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With the Unchained book we say Background skills which addressed a very obvious issue with some skill unbalance. Well what about Feats? Are there some Feats that are nice bits of flavor, but in reality are not going to get you to the end of your feat chain? I think there are, but I am curious what others think and what can be done to bring some of those that are never used out into the light.
I agree with this line of thinking, but unlike the set number and power of skills, feats can wildly change in potency when applied to certain builds, and the number of feats is constantly growing. Short of exclusively using feats like Acrobatic or Stealthy (which I feel would miss the point of background feats), the amount of insight, system knowledge, and trial and error to consider adding even something as obvious as Point-blank Shot (let alone reviewing every single feat in the SRD) is incredibly daunting.
I've incorporated some house rules to alleviate some of the feat tax that background skills would theoretically remove: instead of having to take Combat Expertise, an Int 13 is all that's needed to take any feats proceeding Combat Expertise, so a Half-orc Rogue can take Imp Dirty Trick at level 1 if he really wants to. I'd encourage you to try this instead of creating a list of Background feats and risk breaking the game.
The flavor things that are too weak to be feats should be traits.
The flavor things that are too weak to be feats should be traits.
For some that's true (eg Exotic Weapon Prof), but for too many others (eg Andoren Falconry, Astrological Timing, Caustic Slur) making them traits probably won't entice people to take them, when there's always something more useful like Reactionary, River Rat or Armor Expert.
My experience with background skills is that they work well. Apart from Perform and bards, it's often less than obvious which of those skills in the background list are worth taking even when given out for free, so they do add flavour and little mechanical advantage.
The real problem with this proposal is that there are 35 skills and about 35000 feats, of which 34500 are potentially eligible for backgrounding, with strong caveats as Cuup notes. So it's a bit of a GM call which ones should be included. Anyone want to write a list?
Ideally people should take effort to check different sources and evaluate them individually, compiling a list here, preferably with archives of nethys/ d20pfsrd links for reference.
Once finished, someone in the community should compile the work into a Google Docs.
We should also make sure that the compiled list is organized by which line of books the feats come from, in case OGL status and/or availability becomes an issue.
One thing I had considered since I had been thinking about this is possibly allow non-chain or even non-combat feats to be taken as free feats when you level up on the even levels. A list would be good to compile probably, but this could probably be done a the game table as a case by case basis with the GM and Player.
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I feel like there are a lot of great feats that just aren't worth taking as part of character progression, but giving one of them out as a free background feat would be super useful and flavorful.
Some of them would probably be more useful (skill Focus), and some seem to be designed to be such (Fey Foundling) but balance does need to be considered.