I started thinking about this after playing PFS where item creation feats are banned. For my home game I thought it might be fun if they were not banned, but rare. This would help me control the scarcity of magic items, for one thing.
From there I thought why not extend it to all feats? This would act as an engine to drive NPC interaction and RP.
Leveling up would be as normal, and give you "feat slots". You would fill the slots by finding someone who knows the feat you want, and getting trained by them. This could provide seeds for all kinds of quests as well.
Would you enjoy this kind of game as a player?
At low levels it is more fun than at higher levels, at some point characters will want to 'surpass the master' so to speak.
It could be fun depending on how colorful the NPCs are.
Could be fun if you are playing a more sand-box type game. Though if you level about every 3 sessions, and if it takes you about a session for all of your PCs to get trained, are you ready to spend 1/3rd of your game time levelling up?
And if you spend less time, is there a point?
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What knight said above echo's a lot of what I feel. The other thing to remember is who this affects more, sure everyone get's feats but characters like cavaliers, certain rogues, and especially fighters get hit harder by this then most meaning that those classes will either be the ones stuck dealing with it more or avoid it all together. In spite of all this though with the right group it can be very fun and rewarding, a good place to look at this kind of mechanic is in the 3.5 dm's guide. I remember reading a section about having to pay to train up skills and feats in there as well as the time it took in game for a character to "train in" his points and feats, I believe it was 1 week per skill point and 2 weeks per feat. Next thing you may want to do after that is say the 2 week rule is assuming they can find a trainer for said feat and after a certain point (say 5th level) they can try to self train by taking double or triple the time depending on the feat.
I have toyed with the idea of needing "training" after you level but came to the conclusion that most of the skills learner are discovered over the course of gaining experience rather than ... now that you have killed 10 monsters I will teach you how to kill them faster
Trading from NPCs can be done but I would bury the trading process in downtime so game play is not wasted on going to class ... Ok what if you fail the final exam?
At low levels it is more fun than at higher levels, at some point characters will want to 'surpass the master' so to speak.
It could be fun depending on how colorful the NPCs are.
Nice point.
But anyone with the feat could teach it to you, including someone lower level, another PC, an outsider, a summons, a guild.. So you could "surpass the master" by learning elsewhere.
Is the premise that nothing new can be created? If that's a fundamental part of a metaphysically damaged universe, it might make sense.
If not, people will ask where the trainers learned their abilities. Since they couldn't have developed the techniques themselves, they must have learned them from someone else.
Nothing new can be known. All knowledge must already exist, somewhere in the world.
Maybe the divine force of creation or creativity has been killed by a dark power and must be revived by the party in order to return progress to the world.
Is the premise that nothing new can be created? If that's a fundamental part of a metaphysically damaged universe, it might make sense.
If not, people will ask where the trainers learned their abilities. Since they couldn't have developed the techniques themselves, they must have learned them from someone else.
Nothing new can be known. All knowledge must already exist, somewhere in the world.
Maybe the divine force of creation or creativity has been killed by a dark power and must be revived by the party in order to return progress to the world.
Umbral, I would use a much simpler rationalization for that. I would say being self taught would not be impossible in the game universe at all, but would be impractical for adventurers.
For the same reason that people in real life learn things by being taught more often then they create sciences or martial arts from scratch. For example, someone invented kung-fu, but more people study it since it is established rather then isolating themselves and developing it over from scratch by watching the behavior of animals and meditating or whatever. Likewise Geometry, engineering, anything else. It's already been done, so most find it more practical to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before.
Creating the techniques behind what we call feats would be an occupation that would completely preclude adventuring and would not make for a very fun game.
I would be opposed to it purely from a logistics point of view. If every feat requires a significant amount of game time to aquire its going to have a really dramatic effect on how fast a campaign progresses. Whole game days could easily be lost to leveling.
Not only that but what if it takes a couple of fighters an hour a piece to RP out their quest to find a particularly rare sensei to teach them something...meanwhile Joe the Rogue doesnt even have a feat at that level, what's he going to do with all that time make sandwiches?
Then there is the possibility of a gap where someone doesnt have the feats they should have for their level because they couldnt track down someone to teach them the one they want..
Its one of those ideas that on the surface seems really neat due to all the realism, but on execution can really drag down a game, because it surfaces all these little unseen issues that can cause people to get bored, upset, or annoyed.
