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Thanks for the links BK. I noticed the magic favoring myself, and my campaign setting was originally going to be a low-magic setting, but I figured that would be un-fun to play, so I cut that idea. Subsequently, it allowed me to have a less "plausable" time line explainable by magic. They even had flight at one point, though the one place who had complete control on that blew up. I'm kind of writing wizards out of my setting, however, so maybe the magic would be less of a problem for my fighters. There are few magic-using enemies, normally just other wizards or sorcs at best, and I think the most "supernatural" enemy in terms of abilities is the imp. (Every creature origne in my campaign is explained, and it's hard to explain random wtfpwn critters)

Anti, I agree that feats are narrow, but they're sort of supposed to be, aren't they? Some are VERY specific though, increasing one or two skills by a few points, while others are more useful. I think the main issue is that we only get ONE every x levels, but I think this is because there simply were not many feats to begin with. I might just get myself a list of all the feats in various books and print them (a mate of mine gave me a bunch of PDF files for 3.0 and some 3.5 books a while back, which ToB is not amongst), and compile them into the ones I want and ones I don't want, and increase the frequency of feat gain. I've been wanting to do feat gain by training over leveling but that's been difficult to do.

M.

Well, you could give fighters an initiator level, have the fighter choose all of his own skills (a total of 8 skills, maybe), grant 4+Int skill points, the ability to choose 1 good save, and give a feat every level (which can be any he qualifies for). He can also have the option of trading out heavy and medium armor proficiencies and tower shield proficiency with Weapon Finesse and an additional good save(?).

Voila. It's still a fighter, but has a lot more options (both in and out of battle, depending on what the player wants to pick).

Feats should be nice things that just augment your abilities. Nothing more, nothing less. This is why things like Weapon Finesse are so bad. Narrow? Broad? Maybe, maybe not. Doesn't matter. What matters is that they are useful, but not required, much like items should be. What a good feat does: augments a playstyle without making the play style possible (i.e. it should be possible without the feat, just probably not a good idea), and continues to benefit you throughout your career. Now, there are exceptions as with any rule, but that's a good general guideline. There might be some feats that ddefinitely give you something that you literally could not do before hand, but these things they allow you to do should NOT compose your playstyle.

It's assumed you've been practicing in your spare time. Granted, this doesn't always work (such as when you pick up Exotic Weapon Proficiency in the middle of nowhere, then pick up a bastard sword when you reach the next town). Cest la vie.