Feats of Agility

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107353[1]By Thilo Graf

All right, you know the drill by now, from Abandoned Arts – 3 ages, 1 page front cover, 1 page SRD, 1 page content, so let’s check out these feats!

  • Acrobatic Dodge: When fighting defensively, use your acrobatics skill-check as substitute AC/touch AC. Not even an action while in total defence. Interesting feat and per se a good idea – were it not for the insane amount of ways with which you can magically boost said skill-check. Without them, the feat would be strong, but not that powerful. With them, I consider it broken as all hell, as it essentially allows you to ignore flat out one attack per round. Needs a revision.
  • Defensive Mobility: Gain the mobility-AC-bonus to acrobatics-checks to move through threatened squares and your dodge bonus against AoOs incurred by moving through threatened squares. Nice feat that makes both mobility and dodge suck less.
  • Dodging Dash: Double any dodge-bonuses when using the withdraw action. Nice!
  • Duck and Cover; When making a ref-saves, you can opt to fall prone and roll twice, taking the better result. You must announce the use of the feat beforehand. Cool idea, per se cool execution…BUT. There are ways to negate the prone condition rather easily, making this feat a no-brainer. It needs a caveat like: “Remain prone and incur a -4 penalty on ref-saves in the following round”.
  • Evade Harm: 1/day, you can make a ref-save vs. damage dealt to you by an attack. On a successful save, you receive only half damage. If you have improved evasion, it works with the feat. Extremely cool great and thanks to the 1/day restriction a balanced and neat choice.
  • Graceful Fall: Use acrobatics to negate up to your slow fall distance in damage when falling.
  • Live to Fight Another Day: When an opponent attacks you with a melee or natural attack and misses, you gain +10 ft. movement for one round. Per se a nice idea, but it needs a cap – 3 kobolds miss the heavily armoured lvl 17 fighter and he gets +30 ft. movement? The lack of restrictions make this feat wide open to AoO/reach weapon/etc.-abuse. Another feat that needs a reworking.
  • Mobile Assault: Add your mobility and dodge-bonuses to AC to damage after using acrobatics to move through a threatened square. Cool feat, nice execution, nothing to complain!
  • Opportune Grappler: When grappling someone and dealing unarmed/light weapon damage, you may delay said attack to automatically get an AoO when the victim tries to attack, cast a spell etc. Now here’s the trick: The attack automatically threatens a critical hit (though to special crit-only abilities). Very cool knife-to-the-throat-imagery and one of the better ways to execute the move I’ve seen.
  • Quick Leap: When moving at least 10 ft. to perform a running jump, the first 10 ft. of the jump do not count for your movement. Nice!

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are very good, I didn’t notice any significant glitches. Layout adheres to Abandoned Arts’ 2-column no-frills standard and the pdf has no bookmarks, but needs none at this length. Oh boy. On the one hand, some of the feats herein are vey useful and finally make dodge and mobility suck less and in fact offer some neat options to use them. On the other hand, some of the feats in here are flat-out broken and need a serious revision. I can’t recall a product by Abandoned Arts where the gulf between stellar and bad feats was as evident as herein. Usually, I’d smack this pdf down to 2 or 1 stars for the broken feats, but those that do work, work exceedingly nice. Even with the low price, though, you should be aware of the problems I mentioned. If you don’t mind, this pdf might be a 3-star file. If you do, however, this is not for you and probably 1 star… In the end, I’ll settle for a final verdict of 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 due to the low price and the fact that some feats are indeed vey nice.

Endzeitgeist out.

 

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