| Anaraxes |
Where, exactly, do the PF2 rules say that you can only take a feat once?
Here, just I'm looking for a specific book, presumably the CRB, and page number, not a general philosophical persuasive strategy or design theory.
You could certainly make an argument that the existence of the "Special" sections imply that in general you can't take feats more than once. But that's an assumption based on an implication, not a rule. Starfinder has text that explicitly says not. PF 1e used to work that way -- sort of. 1e CRB p113 says "If a character has the same feat more than once, its benefits do not stack unless indicated otherwise in the description" -- which isn't the same thing as "can't take more than once", as opposed to "it would be pointless and thus silly to take the same feat more than once".
However, that phrase doesn't occur in the 2e CRB, as far as I've been able to tell. "feat more than once" only shows up in the Special sections, which can be read as telling you what does happen when you take them more than once. My searches for similar phrases have come up empty.
If it matters exactly why I'm interested, there are some feats that seem like they're intended to be taken more than once (e.g., Canny Acumen, boosting one of Fort, Reflex, Will, or Per; or Ancestral Paragon, adding back all the little racial features that used to come bundled with the ancestry. These feats require "specialization" in that they have sub-choices. These do not have "Special" paragraphs. Even if there were a rule against taking the same feat more than once, it's not obvious that Canny Acumen (Fort) is meant to be the "same feat" as Canny Acumen (Will), as opposed to a way to save word count by repeating "the same" feat for every trait. And there's a certain famous automated tool that takes the strict view...
So, it'd be nice to have a clear statement for the general, baseline case (You can; you can't; "same" means fully specialized with all the choices, or "same" means the top-level overall feat name, even for the ones with sub-categories) And assuming it needs and gets an errata, it probably wouldn't be bad to bring back the loophole plug of "if you do somehow get the same feat more than once, the benefits don't stack". (The word "stack" appears twice in the CRB, once for bonus types, once in a sidebar mentioned a "stack of dice or tokens".)
But before I suggest an errata, I want to be clear on exactly what the rules do currently say. And so far, I haven't found a prohibition against taking a feat more than once. And that failure is bugging me -- hence my plea for your Aid.