TLDR: its a can of worms.
Could be fun if you are playing a more sand-box type game. Though if you level about every 3 sessions, and if it takes you about a session for all of your PCs to get trained, are you ready to spend 1/3rd of your game time levelling up?
And if you spend less time, is there a point?
Yeah my game is 100% sandbox hexcrawl. I can see why people wouldn't like this in a railroading game or an AP (except maybe Kingmaker where it might solve a lot of the economy and crafting imbalances I have heard about).
That being the case I don't think it would have to change the pace of leveling up in any way.
I did a training type system in regards to feats in a game. However I didn't require it for the feats they earned from class features or levels. I instead gave them the option to train for feats that they wanted and it made sense for, such as a weapon proficiency, alertness, iron will, and such. Basically they would have to find a teacher who had the feat and was willing to impart the knowledge and it would take months to get the feat, but it was more in line with running a kingdom as in X time of each month is allotted to training so it didn't bog things down and gave very interesting and rewarding RP opportunities.
Now obviously this broke the amount of feats characters were expected to have, but my players used this option to acquire flavorful or underused feats.
I have no objection to the need to take time to learn a feat or new ability. As long as the campaign supports taking that time, of course. If I can't take my important feat for 2 levels because we're so busy racing around trying to solve a crisis, and instead I spend those levels with an empty feat slot, I'd be very annoyed.
And as the characters level, it becomes harder and harder to find people who are more awesome than they are. At some point, especially in a setting more like Golarion (or most settings I conceive of), where high-level characters are very rare, you start becoming the sort of people who should be developing their own techniques, not looking for a new, better master. This could just take longer than learning from someone. Maybe it takes a week to learn a technique from a teacher, but two weeks to a month to create it from scratch or reconstruct it without the aid of a teacher.
In general, the PCs are the heroes of the story. They shouldn't be limited to learning from people who are better at the skills the PCs develop. It doesn't mean they shouldn't do it some of the time, but eventually they're hitting that point where they're the masters, and they're developing new techniques that people want to learn from them. But it's a good way for the characters to learn at first. Just that once they become masters, rather than novices, they shouldn't need to rely on finding someone who can teach them.
I like the idea that, in general, it should take some time between adventures to actually benefit from leveling up. But again, only if the pace of adventures makes that possible. In one game I'm playing in, we spent a couple of months of weekly sessions on about 2-3 days of game time, which basically covered the entirety of a single level. In that setup, we would have been, effectively, one level lower for those 2-3 days, because there had been no downtime in which to actually level up.
And in general, this can get very frustrating too. What happens when the fighter wants to learn a particular feat that there's no trainer for? First off, he has to have heard of it (which we'll handwave), and then he has to search out someone who knows that technique, and convince that person to teach it to him. Suddenly, the party is going on a "let one party member finish leveling" quest... and depending how strict you want to get on worldbuilding, they're spending half the game running around the world finding trainers for each party member.
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There was a thread about this on the WoW boards many years ago, it turned into a rather humorous collection of stuff like:
Warrior trainer: "Have you ever thought of running really, really fast at the enemy?" (charge)
Warrior: "Uhhh. Nope. I will try that."
Mage trainer: "I know about 2 hours ago I taught you how to throw a fireball, but have you considered throwing a bigger fireball?"
Mage: Ohhh, great idea!
Perhaps an easier to execute method would be for players to attempt things in combat that reflect their next feat, such as making trip attacks without improved trip, or describing how your barbarian swings as hard as he can before he learns power attack, or fighting defensively to learn combat expertise. Obviously, many feats do not have an untrained counterpart.
As yet another option, your players could announce at the beginning of a level which feat they will choose when leveling up, then spend the level training.
I prefer to allow players to simply choose when the time comes. Not everything in rpgs need be complicated.
What knight said above echo's a lot of what I feel. The other thing to remember is who this affects more, sure everyone get's feats but characters like cavaliers, certain rogues, and especially fighters get hit harder by this then most meaning that those classes will either be the ones stuck dealing with it more or avoid it all together. In spite of all this though with the right group it can be very fun and rewarding, a good place to look at this kind of mechanic is in the 3.5 dm's guide. I remember reading a section about having to pay to train up skills and feats in there as well as the time it took in game for a character to "train in" his points and feats, I believe it was 1 week per skill point and 2 weeks per feat. Next thing you may want to do after that is say the 2 week rule is assuming they can find a trainer for said feat and after a certain point (say 5th level) they can try to self train by taking double or triple the time depending on the feat.
