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To begin, I want to say that I actually like the “everything is a feat” design choice, particularly with regards to class building and level progression.
However, throughout the process of building characters for this playtest and talking with my typical gaming group (we’ve been playing D&D and Pathfinder for nearly 20 years each) we kind of agree on most of the following points. So here is my good, bad, and ugly with regards the to feats and feat selection. I will be breaking this down by categories, so Ancestry Feats, Class Feats, General Feats, and Skill Feats.
As a quick aside, I will be talking about the number of options. I fully understand that this is a playtest and it’s not fair to compare a partially finished document to 10 years of content, but hear me out. Most of the time my concerns are going to be with the number of times you get to pick from a list of feats, not the number of available feat choices.
Ancestry Feats:
The Good: I like Ancestry Feats as a design space, because I definitely believe there is room to make this very unique to Golarion. The racial weapon proficiencies are good choices to put here, because it seems strange that every elf is good with a longsword or every halfling is David vs. Goliath. Even the human has gotten a rather interesting change on its usual “free skills, free feat” and nothing else. In the future I really see this expanding to the different human ethnicities: Taldan, Varisian, Tian, etc.
The Bad: Heritage Feats make very little sense from a narrative perspective. Any of the “genetic” or “biological” feats also seem to be an odd choice. Dwarf and elf only have one heritage feat, so that doesn’t really seem like too big an issue with regards to those ancestries, but then you have the Goblin. It has Flame Heart and Razor Teeth which makes them mutually exclusive. It’s kind of hard to think of a Golarion Goblin without its sharp grinning maw AND being a pyromaniac.
It seems like it would make more sense to bake the heritage Ancestry Feats into the level 1 Ancestry itself and then just not give an Ancestry feat at first level except to humans. That way human can either spend the feat or become a half-elf or half-orc.
Class Feats:
The Good: Modular classes and being able to pick the class features you want and weed out ones that you find inappropriate to the campaign setting makes for better characters in my opinion. It also enables the design team to add and remove content to classes without substantially re-writing the entire class which helps in the inevitable stream of errata that we’re going to accumulate in the next decade of playing this game. Additionally this makes it easier to add archetypes and subclasses without creating a dozen classes that are “kind of like A, but with fighting/casting/skill monkey powers.” It even helps avoid the weird scenarios that came up in D&D 3.5 where you ended up doing a lot of crazy multi-classing and level dipping to get a certain combination of abilities.
The Bad: This is where I make my criticism about there being two few opportunities to take from the Class Feat list. And it’s not terribly consistent across the classes. Sorcerer and Wizard for example feel like they could use the change to take maybe 1 extra feat. They don’t really need much, because the Magic Item Creation feats have all been melded into the new “Magical Crafting” feat and rules. Other classes, especially the ugly that I will get to, feel like they are missing a lot of the class features that made them competent. I know there is a lot of mumbling about caster/martial balance on the internet, and it seems strange that many of the martial classes that are considered “underpowered” lose many class features to the features = Feats change.
The Ugly: The Paladin. While wizard is my usual forte, I have played a paladin in Pathfinder 1e from level 1 the whole way to level 20. He was a nigh-unkillable tank and managed to keep up with the crazy prepared Batman-style arcanist and the heavily DPR optimized war priest. It seemed to be a rather solid class with maybe a bit of help since this was a demon-themed campaign so Smite Evil got used heavily.
I preface with this because the 2e Paladin feels like it has been gutted. I’m not particularly bothered by the loss of Divine spellcasting, because the Paladin list was pretty mediocre in 1e/D&D 3.5. So no loss there. But the rest of the paladin’s class abilities and have been repackaged into smaller, less powerful pieces and placed at mutually exclusive levels.
For example, at level 2 a paladin can get their bonus to saving throws or they can be good at fighting Evil. And if they choose to fight Evil, they can only choose one kind of evil. They can be better at fighting evil dragons OR demons/devils OR undead. Same thing happens again at level 4. A paladin can either be courageous and help his allies fight off fear OR he gets to channel like a Cleric OR is particularly resistant to disease OR can heal his allies of status effects.
