Athlete: One Giant Leap for Mankind

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

The olympian athlete competing in the games of ancient Greece, figures of intense physique challenging the limits of their ancestors and pushing their bodies to the absolute limit: that is what I envision a feat granting you the title of Athlete should be. I want to hurl a discus across a field with pinpoint accuracy and devastating force, sprint fast enough to keep pace with the fiercest beasts around. That’s what I WANT Athlete to do. What it does instead is give you a climb speed and make your jump mechanics marginally better. OOF.

Athlete’s saving grace to me is its ability score improvement; if you have an odd number Strength or Dexterity, or maybe just really need to take that 12 to a 13 to open up a multi-class build, Athlete can feel “free”. Most of the remaining power here is tied to the climb speed, which is middlingly useful.

Not needing to spend extra movement to climb is functionally a climb speed, and notably doesn’t allow you to climb sheer surfaces or perform other extraordinary acts any easier. You’re still going to be climbing regularly, just faster. Out of initiative, this difference is basically meaningless outside of climbing extremely large objects, and even then the rest of the party’s speed is likely going to still be slow making the upside feel pointless. In initiative, encounters don’t tend to that vertical, and thus climbing something quickly isn’t always going to be helpful. It can be decent in wooded environments where you’re looking to catch something scampering up a tree or along rocky cliffs fleeing a pursuing monster, but it's not something you’ll ever be that impressed with.

Getting up from prone for 5 feet instead of half your movement speed is barely an upgrade. If you’re prone, strategically whatever enemy you’re against wants to be within 5 feet of you. This doesn’t help you disengage or retreat any easier, nor does it make being prone less dangerous. Saving ten feet of movement when you’re probably staying put anywhere seems quite bad, especially considering the difference between 15 and 25 feet of movement is still within one movement of the majority of creatures in this game.

Running long and high jumps with a shorter range falls in the exact same bucket; the difference in movement doesn’t matter here. When there are large gaps to cross, jumping them is rarely the best solution the party will have, and when it is how you want to approach it, getting a benefit in a tighter space will almost never come up. This is the kind of text that technically makes something easier, but functionally doesn’t change how anyone is playing. It doesn’t improve your jump distance, it doesn’t make jumping better for you; you just can do it in tighter spaces. Uck.

Athlete deserves to be better. Where it is now, if the climb feature doesn’t interest you, you probably are better off with just an ability score increase or some other feat. Athlete is one of the most underwhelming feats in the game. You will struggle to make these benefits matter.

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