Proposed house-rule for Feats in Road to Legend:

At the start of each dungeon, heroes draw their starting feats as listed on their hero card. They do not receive any additional feats while in the dungeon, except for Arvel who receives one additional feat per glyph.

At the start of an encounter, the heroes draw their starting feats as per a dungeon, but then discard down to one feat each (or two for Arvel).

At the end of each dungeon/encounter, all unused feats are discarded.

Reasoning:

I really like the look of feats and think they work very well in standard Descent, but they don't feel right as part of the "metagame" of RtL with feats carrying over between dungeons. I feel that three feats per dungeon is about the number of glyphs which will be activated in a normal dungeon and the occasional extra glyph gets represented by the extra ones for encounters. Heroes who are demoralised after being completely plastered in one dungeon won't then have to start the next dungeon with no feats, and those who stormed through won't get the bonus of having 5 feats saved up for the next one.

I dislike the importance that 'Prevent Evil' and 'Foil Plans' have in Lieutenant encounters and really dislike the way that right-thinking heroes can, maybe even have to, save their feats from a dungeon to use in relieving a siege three weeks later. However, I do like the fact that they do create a way for heroes to thwart the likes of Merrik with Danger and a Dance of the Monkey God/Animate Weapons besides getting Wind pact. Not only is there a reasonable, but far from certain chance that the heroes would draw one of these as their Encounter Feat, the fact that there is a reasonable chance that they might, should encourage an overlord to choose more, varied, treachery cards than risking the single, devastating ones.

I also am quite disappointed by how a hero's starting skills listed on their cards get missed in RtL. I like the fact that Nanok and Landrec would have a subterfuge skill, giving way to all out fighters like Steelhorns. Under current rules, Nanok will always pick Fighting feats and Landrec will always pick Wizardry. I like getting the heroes back to their roots, as it were.

Finally, I hope this rule will affect the balance between the campaign levels slightly. At copper, when heroes are more likely to be dipping into only the first level of a dungeon for the treasure, the feats will help them deal with early Overlord dominance. At gold when heroes are more likely to be working all the way through to the end of dungeons and rumours, they will have marginally fewer feats than they would otherwise, and some of which are for secondary traits in which they aren't rolling 10 surges.

You may now disagree with everything I've just said at your leisure.

This is all quite reasonable, and I think you've explained yourself pretty well. I agree with the basic premise that Road to Legend is different enough from the base game that new components cannot necessarily be brought over as-is, so I like the reasoning behing the feat limits and feat setup in general.

On the other hand, I'm not sure the feat draws should be as limited as you've made them. The draw limits don't really account for two scenarios: 1, it's much harder to reach the third floor of a dungeon at copper level than at any other level, and 2, the Avatar fight. I would propose two modifications here:

- At copper level, all heroes draw 1 feat card (Arvel, 2) as normal when a glyph is activated. Silver and Gold level glyphs grant 0 feat cards (1 for Arvel) as described above. This may require playtesting: if this makes copper heroes far too powerful (as in the OL has no chance to build the all-important early CT lead), then disregard this modification.

- All Feat cards are discarded and set aside during the Avatar fight, just as the OL deck is discarded and set aside. Otherwise, Arvel would be a top choice as a hero, since she could easily rack up 6 feat cards before the final fight due to the 5 straight dungeon floors, and certain avatars would be vulnerable to Arvel running in and using a pile of feats on them, followed by another hero activating a glyph to restock feats.