General Feats
I really don’t have much to say about General Feats. The ones that are solely labeled as General are pretty class-agnostic, but in terms of actually usefulness it seems like everyone will probably spend their five slots on some combination of Alertness, Fleet, Incredible Initiative, Toughness, and Remarkable Resonance. Those five are markedly better than the rest of the list. Alertness is just about the only way to improve Perception. And the remaining four are the ONLY ways to increase speed, initiative, HP, and Resonance respectively. There really is no reason to spend a General Feat on a Skill Feat as I will now explain.
Skill Feats:
The Good: The concept of using your level of training to unlock special uses of a skill is good. That’s it.
The Bad: The variety and usefulness of the feat selection is overall rather underwhelming. I didn’t look at any of the skill feats and really say to myself “Ooh I should make sure I take that.” In a lot of cases, the Expert level requirement of some feats meant I had to look for filler options to take up the slot until I qualified for a feat I did want as in the case of Magical Crafting. My first skill increase went to Arcana so I had to wait several levels to bump Crafting. Many of the interesting feats are locked behind Master and Legendary levels of proficiency which means only classes with those signature skills are going to qualify for anything interesting.
For casters this might not be so bad, based on spell selection, but my complaints about number of spell slots or magic items will get their own thread. But in general picking Skill Feats felt like a chore sifting through so-so options for a few gems.
One of the things I really liked about D&D 5e was that each of the feats really did something. They were something beyond that made you want to take them. A good feat list needs to grab a player in the way that they lament that they can’t take them all in one character.
The Ugly: A rather alarming number of feats seem to just unlock things that any character used to just be able to do in Pathfinder 1e. Recognize Spell was automatic with Spellcraft, Forager and Survey Wildlife are obvious applications of Survival, Train Animal was the entire point of the Handle Animal Skill, and probably one of the worst offenders in my opinion Group Coercion/Impression. Needing a feat in order to influence more than one person at a time? The break between game mechanics and narrative with those is quite stark.
In summation, I really like the design space that Ancestry/Class/General/Skill Feats creates in terms of making a modular game. Ancestry and Class are closest to a finished state in my opinion. I would recommend melding the “genetic” feats back into the base race, possibly at the cost of the level 1 Ancestry feat. Classes need more access to their respective feat lists, in varying capacities, to smooth out the class balance. Particularly the Paladin, it needs love. General Feats are generic, news at 11, nothing to see here. Skill Feats however are very poorly implemented in this playtest. They unlock basic things that you should just be able to do by virtue of being trained. Make them much more powerful so that the Master or Legend in their respective skill wows and awes their party members.
Dwarves have two heritage feats- Ancient's Blood and Hardy. Giving Ancient's Blood to every dwarf, by default, would be a very bad idea.
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Dwarves have two heritage feats- Ancient's Blood and Hardy. Giving Ancient's Blood to every dwarf, by default, would be a very bad idea.
Must have missed that one. Having read over it, I can see why it shouldn't be rolled into the default dwarf, but I don't think it really changes my opinion on "genetic" feats in general. If anything those kind of feats should be an enhanced version of an existing feature of the Ancestry.
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Gotta be honest the "you're a dwarf, here's all the stuff you get at level 1" of most other editions is something I really enjoy. The idea of slowly growing into your race's base abilities doesn't feel great.
My elf being trained in longsword at level 1 might be important to me, but I have to lose keen hearing for it?
It makes the races lose a little bit of their character and uniqueness
BUT, that said, the idea of your baseline racial abilities getting better as you level up sounds amazing and fun. Dwarves learning how to use their sturdiness in unique ways, elves becoming the best with the weapons they're naturally inclined towards.
That part of the system ranks up there with Action Economy as one of the best changes to the game, in my opinion.
So, overall, I feel like ancestries and feats need another pass as to what exactly is a feat, what isn't, when you get them, etc.
((Also, I see no reason Ancient's Blood HAS to be a heritage feat... picking it at a later level could just mean that you've become better at leveraging your races' innate magic resistance and now you can devote some internal effort to strongly manifest it))
Actually, now that I think about it, and after I looked over the ancestries again, I can come up with a rationale as to how you might gain a heritage feat's abilities at later levels for just about any of them. So maybe they should just scrap that trait. It's just another minor little rule you have to teach people and try to include somewhere noticeable in the book.
Is it really THAT big of a deal that a gnome gets a stronger sense of smell at 5th level that we HAVE to include a special rule preventing it whose only function is to restrict player choice? Seems counter-intuitive to the goal of making a more streamlined and approachable game.