I have long been of the opinion that adding Feats to D&D was a good thing, even a necessary thing.  However, starting some few years back I came to the realization that the designers did not think through the process very well. Specifically they failed to identify what, exactly, feats were meant to represent, what they did.

Not having that codified purpose, there was nothing to communicate to the third party developers, and you see further muddying of the waters from otherwise excellent game designers.  I have spoken on this before, but never with the intent of redoing feats for my own use. However with the coming of 4e and the various 3e grognards setting their heels for a long siege... lets just say it is time. Who knows, perhaps some WOTC designer might read this and go: Yes, we SHOULD have thought of that... there is still time to set it right!

Or not.

So, What is a feat: In D20 as it stands a feat is just about anything. Often they are rules exceptions or keys to certain rule use.  Sometimes they are skill boosters, sometimes they are nigh unto supernatural powers. In some iterations they are memberships or innate abilities.   In short they are a grab bag of goodies used to flavor your character. I'm all for goodies, but the grab bag has led to problems.

First of all: Feats should EITHER represent learned abilities or innate abilities, not both. That's just damn confusing.  Given the current process of 'learning' feats from classes and as one grows with expirence, the use of Feats as innate abilities (including: Snake blooded, Merchant Family, Dragonmarks and others...) leads to... issues.  Lets just say that it destroys the in-game logic of Feats in favor of metagaming balance.  

Second: Feats should not provide exceptions to rules. This is just bad game design and makes 'rules mastery' a joke.  Memorizing each of a thousand Feats, in addition to the rule chapters is not the way to learn a game.  But this is cloudy territory, a fuzzy line, if you will.  Let us take two feats, one good and one bad: Mobility provides the character a bonus to AC when provoking attacks of opportunity from movement. This is good, its not an exception, its a boost.  Improved Disarm however, removes the attack of opportunity that disarm provokes. This is bad: It provides a direct contravention of the existing rules, an exception.  There is middle ground, of course. Monkey Grip (a marginal Feat in more ways than one...) provides an exception by way of boosting.  A more clear demarkation between exceptions and boosting, and rewriting margin cases to more clearly folllow the guidelines, is a worthwhile endeavor.

Third: Feats should never be necessary to perform basic abilities that anyone can do. THis is explicitely obvious when dealing with various gun involved incarnations of hte game (d20 Modern, Spycraft, others) where a minimum of three to four feats can be necessary to hose down an area with autofire... something that any schlub with a gun should be able to do.   Ditto: unarmed combat, though to a lesser degree.  It can be argued that any schlub CAN spray and prey, or punch a fool, but often the penalities for 'unfeated use' are so egregious as to make unfeated use nigh unto impossible.  D20 Future added to this with mandatory feats to use space ships... on top of the pilot skill.  My line of demarkation: Can unnamed NPC's do it? If so, it doesn't require a feat.  Countless hordes of unnamed, unclassed NPC's pilot starships on everyday duties, they fire assault rifles into fleeing refugees or hostages in banks, they punch fools in the mouth for backtalk.  They don't need feats to do so, and these things are hardly 'signature ability' worthy tricks.  They ain't feat material...

Feats should never be necessary for a sub-optimal choice: Okay, so I can't really describe this as clearly as I'd like, so I'll leave you with the example of the worst offender: Exotic weapon proficencies: While few, if any, exotic weapons are fantastically overpowered compared to the ordinary weapons, simply by virtue of needing an exclusive feat to use one they become sub-optimal choices.  Instead of Joe playing his off the wall cool fighter who uses Nun-chucks, we get Joe Mark VII who continues to use a longsword because the feat requirement to be a nunchucker fighters is too painful for the benefit (sub-optimal weapon, reinforced by the wasted feat). Ditto with speed fighters requiring 'Weapon Finesse' feats. A player's concept should not be penalized further. We could go so far as to suggest that any weapon that qualifies for 'weapon finesse' automatically uses Dex to hit with... strength still provides bonus damage.

Feat Chains=Bad: I'll admit that my reasoning here is less solid than earlier, but: A feat should represent something special, some trick or ability that the character has mastered that sets them appart from the common rabble. Metamagic feats are ideal examples of this thought: any wizard can cast a fireball, Joe Wizard can cast his in the blink of an eye, or use it to take out small villages.   Some feat chains are fine as written: Dodge, mobility, spring attack comes to mind here.  Every step in the chain is a unique ability and usefull at multiple levels of play. However, they do not require a chain.  The Armor chain fails on multiple counts:Few fighters are ever going to bother with light armor, and any schlub can wear light armor anyway. The Two Weapon Chain and the Unarmed Combat Chains are failures of chaining, however: Joe the two weapon fighter must continue to take feats in two weapon fighting throughout his career to stay current. He is paying over and over again for the same trick.  If he ever stops buying in, then two weapon fighting becomes less and less optimal for him as he levels out of the initial payout, the feats become wasted.  

