That Customization Piece (General Feats and Proficiency Limitations)


Skills, Feats, Equipment & Spells

Liberty's Edge

Right now, I am in general very pleased with the basic structure of PF2 as the playtest seems to be trending. The action economy, leveling feat slots, TEML, even the magic baselines I'm pretty happy with.

The question, though, is what is going to go into that structure between now and next August - what feats (class, skill, general) are going to be available once the developers add that extra 150 pages of content? The reason why I think this is "the" question is because my largest complaint still remaining, and that of several posters I have noted on the most recent playtest blog, is that there aren't currently enough feat options for weird, out-of-the-box concepts inside each class or the general feats that everyone has access to. I don't feel the sense of a straitjacket that I have seen others comment on, but I don't blame them for feeling it.

A couple examples.

* There are, speaking in very broad terms, roughly half a dozen common "fighting styles" that martial characters use, such as unarmed, two-weapon, sword and shield, heavy two-hand melee, reach/"battlefield control," or archery. In the playtest doc, only the fighter has ready access to even a majority of these, and no class can do all of them without a multiclass archetype. While I understand and even kind of approve of the class siloing, it would be really good if all or almost all the martial classes had some variant on each of these available to them.

* Right now, no proficiency except skills can be raised above Expert outside of class features or class feats. I would like to see the ability to use general feats or generically-available class feats permit any proficiency to be raised to Master, should the player's concept so require it.

Right now, the developers' approach to these issues seems to be via archetypes, whether multiclass or otherwise. ("Mounted Combat" is basically an archetype right now, for example, and Jason mentioned in another thread creating an archetype for two-handed weaponry.) I don't think that's necessarily a mistake, but I do think it's limiting in its own right, since archetypes are exclusionary. That leads back to the sense that the character space is too tight and there's not enough customization possible. There's also the "pick your feat as though you were an X of half your level" complication, which locks out any multiclass option higher than 10th level.

If the plan is to allow these kinds of customization options via archetype, then I would strongly urge the developers to consider making only the multiclass archetypes exclusionary, or at least reducing the minimum feat obligation to just one more feat on non-archetype Dedications. If that's not the plan, then please find some other way to give us the tools we need to color at least a little outside the lines in the PF2 Core.

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