We started to try the “Weapon Feats” from Dark Dungeons (don’t let the word “feat” throw you, they are similar to the “Weapon Mastery” rules from The Rules Cycopledia and have little in common with the “feats” of 3.x or 4e) in my Microlite74 Extended based Wilderlands campaign last Sunday. These rules can be dropped into M74 easily and serve to make weapon choice somewhat more important and bumping up the abilities of fighting classes at bit. Well, it seems to just be “a bit” at lower levels. I’m not sure how it would do at high levels. Even at high levels, fighting classes are generally able to old their own with spell-casting classes in Microlite74, just as they can in most older versions of D&D.

Player opinion of adding Dark Dungeons-style “Weapon Feats” to the game was mixed. Of course, after only one session with the rules, this is to be expected. It will take a few more before there is a real consensus on whether they add enough to the game to be worth the added complexity. To be honest, they aren’t as much “complex” as they are “space-consuming.” The initial draft of the M74 Weapon Feat rules is long enough to be a full Companion volume.

If published for Microlite74, “weapon feats” would be completely optional. My question is not so much if they will work, but whether there is any real interest in something like this among M74 fans. Many players today seem to see fighting classes in general (and the fighter in particular) as “second class citizens” with less “good things” than spell-casting classes. The weapon feat/mastery rules give fighting classes a something that allows them to do more damage and even, depending on the weapon, do special things that most others cannot, but I’m not sure they aren’t a solution in search of a problem given that fighters aren’t pansies in 0e or M74 without them.