Sliding scale feats are unplayable: At the risk of sounding condecending, the sliding scale feats (power attack, combat expertise) are difficult for players to use properly, and they slow down the game significantly when they are used to their full potential (Ie, scaling PA so that the player's damage is optimized vs that AC). Any feat should be at most binary on/off... Redone PA should be a fixed amount when used: half the attack bonus as damage, say which also scales it to level more exactly.

Feats should never be used to fill things done in character: Society feats, Favored in House... these are things that characters should be able to earn IN GAME, as characters and through roleplaying. Forcing them to take a feat in addition is bollocks, and allowing them to bypass it by feat selection is also bollocks. This, ironically, also falls under the 'Nameless NPC' rule. Nameless NPCs belong to these organizations, are favored in their houses. Nameless NPCs should not, IMNSHO, have feats.

This takes us to our core concept: Feats should be used primarily as 'boosters', either providing a specific bonus or a unique 'signature' ability. Most of the skill feats are prefect representations of this, the character is simply better than everyone else at that one thing... at least at a given level.  The intial Feat of two weapon fighting (reducing penalties) is fine. Ranged combat feats need the most overhaul, though several are fine as written, though many should be disconnected from the existing chains.

It could be argued that by stripping away the vast hordes of feats that characters will soon start to suffer 'sameitus' as they all take the same feats from the shallow pool available to them. Not so: First of all, in the end we don't reduce the pool of available feats nearly as much as it sounds, second, recall that other than the fighter, the average character only gets some seven feats throughout their career.  Even if we reduce the starting pool of some 200+ feats from the PHB by half that's still less than 10% of the feats available.

I hope to attach a document or a link to a scrubbed listing of how I would handle the current feat list, with an addendum for Modern's gun feats.

Also: I apologize if this is somewhat disorganized. I am attempting to dump a couple of years of internal monologue into one post without adequet planning, as this was an ad hoc posting...

It's beautiful, Spike.  You've managed to capture many of the things that cause me indigestion with respect to Feats - hence the desire to create a "Featless d20"

But you've given me food for thought - you have quantified the way in which feats bother me, so I can see instances where something like feats could exist, but in a better form.

What if we went crazy, and linked "feats" to certain levels of skill?  Hmm...I won't derail. I'll just say thanks for the ideas...

well said, spike.  one of the big things that has bugged me about 3.x.

By all means, James, expand on that idea. My sole intent personally was to strip out the bloat, the excess and the non-sensical.  It might be valuable to make a player work to keep 'current' with certain 'powerful' feats like two weapon fighting by maintaining some sort  of linked progression. Its not too terrible just to strip out the 'improved' and 'advanced' feats, you still have two weapon defence and a few others to make for a difference between the part time two weapon guy and the full time guy.

I do need to sit down this week and compile the streamlined list, possibly including lists for other books (the Eberron setting has a massive host of dragonmark related feats that obviously need to be touched on, fer ex...)

(long response deleted as I am a long-winded narcissist)

...your comment about Role Playing feats also leads to wonder about how you feel of such skills as intimidate, diplomancy, whatever the skill for LIE is, etc.

I find two main disadvantages to this in play:

First, the end result is that roleplaying is turned into rollplaying.  "I use my diplomacy skill to persuade the king to attack our foes with his army"  A die is rolled.

Rather than have an excellent bought of in-character roleplaying, we now have a die role.

Secondly, roleplayers are penalized for their excellent roleplaying and let at the mercy of the dice...

Wizard Player: "The evil wizard used tgree main spells in that battle.  I saw him cast two of them (and I know those spells) , but he didn't cast the third, it followed right after that amulet glowed.  Therefore, the lightning bolts he fired must be cast by that amulet, which we know is magical, but we don;t know what it does!"

DM:  "ROll your spellcraft.....sorry, you rolled a 1, your character didn't think of that."

Now I agree with everything that you said about feats in general, and most points in specific, but I am also wondering if you see the same problem in the useage of skills; most especially where roleplaying is countermanded by rolling the dice?

Quote from: SpikeBy all means, James, expand on that idea. My sole intent personally was to strip out the bloat, the excess and the non-sensical.  It might be valuable to make a player work to keep 'current' with certain 'powerful' feats like two weapon fighting by maintaining some sort  of linked progression. Its not too terrible just to strip out the 'improved' and 'advanced' feats, you still have two weapon defence and a few others to make for a difference between the part time two weapon guy and the full time guy.

