|
In Way of the Wicked book 5 on page 84 is the Path of the Vampire. A feat progression to become a vampire instead of the template - in other words, slowly becoming a vampire.
Has anyone used this? What do you think? If I have PCs bitten by a vampire, and provide the Bitten feat free is this fair to PCs? If they want to get to the full template, the fastest they could do it is level 12. By doing this they would be using every optional feat slot until after that point. Is this railroading the players to much?
Did it for NPCs - for PCs I'd NEVER have a feat for free. It#s a nice system to easily build cultists, but imho not that great. (Neither are the lich-rules, imho!)
Depending on the feat, I do offer them for "purchase" in my campaign - If you e.g. find a tome containing non-lethal techniques, study it for some weeks and pay a set amount XP (Usually between 500 and 3500), you get a feat that gets rid of the nonlethal penalty. You might handle being bitten in a similar way.
So yeah - that's imho a fair way to balance feats as rewards - they remain firmly in the control of the DM and you may restrict/limit feat access and explain why not more people take powerful feat xyz.
If you don't know it - Necromancers of the Northwest's free Liber Vampyr has a neat PrC that imho handles the transformation into vampirism in a much more satisfying way, including one task per level. (You might ignore these, but personally, I love them...) And I actually had one PC go all the way via the PrC - it worked well...at least for the PC...
I would NEVER force a player down this path, though - it's their character. So if you think about inflicting mandatory feats, I'd advise against it - players tend to be upset about this kind of thing.
Hope that helps!