Prodigious Performances Provided In Due Course
The approvals process in my 3.x Fantasy campaigns
Back in “Exceeding the Extraordinary: The Meaning Of Feats” (April 2012), I promised that a future article would discuss the approvals process for feats, prestige classes, etc, in my 3.x Fantasy campaigns. It’s been a long time coming, but here at last is that discussion.
Why?
In a perfect world, there would be no need for any sort of approvals process. Any feat or class that a player desired would be open to them, regardless of source.
The balance problem
In the real world, things are not so simple. The same good idea might come to many different producers of game materials, resulting in overlapping stackable bonuses, to the point where a game mechanic breaks. Game “balance” and “fairness” are always tricky and touchy subjects, but they are also very real considerations in most games. Some ideas simply won’t fit the campaign. And opportunists can always try to exploit broken rules and mechanics.
Some form of approvals process is necessary to guard against these problems.
The continuity problem
Furthermore, I’ve long been a proponent of the notion that the rules should evolve to match the campaign (from a common base: the published rules) and that the campaign should not be hamstrung by the limits of what the rules support or permit. That also entails some sort of vetting process, though that affects subjects other than feats for the most part.
But here’s a hypothetical conundrum to contemplate: Postulate a master of his craft, whatever it may be, confronting an enemy, and winning (or losing) after an epic battle. Now imagine one of your players pointing out that if the “master” was all he was cracked up to be, he would have had feat “X” which would have enabled him to do “Y”, defeating the enemy quickly and easily.
This is “easy” to guard against; all the GM has to do is memorize the mechanics of every feat ever published and its impact both in combination with other feats and with every combination of class and prestige class that exists.
Okay, now that most of my readers have had a good belly-laugh, there are only two practical solutions: either Feat X does not exist in the game in its current form (i.e. it needs to be modified so that it no longer provides an unacceptably easy solution to what was supposed to be a dramatic and pivotal moment in the campaign background) or it did not exist at the time.
The evolutionary solution
The latter solution opens up a whole can of worms, because it implies that characters can invent and develop Feats in the same way that they can spells. On the face of it, that’s not a wholly unreasonable proposition, because it provides an avenue for ongoing development within the campaign in terms of tactics, strategy, training, education, etc, etc. Fundamentally, this raises the question of what exactly a feat is, at an in-game level? But there is no mechanism for doing this within the game rules, not even a hint of one. Heck, there isn’t even a common standard to what a feat should or should not comprise, as I pointed out in The Meaning Of Feats.
But, setting that to one side for a moment, postulating that such a mechanism has been devised and incorporated into the house rules, I can’t see any GM blindly accepting every proposed feat submitted by his players. There would still need to be some sort of vetting/approvals process.
The potential abilities solution
The alternative is to assume that Feats represent inherent capabilities that training and experience can manifest as in-game capabilities, benefits, or enhancements, and that as such the feats that are available within the game have always existed as potential abilities, even if they were not accessible in the past. This represents an evolving “state of the art” (neatly solving the hypothetical problem of “X”) while giving the players a known rules foundation to work from, and is the solution that I have always – well, taken for granted until writing this article, to be honest, the alternative simply never having occurred to me!
But here’s the important part: assuring consistency with that state of the art once again demands a vetting/approvals process.
Sauce for the goose
Another of the key assumptions that I have always employed is that the rules are the same for both PCs and NPCs. If something is available for a PC to use, it must also be available to any NPC who has the capacity and would benefit from it – whether that’s access to a feat, a spell, a prestige class, a magic item, or whatever. The one exception that I have usually made to that rule lies in restricting player races to those who can integrate into and participate in society within the game, and excluding those creatures that are deliberately unbalanced in game mechanics terms to ensure that they pose sufficient challenge – so no Demigods, no Gods, no Dragons, no Golems, and no Beholders (amongst others).
The result is a vaguely-defined standard that restricts both sides of the table to something approximating a reasonable game balance. If I want something for an NPC, I have to be willing to have that capability in the hands of a PC. If a player wants something for his PC, I need the capability to give it to my NPCs.
Absolutism vs the soft touch
When it comes to enforcement of restrictions, there are two approaches that can be taken. The first is an absolute No, where something is simply taken off the table, possibly with a review date based on in-game circumstances where the denial is rooted in some in-game development – an approach that I have taken quite a lot with my Shards Of Divinity campaign, where ability in certain skills is capped until in-game “technological” breakthroughs. There is virtually no such thing as planar travel, for example – so there are very limited and vague concepts of the Planes, Planar Knowledge is capped, and various feats and classes that pertain to Planar Travel are simply not available – yet. Likewise, certain creatures are encountered far more infrequently.
The alternative is to permit a modified version of the capability in question, reducing its capabilities (or increasing them in some cases), changing the character levels at which abilities are gained, adding, increasing, subtracting, reducing, or otherwise modifying requirements, and so on. Rather than an absolute no, this is a qualified and restricted ‘yes’. But it does impose an additional requirement: before any such changes can be made, the class, feat, or whatever, has to be in an editable format.
