In my home system, magic items are typically found at random, whereas feats are acquired through leveling up. Standard stuff.
As I dream up cool abilities that might excite players, I’m sometimes torn on where to place them. As a magic item, or a feat. One might say that feats are just player facing magic items.
For the most part, my game follows the inventory-as-class model. So, obviously, make them all items! But, I do like seeing my players get excited at the options available in the feats, which in turn makes leveling up exciting…
So, any thoughts on finding the right balance? A guiding design principle that could help me sort the abilities into two piles?
For example, think of your standard “reckless attack” ability. Gain advantage on an attack, but give your opponents advantage to attack you. A learnable feat? Or the axe of some barbarian king?
I am a big fan of diegetic feats. I wouldn’t put them in the inventory slot, that might make a bit of game sense, but in-world? you learn from the axe king, then suddenly your armor is too heavy?
I would just stick them in a section for scars/injuries/feats. just a blank box. its the box where the story of the character is told.
I would say IN GENERAL. I consider traditional leveling good because it assures players a sort of minimum quality enjoyment of the game. they have something to look forward to. when you go full diegetic, sometimes its hard to get buy in. I think the best way to deal with that is to hit them with it EARLY. like first adventure. and also, if need be, talk to them and ask them if they have any ideas… like if someone got INTO IT, I would let them write out a few leveling features, and I would stick them in the game.
Presumably there are more options for abilities than one character will be able to get? In which case, I would do both! But make the magic item version weirder and more powerful.
That way even if the party misses that item (or takes a long time to find it) they can still access a version of that ability if they really want to spend a level-up on it. And, conversely, if they don’t choose that feat they may still find something similar eventually.
And you can also use the discussion/excitement around feat options they are dreaming about to guide treasure placement / new magic item ideas.
In the old-school game I’m running, my general rule is DM’s idea = magic item, player’s idea = “feat” (called something else, but essentially a feat). The magic items rarely have an narrow, direct, class-complementing power to them; more immovable rod-type stuff, this thing is weird, can you figure out how to exploit it? They say something about the world, not about the PCs. I usually have no idea what the players will do with them until they find them.
The player “feats” can be much more direct in how they aid the character’s core thing, but how exactly that works is a negotiation between DM and player.
(also agree with Eeldip, the worst kinds of feats are the plainly non-diegetic ones that are just different ways of making numbers go up)