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Abstract
My opinion is that "path" is a more appropriate term than "feat" for use in 2E. I will attempt to convince more people by stating my opinion in a contrived academic structure.
Introduction
"Feat" has always been a weird word for me to use in 1E. Sure, being able to draw a weapon quickly (as per Quick Draw) is kinda a feat, but is being slightly more alert than average (as per Alertness) a feat? It's awkward at best, in my opinion.
Materials and Methods
My opinion was formed in a near-catatonic hypnotic state, on 3 hours of sleep while futilely attempting to soothe my infant son's cries in the middle of a packed flight out of Dallas.
I spent 10 minutes with my 7E Roget's International Thesaurus to make sure I couldn't easily find one I liked more than "path".
I also went through the feats in the CPG, APG, UC, and UM to make sure I prefer "path" more than "feat" with most of them. Which I in fact did prefer, thank you very much.
Result
"Path" just makes more sense to use than "feat", imho. "Feat" makes no sense in the context of ancestry. "Feats of skill" are the results of skills not the mastery "feats" would provide. "Feats" only make more sense for a narrow set of abilities, e.g. "Dazzling Display".
Examples
Ancestries: "I get a +4 AC because I chose the path of hating giants"(!!) makes more sense than "I get a +4 AC because I choose the feat of hating giants"(?!)
Skills: "I have/choose/am on the path of the artisan", yes. give it to me. all of them! oglogloglogolog... "I have/choose/am on the feat of the artisan", what?
General: "I can take Trample because I am on the Mounted Combat path", beautiful. "I can take Trample because I have the Mounted Combat feat", meh.
Class Feat: "You need to be on the Weapon Focus path to unlock Weapon Spec." is certainly no worse than "You need to have chosen the Weapon Focus feat to unlock Weapon Spec."
Also, it's in the flippin' name!!!!
Pathfinder. Now that so many character building decisions follow the same mechanic, call that mechanic "paths".
Strawmen
Here are some easy counterarguments I thought of and rebutted. So if your counterarguments resemble these at all, even if they are robust, well reasoned arguments, I will immediately dismiss them in the most petty way I can:
- "The couple of times 'feat' sounds appropriate, it's a bit better than 'path' (e.g. Tripping Twirl feat)." But out of the hundreds of feats I glanced through there were only a handful of those.
- "It might make it a bit harder to use 'path' in a non-technical sense." But as my Roget's tells shows me there are plenty of alternative words. Also, when my GM says "You were able to climb the tower barehanded. Quite a feat!" I'm not confused as to what he's saying, now will I be with "path".
Errata
Apologies if this has been suggested before. It's kinda hard to search in the archives for "path" and "feat" :P
Discussion
See below :D
"I'll take the sudden charge path" just sounds weird to me. I don't like it at all. Considering the name of the game is "Pathfinder" it just seems a little to cute, to boot.
Reading "Feat" as short for "Feature" as in "Class Features" becoming "Class Feats" does work for me though.
Examples
Ancestries: "I get a +4 AC because I chose the path of hating giants"(!!) makes more sense than "I get a +4 AC because I choose the feat of hating giants"(?!)
Skills: "I have/choose/am on the path of the artisan", yes. give it to me. all of them! oglogloglogolog... "I have/choose/am on the feat of the artisan", what?
General: "I can take Trample because I am on the Mounted Combat path", beautiful. "I can take Trample because I have the Mounted Combat feat", meh.
Class Feat: "You need to be on the Weapon Focus path to unlock Weapon Spec." is certainly no worse than "You need to have chosen the Weapon Focus feat to unlock Weapon Spec."
Your examples are phrased wrong for feats.
"I have/chose/took the Ancestral Hatred feat."
"I have/chose/took some crafting feats."
"I can take Trample because feats generally don't have other feats as a prerequisite in PF2, making 'path' metaphors less apt."
"See my previous statement, but now we're talking about Fighter feats."
You're using "path" to refer to both feats and feat chains, making it very confusing.
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Changing away from Feat might make sense, but the confusion would likely not quite be worth any clarity off nomenclature.
