| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think 'general feats' should be entirely removed, and either moved into class feats or moved into skill feats. Reasons:
1. There are too many different types of feats. While ancestry feats, class feats, skill feats and archetype feats all have a clear place in the game and can be easily understood during char-gen, general feats seem a little bit lost and are complex to understand, particularly the distinction between skill and general feats as currently expressed in the rules.
2. Skill feats need to be beefed up. Having 'legendary will defense' or whatever as a skill feat requiring legendary arcana/religion/occult skill would make reaching higher levels of skills more exciting. Ditto fleet requiring expert in acrobatics, and so on. This provides additional interest in training up skills, since currently becoming a master providing a +1 is a bit meh.
3. The general feats are the most boring and are simply math pluses to numbers in most cases. They don't make the game better in my opinion, and they feel like a waste of space.
4. With general feats put into the other feat categories, that would leave provide opportunity for extra class feats or skill feats as characters level up.
I'd be okay with this.
| 9 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'd prefer the opposite. They should grant you more general feats, and one at first level, and create a pool of combat feats that you can spend them on.
I'd prefer the opposite. They should grant you more general feats, and one at first level, and create a pool of combat feats that you can spend them on.
Why limiting it to combat feats tho?
| 6 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think ditching Skill Feats, and moving about half of the existing Class Feats to General Feats would have better net effect.
I don't mind skill feats, but I do agree with the rest.
Customising your fighter is abysmal at the moment. In PF1e you had up to 21 combat feats, 3 advances weapon training talents and 3 advanced armor talents. This was a pool of 27 meaning ways to express your combat prowess.
In PF2e it's great that you get some skill feats to advance your capabilities out of combat (something the PF1e fighter sorely needed), but fighters get only 11 combat feats. That's less than half the ways in which a fighter can express their combat prowess which is a substantial decrease. Furthermore because of how stripped back the fighter is, all other classes have had to have their combat fear selection similarly stripped back.
Removing general feats and giving every class more class feats would be a small step in the right direction. Making general feats as powerful as class feats and moving a whole swathe of class feats into the general feat category would be even better.
Removing general feats and giving every class more class feats would be a small step in the right direction. Making general feats as powerful as class feats and moving a whole swathe of class feats into the general feat category would be even better.
This plus making the feats themselves much more interesting is all this system needs to go from stable but bland to something I really really want to play.
| 7 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think the best thing to do is
#1 move all the non class specific feats out of class feats and put them into general: there is no reason to have multiple ways to fight with 2 weapons for instance and those type of feats aren't really linked to the class.
#2 have class feats actually increase your class abilities. You shouldn't have a class feat be something you'd expect to see on other classes like basic combat styles. It makes your class feel more important if your feat picks actually reinforce that.
#3 vastly improve the quality and quantity of all feats: I don't want to pick a feat because it's the least objectionable one of because it's the only viable option. I want to every feat choice to feel meaningful, useful and desirable. I want it have multiple good options every time I pick.
I think the best thing to do is
#1 move all the non class specific feats out of class feats and put them into general: there is no reason to have multiple ways to fight with 2 weapons for instance and those type of feats aren't really linked to the class.
#2 have class feats actually increase your class abilities. You shouldn't have a class feat be something you'd expect to see on other classes like basic combat styles. It makes your class feel more important if your feat picks actually reinforce that.
#3 vastly improve the quality and quantity of all feats: I don't want to pick a feat because it's the least objectionable one of because it's the only viable option. I want to every feat choice to feel meaningful, useful and desirable. I want it have multiple good options every time I pick.
Number 3 cannot happen because this would make characters power level unpredictable, which is opposite to the current design paradigm
Let me expand
Imagine at every level you can choose to make a single one particular aspect of your character significantly stronger.
If you pick option A you are much better at A than if you chose B and, by comparison, much worse at B than if you chose B instead of A; and vice versa
This means that multiplied for 20 levels you have 20 chances of getting "much better" or by comparison "much worse" at something
By lv20 the possible character builds are so diverse that the designers would be unable to create perfectly railroaded adventure path.
Above all, such a scenario would also have the unwanted effect of allowing fun, which curiosly is not amongst the current design goals
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'd prefer the opposite. They should grant you more general feats, and one at first level, and create a pool of combat feats that you can spend them on.Why limiting it to combat feats tho?
