I think that Burdens and Boons should be something that strictly enhance roleplaying potential without asking you to trade things like ASI.
Imo, one of the flaws in 5e is the fact that there are some feats like Keen Mind or Linguist which are strictly suboptimal but at the same time they are nice for roleplay reasons, and I don't think is fair or fun to ask a player to choose between being optimal in combat or focus more on developing your character RPG potential.
So my advice is to make Burdens and Boons something separated from feats while at the same time make them almost non-influencial in combat, so that the general power of PCs will stay roughly the same, while giving players some new tools to personalize their characters
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Awesome, thanks for the feedback. Let me run something by you, just to make sure that we're on the same page. There will (likely) be some feats in Ruins of Symbaroum that are strictly mechanical. But for Boons, you'd rather have the equivalent of 'Keen Mind'* by itself, rather than 'Keen Mind' and a +1 to Intelligence? Assuming that it had to fit into the feats subsystem?
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*Of course we can't actually use Keen Mind due to OGL restrictions. And its applicability seems to vary wildly, in one
VERY popular streaming show it has been effectively weaponized ('My character, of course, remembers the exact conversation/the path out of the maze/the precise arrangement of the runestones/the person's appearance well enough to create an illusionary duplicate', etc.)