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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7588064" data-attributes="member: 4937">Feats in 3e ended up covering a lot of design space.The issue I ran into most often is that I wanted feats to work something like spells, where as you took more of them of a particular sort, you start to get more exponential returns on investment.&nbsp; This is needed to keep non-caster classes in line with caster classes.&nbsp;&nbsp; Spells have so much impact, that non-casters need a lot of something else to equal out.&nbsp; Feats and skills are pretty much the only tools in the box.The &quot;Tactical Feat&quot; design pattern of giving you 3 small benefits with a similar flavor had a big influence on my design work with feats.&nbsp; I also wanted them to take up much of the design space that PrC's ended up covering, so that you could use feats to say something defining about your character.&nbsp;&nbsp; So, if you took a feat that required investment in 3 prior feats, that should be equivalent in impact to being able to cast 4th level spells compared to 1st level spells.&nbsp; You should really get something good, especially when looking at the 4 feats collectively.&nbsp; But just as with spells, there is a real trade off on that complexity, and if anything feats are worse than spells in that feats work like long duration buff spells that have ongoing impact on the game.&nbsp; 5e actually took feats more in the direction I was taking 3e feats before 5e came out, and it really made me want to redo much of the work I'd done on feats once the concept was proved and clear.&nbsp;&nbsp; But the problem is that in order to support those feats, 5e also greatly limited how many you had access to and even went so far as to make them optional for those that wanted to stay more 'rules medium'.&nbsp;&nbsp; And want I've also discovered is that players like taking feats and that since I level up pretty slowly, feats need to come early and often if they are really to do anything for you beyond something useful but not particularly cool like &quot;Improved Initiative&quot; or &quot;Power Attack&quot;. If you have 10 or 20 feats, that give you 3 small situational bonuses each, then pretty soon you have a ton of fiddly things to keep track of.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7588064, member: 4937"] Feats in 3e ended up covering a lot of design space. The issue I ran into most often is that I wanted feats to work something like spells, where as you took more of them of a particular sort, you start to get more exponential returns on investment. This is needed to keep non-caster classes in line with caster classes. Spells have so much impact, that non-casters need a lot of something else to equal out. Feats and skills are pretty much the only tools in the box. The "Tactical Feat" design pattern of giving you 3 small benefits with a similar flavor had a big influence on my design work with feats. I also wanted them to take up much of the design space that PrC's ended up covering, so that you could use feats to say something defining about your character. So, if you took a feat that required investment in 3 prior feats, that should be equivalent in impact to being able to cast 4th level spells compared to 1st level spells. You should really get something good, especially when looking at the 4 feats collectively. But just as with spells, there is a real trade off on that complexity, and if anything feats are worse than spells in that feats work like long duration buff spells that have ongoing impact on the game. 5e actually took feats more in the direction I was taking 3e feats before 5e came out, and it really made me want to redo much of the work I'd done on feats once the concept was proved and clear. But the problem is that in order to support those feats, 5e also greatly limited how many you had access to and even went so far as to make them optional for those that wanted to stay more 'rules medium'. And want I've also discovered is that players like taking feats and that since I level up pretty slowly, feats need to come early and often if they are really to do anything for you beyond something useful but not particularly cool like "Improved Initiative" or "Power Attack". If you have 10 or 20 feats, that give you 3 small situational bonuses each, then pretty soon you have a ton of fiddly things to keep track of. [/QUOTE]

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