HELP NEEDED: Feats!

[inuyasha]

What are some good guidelines when designing feats, without being too weak, and without being too strong? Particularly racial feats, I want to design some for a campaign im making, using a 3rd party book for races instead of PhB

[Yora]

The only real guideline is to compare it to other feat and check if it is so much better than others that everyone would take it, or so weak that everyone would rather take something else.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Specifically, look at feats that people actually take, like Power Attack, Knowledge Focus, or Superior Unarmed Strike.

[inuyasha]

ah OK, I thought there were more guidelines somewhere, or possibly a handbook but nvm :)

[Yora]

Not really. That would have been helpful to many of the writers who made the feats that are in the books.

[ngilop]

i have to agree with the general consensus that most feast are not really worth a feat 'slot' i mean really Toughness is suppoed to be just as good, powerful and versatile as Natural Spell? I think not.

I made a huge list of fighter feats and am fact still working on them, i made a few more but i am still looking for the sheet of paper I wrote them down on.

the majority of those feats look a bit like full on class features. and guess what.. they are supposed to as the poor fighter never really got any to begin with LOL.

but you can see i combined feats like dodge and lightning reflexes to make a worthwhile feat.

if i made a feat creation handbook i would say to make fighter/rogue feats a bit more powerful than wizard/cleric feats as those classes alreayd have super powers in the form of spells.

[Amechra]

If you want me to dig out some feats I've done as examples, just say the word.

Keep in mind that they tend to be... odd.

[GunbladeKnight]

The only real guideline I can think of for making a "good" feat is to have it give character options. Why does everyone love Power Attack, Robilar's Gambit, and Metamagic? Because they allow you to do something new.

Why do people hate Weapon Focus, Dodge, Toughness, Lightning Reflexes? They are a one-time boost that lose their effectiveness rather quickly. (People prefer Improved Toughness, but still see that as weak)

Why do people hate Weapon Finesse, Improved TWF, Greater TWF, and possibly even Force of Personality? Because they are essentially taxes for wanting to play a certain archetype. Heck, until they added Perfect TWF, THF ultimately ended up better for full BAB classes (though it still does).

[Deepbluediver]

I don't know alot about differentiating racial feats from any other kind, but I generally judge feats on two main criteria: power and interest.

Essentially, a really good feat is one that has a significant effect on your character both in terms of mechanics and flavor or fluff. A decent feat has one or the other, and a bad feat has neither.

Toughness is en example of a bad feat, IMO. If you used one of the homebrew versions that allowed it to give additional HP per HD, then it gets bumped up half a step because it's still not interesting, but it's mildly useful in some situations.

Here is a link to some homebrewed feat-chains for weapon styles. Most of these are what I would call decent feats, because they have a direct and noticable improvement on the power and/or competency of a character.

Vow of Poverty is an example of a really good feat, IMO, because of what they tried to do with it. The bonuses could be a little more interesting, but the effect of the feat was supposed to have a major change on your character. Not every feat needs to be quite like that, but ideally its the kind of thing you should compare other feats to so you can see how they stack up.