I do need to sit down this week and compile the streamlined list, possibly including lists for other books (the Eberron setting has a massive host of dragonmark related feats that obviously need to be touched on, fer ex...)

Hey - I'll trade you for that list.  Ya know, something like a compilation of your original Races essays

Seriously - if you do compile a list, I'd love to see it.

Gladen:

To be succinct, taking a feat of 'beloved by the king', if there is one in some book somewhere, is about as interesting as simply rolling the dice for, say, Gather Info and going 'So, everyone in the bar tells me the goon is in the alley'... which from the tone of your abbreviated post you suggest you dislike.

I'm all for social skills. Not every player is willing to go into deep roleplaying scenes, and even those that do might still like a little dice adjucation now and then (the dice are impersonal and you can't cry they are unfair if things don't go your way, you see).  Never mind the fast talkign PLAYER should not have an advantage over the player whose actual character concept is 'fast talking smooth con man bard dude'.  

But: the process of joining a group, a society, should never fall upon a single dice roll or 'feat selection'. First of all, as a GM I would LOVE for a player to say 'Hey, I think my dude should totally join the Grey Wizards of Khador!'. Talk about adventure hooks and the grist of many sessions of subplotting: And you can beleive that after WORKING for that membership he'll do a hell of a lot with it more than if he just said 'Hrm.. I get a feat next level... I guess I can join the 'Grey Wizards'. The bonus to ice spells is alright."  

Yeah: Talk to an NPC, roll some social dice, pick up a few adventures and THEN you are a member. Not: So, I took this feat, I'm totally a member.

Ditto 'Favored in House' (totally Canon Eberron Feat). You want your House to love you and give you stuff? Fine, do shit for them, earn that love and trust by ADVENTURING for them, sweet talking the daughter of the head of the house, whatever.

EDIT::: No GM I've ever played with has decided the player didn't think of something just because he rolled a one on a check.  In your example: Yeah, you saw it, but you think it might be X (when its really Y) or something to that effect. Most of the people I am willing to game with will accept that the GM flat out lied to their face and run with it.  Previous exceptions to that rule at least knew they didn't know. That's what the one mean. Not that the player didn't see what he thought he saw.

Spike, your whole post is seriously fucking good! Well thought out. I want to address a few things, though. I'm working on my homebrew D20 fantasy game and considering some stuff. Hope it won't be considered heresy.

Quote from: SpikeFirst of all: Feats should EITHER represent learned abilities or innate abilities, not both. That's just damn confusing.  Given the current process of 'learning' feats from classes and as one grows with expirence, the use of Feats as innate abilities (including: Snake blooded, Merchant Family, Dragonmarks and others...) leads to... issues.  Lets just say that it destroys the in-game logic of Feats in favor of metagaming balance.

Good stuff here. There needs to be a clear purpose with feats. However, I'm still undecided as to whether there needs to be something else not called feats. I'm undecided. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.

Quote from: SpikeSecond: Feats should not provide exceptions to rules. This is just bad game design and makes 'rules mastery' a joke.  Memorizing each of a thousand Feats, in addition to the rule chapters is not the way to learn a game.

See, this was the part that spoke the most to me. There needs to be a real stand taken here, I agree with you... except I'm going the other way.

I think all feats *should* be clever, elegant exceptions to the rules. And not simply crappy stacking bonus. That's what I will be shooting for in my design. They're going to take the system in completely different direction from standard stuff.

And the current mundane feats will be just special moves that anyone can try without the need for feats.

I disagree with you that it is in any way "bad design". But I totally see where you are coming from when you say it is rather important to not mix "rules of exceptions" with standard rules.

I want feats to make the game a totally different experience. I don't want too many of them, though.  

Quote from: SpikeFeat Chains=Bad

That's another interesting thing you pointed out. I'm not sure I agree. If feats aren't going to be wild systemic exceptions, then I think feat chains are good. But they sucked in 3e. I think they needed to be reworked.

I think WotC will explore the concept eventually. They are bound to. It's what made them a rich company (M:tG addictive combos and deck building). More thought simply needed to be put in it.

I would compare 3rd edition D&D and its feats to early M:tG. Promising but flawed. I think there's room to fine tune and I don't think this particular edition and its suck chaining feats make the whole concept flawed.

But anyway, it's still a great analysis, very articulated. And even the stuff I disagreed with actually made me think about the design decisions I am taking with D20!

Fair enough, Spike: and well said, I might add.

So your main point with role playing feats is that unlike roleplaying skills, which (in so many words) put all players on an even keel, the Role Playing Feats are so much deus ex machina that detract from the experience of playing the game by means of forcing what should be played out into background story.

