We all know feats are not all created equal, which makes the idea that they’re balanced against an ASI pretty dubious. One alternative is to just not use feats, since they are optional. But what about going the opposite direction? You can only take a feat when you reach an ASI level.
Obviously this would slow down ability bonus advancement. It would still be possible to increase ability scores with “half-feats,” but that limits your selection of feats, which seems like a reasonable trade-off to me. And even then you only get +1 instead of +2.
Has anyone tried this? If so, how did it go? If not, what are your thoughts about it?
I haven't tried this.
I think if you did, It'd be important to address feat balance. Where using
ASIs only lets you avoid the imbalance of feats, using
feats only doesn't, even if it makes imbalance no worse. The easiest way would be a for players to have a gentleman's agreement to take feats of comparable strength--so you avoid a situation where one player has sharpshooter and crossbow expert and another player has linguist and elemental adept. Alternately, you could tinker with the overly strong or weak feats... but I'm sure this insight is a surprise to absolutely no one here at ENWorld.
The other issue is that some PCs need ASIs a lot more than they benefit from feats. Monks would have a bad time with this houserule (maybe make an exception for them?). So would unusual multiclass combinations (if multiclassing were permitted).
Apart from those issues, it's not gonna break the game, and I can see it being a good change of pace. It would incentivize more odd numbered ability scores on character creation and it would disincentivize PCs getting 20 in any ability score, since doing so without the Tasha's custom option would take at least 12 levels. That'd all make PCs a bit less powerful. But they would presumably be more interesting with feats than with ASIs, and it'd give permission to players who want to take, say, chef or wood elf magic (which are
fine) without feeling like they're doing something wrong.
On the other hand, since there aren't
that many cool and appealing feats--especially if players decide it's gauche to take SS, GWM, PAM, etc.--you might find that all your PCs now pick up their basic numbers increases via resilient and/or skill expert (which I would consider only marginally more interesting than ASIs). A lot of the fun and flavorful feats don't go together that well flavor-wise. For example: shadow touched and telekinetic are cool and work reasonably well together, since they can both add to the same ability score, but they don't intuitively fit with each other. Does this spur creativity by, for example, pushing the player to think of a good reason why they do go together (awesome), merely lead to the fluff of the feats being ignored (totally fine), or discourage players from taking them together (unfortunate). How much creative mileage you get out of the houserule is gonna depend a lot on the players.