Practicality means that I could not hope to type them all up myself – so the fundamental requirement of my players is that if they want access to something before I am going to get to it, they have to type it up for me.
The Approvals Process
Those are the fundamental considerations that evolved into the approvals process that I employ in my 3.x fantasy campaigns. It doesn’t matter whether I’m talking about D&D 3.0, D&D 3.5, Pathfinder, or any other variant of the d20 rules system (simply because I don’t use the game system for any such campaigns doesn’t mean that I’m going to rule out doing so at some future point in time). Nor would it matter if I were to change to D&DNext – the same process, or an appropriate variation on it, would apply to anything in a non-core game supplement.
The general approvals process is as follows:
- A physical copy of content the must be provided to the referee for conversion to an editable computer-based document. Where this is provided by the loan of the sourcebook to the referee, the “computer version” will be generated by the referee when time permits and this must be done before this step is considered complete. Players wishing to accelerate the process may choose to submit an electronic copy ready to be edited and then copy-and-pasted onto the approved list. PDFs of the source which do not permit copy-and-paste are considered the equivalent of loaning a sourcebook, because the work required is still the same.
- Background Justification: The referee will review the content from a standpoint of campaign background fit, and make any adjustment deemed necessary, or refuse to approve the submission. If the submission is not rejected as unsuited to the background, it then proceeds to step 3.
- Comparative Justification: The referee will then review the content from a standpoint of game balance, and make any adjustment deemed necessary, or refuse to approve the submission. If the submission is not rejected as unsuited, it then proceeds to step 4.
- Rules Justification: The referee will then review the content from a standpoint of uniqueness, logic, and necessity, and make any adjustment deemed necessary, or refuse to approve the submission. If the submission is not rejected, it then proceeds to step 5.
- The referee will then review the requirements to ensure that they reflect the considerations of steps 2-4 above, and make any adjustment deemed necessary, or refuse to approve the submission. If the submission is not rejected, it then proceeds to step 6.
- If approved, the submission will be noted for inclusion on the the official Approved lists.
- When time permits, the referee will act on that note and add the approved version to the official Approved list. If time is short, he may include the submission as an addendum to the official list; this qualifies as approval.
Documentation
The astute reader will have noted mention of an official “approved list”. I use a set of tables in a HTML format (keeping the size of each file down to a practical limit) because that was the fastest and most flexible approach; you could use a table in a word document, or in a star office document, or however you wish.
Feats are organized according to a standard taxonomy, dictating which table they get listed under:
- Personal Development Feats – let you do things others can’t
- Battle Feats
2a: Initiative Feats – add to your initiative
2b: Attack/Weapon Feats – add to your attack total
2c: Defense/Armour/Shield Feats – improve your AC
2d: Tactical Feats – add combat options
2e: Strategic Feats – only work in a group or in the long-term
2f: Ranged Combat Feats – specifically for ranged combat
2g: Other Combat Feats – whatever’s left - Metamagic Feats – enhance or adjust specific spells at the penalty of occupying a different spell slot or vice-versa
- Task-Oriented Feats – bonuses and alterations to skills and skill uses
- Item Construction Feats – construction of arcane and unusual objects
- Other Arcane Feats – enhancements to spellcasting in general, some only available to Wizards and others only to Sorcerers, including Necromantic feats
- Spiritual Feats – for Clerics & Druids
- Unholy Feats – inherently Dark feats used for purposes other than Necromancy
- Miscellaneous Feats – enhancements for everyone else (including monsters)
Feat Types were also expanded with some additional subcategories added:
- General: feats of use by a variety of classes
- General (Evil): feats of a specifically evil nature, of use by a variety of classes
- General (Heritage): feats relating to your ancestry. You can only ever have one heritage feat.
- General (Tactical): feats specially designed for massed troops, usable by any class
- Item Creation: used to create magical or unusual items
- Metamagic: used to alter the power of spells while altering their spell level
- Necromantic: feats relating to death, the dead, and undead
- Necromantic (Evil): feats of a specifically evil nature relating to death, the dead, and undead
- Special: available only to specific classes, races and/or in specific circumstances
- Special (Bardic): available only to Bards and not to Bard variant classes
- Monster: normally available only to monsters and non-humans, often restricted to a specific member of those groups
Feats were arranged alphabetically in the list to make them easy to find. Feat descriptions consisted of five columns, the fourth of which contained multiple sub-items on separate lines within the table cell:
- Name – Some feats get renamed for various reasons, including two different sources using the same name for two different feats. I also tend to rename feats if they are substantially changed. Renamed feats will have the original name in the Source field. Feats that have been renamed because of modifications made will also have an entry under the original name showing (in the summary field) that the feat has been replaced by a modified version named [x].
- Type – from the categories listed above. Different campaigns may have additional types.
- Source – The name of the source and the page it is listed. I use an m-dash to indicate an original feat. If the feat has been modified from the original, this is also noted in brackets.
- Summary – The amount of content varies from a complete description to a brief synopsis listing the essentials.
