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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libertad" data-source="post: 9821165" data-attributes="member: 6750502"><img src="https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/b639876b55bc.webp" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /> Chapter 6: Feats<a href="https://elseworlds.fandom.com/wiki/Whirlwind_Attack_(Advantage)" target="_blank">Link’s Spin Attack colored by Creamy423</a>Third Edition introduced the concept of Feats, representing special abilities that you either have or don’t have. They encompassed everything from “you are more accurate with this weapon type” to “you’re an initiate of a specific deity’s religious order and get some thematic divine powers.” The intent was for additional customization, so that no two Elf Fighters or Human Monks felt the same in gameplay.In practice, the huge amount of feats released, along with more than a few being intentionally unbalanced, resulted in a lot of option paralysis. Additionally, many people accidentally nerfed their own character concepts by picking feats that didn’t do what they sounded like they were intended to do. Barring bonus feats, most characters would only ever get a half-dozen at most over the course of a 20-level campaign, so this added insult to injury. The Tome authors noted this, and their alternative was to create scaling feats that add more abilities as a character increases in power.Character Backgrounds aren’t actually feats, but instead a means of handing out minor boons for players who give their character a detailed story. 13 examples are provided of varying power. For example, Apprenticed is one of the better ones in granting Hide, Spot, and Spellcraft as class skills, while Hero of the Peasants grants +2 on Handle Animal, Sense Motive, and Survival…but makes you start out with nothing but extremely subpar equipment. On some more powerful and abusable options, Moil Wrought lets you be treated as undead for the purposes of positive/negative energy, War Profiteer lets you make all your weapons and armor be masterwork for free, while Experimental Stock lets you get your choice of low-light vision, a natural weapon, or +1 Natural Armor but in exchange you get a “bad choice” such as -5 to speed or -2 to initiative checks. Presuming that you can choose the bad trait, a penalty to initiative is much worse than a penalty to speed.Thoughts: Not really feeling it, to be honest. Different groups are going to have different expectations of what is a “sufficient backstory,” and handing out uneven bonuses and penalties can appear as DM favoritism. Most of the time, making a backstory is its own reward, and the majority of gamers don’t really need incentive to do this.Combat Feats is where the chapter really begins, providing us with 28 such options. All such feats grant a new ability when the character’s Base Attack Bonus is 0, 1, 6, and every 5 higher, for a potential 5 abilities per feat at BAB +16. Several of these feats have the same name and/or are meant to replace existing PHB feats, such as Blind Fighting and Weapon Finesse, but we get quite a few new ones as well. One thing to note is that Combat Expertise and Power Attack are no longer feats; they are things every character can do by default, as detailed later in Chapter 10.Most [Combat] feats are pretty straightforward and provide a variety of nifty abilities. For instance, Elusive Target provides increasingly potent defensive powers such as +2 to Armor Class, immunity to suffering from flanking and higher ground modifiers, and can spend immediate actions to redirect attacks to other targets and even make one such attack auto-miss. And then we have Juggernaut, which treats you as one size larger for stuff like Bull Rush and Grapple, can destroy magical Force effects by inflicting 30+ damage on them, and can deal automatic damage to those you Bull Rush or Overrun.Thoughts: Most of these feats are more valuable than the vast majority out there in the 3.5 wildlands, but they fit within the Tome’s design expectations and greatly obviate the dumpster-diving options paralysis that has plagued 3.X games. One thing I will note is that while intended to be best for martial characters, a few such Combat feats can also really empower spellcasters. Command is one of the Leadership feats, and its +1 BAB ability treats their Leadership score as their BAB plus their Charisma. Sorcerers, Warlocks, and other half-BAB Charisma classes may even out at higher levels to make up for the BAB difference with Fighters and such, but at low levels it’s quite easy to min-max a high enough Charisma to be a better commander than such classes. Additionally, Insightful Strike lets one substitute one’s Wisdom for melee attack rolls at +0 BAB, which is great for war-priest types, while Zen Archery does the same at 0 but for ranged attack rolls. But get this: Zen’s +1 BAB benefit lets the character treat any opponent they can hear as one they can see for the purposes of targeting them with ranged attacks. This is a godsend for casters of all kinds, who have ample access to ranged spells. Line of sight is extremely important for the purposes of hitting such creatures with spells, which makes it good enough to practically be a feat tax for such characters in much the same way Point Blank Shot and Precise Shot were for ranged characters. And speaking of such feats, you still need to take the Sniper Combat feat in order to avoid -4 for shooting into melee via its +1 BAB ability, so certain feats are still all but needed for broad archetypes.Skill Feats scale under the same premise, but for particular skills at 0, 4, 9, 14, and 19 skill ranks. There are 35 feats here, and according to the PDF’s Credits 28 of them were written by the poster Iaimeki. 