I believe Metamagic and a few other obvious overlaps are implied here, just Combat Feats being the most discussed one.
I believe Metamagic and a few other obvious overlaps are implied here, just Combat Feats being the most discussed one.I'd prefer the opposite. They should grant you more general feats, and one at first level, and create a pool of combat feats that you can spend them on.Why limiting it to combat feats tho?
Yeah, most class feats are fine with they are, only a those 2 examples really stand out as something that could benefit from being universal.
If this change is made, there would need to be a lot more General Feats gained, though.
I believe Metamagic and a few other obvious overlaps are implied here, just Combat Feats being the most discussed one.I'd prefer the opposite. They should grant you more general feats, and one at first level, and create a pool of combat feats that you can spend them on.Why limiting it to combat feats tho?Yeah, most class feats are fine with they are, only a those 2 examples really stand out as something that could benefit from being universal.
If this change is made, there would need to be a lot more General Feats gained, though.
I don't think you'd need that many to be honest, as Class Feats could still modify some of the baseline functionality for General Feats.
Really they just need to grant an additional General Feat at level 1.
|
I could see the basic suggestion here working well. I think skill feats are the groundwork for a great design, but the content isn't quite there yet. And both the name of general feats and their interaction with skill feats is a bit confusing.
One of the biggest benefits we've found with the Playtest's approach to character creation is people not having to dive right into a huge list of feats. So adding a general feat (or skill feat) at first level would be a step back.
3. The general feats are the most boring and are simply math pluses to numbers in most cases. They don't make the game better in my opinion, and they feel like a waste of space.
I will counter this a bit, though. Little nudges to math aren't necessarily the most interesting, but they are less complex and don't generally require special tracking.
This serves a really vital role in letting players choose their own level of complexity. It sounds weird, but forcing people to choose interesting feats isn't ultimately good for the game. Sometimes, they just need to choose a thing, adjust some stuff on their sheet and forget about it.
Cheers!
Landon
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I agree with point 2 and parts of 3, but I think general feats are pretty important for a few reasons. They are in the perfect position to develop the aspects of a character not covered by class, especially weird ones that don't fit nicely into skill feats.
Feats like toughness and armor proficiency are pretty boring by themselves, but they make a heavily armored melee wizard/Fighter less dangerously fragile. For non cross-class characters, things like breath control and ride can help stretch a character to be capable of more than what is defined by their class, which is even more important in this edition, since classes have stronger niche protection.
And yeah, a decent number of them are kind of boring, but there are lots of great feats from 1e that wouldn't quite fit as skill feats or class feats, like drunkards recovery, the possessed hand feat line, brilliant planner, and elongated cranium. If these sort of feats had to directly compete with skill feats or class feats, then they couldn't exist without being trap options unless you find some crazy synergy that makes them more powerful than intended. That was the situation for a lot of neat feats in 1e and general feats avoids this.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I can agree general feats do feel weird... I would rather you ha a pool of feats inside a class that most classes can take and a few only that class can take. Including something like. Oh this class can pick "Weapon proficiency group increase." up to legendary. Instead of only having a general feat that makes you just well... Trained in a simple weapons.
IMO, I like General feats, as they provide the area for feats that are just kind of boring, but necessary, like weapon/armor proficiency, toughness, and others which will come either in the CRB or in later suppliments, and having that room, or the room to take extra ancestry feats or skill feats with them means you'll always have an option for something more interesting, if you don't need any of the boring but necessary feats.
I think there are valid points to what you say, especially that skill feats could be beefed up, but I think the biggest issue is that General feats shouldn't be the only choice at the levels you get them (same, probably with ancestry feats, though 1.4 might change that for me). If you look at them through the lens of being your one main point of differentiation at 3rd/7th/ect levels, they're very underwhelming, but I could see a better approach, involving a change to archetypes, perhaps becoming more akin to expanded backgrounds (i.e. maybe a Wilderness Guide, who gets bonuses to tracking and assisting others in environmental challenges), and having those be the off-level main feats, in addition to the general/ancestry feats, much in the same way that class feats are the even-level main feats, supplemented with skill feats. It'd mess with MC archetypes a little, but maybe archetypes could still provide class feat options as well, which could only be chosen with your class feats, not archetype feats, but this way, I think it'd allow you to make meaningful character choice at each level, while still allowing for the boring necessities.