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Thursday, October 24, 2013

Thoughts on Feats for OD&D

There’s a post about designing feats for OD&D on the Hack & Slash blog. C complains baout pretty much everything I complain about in the typical feat system: big ol’ laundry lists slowing down character creation, lots of list-padding, niche protection for the guys who take feats, and weapon tree-inspired lists of onerous prerequisites. But people do like to have a little choice.

C suggests some guidelines to follow, should anyone wish to add feats to OD&D. I pretty much agree, but have some specific points of my own:
  1. Stick to Heroic (4th level Fighter,) Superheroic (8th level Fighter,) Expert and Master (5th/10th level Thief/Talent,) Saintly (8th level Cleric,) and Wizardly (11th level M-U) as your feat categories and pre-requisites. Plus maybe general.
  2. Use the spell lists as a guideline to feat power level for the mundane (Fighter/Thief) classes. General = 1st and 2nd level, Heroic/Expert = 3rd and 4th level, Superheroic/Master = 5th and 6th level.
  3. Fighter feats require physical effort and some kind of “ingredient” or tool. Thiefly feats must be applied to one of the thiefly talents. Cleric/M-U feats should be fairly limited, because they get their “feats” as spells.
  4. Every feat should have a drawback, if not more than one.
  5. Rather than make feats part of character generation, make them a part of play. That settles the question of how many feats a character gets per level (as many as the character can afford and has the time for.)

9 comments:

  1. I already shared my thoughts over on C's blog (I largely disagree with him), so no need re-posting them here. I would like to add that I like your fifth point. In-game training, like with learning a language, could definitely work. My only concern might be that it could undermine the level system, but I don't think that'd be a real problem depending on how you handle time in your campaign

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  2. Cleric/M-U feats should be fairly limited, because they get their “feats” as spells.

    This prompts the question though, in a system with feats, why aren't spells feats?

    That is in fact the approach I have taken (sort of) with my recent sorcerer class:

    http://www.necropraxis.com/2013/10/18/sorcerer-class/

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    1. Aren't they feats already? The only difference between a feat and a spell is that you have to pick your spells each adventure, whether you memorize them, scribe them on scrolls, or brew them as potions.

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    2. The strength of feats as a design element though is that they are more interchangeable. Spells as traditionally expressed in the complicated collection of level-based slots are not clearly related to any other class ability or capacity.

      So no, I don't think they really are feats already. Magic-users certainly get way too many of them to really be handled in the same way, at least not without significant rules hacking.

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    3. Not really getting what you mean by interchangeable, since they seem pretty interchangeable to me.

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    4. Well, a 12th level magic-user in Men & Magic has 21 spell slots that can be filled by a potentially unlimited number of spells (depending on how spell acquisition is handled, of course, but it is not uncommon for referees to allow found or captured spell books to be used directly).

      That certainly doesn't seem commensurable with any feat system I have yet seen.

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    5. This prompts the question though, in a system with feats, why aren't spells feats?

      Because homogeneity for homogeneity's sake artificially limits design flexibility and creativity.

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  3. Every feat should have a drawback, if not more than one.

    Could you expand on this? I don't think I've seen this element in any existing feat systems. (Well, other than in the opportunity cost inherent in needing to not choose N-1 feats when you do choose a given feat.)

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    1. I'll probably write more on this topic specifically, but it's basically a specific instance of the "internal balance" or tradeoffs I've written about before, such as here:

      http://9and30kingdoms.blogspot.com/2013/08/do-i-hate-game-balance.html

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