Feat or Class Ability?

[J.Gellert]

I am remaking the classes to make them more customizable, having players pick their own class features from a list. However, I have noticed that some of them (speed increases, skill increases) are very much like feats. The distinction is pretty clear in the game - you choose feats, but you don't choose class features. But if I make these "talents" a choice, suddenly it's more fuzzy. Why would "Sneak attack +1d6" be a talent and not a feat?

I am not sure how the designers looked at something and decided "hey, this will be a cool class ability" when they could have made it a feat instead.

What do you think should differentiate the two?

[Yuki Akuma]

I'd suggest taking a look at D20 Modern - it does exactly what you're suggesting.

[Ashtagon]

The criteria I would use is: Is this an ability that any class should be able to benefit from? If any class should be able to get it, it really should be built as a feat. If it is written specifically for particular classes (bardic music feats and wildshape feats, I'm looking at you), it should be a class feature.

[Yuki Akuma]

Then what about metamagic feats?

[Ashtagon]

Those fall into the murky in-between region which I purposely didn't mention in my previous post

[J.Gellert]

The criteria I would use is: Is this an ability that any class should be able to benefit from? If any class should be able to get it, it really should be built as a feat. If it is written specifically for particular classes (bardic music feats and wildshape feats, I'm looking at you), it should be a class feature.

Simple and clean. I like it. I don't mind things like the metamagic feats (they are already "talents" under what I made, because I have merged most of the caster classes) but ...Wild Shape itself is an option, so it may still be a little fuzzy.

[Person_Man]

I agree with Ashtagon. Feats are things that anyone could conceivably use, Talents/Class abilities should be class specific.

The one exception would be synergy feats (Swift Hunter et al) which obviously need to be feats.

[Kroy]

Take a look at Baron Corm's Build-A-Char! thread. It is pretty much what you want, and quite easy to edit for your particular game.

[J.Gellert]

Build-a-char seems interesting but it's much more than I need. It's almost a whole system from the base... I'd rather not go there.

On the other hand, I took a look at the D20 modern SRD, and it does almost exactly what I am doing. Excellent! If it works there, it'll work for me

[levi]

You might want to check out the Generic Characters alternate rules. They have a handful of class features already statted out as feats.

Balance isn't really supposed to match the normal d20 baseline (check out the Spellcaster spell list), but the feats should probably be pretty useful. The sugestion to check out d20 Modern (or the Modern SRD) is a good one too.

Finally, you might want to look into BESM d20 (or the Anime SRD, html here or pdf there). It's a mostly character point based fusion of BESM and d20. I don't know how useful it'd be directly, but you could probably rework some of the Attributes into feats or talents. (There's lot's of customization options in there.)