Yeah, pretty much spot on.  I don't mind advantage systems when they represent innate traits.

Therein lies the problem for D&D.  If you can't add special feat-like abilities that aren't unique snowflake later in the character development, a certain segment of the gaming population will be upset.  Not me, mind you, but some.

They want to be able to come upon a temple of the Snake god and be so enthralled by the Brotherhood of the Scale that they can join and gain all of it's benefits, including access to the new Lightning Strike, Venom Strike feat chain. Have to sell those d20 books, ya know?

In LG, they did this outside of feats and through affiliations (an option from PHBII I believe, though I'd have to go look). You had to gain affiliation points over time (or for a cost) to join an organization that then provided certain benefits. As far as I know, they did not include innate abilities - but don't quote me on that, I'm not an LG expert.

CD: I don't think you have to have 'exceptions' to make Feats more interesting than just a bonus, though obviously, exceptions can be easier to think up than non-exceptions that have the feel you are looking for. A less absolute ruling on exceptions in my mind would be that the Feat exception could not alter someone elses 'rules'. For example: A feat taken by Joe should not prevent Frank from getting his attack of opportunity off.  Then again: recall that I felt Monkey Grip was less of an 'Exception' and more of a 'non-numeric booster', so there is precedent for a middle ground.

On the innate traits: I borrowed my roommate's Neverwinter Nights 2, during character creation everyone gets a 'background feat', sort of an innate ability as an extra. In D20 Modern everyone gets to pick a background and there is already a precedent in 'everyone gets one starter feat'.  In my upcoming Eberron game I plan to allow everyone a free 'Dragonmark' feat (and in fact the Eyes of the Lich Queen adventure gives a free Dragonmark as well...) if they chose.  I don't think a seperate system is needed so much as a clear guidance: Everyone picks one background/innate feat or no one does. Don't muddle it with feats as learned abilities.  The infrastructure is there in many setting books with 'backgrounds' with certain recommended feats, just adapt that to provide an innate feat instead.

Gladen: It seems we are on the same page then.

James: Not sure what you are saying. Joining the temple of the Snake Cult is an adventure, and the feats you mention would be normal feats: Learned tricks not available to the ordinary thug.  I can see it now: the grizzled adventurer returns from the Jungles and has to deal with some bandits

"Now let me show you what I learned from the Monks of the Snake God.... Twin Viper Fang STRIKE!"

:what:

LG?

Quote from: SpikeJames: Not sure what you are saying. Joining the temple of the Snake Cult is an adventure, and the feats you mention would be normal feats: Learned tricks not available to the ordinary thug.  I can see it now: the grizzled adventurer returns from the Jungles and has to deal with some bandits

"Now let me show you what I learned from the Monks of the Snake God.... Twin Viper Fang STRIKE!"

:what:

LG?

Spike,

My fault for not including the assumed caveat that the entire feat chain is based on an innate attribute, not a learned skill.

LG = Living Greyhawk, the RPGA campaign.  The region in which I live, Verbobonc (IL and IN), is/was fairly progressive - coming up with rules for a Town project for characters to buy homes, build businesses, etc (essentially become a part of a community in the region).  One of things they did was offer this affiliation point system (actually a revamp of an earlier attempt) that used WotC published optional rules (IIRC).

The idea being that if you were going to get that feat, you were going to have a meaningful (read: cost resources) relationship. A way to avoid everyone running around with every feat from every organization just because. Instead, you had to kind of pick and choose what was important to the character in question.  Kinda off topic, accept that it was a way to control this kind of "setting feat" access...

James: Yeah, I figured out the LG right after I hit send.... I'm a little slow

The thing is: Membership feats shouldn't exist. The Affiliation points thing (I think I've seen that in Star Wars, actually...) is perfectly fine. If a feat doesn't exist, it can't be a prerequisite! Huzzah!

Actually: Iron Kingdoms does that. In order to learn to make 'gunpowder' you have to be a member in the golden order. Two feats in order to use your alchemy skill to make the one alchemical item that is canon in the setting. Personally: joining the Golden Order is adventure/roleplaying stuff, as is learning the secret formula for gunpowder (obvoiously easier if you are member of the golden order).  Now: IK did offset the fact you were buying membership by providing other bonuses (Grey wizards got bonuses to ice spells, fer ex), but the core reason for the feat was to 'be a member'... total fail in my book.

I like social situations as feats in at least one circumstance: the "you may only take this feat at first level" kind. Want to be beloved by your house from childhood, which will translate into kewl benefits during the game? That's fine, as long as you're spending chargen resources on it.