How "General" are General Feats?

[The Shaman]

Hi, I am currently going through the core book, and I am a bit confused just what you can take with the general feats. I expected it to be any feat you qualify for - after all, they include skill feats, which you specifically get from your class. Does that mean you can also take the general feats to get more class or multiclass feats - and if no, why shouldn't they, since you can use them to take more skill feats?

[Voss]

The general feats can be used on any feat with the 'general' tag. [in the little blue box below the name of the feat.

They can't be used to take class feats and Archetype feats are explicitly only exchangeable with class feats.

As to why, general feats are almost universally less powerful than class or archetype feats. They're little things you pick up along the way, class feats are defining for your character.

As stated on page 160, "Some abilities require a degree of training, but can be learned by anyone, not only members of certain ancestries or classes. These abilities are called general feats"

I do think some name reshuffling and a thesaurus should get involved.
Class feats
Ancestry traits
Skill trick (?) or Skill feature or skill facet
General training

[The Shaman]

That is the purist reading, yes. However, you can use them for class skills, and there are currently very few general feats for characters who want to focus on other options.

I think if "general" feats give you the option to take more skill feats, they should give you the option to specialize in class abilities like the "extra X" feats from 1E and get more class/multiclass feats. What do you think?

[Turkina_B]

The Shaman wrote:

That is the purist reading, yes. However, you can use them for class skills, and there are currently very few general feats for characters who want to focus on other options.

I think if "general" feats give you the option to take more skill feats, they should give you the option to specialize in class abilities like the "extra X" feats from 1E and get more class/multiclass feats. What do you think?

Actually there is the Ancestral Paragon feat that allows an additional ancestral feat but only once as far as I can tell.

[Turkina_B]

I would also like to see an option to swap general for class feats.

[houser2112]

Turkina_B wrote:

Actually there is the Ancestral Paragon feat that allows an additional ancestral feat but only once as far as I can tell. I would also like to see an option to swap general for class feats.

And if you're Human, you can use that Ancestral Paragon general feat to select the Human ancestral feat Natural Ambition, which you can use to select a 1st-level class feat. This won't help you with archetype feats, which are all higher than 1st level, but it's something I guess.

[Zi Mishkal]

So wait, are the feats with the traits "general" and "skill" able to fill general feat slots and / or skill feat slots?

[Claxon]

Skill feats are a subset of General feats is my understanding.

All Skill feats are general feats. Not all General feats are Skill feats.

[Draco18s]

Zi Mishkal wrote:

So wait, are the feats with the traits "general" and "skill" able to fill general feat slots and / or skill feat slots?

Any time you take a General feat you can pick any feat with the General trait (which includes all skill traits).

Any time you take a Skill feat you can pick any feat with the Skill trait (but not any General feat).

[Zi Mishkal]

Thanks, Claxon, Draco18s. That was my understanding. I just wanted clarification :)

[Neodymium]

This conversation is why I maintain that either Ancestry and Class feats should be renamed to not have "Feat" in their title, or General and Skill Feats should be renamed. They are not interchangeable despite the mechanical similarities and there is no good reason to have "...feat" appear 10,000 times in every class progression chart.
Powers are Spells with special and specific ways of accessing them. So there is precedence for having a mechanical subcategory gain it's own separate name. Why not go with Class Talents and Ancestry Gifts?

Here's an easy to read graphic to explain the feat groupings
[img]https://s15.postimg.cc/4ct13g1h3/pf2-feat_categories-1.png[/img]