Also, if you are going to change it, path seems a singularly bad option. It's not clearer or more appropriate, and despite being in the name of the game is just not a great choice.
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"Feat" is already deeply ingrained into the subconcious of anyone who has played d20 for any length of time. It's gonna be hard if not impossible to displace.
If anything a much better fit would probably be "Ability", but that has already been claimed by Ability Scores (which IMO would be much better if they were called Attributes).
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"Feature" and "ability" both sounds pretty good to me.
Another option is to make them have specific names for each category instead of it being "_____ feat", which is pretty boring and only makes sense mechanically, not thematically. So instead of "class feat" you'd call it "discipline" and instead of "ancestry feat" they could be "trait" (unless we still have 1E traits).
QuidEst, my examples weren't the best, but I still think "path" sounds better, even if it's not chained with other paths.
As for TheFinished's point, if they're changing "race" to "ancestry", I'd say that's way more ingrained (albeit, it has sufficiently negative context to warrant the change more than my "I don't like how 'feat' sounds" natter).
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I was just getting ready to start referring to PF2 as the featening...
Sure, lets rename every established game term over to something else just because it makes more "sense", gotta alienate and make it harder for the main demographic to get into this again shall we?
Oh well the reference document for PF1 to PF2 and 3.5 to PF2 is going to be thicker than the core book by this point.
I'd rather save "Path" for the mode you choose for your class at level 1. So if you are an Evoker Wizard or Illusionist Wizard, that's your Path.
I was just getting ready to start referring to PF2 as the featening...
You go back to your popcorn sir. -_-
I'd be fine with Dongle.
I was kinda fine with Feat when I thought it was just Class and General, but now that we have Class, General, Heritage, ¿Ancestral?, Skill, and Proficiency Feats... yeah...
well technically rysky atm we have the following types of feats.
General, Achievement, Armor Mastery, Betrayal, Blood Hex, Combat, Coven, Critical, Damnation, Faction, Familiar, Grit, Hero Point, Item Creation, Item Mastery, Meditation, Metamagic, Mythic, Panache, Performance, Shield Mastery, Stare, Story, Style, Targeting, Teamwork, Trick, and Weapon Mastery feats
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I was kinda fine with Feat when I thought it was just Class and General, but now that we have Class, General, Heritage, ¿Ancestral?, Skill, and Proficiency Feats... yeah...well technically rysky atm we have the following types of feats.
General, Achievement, Armor Mastery, Betrayal, Blood Hex, Combat, Coven, Critical, Damnation, Faction, Familiar, Grit, Hero Point, Item Creation, Item Mastery, Meditation, Metamagic, Mythic, Panache, Performance, Shield Mastery, Stare, Story, Style, Targeting, Teamwork, Trick, and Weapon Mastery feats
1) That's in First Edition.
2) Those all fall under General Feats aka there's no unique path for each set that everyone gets (though there is shortcuts).
I thought we were just listing off types of feats. >.>
No I was just saying that it seems like a lot of different kinds but we kind of already have a lot of different kinds if you think about it.
1) I completely disagree with OP, Feat is PERFECTLY suitable, and Path is not better term for it. If you have better Perceptions than another then you can indeed see what they cannot. AFAIK Pathfinder skills will work such that Skill Feat will unlock higher proficiencies which allow totally new applications of the skill anyways. But quibbling over that tendentious detail of one minor subset of Feats is not reason to change name of Feats in general.
2) I happened to be musing about the term "Path" myself independently, but this would be in the sense of a chain of Feats, possibly also tied to other non-Feat mechanics as well... I.e. Path of the Totem (Barbarian), Path of Bannherholder (Cavalier-esque), Path of Bombs (Alchemist) etc. The narrowness/broadness of those is not crucial, that is design deciion, I'm just trying to broadly indicate what "Path" could/should be used for.
3) The reason that usage is valid and Feat=Path is not, is path inherently means a line between two points. A Feat itself is a single point, it is not a line comprising multiple points.
I think what is being called paths is probably gonna be pretty close to how arch types are gonna work.
