Fiddling With Feats

In today's Legends & Lore column, Mike Mearls discusses how his team has been tinkering with the role of feats in D&D Next. As you know, the new edition is supposed to have a modular rules system, and feats were proving troublesome to design as an optional component of the game. Their current thinking, as Mearls explains, is to give players periodic opportunities to choose either an ability score increase (+2 bonus to one ability or +1 to two different abilities) or a new special ability. You'd expect power gamers like me to always choose the ability score boost, but the two feats provided as examples are robust enough to merit serious consideration; they're far more powerful than feats in previous editions. I look forward to giving the new feats rules a spin in the next playtest packet...whenever that may arrive...