| Meophist |
So, I've been thinking about how Pathfinder 2 is handling feats and progression, being somewhat dissatisfied with it. This led to the line of thought: How would I do this if I were designing this game?
Okay, rather than calling them feats, let's just call them "choices" for now. As you create and progress your character, you make various choices for your character. This is fine.
Something important to do is to separate combat and non-combat choices. Combat is a big part of Pathfinder, and it creates problems if a character is too strong or too weak compared to the other characters in combat. If combat and non-combat choices aren't separate, then those who use choice that could be used for combat for non-combat things can end up too weak to meaningfully participate in combat encounters, and for the reverse, they could end up so strong they may invalidate the contributions of the rest of the party during combat. Since these scenarios are bad, combat and non-combat choices needs to be separate.
So we have combat choices and non-combat choices being separate things. Next thing we need to worry about is the different requirements for combat choices and non-combat choices. Specifically, for combat choices, we generally want to build tall. For non-combat choices, we generally want to build wide.
Starting with the combat choices, "building tall" means that the choices needs to increase in power over time; they need to be scalable. Numbers go up over the course of a character's adventuring life, so the combat choices needs to account for that. So, I thought of the idea of "Paths" for combat choices. You can choose one or more Paths at level one and can either go into new Paths or invest more into an existing Path over future levels.
One possible Path could be Sneak Attack for the Rogue. Sneak Attack adds a bit of damage at level 1, but needs to increase in damage in order to keep up with the increasing amounts of HP enemies get. So in this Path, the Sneak Attack automatically advances in how much damage it deals as you increase in level. Additionally, you can invest in it with future combat choices in order to, for example, add effects to the Sneak Attack or make it easier to do. Alternately, you may want to go into a different Path altogether for enhanced versatility.
Okay, so combat choices can be done with this Path thing, what about non-combat choices? Skill feats seems good for that, but that by itself feels a bit lacking. Well, more than lacking, it doesn't have that personal touch, it feels a bit too generic and, well, everybody could get them. They're not you.
So, I think it's possible to do them more class-like. Make them class feats, special non-combat things that showcase the class themselves, rather than just a skill. Many of these can have skill proficiency requirements, but they could feel like they belong to the class. I feel that could do a good job.
Between these combat choices and non-combat choices, probably best to give the player choices in these in alternate levels. Ah, right, there's Ancestry feats as well, isn't there? Well, we can make half of the non-combat choices dedicated to these. Then we could…
…Wait…
At this point, I realized I basically just reinvented what Paizo did for Pathfinder 2. The combat choices are class feats, non-combat are general and skill feats. And there's also ancestry feats. The class feats also generally fit what I've described as "Paths" as well, although not quite laid out in such a way. The non-combat is more class-agnostic than what I would like though, but the general concept stuff is similar enough.
Where to go from here?
To be honest, I think the current system came from pretty logical steps, but although my line of thoughts ended up in similar place as Paizo, they're not the same(to be fair, probably because I read the playtest before this thought exercise). So, why the differences? Well, it has to do with what I feel is lacking in the current playtest.
First thing I feel is lacking is that it feels like the current class feats, well, you can invest your class feats into a certain direction, and it feels like you'll fall behind if you're not consistently investing in a specific direction. Admittedly, my current Paths idea has a similar issue, but I feel its auto-progression can give space where you can't simply continuously invest in one playstyle and give room to diversify. So, to put it in another way, and in bold because it's important, I think you shouldn't be able to invest all of your class feats in a specific direction to force the player to invest in something that's not simply the single style, and this will give more incentive to move away from simple cookie-cutter builds. Having more auto-advancement in class feats can help with this, creating blank levels where continuing to invest in that single style is impossible.
The other thing I feel is lacking is, well, the classic problem: The Fighter. The Fighter is good at, well, fighting. More specifically, it's good at martial combat, so pretty much all Fighter feats goes towards advancing that. The Fighter isn't really the only one that suffers from this, just the most. Nearly all of the Barbarian's feats only affects its rage.
So the big problem this gives the Fighter is that it doesn't give the Fighter much to do outside of combat, especially not anything unique. I feel giving the Fighter more skill ranks is only a bandaid for the problem, when it comes to skill, it's not like it's going to beat the Rogue. Now, signature skills do go some way of helping with this problem, but I don't really like that entire mechanic, but that'll be for another post.
How do we fix this? Well, I gave a solution above. We should make more general/skill feats class-specific, so that each class has more unique things they can do outside of combat. I don't mean make the current general/skill feats class-specific, but make new ones that show off what each class is about.
That's about all I have to say currently on the matter. I have more details, but they're details and are less important. Thank you for reading.
tl;dr: Bold stuff.