Hello Everyone,

It’s been a long haul, but the time of the feats is upon us! There is a lot to cover here with the feats overhaul, but I want to put the disclaimer that I will not be listing all new feats or changes to current feats in this as it would just be too many here in this report. I will however highlight a few specific changes, as well as a list of feats completely removed from usage. I urge y’all to go play with the CS Sandbox and your personal CSes to see what is now available to use. A public GoogleSheet can be found here that includes all feats in our system as of this report.

Feats Overview

The Big Picture

For this very lengthy project, there were several goals I went into it hoping to accomplish.

1. Coverage of Skills and Powers

The number one thing I wanted to accomplish was ensuring there were more feats in the system. Many skills, such as Might or Astrogation, had no feats associated with them, or just one or two available. Several of those that did have one or two were “Skill Swaps” which really only meant a different skill was being used in place of it. Our skills and force powers are in the system for a reason, and so I wanted to make sure all of them had at least a little love and attention from the feats system.

2. Clarification and Standardization

It is a pretty common occurrence for people to question if a feat is required to do something, or if it was covered by a higher skill level. Other feats had unclear usage or terminology. The feats system had gone through multiple updates since it was initially added. These additions had involved the work of a lot of different people, with different manners of writing. To help bring all feats, new and old into line as much as possible, this meant identifying what the core types of feats are, and reviewing all of them to try to keep them in a consistent style as all others for those types.

The New Breakdown

At the top level of feats, there are two categories they fall under. They are either Granted automatically by the system, or they are purposely selected by the member to fill their available feat slots.

Granted Feats are categorized into four types. All sheets get two Species Feats, two Discipline Feats, and an Order Feat. Additionally, it is possible to get a granted feat of Steel Curtain for reaching the top level of the INQ Society. All of these categories were reviewed and standardized as much as possible for what they were doing.

Selected Feats is where the bulk of this project took place. After reviewing all of the feats in the system, it turns out that these feats fall into three distinct categories.

Skill Boost Feats are situationally based uses of skills and powers that can get a bonus to the level you have listed on your sheet. By and large, these are all single skill point gains and have had that language standardized to ‘+1 Skill Point bonus to Skill/Power’ along with a ‘(to a maximum of +5)’ at the end. There should no longer be any doubt if a feat is just making you temporarily better at something, and it should be clear that any modifying skills/powers you have at +5 already are functionally useless to you.

Skill Swap Feats are situationally based uses where you can substitute one skill with another skill. These feats have been standardized to link to the skill that you are swapping in, along with clearer language that dictates what skills are being switched. They all are in the ‘Skill Name Skill’ format.

New Abilities any feat that doesn’t explicitly mention swapping two skills or getting a +1 Skill Point bonus is categorized as providing a new/unique functionality to whatever skill it is attached to. This means the difference between a +1 and +5 in a skill doesn’t matter, the feat is what lets you do that thing.

New Abilities feats are further expanded by the addition of Tiered Feats. These are much like the different tiers/levels of the feats that Disciplines award. Any feat that has additional levels is noted with a roman numeral at the end. Some feats only have two levels, others might have four. These are locked to only appear in at the ranks they are allowed at. If you get a promotion and it passes the threshold to go from an I to a II, the I level will disappear as an option, and you will be allowed to select the II option.

Unlike the Discipline feats, however, these will not automatically update on your CS. You will still need to go select the higher level as you update your sheet post rank elevation, but you will not need to worry about accidentally selecting the lower level one.

That said, despite having gone over and reviewing all of the feats, there is still a solid chance I missed correcting/standardizing some so if you find any that seems not in line just poke me.

Feats by the Numbers

Granted Updates

The easy numbers to go over fall under the Granted Umbrella of Feats. At present we have 136 Species Feats, 5 Order Specific Feats, and 96 Discipline Feats. Most of the changes here were superficial clean-up of spell checks and standardization stuff. The biggest point of note in changes here is to the Sorcerer DIscipline. For a long period of time, the unique feat of Lancing has been an awkward one. Distance is a loose term in our system.

After some workshopping this is now changed to the Priming feat:

Priming I - Sorcerers channel the energy of combat. Fueled by surge of Force energy, {{member}} is capable of chaining together two offensive force abilities in rapid succession, at the personal energy cost of using one. When the battle pauses or comes to an end {{gender:he,she,it,they}} experience a temporary fatigue {{gender:he,she,it,they}} {{gender:comes,comes,comes,come}} down from a battle-high. Applies to: Force Lightning, Telekinesis, Slow, Blinding, and Blackness.

