Feats - Arcanorum/rogueworld GitHub Wiki
Purpose
To further the goal of getting players to communicate and assign roles to specialise in, each player should regularly be presented with the option of picking something that mostly benefits themself, or mostly benefits the team, so they are constantly presented with opportunities for how to progress their character, and to test their ability to work with other players to make the team as a whole become greater than the sum of its parts. (Specialisation)
Similar to various unlockables like skills/abilities/technologies etc. in other games, a player can't do everything at first. They can do various basic things, but additional options need to be unlocked gradually. To do this, a player can unlock additional features, or "feats", for their character, which come in the form of being able to gather a new resource type, craft a new item type, cast a new spell, or various passive benefits such as being able to perform a specific action faster. The player is not made to pick pick a bunch feat options all at once during character creation, but instead feats become available as they play and have chance to actually learn what each feat does one by one over time. (Pick up and play)
Players should need to work together and ask around for which would be the best feat of a selection to choose from for the team as a whole, and which feat lines to pursue as far as they can to unlock the highest tiers of certain types of items and spells, thereby making them available to the rest of the team through that player. (Dependency)
Players only choosing what they themselves want may result in many members picking the same feats, when only one player may have needed to pick it to be able to share its benefit with everyone else. For example, multiple players with the Warrior class may pick the Bladesmith feat line to be able to craft their own swords, but collectively all but one of those chosen feats are redundant, as they could instead just decide amongst themselves who should pick the Bladesmith feats and make the swords for the others, thereby freeing up those feat points of the other players to be used on other things. (Purpose)
Feat points
Every time the player levels up, they gain a "feat point" (FP).
Feat points can be spent on available¹ feats to unlock² them through the feats menu at any campfire. Each feat costs 1 feat point to unlock.
When choosing a feat to unlock, the player is presented with a limited³ range of options (3 or 4?) that are randomly picked from the feats that are currently available to them. This set of options is reset every time they unlock a feat.⁴
¹ Available: A feat for which all of the requirements to be able to unlock it have been met, but that has not yet actually been unlocked, so cannot yet be used by that player. The availability of a feat may be determined by a character's attribute points, level, and previously unlocked feats. When checking the level requirements of a feat, it is important to check against the level the character would have been at when they gained that feat point, not their current level, or this may incentivize players to stock up their feat points (or just go AFK and come back when they are a higher level) and only spend them at a higher character level when they know the better feats they want have been made available, to skip earlier (and generally weaker) feat options that have lower level requirements. Also, it is important when checking the AP requirements of a feat to check the against the character's base APs, not their current overall value, as some attributes can be temporarily boosted with "virtual" APs.
² Unlocked: A feat that came up as an available option that the player then chose, and that they can now use. Once a feat is unlocked, it is no longer available and won't come up again in the pool of potential feats to pick from, so can't be picked multiple times.
³ To avoid bombarding the player (especially new ones) with every possible option that is available to their character at that point and expecting them to read through every option to figure out which would be the best one for them. Reduces decision fatigue while still allowing enough autonomy and freedom of customisation. (K.I.S.S.)
₄ With some weighting towards other available feats in the same line to make continuing that line and specialising further a bit easier. Like upgrades in Vampire Survivors. (Specialisation, Replayability)
Feat types
Passive
Feats that provide some constant benefit to the player once they are unlocked are considered "passive", such as the ability to craft a new item, or an increase to their attack rate with a certain weapon type.
Passive feats are generally simple effects that just work in the background for the player and cannot be "activated".
Particularly useful for new players who are still exploring the mechanics and who shouldn't be overwhelmed with too many complex spells.
Giving them a range of passive feats first allows them to pile up a few passive effects that help them over the whole duration of the game, similar to stack stick characters in other games that are easy to be effective with and are generally noob friendly, but have a low skill ceiling.
Spells
Feats that are considered spells must be activated by the player, and usually have a target that they are cast on.
Spells don't provide passive effects after being unlocked like passive feats, though the spell effect itself after being cast may have a passive bonus aspect, such as gaining HP every few seconds while under the effects of an enchantment.
See spells.
Lines
Certain feats require other prerequisite feats to have been unlocked before they are added to the pool of available feat options the next time the character spends a feat point. (Specialisation)
For example, Bladesmith III requires Bladesmith II, which itself requires Bladesmith.
Attribute point requirements
Many feats, especially spells, require the player's character to have at least a certain amount of points in a range of attributes before that feat becomes available.
This is to restrict feats to characters with a certain focus based on their class/race combo, so that not every character can just pick any feat, thus making certain players needed to fill certain roles in a team to get a wider use out of the range of all possible feats. (Specialisation)
Level requirements
Feats may have a character level requirement and/or attribute point requirement(s) (especially for spells) that the player character must satisfy first before that feat becomes available.
Restricting access to certain feats behind a time-gate like this is intended to allow low level characters to be more similar and flexible in their roles in the team early on, as there isn't as much need for role specialisation early on due to most players still being involved in gathering resources, exploring the map, and getting familiar with each other and deciding who should do what.
It also means that early-game feats (like those for gathering & crafting) won't be competing with as many other feats for a chance to appear in the list of options when a player goes to spend their feat points.
It also allows for specific feats to be made available in a steady and controlled rate that doesn't risk bombarding new players with more options than they know what to do with at first, especially for more advanced spells, where the player should be given some time to get familiar with the game first and be presented with options as they are more ready for them. (Pick up and play)