I think the fighter who needs more feats would be ok because he would also be able to get most of them in the same place, maybe a fighters guild or an expert fighter in a frontier town. So he wouldn't be running around like crazy every level looking for someone new to teach him great cleave or whatever.
As for the mechanic in the 3.5 DMV I'll give it another look but I think my house rule would be a bit different. I don't want it to apply to skills for one thing. More importantly, I don't think I would have any downtime mechanic built in. I think I would keep the time investiture buried in the abstraction of downtime while adventuring as well as hands-on experience in the field. Kind of like the way we do it now, except all this experience from leveling would open up feat "slots" and then someone who has the feat shows you how to do it and the effect crystallizes into the new technique or ability you can now actually perform.
In other words, I'm not looking to add a lot of downtime, or turn a game session into a class room. I'm not even trying to add realism or simulationism. What I'm interested in is driving NPC and social interaction, seeding quests, and being able to customize your game in setting specific ways with one big house rule instead of maybe a list of banned feats.
I have toyed with the idea of needing "training" after you level but came to the conclusion that most of the skills learner are discovered over the course of gaining experience rather than ... now that you have killed 10 monsters I will teach you how to kill them faster
Trading from NPCs can be done but I would bury the trading process in downtime so game play is not wasted on going to class ... Ok what if you fail the final exam?
I'm not picturing a training process that wastes game play or even in-game time. I'm thinking you just find someone with the feat, if they agree to teach you, you now have the feat, (as long as you have an available feat slot you haven't filled.).
Sure it isn't realistic or simulationist that someone can teach you something instantly, but the way we do it now isnt either. You kill another goblin, suddenly you know how to fight with a sword in each hand, or fire two arrows at once.
Like you say, the xp you gained adventuring already explains the increase in aptitude. I would just have the instruction from someone who knows the feat be required for all of your experience gained in the field to manifest as a specific new ability or technique as represented by a feat.
I don't have a problem with either way in terms of realism. I'm not looking for an ultra realistic game.
I have other reasons I think this could be fun, and make the world come alive. Maybe it gives a hero a reason to want to save a town for example.
If you're going to require downtime to learn and potentially downtime to search for trainers to teach these feats, then you have to structure your game to allow that.
If your usual pattern is to have a home base and go out on short, largely unrelated adventures with downtime in between, then it could work well. If you're involved in long wilderness journeys or racing to stop the BBEG, then stopping for a few weeks and seeking out trainers becomes more of a problem.
That kind of logistical problem is why my groups dropped training time back in the 1E days.
I'm thinking no down time to learn. Time finding someone to teach you I wouldn't call down-time, I'd call it up time. It wouldn't be a distraction from the game it would just be part of the game.
Home base with short adventures is kind of the way my game would be structured, but they are not necessarily largely unrelated, and downtime in between would still be completely optional.
Thanks for your comments they have been the most helpful so far, I think you have a better idea of what I'm driving at.
You would still be learning all the time, and that would still be reflected in most ofl the usual ways you mentioned (BAB going up, etc.). Having the new feat show up when you found someone to teach you wouldn't seem that much more arbitrary then having it show up when you rest at an inn after killing enough goblins or whatever.
Anyway I'm not going for realism. Like any other decision about a game, my sole consideration is fun.
I think people are associating this idea with apparently similar things that have been tried before in other editions, where the goal was realism, but executed in a way that got overly complicated or interfered with the style of play that was assumed. I'm going for something quite different than that.
I'm wondering if anyone can see how this could be really fun as a house rule attached to a particular campaign setting with the right kind of pace and structure built in. This would include NPC's and factions that would ensure the availability of the feats in ways that would drive a free form kind of open ended plot.
i think someone already mentioned it, but trainging for ability/feat/spell and having it cost time/gp is not a new idea.
it was a variant rule in 3.0 that the dm went with. (maybe 2nd edition too)
my group went this route, and at first i didn't like it because of the down time it would have created in game.
then we noticed the rogue picked up crafting and profession skills, the ranger picked up animal handling for animals/beasts, and so forth.
take note that all of this craft/profession training was in the background, and since this was the realms, you never had a shortage of heroic npcs to teach you a feat or skill. there was no quest to find the feat dodge.
in the end, we had more resources then our gold sink into nothing.
while using this variant rule, another gaming rule bumped into us by accident during the course of this playstyle, aging.
our cleric and wizards were suddenly very happy turning middle age, while our half orc barbarian, not so much.
