How many feats?

[Draz74]

For my purposes here, "feats" means special abilities that a player (or GM) has to choose to actively use.

I'm gutting my previous homebrew and questioning a lot of its fundamentals, and one thing is this question. How many options for a character is too many, leading to decision paralysis and big slowdowns in combat?

I'm suspecting the answer will be somewhat level-based, and also dependent on the role of a creature in the story (PC, Mook, boss, or something in between).

[Deepbluediver]

I'm all in favor of player-agency and giving players more choices to pick from. Assuming you add them onto the character at a reasonable pace, then the person should have a good accounting of their abilities and not be paralyzed when having to choose between a variety of different hammers (to smack down whatever the nail-of-the-moment is). The only real issue I see is if someone relatively new to the game is trying to build a higher-level character right from the get-go.

One thing I dislike about passive, always-on abilities is that players tend to pick them to the exclusion of active abilities, which IMO are far more interesting. It's seems to be to easy for people to settle into a rut, of "this is my one trick, and this trick may not be great but it's never bad either, so I will do everything I can to boost this one trick, other options be damned". I'm not saying that all players or tables are like that, I'm just saying that it seems to be a kind of trap I worry about setting. So I naturally gravitate towards writing feats as either active choices, or to be split between a passive buff and an active ability.
Alternatively, if I want a set of feats to be passive-ish in nature (such as Fighter-bonus feats, that improve a particular combat style) I will give a certain number of those to the character as a class-feature, which leaves their level-up feats free to be picked for more (again, IMO) interesting options.

If you want to think about it this way, every single spell is an active ability that a player has to decide to prepare and cast, so as an upper limit there should be no problem with giving martial or gish-classes as many different abilities as your pure-spellcasters have spells. That's just my 2 cp, anyhow.

[rel]

I like a small number of distinct powerful abilities. About 10 as the absolute maximum.
Start with about 5 and slowly increase the number of abilities as the character progresses while also allowing the player to swap out less relevant options as they progress.

This strikes a good balance of having options and being able to easily keep all the options in your head as a player, and perhaps more importantly, as a GM designing encounters for said players.


It's important to note that under such a design paradigm the powers need to impactful and broadly applicable.

Flight would be an example of a good power. Twice as good at killing a specific kind of enemy would be an example of a bad power.

[nonsi]

For me, the name of the game is options and decision making.
If it's all about stats, the game becomes boring on one hand and on the other hand players run into too many situations where they're helpless to contribute in any meaningful way.
The best decision I know of, is to make a lot of feats better and eliminate a lot of the prereqs - that way players won't burn this valuable resource on fillers.
This is especially noticeable when it comes to melees and skill monkeys.

Below are two posts in my homebrew project that address feats:
https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=18777393&postcount=8
https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=18777396&postcount=9
Use them as you see fit.

[MrStabby]

I am going to give a kind of non-answer, that I hope will be kind of constructive.

Firstly, its not really about number, but about choice.

If you have 5 abilities to use, and there is one thats good in combat, one for exploration and one for the social pillar of the game, then really there isn't much choice. Wherever you are there is not really much of a decision to be made. Even if you focus in, it remains - in combat you migh face a horde of enemies or a single uge monster, or a spellcaster. There is probably a clearly best ablity for each of these in any system with few options. You want to hit the sweet spot for the right amount of choice.

Above is circumstances where there is no real choice at all. It is choice, I guess, but not meaningful choice. Then there is the flip side where choices are too similar - do I cast fireball or acidball when they will hit the same enemies and do the same amount of damage and there is barely any difference between them? Again, there is choice but not meaningful choice. A rich set of options straddles this - you have things that will lead to different effects and different outcomes, whilst at the same time it is not always clear which is better. Personally, I think about three real and genuine choices for most circumstances is about rich enough.

Resource managmeent is a very good way of dealing with this. It makes some of these more meaningful as it isn't a case of do X or do Y, but rather a choice between do X now and only be able to do Y later. The question around whether its worth using a resource now can turn a number of no-brainer choices into more meaningful decisions that actually give players agency and have a meaningful effect on the way the game develops.

I would also say it is a question around when decisioons are made. To use D&D as an example, you can make decisons turn by turn in combat, you can make decisions at the start of the day around which spels to prepare, you can make decisions between sessions around which feats you wish your charater to take. Decisions made at different times will slow the game down to different degrees. Pushing more decisions to the times when players can make them without slowing down things for others is probably good design.


A similar principle probably follows for enemy design as well. You want players to be able to make informed decisions every round. If an enemy is too simple, too predictable, then players can formulate a strategy on round 1 and algorithmically follow through on the folowing turns executing it. It might work or not, but there is no need to adapt. On the other end of the scale, if you have an enemy boss that can do pretty much anything then there is no scope to make informed decisions. "it was immune to cold damage last turn, but it might not be this turn..." or "well it might do damage to everyone stood next to it, or possibly it can stun people in a ring between 10 and 20 ft away" are the kind of things that demonstrate people cannot make informed choices - they might as well roll a die to determine what their PC does as planing is a waste.

You want the sweet spot where there is some predicability and some surprise - that every turn in combat is fun as people readjust and change tactics but planning remains a fulfilling activity. Some of this is as much about telegraphing abilities or about puting strong themes in, but it does also overlap with the sheer number of functionally different things adversaries can do.

A system itself can manage some of these - if you have an enemy casting a lot of cleric spells, it shouldn't really come as a surprise to the players if tha character is also able to heal.