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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7884097" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.This is one of the several reasons that any Feat which wasn't core I wanted to individually review and if needed rewrite before I added it to my game.I love feats. I've written a lot of them. But the Feat mechanic is very deceptive from a design standpoint. Feats are short little bits of rules. So, you might suppose that Feats are easy to design. Ideally, you really only need to write a sentence or two. Certainly, tons of publishers acted like Feats are easy to design. But designing a good Feat is actually really difficult, because what a Feat really does or ought to do is interact with some subsystem of your rules. And what too many feat designers tried to do is make Feats that were little rules subsystems in and of themselves. And the result of that is, among other things, exactly what you are talking about here.A feat should not by its existence imply a restriction in what is possible unless that restriction preexists the feat. A feat can say, "Normal: There is a restriction. Benefit: This restriction is partially removed." But a feat should never create a new restriction on characters who don't have the feat. Ones that particularly annoyed me were feats that implied, for example, only someone who has the feat can throw an opponent in a grapple. They'd codified the rules for throwing an opponent in the feat, rather than codifying the rules for throwing something as a standard combat maneuver, and then having a feat "Hey, you know Judo!" that made you good at it.This is a specific example of a general rule that a feat should never have a remote side effect in the rules. You should never need to know a feat exists in order to know what the rules are. Only the feats that the characters involved in an action have should be relevant. You shouldn't need to know all 600 or 6000 feats in order to know what the rules are.Again, no brand management. Rather than extending the basic rules, so much of the rules of 3e ended up silo'd off to specific Feats or PrCs as the "answer" for how limitations in the basic rules would be solved.   But that really only made the problem worse.</blockquote>

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