7 of these feats have the [Leadership] tag, meaning that they interact with the Leadership rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. While you can take more than one, they don’t multiply your followers but they do multiply the amount of Cohorts you have, which are effectively additional PCs or monsters whose Challenge Rating count as effective levels, and they are always 2 levels/CR lower than the PC with the feat. So it should go without saying that the Tomes made Leadership even more powerful than in base 3.5, where it was considered the most powerful feat for most builds and not placed in the Player’s Handbook for this very reason.Almost every [Skill] feat grants the effective benefit of Skill Focus at 0 ranks, where you get a +3 bonus to the relevant skill, but otherwise the later ranks can run the gamut in powers and effects. Some of the more notable ones include Alertness’ 9 and 14 rank abilities that grant 60 and 120 feet of blindsight, Combat Casting’s 4 rank ability that lets you take 10 on Concentration and caster level checks as well as maintaining concentration as a move action at 9 ranks by succeeding on a decently difficult check, Dreadful Demeanor which lets you cause increasingly deleterious debuffs when using demoralize and fear effects, Item Master which lets you avoid mishaps when using magic items at 4 ranks and at 6 ranks can roll Use Magic Device twice and take the better result for determining random effects, and Monster Rancher which among other things lets you use Handle Animal on a wider variety of creature types and can have monsters as followers for Leadership purposes.Thoughts: I also like these skill feats. A lot of the more broadly useful abilities kick in around 9 ranks, which is low enough to see play in most campaigns but also high enough that they’re not “one and done” dips. Besides the Leadership feats, I do feel that some of these feats are going to be more powerful and broadly useful in campaigns: Alertness’ benefits go without saying, Combat Casting is still nigh-necessary for casters, and Stealthy’s low-rank benefits (hide as free action after attacking and snipe with melee attacks at 4 ranks, constant Nondetection at 9) can be devastating on many melee builds if they have a high enough Hide modifier.One more thing is that another kind of option paralysis is likely to occur at higher levels; not only do characters have more feats, each scaling feat exponentially adds more abilities of which to keep track. Since baseline 3.5 at such levels is already juggling a lot, Tome feats have streamlined the amount of options in exchange to take at all in exchange for a lot of options to juggle at higher levels.Celestial, Fiend, and Elemental Feats can only be taken by specific kinds of outsiders. Unlike the [Combat] and [Skill] feats, they don’t grant scaling abilities, instead being like normal 3.5 in granting single or a few powers all at once. We talked about [Fiend] feats in the last class post, and there aren’t many that are exclusive to Celestials in comparison to Fiends. The Tome Aasimar and Tieflings are eligible for taking these feats, but anyone else can via buying Product of Celestial/Infernal Dalliance as a feat tax which also gives either at-will Smite Evil or natural weapons along with 5 points in particularly energy resistances. The Elemental feats are a bit all over the place: Adobe of Earth grants a burrow speed, and Ice Trail is akin to “turn squares you leave are greased up.” But then you have Adept Flyer, which grants a Fly speed that improves by level (Adobe’s burrow doesn’t) which is going to be much better for most builds. Primal Armor grants Damage Reduction equal to half your level, but Primal Fortification is more useful in granting immunity to Critical Hits and flanking, the latter of which is the favorite arsenal of Sneak Attackers and other triggered boons. Touch of Shadow is downright overpowered, where you can make natural weapon attacks as touch attacks; the required downside of not adding Strength modifier to damage is hardly a penalty.Thoughts: While there’s quite a bit of nifty feats, they do vary in balance, and the introducing of the scaling Combat/Skill feats means that they’d have to be quite impressive to take in order to justify giving up on the former’s many bennies.Necromantic and Undead Feats round out the chapter. The Necromantic are 14 in number and the Undead 3, and the former aren’t in alphabetical order like the other feat entries in this book. Of special note is that many of the Necromantic feats grant the ability to create and control undead. The text points out that each such feat is considered to have its own “control pool,” meaning that limits one would have on controlled undead via a spell, class feature, or other feats don’t count towards this total. Undead can be created via a ritual taking 1 hour per Challenge Rating of the dead creature to be animated, and 25 gold pieces per Hit Die. Only 3 Necromantic feats outright have spellcasting or caster levels as prerequisites, allowing these feats to be attainable by noncaster classes.The more interesting Necromantic feats include Blood Painter (cast any spell you know without expending a slot by dealing Constitution damage to yourself by painting an image in your own blood), Fairy Eater (cast more powerful illusion spells, know Trickery domain spells, can count as Fey for game mechanics purposes), Sleep of the Ages (immunity to critical hits and sneak attack, can enter a state of suspended animation by removing your internal organs), and the Path of Blood (can create Vampires and Vampire Spawn, unintelligent undead full-heal at next sunset if they kill a living creature before then, can learn spells with the [blood] descriptor).As for the Undead feats, you need to be undead in order to take them (big surprise there), with one of them requiring you to be a specific type: the ghoul. They are Enervating Touch (unarmed and natural weapons automatically inflict one negative level and give you temporary hit points when hitting intelligent targets), Control Spawn (those who die from your negative levels rise as a Wight controlled by you), and Paralyzing Touch (must be a ghoul, natural weapons cause 1 minute paralysis on a failed Fortitude save).Thoughts: Suffice to say, necromancy in base 3.5 is a very powerful tradition due to the ability to create undead which can tip the action economy in the party’s favor. There is of course the supposed social downsides in that such magic is hated in most fantasy settings, but that is a subjective thing. The Tomes don’t do anything to make it less powerful; if anything, they make necromancy even more powerful, and grant access to even more powerful undead types long-term via easy-to-take feats. Control Spawn is easily exploited by the Bag of Rats trick in killing small defenseless creatures to turn into Wights, and if Enervating Touch were paired with Touch of Shadow somehow it can easily stack debilitating debuffs on targets. Blood Painter has an infinite casting exploit if you have a Marshall in the party, who can patch up the Constitution damage with their at-will Restoration. I’d be loath to include these feats in a campaign for the aforementioned balance reasons.Thoughts So Far: I do like the [Combat] and [Skill] feats, although as mentioned before they vary in general balance and appeal even if few of them are outright truly bad. The planar and necromancy-flavored feats are even less balanced and easily exploitable. While there are much less feats to worry about in a Tome game, they still require a careful look to ensure game balance.Join us next time as we begin Chapter 7: Prestige Classes!</blockquote>

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