Introduction
Why even resort to feats?
Character differentiation. In the
battle against cookie-cutting, uniqueness is the weapon of choice. I don’t mean
the “uniqueness” dictated by builds, the sort that always degenerates in soulless
sinergy and the grinding crunch of efficiency, but the uniqueness which only a
lottery windfall befalling a poor man can provide: Fortune.
On the useful Feat
As mentioned, I don’t think of
feats in terms of an exercise in optimized character aerodynamics, nor do I pay
heed to the tiresome paradigm of there’s
a feat for that, according to which a character wishing to be an archer in good
standing unavoidably beget having the archery feat. I detest and reject
the whole “mandatory option by design” school.
Courtney Campbell (of Hack & Slash fame) once wrote a resonating piece on this topic, which in an
interesting case of the OSR seeping back into the mainstream ended up being
adopted by fifth edition’s design ethos. I plod along much the same lines
insomuch as I treat each feat as a self-contained affair instead of a branching sequence of optimization enablers. Unlike the PHB, however, instead of each feat allotting the
character a whole career-making suite of expertise abilities, mine are to act
more as differentiators that happen to lend a little bit of power. This necessitates that they be both randomly acquired and drawn from a large pool of possibilities.
Stumble at every hurdle
First of all, I’ve cheated. There
are not one hundred feats in the table that follows, rather, the table’s design
meant that it got nibbled of six entries at each end, for a total just shy of
ninety.
These first hundred entries
don’t feel terribly inspired. Filling the table felt easy while the
first twenty-odd ideas bounced off, the momentum was kept by drawing and
quartering the PHB feats and then… stall. Coming up with feats that are both mundane
and that don’t simultaneously encroach red-handedly upon the thematic expertise
turf of the character classes is somewhat difficult and I’m all
for protecting the niches, so the going got slow. Yet, also implied, is that
the list is not set in stone: once the ideas do flow, from within or with
player input, I’ll gladly update and expand the table to a d300 or further
still.
In a continued effort to
differentiate the demihuman races I’m up for trying something different: the
more overtly magical feats, the kind that would feel a bit too difficult to
explain if manifested on a prosaic human, have been pushed to become part of a
second table – the second d100 for magical feats. I did concede to have divine
interactions seep into this mundane table, as they are implied as a natural and
non-inherent kind of supernaturalism.
Accrual of Commitment
Feat acquisition can come both at
character generation or later through levelling and other events derived from
play. The in-setting explanation for their acquisition (or manifestation) is
assumed to fall upon the player, with mediation from the referee.
I ended up artificially
constraining myself to have each feat be a blurb, alloting it no more than two
lines or roughly 120 characters apiece, dismembering the PHB feats and injecting
some of my own brain juice among the cracks. One of the side effects was that the
majority of the feats ended up not being worth more than a single mulligan
token, which will force me to go back and revise the feat pricing part of the character
generation procedure. If the concern for impractical characters bedecked in
feats like christmas trees does come up through play (which I doubt) a feat
limit equal to the proficiency modifier for starting characters or something of
the sort can later be proposed.
The feats themselves offer
between one and three thematically linked things. They often grant proficiency
in a skill wherever it makes sense due to the nature of the accompanying ability
or if the entry just needed some value shore-up. A number of them are based
on affording special dispensation from both the general rules or the hogwash that
I’ve been spewing this past year and touch mainly on the pillars of play –
combat, exploration and interaction – that ought to be common ground to
whichever race or class that ends up taking the feat. If some entries
read as vague and underdeveloped, the rationale is that the referee should only
expend time with something that has a 1/100th chance of occuring once it
actually does. Then it can be appropriately fleshed out mechanically.
The Crunch
- Men and Half-men roll
exclusively on the d100 mundane table.
- Elves and Dwarves roll on both
tables (d200).
- Gnomes roll exclusively on the
d100 supernatural table.
- If a feat grants training on a skill
the character is already proficient in, increase the skill’s associated
attribute by 1 instead.
- In the unlikely event of an individual
feat being rolled twice, fashion an improved version of it (or reroll, if this
proves impossible).
The table
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| Feat: Improved Table Reading |
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