Excessive Siloing


General Discussion


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[Siloing - when the game gives characters resources to spend in several distinct lists of different content]

With 1.4, a new kind of feat was introduced, the heritage feat.

From memory, we now have Class feats >> General feats >> Ancestry feats >> Heritage Feats >> Skill Feats

Each of these categories is worse than the one before - the exact order is debatable. With class feats already being on the weak side compared to what we were doing in PF1, skill feats obviously have to be almost worthless, and most of them are indeed so. But there are always a few gems, or at least things that can be abused.

I feel this is not a good way to structure character creation. The many different options become restrictive instead of permissive. Depending on the PCs concept, there are bound to be some categories that are very useful and others that are off. Not only because of the power goal of each category, but simply because there is a limit to designer creativity and foresight, as well as the amount of text you can use.

I feel this siloing should be reduced. At the very least, allow us to replace feats with other feat categories lower on the totem pole, so that we can change Class feats for General feats and so on. But preferably also by abandoning the deliberate power difference between different kinds of feats.

It is impossible for every list of feats to pander to every player's wants. And it is also impossible for designers to write to 5 or more different standards of power throughout. The more power classifications you try to keep, the bigger the risk of making feats either too weak or too powerful.


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Actually, 1.4 removed Heritage Feats, by replacing them with Heritages. (Heritage feats were Ancestry feats you could only take at first level)

Heritages are one time choises for your character.
I'm glad they lost the feat-label so it's easier to notice that you only gain them when creating the character.

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As for the power-level of different feats: Yeah... I don't know.

Yes Class feats are different from General feats are different from Ancestry feats.

Skill feats all have the "General" trait, so you can take Skill feats when you gain a General feat (but not the other way around).


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Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Charter Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

I'd actually love if some of the weaker class feats got the general tag so you could grab them with a general feat. Some of the monk movement ones are of similar strength to a skill feat so it'd be nice to have that as an option.


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I think class feats and race feats need to get tossed by the wayside. Have combat feats, skill feats and utility feats. By all means have some feats have a class or race as a prerequisite, but don't make that the default assumption. Then each class determines how quickly the different types of feats are handed out.


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My first impression of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition was its character class system seemed to have cobble together three separate customization subsystems. It had feats mostly for the fighter, skills mostly for the rogue, and spells mostly for the cleric and wizard. The earlier editions of D&D had not had 3rd Edition's emphasis on creating unique characters. Pathfinder kept that degree of customization and added archetypes, too.

The changes in Pathfinder 2nd Edition don't increase the siloing. By combining together BAB, saves, weapon and armor proficiency, and skills into the proficiency system and envisioning racial traits as ancestry feats, Pathfinder 2nd Edition created more uniformity between the silos so that we can compare them more easily. Once two silos become compatible with each other, we wonder why they are still separate.

The main reason to separate silos is to reduce min-maxing. Specializing in an individually important area, leaving the rest of the party to carry the burden in other areas, is built right into the game. It could be the character who can fight but cannot deal with social situations, it could be the character who can pick locks but cannot ride a horse. Overspecializing, AKA min-maxing, is when the neglected areas are important, too. An example of overspecializing is a fighter great at melee attacks but entirely lacking a ranged attack.

Overspecializing is a pain on us GMs. If we create a challenge based on the specialty, it is too easy for the specialist and too hard for everyone else. If we create a challenge based on anything else, it is too hard for the specialist. The player designed his character so that his only fun is excessive victories in identical challenges. I try to discourage overspecialization by varying the challenges while the character is merely specialized but not yet overspecialized.

The Pathfinder 2nd Edition silos don't do much to prevent min-maxing. For example, a melee specialist could chose Weapon Familiarity from ancestry feats, melee combat feats from class feats, and melee combat defenses from the skill feats. The character can still ignore investigative and social abilities and might even be deficient in ranged attacks. The feat silos in Pathfinder 2nd Edition are set up by prerequisites--if a feat has a skill requirement, then it is a skll feat--rather than by roles in the game.

Liberty's Edge

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I like things being divided up. I like that fighters and rangers can do similar thing sin different ways. I like that I'm picking from small lists every level instead of one giant list where I'll never even look at half of the options and have to filter out all of the ones that have prerequisites I'll never meet.

The current structure of class feats definitely makes them more accessible to new players. It also makes it easier to compare what Class A and Class B can do at Level X.


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I will always find it weird and gamey that you can take feats (and even bloodlines for sorcerers) at later levels to obtain abilities that are literally part of your birth. Yeah, I can explain it away with a wave of my magic "but it's a latent ability that didn't come out until you are older" wand, but it still feels like the system is moving in the wrong direction on stuff like this. I mean, I am all for customization, but artificially spreading ancestry/heritage traits out across the character's career is form following function.


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John Mechalas wrote:
I will always find it weird and gamey that you can take feats (and even bloodlines for sorcerers) at later levels to obtain abilities that are literally part of your birth.

I think it makes sense for characters who are literally transforming into something else (e.g. certain Sorcerer bloodlines). If my Elf Sorcerer has the Undead bloodline and is slowly becoming Undead...that tracks with established fantasy themes. The supernatural bloodline is slowly overwriting the mundane bloodline.

John Mechalas wrote:
Yeah, I can explain it away with a wave of my magic "but it's a latent ability that didn't come out until you are older" wand, but it still feels like the system is moving in the wrong direction on stuff like this. I mean, I am all for customization, but artificially spreading ancestry/heritage traits out across the character's career is form following function.