Priming II - With further training, {{member}} has learned to be more effective in their Force usage. In the frenzy of battle {{member}} can now channel three offensive Force powers together in rapid succession at the personal energy cost of using one. When there is a pause or end to the combat, {{member}} still experiences temporary fatigue. Applies to: Force Lightning, Telekinesis, Slow, Blinding, and Blackness.

Priming III - An Elder Sorcerer on the battlefield is a master of harnessing the available Force energy around them. {{member}} can rapidly chain together three Force power attacks for the personal energy cost of one, but no longer suffers any post-combat fatigue for using this ability. Applies to: Force Lightning, Telekinesis, Slow, Blinding, and Blackness.

Selectable Updates

This is a breakdown of types and distributions. As you can see there are a total of 126 Feats that grant new abilities to skills and powers, 35 that give situational skill boosts, and 49 that function as a skill swap.

In total for “selectable” feats you are looking at 172 “unique** selectable feats. The actual total is 210, but that is only when including each level of a tiered feat in the count.

While counting all the feats, it has a distribution of 118 for ones targeting Skills and 92 that target Force Powers. The reason that there are 96 locked to force uses, is because several feats target specifically the Primary/Secondary Lightsaber Form Skills, which are Force user locked.

Rank wise you will see the majority of feats come within the Journeyman/Equite levels. Given the distribution of active members tends to fall in that range, we wanted to make sure the majority of “new” stuff to pick is unlocked there while keeping some good options open for lower-ranked members, and neat powerful stuff that can be earned in the late game.

Here is the breakdown for each Skill and Force Power as well as what it was previously.

Some important notes here, this list again ignores the tiered levels and counts each set as a single feat (This is why Telekinesis looks like it lost more than it did). But also, with all “skill swap” feats, this is now only counting based on what feat is being used, and not what it is replacing. The previous count from what was in the system before this update counted both.

Additional notes. Dual Wielding looks like it lost 1, but really it's because it was counting Familiar Steel and Two Hands as part of it previously, this is because Dual Wielding is the skill being replaced.

Force Lightning had several of its feats bundled into the tier system but retains the same functionality gain it had previously. Telekinesis did the same but also did lose the Double Fisting and Saber Throw feats, as these are just a given within the power itself.

Removed Feats

While some feats got renamed/reworked to function as part of this update, there were a handful of feats in our system that we are fully removing from use. Most of these are either redundant to the skill/power themselves or have no real useful functionality in our system.

1. Active Reload - While blasters/slugthrowers/ships whatever do have ammo that can be reloaded fictionally, they aren’t things we track. If you feel you do need a reload moment in a fictional setting, just do it. You don’t need to waste a feat to dictate how fast or slow you are for it.
2. You've Got The Touch! - This feat boosted “point-blank range” usage of force powers, which really isn’t something we care about in our system. Use your powers based on your skill level and as you feel appropriate in the fiction.
3. Saber Throw - This is a TK thing, and you don’t need a special feat to do it with TK. How well you control it is just up to your TK skill.
   
4. Double Fisting - Horrible name aside, multiple targets with TK is part of the TK power, and you don’t need a special feat to force choke multiple people, it just depends on your skill level.
5. The Hand Is Quicker - This feat was for quickly disarming an opponent, which was primarily covered by the Sleeping Rancor feat for PMA. We felt it worked better located there, so we are removing the redundancy of it.
6. Obfuscation and Alter Image - Both of these feats are duplicating the functionality of the Shadow Discipline’s Ghosting and Faceless feats. These are unique in they were the only two selectable feats that were duplicates of Discipline feats. There was a bit of discussion of either enforcing them as Elder-locked feats with all of the other discipline feats getting a similar treatment, or just not allowing it. In the end, it was the strong opinion of myself, others on the Voice Staff, and on the DC, that Disciplines are supposed to be about the unique powers that you gain by selecting that particular discipline, so these are being removed.

Forth Coming

Obviously, this update has made the related feats and such on the skills/powers wiki page. This will be chipped away at but was a much lower priority compared to getting the update out. Hence why I am including the above read-only GoogleSheet.

As this feat update breaks pretty much every sheet, we are now also beginning to work on the faction refresh, with updated rosters and sheets across the board. And as for our mysterious new enemy, expect more nuggets of information to be dropped, and opportunities to learn more are rise.

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