I think it is great for people to keep tossing out creative new ideas and this is an interesting one to consider. For me, the most important thing is that everything called a Feat/feature/path/etc. be roughly the same level of power and be comparable as far as how much they singularly define who your character is.
If class feats completely blow every other feat out of the water, then it will be weird having them all share the same name, but if the design principle is consistent, and feats/features/paths are all "modular 'things' that differentiate who your character is and what they can do from other characters with similar higher order design concepts," then I think it is a great idea for them all to share a mechanical name.
As an aside, any bonuses given by feats/features/paths all need to either stack plainly or not at all. The last thing the new edition needs is 4+ types of feats with 10+ types of bonuses that must be tracked separately.
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Well in that case we can combine Heritage and Ancestry. Proficiency isn't a feat type. So we've narrowed it to 4 [class, general, ancestry and skill] which isn't that complicated it at all especially as they will all hopefully have their own clear cut section of the book.I was kinda fine with Feat when I thought it was just Class and General, but now that we have Class, General, Heritage, ¿Ancestral?, Skill, and Proficiency Feats... yeah...well technically rysky atm we have the following types of feats.
General, Achievement, Armor Mastery, Betrayal, Blood Hex, Combat, Coven, Critical, Damnation, Faction, Familiar, Grit, Hero Point, Item Creation, Item Mastery, Meditation, Metamagic, Mythic, Panache, Performance, Shield Mastery, Stare, Story, Style, Targeting, Teamwork, Trick, and Weapon Mastery feats1) That's in First Edition.
2) Those all fall under General Feats aka there's no unique path for each set that everyone gets (though there is shortcuts).
Ah okay, kinda thought I was overthinking it.
Hmm...
Call the individual Feats "Steps", and change Feat-Lines to "Paths".
Suddenly it all makes sense!
And just to add another dissonant voice:
The common German translation for "Feat" in D&D-terminology is "Talent" (different pronunciation but same meaning as in English).
Which doesn't always fit, either, but I thought I'd bring it up.
While I have no opinion about the merits of the author’s proposal, the write-up was hilarious.
I recommend that the journal accept this paper.
—Referee #2
Call the individual Feats "Steps", and change Feat-Lines to "Paths".
Suddenly it all makes sense!And just to add another dissonant voice:
The common German translation for "Feat" in D&D-terminology is "Talent" (different pronunciation but same meaning as in English).
Which doesn't always fit, either, but I thought I'd bring it up.
I would at least like Talent to be the name for what they are currently calling Class Feats, but eh.
A real benefit of calling everything a feat allows us to write "For the purposes of feats, spells, and items" rather than "for the purposes of feats, talents, skill unlocks, spells, items, and effects".
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I'm on board with this. Certainly, it'd turn a staple of the game into something extremely marketable "CHOOSE YOUR PATH" for a game called Pathfinder, giving examples of some possible Paths and whatever is a GREAT way to make younger and newer players hook onto the idea quicker. I certainly know Namedrops are popular, so yeah, why not?
Personally, I've always hated how the word "Feat" has been used in d20. I think of a feat as an achievement, something discrete you have achieved in your life, not an ability.
Why not the word "Talent"? Is that word already being used for something else in PF2? I don't think it's any more off-putting to d20 veterans than using "Feat" to refer to everything under the sun, including things you choose simply because you're a human/dorf/etc.
"Talent" would be a good choice as that word has already been used for similar options in the past.
"Path" implies something that progresses over the course of multiple levels, and not all likely "feats" would do that.
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Having one standardized term for 'the things I pick from a list and give me cool stuff' is a really good idea for avoiding new player confusion. That term wouldn't need to be Feat for new players...but it's a lot easier for existing players if it is.
So...yeah, making everything Feats seems like the right choice, all things considered.
The one down side.. It gives my group the excuse to keep using that tired and wore out joke of how many feats do you have? two! left and right! and all variations of that.
I'm not for it. Besides the posts that were stated previously (it dosen't change much, it sounds more like a feat chain rather than a passive effect or ability, it also sounds like a lifestyle choice) a dumber argument (which I will give) is that naming it after pathfinder makes it sound like the game is about gaining feats.