- Prerequisites – If there aren’t any, I always explicitly state ‘none’.
- Effect/Benefit – Always present, stripped to the essential game mechanics.
- Special conditions/rules – Present only if relevant. I have a tendency to be specific here about what any modifiers deriving from the field will not stack with.
- Normal – again, only present when appropriate.
- Notes – rarely used, and only present when there are some. Because I treat ‘flavor text’ as rules, this sometimes contains specific notes describing the impact of that.
- Approved – A simple Y or N. Entries that have been rejected (or replaced with alternate versions) are in bold and red, and with a slight red tint to the cell color to make sure that this fact is obvious.
I have two illustrations to offer. The first, possible only because I did not use a fixed width table, shows a set of entries (from the Personal Development Feats list) under G, gives some actual examples of entries on the table with the text at a legible size:
The second gives an idea of how the list looks when printed, this excerpt showing the “I” entries from the same table of feats. It isn’t expected to be legible because the horizontal space available here at Campaign Mastery is much less than a printed page width, so I’ve had to compress the image size. As you can see, most feats don’t take up very much room – three lines would be typical, six or seven lines occasional, and more than seven lines unusual. I think the longest entry is about 10 lines in length when printed. “Good Eye” (shown above) is 5 lines long when printed – and that’s counting a full line for “Prerequisites: None”.
Some feat-specific house rules
Within the same document are some house rules and clarifications that relate to the approvals process and its enforcement as it specifically applies to Feats:
- Feats
- Feats which are not included on the official “approved” list generated by the referee are not available until they are approved and so included.
- Past reviews by the referee indicating the acceptability of a given feat are NOT considered Approval of the feat until it is placed on the Approved list, they merely indicate that Approval will probably be forthcoming when the feat is submitted for Approval.
- Any character who has an un-Approved feat listed on their character sheet will lose both the feat and the feat slot it occupies, and the feat in question will be banned from the game from that time forward regardless of whether or not it would have been approved had it been submitted properly. It is therefore in the player’s best interests to submit any desired feats for approval in advance of choosing the feat for their character.
If the offense recurs, harsher penalties may additionally be required. - Any feat which is on the approved list may be taken by any character provided that any background considerations and other requirements are met.
- Feats are not just game mechanics, and the descriptions are not justifications of the game mechanics. e.g. “Thug”: You know how to get the jump on the competition and push other people around. While others debate, you act.” Those can also be described as “Impulsive” and “Aggressive”, and the referee is entitled to misrepresent a situation from time to time to entice the character to enter combat prematurely.
- Most of the problems with feats stem from the failure by players to submit a copy that the GM can retain for use during the game with his NPCs.
There are similar sections for Prestige Classes, Spells, Magic Items, PC Races, New Monsters, and new uses for skills. But they are all variations on a theme.
Not So Draconian
You might get the impression from the above that I take a very hard line on respecting the approvals process, in fact that I am positively draconian in laying down the law and enforcing it. While I want that option up my sleeve for use if necessary (and hence have adopted such a tone in the house rules listed), the reality is that I am a bit of a softy who rarely exercises the prerogative to be really harsh. I’ve been known to permit Feats and classes into the game before they have even finished being written, never mind approved, for example.
At the same time, not knowing what to expect gets under my skin; too much provocation in the form of liberties taken (especially liberties taken without my prior approval) eventually results in an explosion. So, while I recommend that GMs issue similarly hard-line dictums, they should also be fairly relaxed at granting temporary exemptions, especially in the face of untoward circumstances.
In fact, this formal approvals process and the harsh penalties were the result of the last such major explosion, way back in February 2006. Although I’ve vented a couple of times since, that was the last time I was sufficiently angry that I tossed around words like “ultimatum” and “non-negotiable”. I like to think that at least part of the reason for that has been the existence of a clear approvals process. It’s also worth noting that back then, I was able to dedicate three or four days a week to my campaigns, if not more so, aside from the occasional interruption for a stand-alone article Roleplaying Tips. I have much less time available, these days, so some measure of practicality has to be accommodated.
Approval? Respect.
A carefully-crafted approvals process for the inclusion of material from outside sources should be part of every campaign, whether we’re talking Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Space Opera, Pulp, or anything else you can point a d6 at. Implementing such a policy is a matter of mutual respect between players and GM. Not doing so calls for blanket bans on third-party sources, on player input into the game mechanics, and (in fact) on player input & creativity in general. Failure of the players to adhere (as much as possible) to such a policy clearly creates more work for the GM and is disrespectful of his efforts towards the game.
Any RPG is collaboration between players and GM. An approvals process is not about dictating terms, or shouldn’t be; it’s about how best to integrate the elements that the players want to have on the table with the campaign that the GM has and is creating. It can be a bone of contention, or it can be oil upon the waters, defusing the potential for conflict between players and GM.
It can even be argued that such a process is not necessary if sufficient respect exists at the game table, and I would have a hard time disputing it. But in the real world, rules are often necessary, and these are the rules that I have evolved to maintain the integrity of the campaigns that I run – when I need to enforce that integrity.
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