Writing Feats

Feats are the hardest thing to get right in this system, because a Feat is the only place a character's capability is written down. Get the scope wrong and either everything is covered by one Feat or nothing is covered by any of them.

Scope is the whole craft

The Ability field describes a family of actions, not a single move. That family should be wide enough that the Feat comes up in most sessions and narrow enough that it does not swallow its own category.

• Too narrow is something like picking a lock with a bent nail. It comes up twice a campaign and then sits there.
• Too wide is something like good with people. It quietly becomes the entire Social category and every other Social Feat stops mattering.
• About right is something like @Missing file, which covers reading intent, spotting a lie, and knowing when a room is about to turn.

A useful test is whether you can imagine three different scenes this month where the Feat is the deciding factor, and at least one scene where it clearly does not apply.

Naming

Name the ability, not the character and not the flavor. @Missing file reads as a capability someone could take. Something like Mara's Legendary Horsemanship does not, because it is welded to one person and one genre.

The exception is the per character copy. When two characters need the same ability at different tiers, the second file takes the character's name in parentheses, and that suffix is the signal that it is a copy rather than a new idea.

Categories are load bearing

The three category lists on a sheet are filtered, so a Physical Feat can only be linked under Physical. If you find yourself unsure which category something belongs to, it is usually a sign the Ability text is describing two abilities. Split it.

Nothing stops you from having the same idea appear in two categories when the fiction genuinely differs. Reading tracks in the dirt is Physical, knowing which people leave tracks like that is Knowledge, and those are different Feats owned by different characters.

Setting starting tiers

Feats default to Unranked, and that is the right default for anything created during play. As a builder you can set any starting tier, and this is your main lever for making a character feel like what they are.

The shape that reads best is one thing high, two or three in the middle, and everything else absent. A character with five Medium Feats reads as generically competent. A character who is High at one thing and Unranked at the rest reads as a person.

Remember that tier lives on the shared file. If you set @Missing file to High for your protagonist, every character linked to that same file is now High at it. Copy per character before you set tiers, not after.

The upgradeable flag

It is true for every tier below Master and false at Master. There is no other rule and no other use for it. Do not repurpose it as a lock for abilities you do not want growing, because the GM reads it as a statement about being finished.