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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5703234" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think that this is related to (1) the relative value of a feat in D&D character building, and (2) what counts as contributing to the strength of a PC.In Burning Wheel it is possible to spend character building resources on hostile relationships - like the monastery JamesonCourage describes, except they are your enemies. This doesn't directly create a PC resource, but it does create something the player can use in the course of play to establish and build his/her PC. Roughly speaking, the resources are being spent not to improve PC effectiveness but to improve PC screentime and integration into the fiction.In one of my RM campaigns three of the PCs were samurai - a clan leader, his cousin, and their retainer - and the cousin PC was an excellent weapon and armour smith. Over the course of the campaign he made weapons for the clan leader, and armour for the retainer, but I believe never built anything for himself. Nevertheless, that activity conributed to the PC - it helped define his role in the story, and his character (selfless in the service of others).I think that it played a role, in the building of that character, that buying up the crafting skills, while affecting his capacity as a samurai warrior, didn't affect that capacity in a terribly adverse fashion. He remained a viable warrior at all levels of play.The Craft Arms and Armour feat, if it is bad design, is so (I think) only against an assumption as to what a feat should do in D&D (ie improve PC effectiveness) and what the point of play is in D&D (ie rather gamist in orientation). I can see how those who have drifted their 3E play away from those assumptions wouldn't find the feat a problem. I can even think that the feat (like the Crafting rules) might have been put into the system precisely to support that sort of drift.The same guy who played the samurai swordsmith in my RM game now plays a wizard in my 4e game who has, among his feats: 2 familiar feats; Deep Sage; and Skill Training (Dungeoneering). He is also multi-classed as an Invoker, so that he could Paragon as a Divine Philosopher, despite having a 6-point split between his WIS and INT. And he knows, and spends resources on casting, many rituals. (Mostly informational ones, but it's likely that the first magic items he builds - he hasn't made any yet - won't be for himself.)This isn't the sort of PC one would take into Lair Assault - but it is completely viable in the game that we play. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably state that this PC also does also have Expanded Spell, Action Surge and Additional Implement Mastery. And his dailies include Flaming Sphere and Wall of Fire. Like the samurai, he's not at all completely gimped.)</blockquote>

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