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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6278956" data-attributes="member: 4937">Mostly your response serves to remind me just how far outside of mainstream 3.X I've gotten.I don't agree that this is problem, nor do I see how it is a problem for the player provided the player accepts the fundamental principle he can't be good at everything.  Numerous feats ensure that whatever concept you have, there is something that contributes to it.  With a good enough set of feats, it's almost impossible to have a concept that you can't build.  So long as you are happy with your feat and how it mechanically informs your concept, why should the fact that you didn't take 20 or 200 feats bother you?  No, by say that I saw problems with feat bloat I didn't mean what seems to bother you at all.  What I meant is that as the number of feats increases, your ability to understand the abilities of a character at a glance decreases.  The short list of feats actually carries a heavy freight of rules.   That's the only thing that bothers me with feats.  However, it's less of a bother to a player, sense they only have to recall what they can do with their short list of feats for a single character.Other problems that I've seen in 3rd party supplements with feat bloat generally involve things like a) feat tax, in that some feats are so good everyone feels compelled to take them, b) pointless feats, in that they are so weak no one would ever take them, c) unbalanced feats in that some feats strengthen already strong concepts where as others insufficiently support others, d) outright brokenness and poorly considered rules resulting for lack of play testing or foresight in the design.   I try to be very careful when adding a feat.  I think I've largely avoided all these problems, and in any event, they are all far smaller problems than those resulting from a bloat of classes and prestige classes, templates, and monstrous races as PC's.  Knowledge (Local) doesn't have a unique mechanic RAW.  It shares the basic mechanic with the overall D20 mechanic the game is rooted in.  When you remove a standard mechanic and replace it with a specialized one, the net result is not the same. It is similar, but it isn't the same.  Instead Speak Language has its own unique mechanic, and now Knowledge (Local) does as well.   And for that matter, so do Run and Porter (my own homebrew skills).   But it bugs the heck out of me and if I could think of a better way, I would.   Rules bloat introduced in 3.5.With respect to Know (Local) 3.5 cleaned up things compared to 3.0, but it still left a lot of ambiguity.  It seems like your ok with the ambiguity.Suppose I want to know about the ancient past, the world's equivalent to the events of the Trojan War, and I happen to be in Sparta (or its equivalent).  Do I roll against Knowledge (History) to learn the cities history, or against Knowledge (Religion) because the events have passed into an age of myth and concern stories of the gods, or Knowledge (Local) because it involves legends of the city's founders?  Suppose I want to know who the king of the city is.  Do I roll against Knowledge (Geography) to learn about the people living in the land, or against Knowledge (Nobility & Heraldry) because it involves royalty, or against Knowledge (Local) because it is about inhabitants?   Your answer just seems to be, "Shrug, just let them roll."   There is nothing wrong with that, but it works in a small way against the idea that skills are valuable.There is a 'simple' solution to that as a game designer/game master.  Don't write into your game feats that are thematically weak.  A feat can be  poorly suited to the particular game being played but that's not the same thing.  Gaining a natural climb speed in trees might not be much good to you in a city game, but might be quite worthwhile in a game set largely in the jungle.   As long as a feat helps draw spotlight to you and helps you do what you want to do with your character, it's not a bad feat.   If there is such a thing as a feat that fits a theme but adds too little to a character, the feat should be strengthened.This sentence is one of those that told me my game has evolved quite radically away from the main 3.X family.   In my game, feats largely serve to distinguish you in a narrow field above (or sometimes below) what would be expected for your level, while skills largely serve to open up possibilities.  So in that sense, however much 3.X might be working against me, my own game isn't.  Let me give you an example:You don't need a feat in my game to tell lies so slick that even magic can miss them.  You just have to be good at the Bluff skill.  You don't need a feat to disarm a character at range with a whip; you just need to be proficient with a whip.   I am always looking for opportunities to move abilities opened up by feats into simple uses of a skill so that simply being skillful at something allows you to do much or all of what you might otherwise be only able to do with many feats.  And I'm always looking for ways to rewrite powers so that they are dependent on skills.And what you called 'jumbled' looking at my off the top of my head attempt at making a feat to theme, I call being broadly useful.  It ensures that if you take a feat suited to your character, you'll probably have many opportunities to employ it.   Ultimately feats have to be measured against spells.   You don't, or rather I think you shouldn't, look at numerous spells and complain of 'spell bloat' creating opportunity costs, or at a spell description that allows many uses and options and say 'that's jumbled'.</blockquote>

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