Hello again! Hope you’re doing well. I’ll begin with a personal update or two.

Back on Easter weekend, I drove down to Bethesda MD to participate in ScrumCon, a local convention with both RPGs and miniatures games. I ran a session of my Primeval Thule campaign (that’ll be a topic of a blog later in the year), and I presented a giant Axis & Allies Naval Miniatures match for two teams of four players. Basic tactical advice: Don’t steam your aircraft carriers straight at enemy battleships. That’s not what they’re for. A good time was had by all.

In other news, I’d like to recommend Death and Other Details, a nice whodunit series on Hulu. My wife Kim and I sometimes have trouble finding shows we can both get into for our evening TV-watching, but a good mystery can usually interest us both. (We recently watched A Murder at the End of the World, and of course Only Murders in the Building, too.) Reading-wise, I just finished Poul Andersen’s Flandry of Terra, and I’m now working my way through a Doc Smith series I never read before—the Family D’Alembert books. Not quite the Lensman series, but I do love a Doc Smith story!

Okay, on to this week’s topic.

Feats

As I told you last month, I was one-third of the initial 3^rd Edition design team for Dungeons & Dragons. Monte Cook, Skip Williams, and I began our work with months of day-long discussions of just about every part of the 1^st– and 2^nd-Edition D&D rules. Big pieces of the 3E rules set were sketched out in those initial discussions, and later improved and refined through rigorous examination of all the interested parties at WotC—not only Jonathan Tweet when he joined the design team, but also expert designers such as Ed Stark, Peter Adkison, Skaff Elias, and many more.

When Skip, Monte, and I got to Non-weapon Proficiencies, we found a mess. Some Proficiencies covered things that were occupations—the old “secondary skills” of 1^st Edition like Armorer, Miner, or Sailor. Some were strange talents like Fire-building or Rope Use that you would imagine anyone can do. And some clearly made your character better at being an adventurer, like Blind-fighting or Endurance. How were we supposed to rationalize all this?

In talking it through, we realized that we didn’t want one pool of mismatched talents. We were looking at something that required segregation: an “A” bucket of important tricks and talents you either had or you didn’t have, and a “B” bucket of skills that could be incrementally improved by study. Thus, 3^rd Edition gained its Feats and its Skills.

We retreated to our various assignments, and implemented the ideas we had been discussing. For my part, I focused on the game’s initial set of combat feats, creating a set of options for players looking for ways to fight better. Power Attack, Cleave, Combat Expertise, Spring Attack, Rapid Shot? They all came out of my initial feat design document, along with quite a few others.

Admittedly, some feats weren’t all that good for the game—for example, Power Attack as I designed it demands a lot of math at the table, and it’s highly abusable by players looking to optimize their characters. But it was a direct implementation of a concept easy to picture in your mind’s eye: swinging for the fences. I always felt the best feats were talents or tricks you could describe without numbers if you had to.

(A little aside: I’m fond of using placeholder names when iterating on a bunch of ideas. So my initial document included “Sucks to be You,” which became Spring Attack. And “Born a Mongol,” which became Mounted Archery. My friend and colleague Sean Reynolds later roasted me in an article about that. Sigh. Where’s the sense of fun?)

I can’t claim sole credit for inventing the concept of feats. I think I made the initial observation that we needed two buckets for the proficiencies we were evaluating instead of one, but establishing what those were and creating a game system was a group effort. And we certainly were aware of other contemporary RPGs out there with talent systems, so it wasn’t like we discovered fire with the idea.

So what have feats contributed to the game since 2000? Most of those initial combat feats I came up with went on to feature prominently in 3e and 4e. Some are still around in 5e! Feats turned out to be a huge new toolkit for character customization. They became a crucial currency, giving any character the ability to develop a unique combat style or talent set with some careful leveling choices.

In time, the D&D rules set grew to include literally thousands of feats scattered across scores of game supplements—far too many to manage, frankly. I think that’s what 5e was trying to correct by choking down feat acquisition to one per 4 levels and limiting the pool of feats to choose from. I think it’s a bit of an overcorrection, though. I hope we get a few more in the next edition.

Anyways, there you have it: feats. For all you DMs out there who ever had to contend with player using a broken Power Attack build … sorry? Just remember your player had fun even if your monsters didn’t.