Cinco: Feat Experiment

One common complaint about feats or even class features is that they foreclose particular actions from characters in general by cloistering them within specific character options. For this reason, I tend to like what I currently have going on in my home game CINCO, where a character's equipment in combination with their aspects determines their capabilities, which feels both more flexible and more natural.

But I had a thought: maybe the foreclosure is the point? Sure, it keeps things simple one way to not have character builds, but the trade-off is that all rules apply to everyone all the time. I realized in the shower that I wouldn't necessarily like to have every possible rule in the back of my mind even if I only use a subset of them. It's nice in typical D&D to know that you're a whatever, and to have your special rules in your character sheets where you know what you need to worry about (and you don't need to open the book to find rules that always apply to everyone).

So I WAS going to try something this weekend: for some of the more complex rules, like critical moves for damage types, I separated them from the main text into piecewise feats. I also wrote some additional feats for character origins, as well as special ones which don't have a corresponding general rule but made sense as one that could be unlocked. Players would pick one origin feat plus as many experience feats as they have levels, and in doing so could pick and choose with which rules they wanted to play on an individual basis.

But when I polled the freakiest players, the ones who were the most relatively in-the-know about this TTRPG nonsense: they liked this idea, but they liked even more how we had been playing where I remember and reference rules for them. We had played this whole time in a style which people call black-box, FKR, or HUDless; this was mostly because I didn't want to impose bespoke bullshit on them, but the effect was of a highly fluid play discourse where the players described their characters' actions in natural language and trusted me to make game-sense of those actions. "I don't want to engage my gamer brain at all", one of my friends said. "I have plenty of CRPGs and D&D for that xD"

So... alright! We are going to continue playing that same way. I genuinely feel like feats would be useful to onboard others with different expectations or personalities, so I'm keeping them in my back pocket as an alt play-mode. However, if my friends feel like the way we play now is a mode of authentic creative expression for them, I'm both sincerely honored and I wouldn't want to take that away from them. Just all around interesting!