Yeah I kind of remember training being a requirement even to level up in 2e. Optional maybe? I don't think we ever did it.
Thanks for the Forgotten Realms story. So you ended up liking the training rules, even with downtime required? Maybe I will keep that after all, what was it 2 weeks for a feat? I'm not sure I would bother with skill ranks though.
What do you mean about "more resources then our good sink into nothing". I'm not sure I'm reading that correctly.
Every feat, every level? No. There's no fun in that, imho. It's logistically impossible, anyway.
Levels 1-4: You level more or less "automatically", needing only a place of rest to consider the training you've already gotten. I assume PC's learn from the best of the best, or those with the greatest insight, so their training sticks the first few adventures.
Levels 5+: You level only from "Downtime", which takes place in a town or city where you've established a residence, and have gotten to know some locals. Spend some gp on materials, trainers (money sink!) and equipment, and you're good-to-go. Assume a week to 10 days of downtime for each level until you hit level 15. Downtime should happen about as quickly as any roleplayed scene, with each player describing what they're training-up in. It's that simple.
As for specific feats? Why not give players the opportunity to rp a little advancement? "That feat you want; do you want to make it a quest? I'll make it worth extra XP for you if you can delay having it long enough to achieve the end of this quest...?"
I think there are better things to roleplay then having someone train you. I am okay with you wake up after a night of rest.
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No way, no offense but this sounds exceedingly tedious and unpleasant to me. Like other people have mentioned earlier in the thread its way too much a hassle I think to level up your character, not to mention the tons of endless personal side quests just to find a trainer to have a chance to learning a new feat.
No offense taken, I didn't start a thread just to hear only what I want to hear, I'm curious if people think it sounds fun. Thanks for the reply.
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No offense taken, I didn't start a thread just to hear only what I want to hear, I'm curious if people think it sounds fun. Thanks for the reply.
With the right group and right GM, this could be fun. It's just a style of play. I imagine you'd adjust the campaign around their learning, and adjust according to what they've been able to do. You've hinted as much...which also removes many of the objections above. X)
Doing this would require trust, that's all. So long as there's trust, it can be fun.
Is the premise that nothing new can be created? If that's a fundamental part of a metaphysically damaged universe, it might make sense.
If not, people will ask where the trainers learned their abilities. Since they couldn't have developed the techniques themselves, they must have learned them from someone else.
Nothing new can be known. All knowledge must already exist, somewhere in the world.
Maybe the divine force of creation or creativity has been killed by a dark power and must be revived by the party in order to return progress to the world.
Assuming you're being sarcastic... yes, someone originally invented the wheel. It probably took them 40 years, but they figured it out. The guy they taught it to probably figured it out quite a bit faster though.
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Perhaps an easier to execute method would be for players to attempt things in combat that reflect their next feat, such as making trip attacks without improved trip, or describing how your barbarian swings as hard as he can before he learns power attack, or fighting defensively to learn combat expertise. Obviously, many feats do not have an untrained counterpart.
As yet another option, your players could announce at the beginning of a level which feat they will choose when leveling up, then spend the level training.
I was playing around with this idea. Especially with the free spells learnt by the arcane casters.
I don't want to sound to critical. It could certainly be fun, in the right sort of game. It flat out wouldn't work in some and could be frustrating in others.
Part of the problem is that the easier and less frustrating you make it, the less potential there is for fun as well. If there's always a trainer available willing to teach whatever you want, then what does it add. If you're always off on quests to find trainers or do them favors so they'll teach you, or if you can't find trainers for the feats you want then it gets frustrating. Balancing that could be tricky.
Nope you don't sound too critical, your comments are exactly what I'm looking for. Helps me identify the potential pitfalls and plan accordingly. Plus it sounds like you are speaking from experience that goes back quite a way to the golden age of gaming. I'm trying to recapture that glow I remember but it's very illusion and the kids have changed so much.
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Let's say you've got a player who is putting together a special "build", like a Fighter who is taking a weapon specialization, or the Leadership Feat.
GM: "You're going to make level 7 soon, do you want a specific quest?"
