Feats and the Tier Ladder
Everything your character can do is a Feat. Each one is its own file, and each one belongs to exactly one of three categories.
- Physical is anything done with the body. Fighting, running, climbing, riding, building, enduring.
- Social is anything done with people. Persuading, leading, lying, performing, reading a room.
- Knowledge is anything done with the mind. Lore, investigation, languages, systems, theory.
A Feat covers a family of actions, not one move. @Missing file is not a single trick, it covers hard travel on whatever your world rides. Its Ability field is the plain description of what the Feat lets you attempt, and that description is what the GM checks against when you try something.
The ladder
Every Feat sits on one of five tiers. The tier answers one question, which is how hard the story can lean on this before it breaks.
| Tier | What it means | How it plays |
|---|---|---|
| Unranked | Untried or untrained | Everyday uses work. Pressure, speed, or someone pushing back brings complications |
| Low | Reliably competent | Ordinary uses land. Hard ones cost something or need help |
| Medium | Professional | Hard things work when the plan is sound. Only the exceptional demands a price |
| High | Exceptional, people seek them out | Almost nothing routine stops them. Only extraordinary trouble carries a real risk |
| Master | Among the best alive | The impossible becomes merely difficult, and failure only happens on legendary ground |
Anyone can try anything
If nothing on your sheet covers what you want to do, you can still do it. You just attempt it Unranked, which means it works fine when the stakes are low and gets interesting when they are not. You are never blocked from trying something. You are only ever told what it is likely to cost you.
Feats are shared files
A Feat is written once and any character can take it by linking it onto their sheet. That keeps the library clean, and it has one consequence worth knowing. The tier lives on the Feat file, so two characters linked to the same Feat share the same tier.
When that is wrong for your table, make a second copy of the Feat with the character's name on it, like Hard Riding (Mara), and set its tier separately. That is the normal fix and it costs nothing.
Where new Feats come from
You do not buy Feats. When your character clearly demonstrates or trains a real new capability on screen, the GM writes it a file, starts it at Unranked, and links it to you. Reaching for something you have never done is how you get better at it, which is the whole growth engine of the game.