I like rewarding my players with personalized boons, but homebrewing these takes time and is tricky to balance. At a certain point throwing more gold at players doesn't mean much, and magic items become stupidly strong super fast. These Talents are the perfect solution. They're not as strong as Feats, so they aren't gamebreaking, but they're significant enough to matter. Some Talents are simple buffs, some add a cool new twist onto an existing ability, and some even help beef up classes that can be a little lacking in vanilla D&D. I hand Talents out as rewards instead of the suggested 'on level up' system, and it's a great way to make characters feel a) individualized and b) like their development is being guided by the choices they make in-game. A cleric that uses Bless to aid their companions a lot could, for example, find their godddess reward them by enhancing their Bless. I also really like the Talents that are specific to factions. If you're a member of the Zhentarim, there are Talents specific to you. That really encourages RP and rewards players for engaging with the world. I'm not personally a fan of gating Talents to specific races outside of things like addressing the Drow's sunlight sensitivity or enhancing the Eladrin's Fey Step, and many racial Talents here feel like they could be general Talents. I make most of those racial Talents open to all, but for tables that adhere to pre-Tasha's racial rules, I can see how these racial Talents can add variability to play. All in all, the Talents series is well done. It saves me time brainstorming unique rewards, and my players are happy because their characters are stronger and feel more personal to how they specifically play. I highly recommend this book and all the books in this series.

Love this. A great concept for introducing some inventive mechanics to add a little extra utility, expertise, and features to your player character's repetoires without breaking the game, making them overpowered, or having to rely entirely on level advancement, multiclassing, or character rebuilding to implement and enjoy. Highly recommended.

Honestly I would recommend this to any table, it adds so much for the players, and my players certainly love it. The vast amount of options and low price make it a no brainer.

As with Monster Talents, the Character Talents books are phenomenal products. If you feel that 5e doesn't offer enough player customization, this is an essential way to give your players more options. Just remember that it does scale up their power a bit, so either plan more difficult combat encounters or give your monsters their own Talents to balance it out.

Wonderful series of products! Pick up the Character Options: Talents II and Monster Talents publications as well!

Good value. Great variety. Good support from the author whom updates this product.

I just got back from a 3-year hiatus from D&D and started digging into this. It brought me back to 1993 when I read my first PHB. It's a fresh look at how a player can customize his character to his hearts desire. Totally worth it!!! Can't wait for the next batch.

If you are looking for ways to increase the 'cool' factor of what your player's characters can be, this is your supplement. Consider this a massive library of "minor" feats to supplement the regular feats.

I have only perused this from a high level, and I do believe that there could still be a bit of balancing needed with some of these. For instance, the Dashing Scoundrel talent allows the character to, 3 times per day, add a d12 to five of the most common skill checks. A d12 seems awfully big for this, especially for a mini-feat. But these kinds of considerations are easy to vet in your own game, and don't diminish the massive amount of work that went into the book, and the flavor it presents.

Even though I am afraid that implementing these fully as written could possibly lead to some classes overlapping the specialties of other classes, I love the material. Nicely written and presented.

Having now employed talents in my game for the last 2 and a bit months (First testing them in a special monthlong Halloween campaign and then transferring them retroactively to my main campaign), I have to say that I absolutely adore the concept. Talents are simple, yet effective, and make every character feel just that bit more different to each other.

I think my only problem is that even with as many talents as there are - plus the Feat-augmenting talents in the second book - there's just not enough for me to pick from! XD But don't take that as a serious problem. The ones available give me a more than suitable framework for inventing new Talents, including ones specifically for homebrew classes.

All in all, I strongly recommend this book, its sequel, and the Monstrous book for monster-players. I really look forward to a Talents 4, and hope for more subclass options, more playable race support, and maybe some more obscure ideas, like Fighting Style augmenting talents.

Holy crap what a cool idea to add some new flavor to your game! These talents are nicely balanced and give variety to any character. You can add them on top of standard bonuses or even substitute them for portions of your build.

If you're a DM, this would be the perfect way to surprise your players by allowing them to unlock abilities they had no idea existed!

Both of these products Talens I and II are 100% helpful to any DM that homebrews their campaigns. The variety that these products privide are like a candy to a child for any DM worth their salt.

I enjoy the options in this document. Its going to take some work to adapt and add to my game, but I think it will be worth doing.

Exactly what I was looking for! Gives my players that extra flavor and utility while maintaining game balance. So many cool talents in here, I can't wait for the second book!

Having come from 1e to 5e, I love that Feats and backgrounds exist. But even with that, I'm always looking for ways to make characters more interesting. I saw this posted on r/dnd over on reddit and it's one of my first 'insta purchases'. For $10, I got a ton of 'mini feats' for players to have fun with.

I'm not a rules guru so I can't attest to what may be overpowered. It seems that most are 'mini feats' like the discription of the product states. While some might be OP (again, not a rules guru), if all sides can take advantage of them, the field remains balanced in my mind. And I tend to have a 'rule of cool' at my table. I want my players to be epic. I want them to be larger than life heroes. Adding talents give them another simple mechanic to give a bit more depth to the characters.

I like the "3 points" mechanic that is used for many of the talents (scoundral points, hero points, etc.). Not sure why exactly, I just do.

All in all I really like this idea of lesser powered talents that can provide additional dimension to characters and I'm looking forward the the second one coming out.

I purchased this product because I do love giving my players extra character options and I was considering giving them free feats at level 4 but saw this and figured it might be a good alternative. I personally think that it's solid work, but there's a huge amount of talents that are either underpowered or overpowered with only about 1/4th of the options landing somewhere I would personally say are both balanced and interesting options for characters.

If talents are intended to be "lesser" feats these range from much weaker to much stronger in comparison to a lot of PHB feats and that huge swing in quality between talents is concerning for me. It's expecially concerning when it comes to recommending this product or not. If you have a pretty firm grip on the balance of 5e, particularly with feats and class features, I'd say you'd probably get good use out of this if you take the time to separate out the talents that are too strong or too weak and either change them so their balance is a little more in line with other talents, or just remove them altogether.

I think with a lot more work on the balance of these talents this product would be incredible, until then I'd be wary of implementing this if you're a new DM. However if you do like when your players are really powerful, this is a great product for you (so long as you can point out which ones might be a little too weak to pick up as is).

I'd say it's pretty balanced. improves game play without overpowering characters.

However, I wish it had an interactive table of contents. It's too tedious to flip through the pages just to get to where you want.