Player: "Sure, what do you mean? I was going to take Leadership."
GM: "If you make the level before we get to this questline, then level up, but hold-off on taking Leadership. I think I can make it more interesting."
Player: "How do you mean? How does not taking my Feat make it interesting?"
GM: "I'm going to make acquisition of that Feat an entire adventure for you and the party, which will involve you commanding a small unit of men as you become an enforcer for the local king. You'll have to keep your men's respect, and accomplish the mission for the king's general even if things get rough."
Player: "Sounds fun, but why now? How is this any different from adventuring?"
GM: "If we play-out you LEARNING to command men, then you can say that's how you became a leader, rather than just 'I got level seven', PLUS, it will give you a relationship with a local general, and possibly a title awarded from the king. Plus, the group will gain a valuable ally, having helped-out this kingdom."
Player: "Oh, I see. Sure. And my reputation from this will help attract my own followers and so on..."
GM: "Exactly. You're on your way to becoming a king yourself, instead of just having another Feat."
~~~
Player: "I'm about to hit level 11. I've never used 6th level spells before."
GM: "Yes, it's been a long-haul, and you guys have survived a lot."
Player: "I'm thinking of Globe of Invulnerability."
GM: "Want to make it a little more fun?"
Player: "Doing what?"
GM: "Not every spellcaster can cast 6th level spells, after all. Your wizard has become exceptional. He's above-average."
Player: "Yeah?"
GM: "How about a special quest to obtain that 6th level spell? I'll make it worth your while...?"
Player: "Don't I just get it from ...research...or whatever?"
GM: "Sure, but if I told you that there is a spellbook lying in some ruins on a distant and forgotten island,...some old wizard's tower,...a wizard who was killed by his own creations...he had insight into what we would call '6th level spells'. Would that interest you?"
Player: "Cool! But what's the advantage to me, for waiting on that spell?"
GM: "Well...it's a whole book of magic, after all...or maybe that Globe of Invulnerability is in it, (according to your research) and it's a custom spell...you can give it your own special style."
Player: "Make the adventure especially deadly, and I wouldn't mind seeing more than one 6th level spell in that book, Including the Globe of Invulnerability."
GM: "You got it."
Assuming you're being sarcastic... yes, someone originally invented the wheel. It probably took them 40 years, but they figured it out. The guy they taught it to probably figured it out quite a bit faster though.Is the premise that nothing new can be created? If that's a fundamental part of a metaphysically damaged universe, it might make sense.
If not, people will ask where the trainers learned their abilities. Since they couldn't have developed the techniques themselves, they must have learned them from someone else.
Nothing new can be known. All knowledge must already exist, somewhere in the world.
Maybe the divine force of creation or creativity has been killed by a dark power and must be revived by the party in order to return progress to the world.
That's the TLDR version of what I was trying to say in reply to this comment.
I have no objection to the need to take time to learn a feat or new ability. As long as the campaign supports taking that time, of course. If I can't take my important feat for 2 levels because we're so busy racing around trying to solve a crisis, and instead I spend those levels with an empty feat slot, I'd be very annoyed.
And as the characters level, it becomes harder and harder to find people who are more awesome than they are. At some point, especially in a setting more like Golarion (or most settings I conceive of), where high-level characters are very rare, you start becoming the sort of people who should be developing their own techniques, not looking for a new, better master. This could just take longer than learning from someone. Maybe it takes a week to learn a technique from a teacher, but two weeks to a month to create it from scratch or reconstruct it without the aid of a teacher.
In general, the PCs are the heroes of the story. They shouldn't be limited to learning from people who are better at the skills the PCs develop. It doesn't mean they shouldn't do it some of the time, but eventually they're hitting that point where they're the masters, and they're developing new techniques that people want to learn from them. But it's a good way for the characters to learn at first. Just that once they become masters, rather than novices, they shouldn't need to rely on finding someone who can teach them.
I like the idea that, in general, it should take some time between adventures to actually benefit from leveling up. But again, only if the pace of adventures makes that possible. In one game I'm playing in, we spent a couple of months of weekly sessions on about 2-3 days of game time, which basically covered the entirety of a single level. In that setup, we would have been, effectively, one level lower for those 2-3 days, because there had been no downtime in which to actually level up.
And in general, this can get very frustrating too. What happens when the fighter wants to learn a particular...
