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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5599247" data-attributes="member: 54877">What I want is to spend somewhere between 5 minutes and an hour (depending on how important the particular choice), picking between several viable and interesting options. Filtering through the substandard (however defined for any given player) is nothing but busywork. We may have to put up with a certain amount of it because one players' substandard is another players' goldmine, but that doesn't make it a positive thing--merely necessary.  But generally, one of my contentions is that the longer the list gets, the more busywork you inevitably get, in return for less and less actual choices that any player will find interesting--either with making the pick or then later in play. It is the classic diminishing return.  The busywork is only rewarding to those who enjoy "putting in the work" to gain advantage (social, mechanical, whatever). I don't care if we sacrifice some of their pleasure. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  It is rather tricky. I think the key to this kind of design is to have the courage of your design. If you are going to do this, then do it. Accept that, for the reasons you listed, trade offs will have to be made in other areas. There may be particular flavor ideas or mechanical representations or whatever that--while acceptable in a toned down format--simply don't cut it in such a design. So don't include those. There may also need to be mechanical and other system support to mitigate such issues. You might have default abilities that aren't quite as good as the increased breadth, but still allow a certain amount of forgery. Or you might give most characters several "picks" to give the party a solid breadth, and then let them hire NPCs for the other stuff. Or any number of things. So again, you can't do this halfway, because doing it right will have ramifications throughout the design. Really, there are several, mutually exclusive, ways that feats could go, but I find that all of them have the characteristic that they are pushing things into a more robust design that does have the courage of its convictions. Feats keep trying to be "little extras that you get a bunch of" and "mechanically significant", and keep running into the compromises between those two positions. If that is the actual design intent, then have the courage of that conviction and get rid of them, replacing them with class or multi-class options, themes, or other ways to package abilitiy in a class-based system. Not that I'm probably arguing with you at all in this post ... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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