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How do you feel about the only-general-feats direction of D&D?
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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5571270" data-attributes="member: 54877"><p>In general, I'm of the opinion that feats should be a mostly orthogonal design space (to skills and powers), or they should not exist at all.</p><p> </p><p></p><p> </p><p>Despite mostly agreeing with this, I do have one disagreement: I think this should really be an iterative process, and I think the lack of iteration is the reason why the theory of feats and the practice diverges so much.</p><p> </p><p>Start with an interesting thing to do. Then make rules for it. Now go look at those rules and see if there are some other interesting things that you can "lacquer on". Try some of them. If the lacquer doesn't take very well, then perhaps your new interesting things aren't that hot. Or maybe your mechanics were so focused on your first interesting thing, that they could use some refinement.</p><p> </p><p>Take having a racial feat for eladrin weapon training. I'm not saying it is good or not, but for sake of argument, let's assume it is an interesting concept worth exploring.</p><p> </p><p>1. If we can easily come up with similar feats for other races, expanding their combat capabilities in ways that make sense for those races--ok, then the interest/mechanic angle is plausible.</p><p> </p><p>2. If we keep stepping on other racial capabilities (or not, just to be arbitrarily different, e.g. sworld-wielding gnome cultures)--then the mechanic may be ok, but the flavor limiting by race is not.</p><p> </p><p>3. If we find ourselves making up goofy options to fill in the chart (e.g. humans aren't getting anything that really fits them), then the mechanics are too limiting.</p><p> </p><p>You can't really answer questions like that in one pass. What you want to end up with is: "Here is the exact scope of what I want to cover with the flavor, no more no less. The mechanics cover that, without intruding in some place they don't belong." Once you get that, you don't <strong>need</strong> new feats for new races. You've already covered the complete scope of what "racial feats" can do, and any new races will fit into that set. (Due to limits of space, you might not have included the complete scope in the initial PHB. But you knew more or less what it was.)</p><p> </p><p>Exception-based design, properly understood, does not mean making up an exception for everything, on purpose. Rather, it means that if you can cover most of what you want with the main design, you won't unnecessarily complicate that main design if you can handle a few outliers with a few exceptions. The skill system, with alchemy tacked on, is good exception-based design. Powers are merely lists put together with some guidelines on effectivness. Not the way I'd have done it, but a valid design choice with a long and illustrious pedigree. Feats are trying to have it both ways, and thus not working well.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5571270, member: 54877"] In general, I'm of the opinion that feats should be a mostly orthogonal design space (to skills and powers), or they should not exist at all. Despite mostly agreeing with this, I do have one disagreement: I think this should really be an iterative process, and I think the lack of iteration is the reason why the theory of feats and the practice diverges so much. Start with an interesting thing to do. Then make rules for it. Now go look at those rules and see if there are some other interesting things that you can "lacquer on". Try some of them. If the lacquer doesn't take very well, then perhaps your new interesting things aren't that hot. Or maybe your mechanics were so focused on your first interesting thing, that they could use some refinement. Take having a racial feat for eladrin weapon training. I'm not saying it is good or not, but for sake of argument, let's assume it is an interesting concept worth exploring. 1. If we can easily come up with similar feats for other races, expanding their combat capabilities in ways that make sense for those races--ok, then the interest/mechanic angle is plausible. 2. If we keep stepping on other racial capabilities (or not, just to be arbitrarily different, e.g. sworld-wielding gnome cultures)--then the mechanic may be ok, but the flavor limiting by race is not. 3. If we find ourselves making up goofy options to fill in the chart (e.g. humans aren't getting anything that really fits them), then the mechanics are too limiting. You can't really answer questions like that in one pass. What you want to end up with is: "Here is the exact scope of what I want to cover with the flavor, no more no less. The mechanics cover that, without intruding in some place they don't belong." Once you get that, you don't [B]need[/B] new feats for new races. You've already covered the complete scope of what "racial feats" can do, and any new races will fit into that set. (Due to limits of space, you might not have included the complete scope in the initial PHB. But you knew more or less what it was.) Exception-based design, properly understood, does not mean making up an exception for everything, on purpose. Rather, it means that if you can cover most of what you want with the main design, you won't unnecessarily complicate that main design if you can handle a few outliers with a few exceptions. The skill system, with alchemy tacked on, is good exception-based design. Powers are merely lists put together with some guidelines on effectivness. Not the way I'd have done it, but a valid design choice with a long and illustrious pedigree. Feats are trying to have it both ways, and thus not working well. [/QUOTE]
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