This gives me a lot to think about, thanks.
I'm thinking at some point you would have to go to other planes to learn new tricks maybe?
I don't think trainers make sense for all feats either. Desperate battler from the inner sea world guide where you learn from fighting alone seems counterintuitive to learn from a trainer. Razortusk you must see a trainer to make your teeth grow bigger and sharper. I could make this list longer but some counterinuitive things pop up.
Ouch razor tusk is a bad one. That would make no sense.
Then again it makes no sense that your teeth get bigger suddenly because you killed enough goblins, so you can't really win with that one.
Actually if you're up for it doctor wu, go ahead and add some things to that list so I can see what I'm up against so to speak.
Yes or No is my answer.
If this is an excuse for placing downtime into your adventures and you will run some intensive role play during that downtime the count me in with a big YES!
If however this is instead an excuse to restrict feats to special reward status and you as the GM will use this to control not only which feats are available but who gets whichever feat... then No count me out. This last option sounds particularly unfair, turning the whole game into "who can butter up the GM the most so that he doesn't ruin your build by never letting you have access to an important feat. Or even worse a play of favoritism where your best buddies get all the best training they want for free while the rest have to suffer with substandard feats at an elevated cost.
Hey Aranna I was going to run it with a premade hexcrawl sandbox campaign setting with the NpC's already defined and waiting for the party to meet and interact with them.
You placed every feat onto a fully developed NPC trainer?
If so then that does avoid the favoritism mostly...
But I guess I would want to role play the training, otherwise what is the point? Surely not realism... that isn't possible in a level based fantasy environment.
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We had something vaguely related to this in an old 2nd/3rd ed hybrid D&D campaign. In winter, travel would be impractical, so we had regular downtime in which to hone skills*. However, these skills came in addition to those gained at leveling up, and cost some money. Getting the money to train in downtime was actually one of our major goals; 100GP (which was a lot of money in that campaign) bought you one skill in one winter. For 400GP you could learn two skills in a winter, but only near the end of the campaign did we get that kind of money.
We liked it, and something similar is creeping into our Pathfinder now. You can learn feats in downtime, but they're limited to "safe" feats that don't change game balance too much. Mainly the skill bonus feats and teamwork feats. Actually, learning teamwork feats at the same time with other PCs is a good thing. They're almost guaranteed not to break party balance (because other people also have to get them), and they're not that strong anyway, but nice enough to have if they don't get in the way of getting normal feats.
Another thing to think about here is the Training Montage. A good example is the Avatar: the Last Airbender series - it had lots of training montage episodes. It's nice to do that now and then, but it shouldn't become a habit because it might get in the way of normal gaming too much.
Here's what you could do: when a player levels up, have the player tell the group a short (5 minutes or so) story of how the character developed the new ability. As long as the player doesn't do anything outrageous, just give the player free rein to explain how he learned it.
*Skills were 2nd ed Nonweapon Proficiencies, Weapon Proficiencies and some Feat-like things; all those things cost the same "points" in this system.
I started thinking about this after playing PFS where item creation feats are banned. For my home game I thought it might be fun if they were not banned, but rare. This would help me control the scarcity of magic items, for one thing.
From there I thought why not extend it to all feats? This would act as an engine to drive NPC interaction and RP.
Leveling up would be as normal, and give you "feat slots". You would fill the slots by finding someone who knows the feat you want, and getting trained by them. This could provide seeds for all kinds of quests as well.
Would you enjoy this kind of game as a player?
Excuse the cryptic response but...
"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?"
Someone had to invent the feat. Which means someone can re-invent the feat. Especially since feats are not entirely assured to be the exact same technique that everyone else practices but may have the same effect mechanically (perfect example would be Improved Unarmed strike).
EDIT: Same problem with leveling up requiring trainers. A variant mentioned in the D&D books was requiring training to advance to the next level. You had to go find a teacher, pay gold, and then play your level up music. The problem is, who taught the teacher, and who taught them, and who taught them? Somebody had to be a 1st level Fighter at some point, but how did they make it to 2nd level if they couldn't be taught to get to 2nd level?
Just something worth thinking about.
EDIT 2: This is also why I don't have restrictions on playing Jedi in non-Jedi periods when playing Star Wars. Sometimes taking levels in a class means you are rediscovering, reinventing, imitating, or improvising your skills to a point that they work. When the Star Wars designers were asked about how Jedi came about, someone said "Somebody took a level of Jedi". :P
I have played in a game where this was the requirement for learning feats and spells. If a character wanted to discover something on their own, it took four to eight times as long, and base training time was already prohibitive and expensive.
At one point, almost every member of the mid-high level party was several levels behind their XP total because they couldn't get training. My druid had approximately level 7 casting at level 11 because past a certain level, druids (especially friendly druids) were rare and druidic casting could only be learned from great elemental spirits... which would invariably give a cryptic task to be completed first...
Which meant another adventure without those abilities, gaining experience on that adventure, and when training finally arrives, only catching up to where the character should have been at the start of the side quest.
There was almost no possibility for a main campaign. The entire focus of the game was training. There was nothing else we had time for.
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As long as the training opportunities are built into the adventure, it shouldn't be a problem.
If anyone gets saved during the adventure, they can offer to teach a 'lost technique' (a feat, spell, whatever) to one or more of their rescuers, or one of their grateful relatives could offer to do the same (or even the *ghost* of a grateful ancestor, offering some arcane or divine enlightenment, as they are now freed up to go on to their final rest, now that their last descendent is safe and can continue the family line!).
Similarly, tossing a book with some detailed analysis of a fighting technique (like vital strike, written by a legendary fighter who believed that one focused blow was worth two or three increasingly clumsy attempts), or the formula for a new spellcasting technique (representing a metamagic feat that the player told you he wants next level) into the treasure pile could allow for training to be handled 'organically' without having the 'ding! You hit level X, you wake up with a bunch of new skills, feats, etc!'
And there's the 'old master' who lingers around the PCs home base and happens to know (or be able to find) any information they need for training purposes. Each class might have their own 'old master,' or a collection of different specialists (a rogue, for instance, might have befriended a guild or gang of rogues, each specialized in a different set of techniques, so that it doesn't matter that none of them are twice the PC rogues level, they'll always have a disparate array of tricks to teach, even if they are eventually telling him about tricks they themselves have only heard about, and not actually mastered...).
A cleric or necromancer type mentor, able to call forth spirits of the dead, or from other planes, to tutor/mentor/train their young friends, could be an ideal 'jack of all trades.' It doesn't matter if the doddering old high cleric doesn't know a glaive-guisarme from a dire flail, one of the old heroes of the faith was an expert in exactly what the fighter needs to know, and he can use some holy relic at the temple to contact the spirit of that worthy to offer some tips to the next generation of heroes of the faith. Similarly, the necromancer mentor may not know bupkiss about bardic music, but he's got a couple bard skulls lying around, and one of them might remember something useful... Summoners and conjurors and druids and psionicists could fill similar roles, tapping into extraplanar tutors or fey allies or 'the universal group-mind' or whatever. Even an NPC Expert could have a big library or other archive of training materials for PC use, and they could study up on famous heroes or ancient spellcrafters as part of their 'leveling up' process.
If too many options turn into 'go adventure to find X feat' type situations, it runs the risk of sidelining the actual campaign.
On the other hand, it's a good way to keep non-standard options rarer and more 'special' feeling. Third-party feats, spells, etc. that you've approved might require a little active effort on the part of the PCs, and not be something you automatically place for them to find as a part of their standard adventuring.
If you are willing to go totally 'video-game' there could be items like rune-engraved stones, or single page versions of a Manual of Skill At Arms or whatever, that teach only a single Feat to the person who unlocks it by studying it for 24 hours (and only to someone who has an open feat slot). I'd skip this just because I don't like the feel of it, aesthetically, but it is little different than the 'old mentor' idea I had above, where one trainer has access to all sorts of training options through summoning / necromancy / whatever.
Played in a game like this before...it was the suck. Too many limitations on the game created an imbalance where some classes had found their awesome feats and others hadn't. In this instance, some players were very happy with their characters, while others were bored to tears with their crappy feat choices. It evened out later on, but do not do this. If you would like to change the way the game works, just start from scratch and create a game where this is the way it works. Hopefully your group will want to experiment with you...otherwise don't even bother.
You placed every feat onto a fully developed NPC trainer?
If so then that does avoid the favoritism mostly...But I guess I would want to role play the training, otherwise what is the point? Surely not realism... that isn't possible in a level based fantasy environment.
I haven't yet I'm still trying to figure out if it's a cool idea.