But adopting it wholesale for ancestry is pretty gamey. I like that it neatly replaces Level Adjustment, Templates, and Pathfinder First Edition's "Racial" Feats...but those are gamey reasons to like it.


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I really like the siloing. It's a combat focused game if combat feats and skill feats come from the same pool skill feats will almost never be taken. General feats could probably be removed or combined with ancestry feats but I think the Class Feat/Skill Feat separation is ultimately a good thing.


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The Once and Future Kai wrote:
But adopting it wholesale for ancestry is pretty gamey. I like that it neatly replaces Level Adjustment, Templates, and Pathfinder First Edition's "Racial" Feats...but those are gamey reasons to like it.

And... I am going to agree with you on that last point. There are a lot of game reasons to like it.

This is one of those "I don't like it but I can accept it" things.


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And there are a few game reasons to dislike it. Neglecting roleplay contributions, what is there to make a class worth playing more than once? It's certainly not the different ways one could choose to build said class. Heck, given the total homogeneity, what is there to make building any character except your first interesting?


Pathfinder PF Special Edition Subscriber

Class feats are the replacement for the majority of PF1's class features and archetype features. They're basically a more streamlined, more flexible, easier to use method for class customization. In that sense, PF2 isn't any more siloed than PF1.

If class feats became fungible with general feats or with skill feats, then the differentiation between classes would be greatly reduced. This would go about half the way to a classless system, not necessarily a bad system, but then we aren't talking about Pathfinder anymore.

I can see arguments for renaming class feats into something else, to avoid the uniform use of the word "feat" (even though this uniformity has some benefits). I can see arguments for increasing access to certain class feats, or even for making a few of them general feats. But ditching class feats altogether doesn't make sense to me.


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There is another term for siloing: feat tax.


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thorin001 wrote:
There is another term for siloing: feat tax.

That is blatantly wrong. Feat tax is when you need to take a feat you don't want in order to get something you do want. At worst you could say siloing causes wasted feats if you literally cannot find any skill feat worth taking on your character.


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thorin001 wrote:
There is another term for siloing: feat tax.

No, feat tax has a specific meaning- something you have to take to fix the math or to gain the ability to take later feats.

PF2 is now littered with the equivalent of 'weapon focus' (become expert at X,Y,Z), demonstrating the former. There are still a couple of the latter but they're admittedly on shorter chains.

---

The specific siloing problem that PF2 has created is most of the feats are garbage, and there isn't any reason to take them. But you have to fill up your character sheet with something at pretty much every level, regardless of how silly or worthless it is. This is particularly true of racial and especially skill feats.

Leveling a rogue is an exercise in managing an absolute tidal wave of trash and traps for no reason.


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Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

I'm okay with the Class, Ancestry, Skill, General "silos". They make it easy to create certain kinds of feats that aren't immediately discarded by optimizers.

The kind of siloing that I don't like is dividing feats up by level and dividing basic combat styles up by class. You end up forced to take things you don't really want because there are no good options, and forced to multiclass just to think outside your class's box.

They should seriously reconsider the level tiers, either reducing it down to 1-10 and 11-20, or removing them entirely. Prerequisite feats already function as level requirement anyway.

General feats need to be seriously beefed up to offload a lot of what Class feats are being required to fill right now, and letting you make combat style choices outside of class.


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Feats are "garbage" because in order to make characters power perfectly predictable at all levels, Paizo had no other choice but making all feats basically irrelevant

If all feats are weak, no matter what you choose (or don't choose), your character will always stay into the predefined range of power.

This ensures that the game is always balanced no matter what the players choose, because, well, their choices technically don't matter

This wouldn't be bad, if the players didn't notice.
Problem is... they do.

This is not going to change. Let's look at facts.
The official Design Goals clearly state that one of the game's priority is to be well balanced.
However, nowhere in the list it says that building characters is supposed to be engaging on a theorycrafting level.

That is the job of other games, such as, well... Pathfinder 1, amongst many others.

PF2 is different and unfortunately, as the time goes on, this fact appears to be less and less likely to change.


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D@rK-SePHiRoTH- wrote:

Feats are "garbage" because in order to make characters power perfectly predictable at all levels, Paizo had no other choice but making all feats basically irrelevant

If all feats are weak, no matter what you choose (or don't choose), your character will always stay into the predefined range of power.

This ensures that the game is always balanced no matter what the players choose, because, well, their choices technically don't matter

This wouldn't be bad, if the players didn't notice.
Problem is... they do.

This is not going to change. Let's look at facts.
The official Design Goals clearly state that one of the game's priority is to be well balanced.
However, nowhere in the list it says that building characters is supposed to be engaging on a theorycrafting level.

That is the job of other games, such as, well... Pathfinder 1, amongst many others.

PF2 is different and unfortunately, as the time goes on, this fact appears to be less and less likely to change.

What do you want from feats? More chances to hit? More damage? Bigger numbers?

I'd rather have feats that give my character more options, instead of improving the same, basic thing over and over.
When you built an archer in PF1, feat choices were always the same: a long chain that made you incredibly good at full attacking. One character could take a feat before the other, but in the end they all had more or less the same ones. And their turn played almost exactly in the same way: the Inquisitor full attacked with manyshot and a judgement or bane, the Zen Archer full attacked with flurry, the Fighter full attacked with manyshot and higher BaB...
A fun game, IMHO, shouldn't give me a long series of feats to improve my DPR and that I'm basically forced to take; I would rather have one, two at most of them, to give me a solid (and possibly scaling) mathematical improvement in the style I'm committing to, while the rest should be options: pin the enemy, disarm it with my arrow, make a counter-shot to deflect the enemy's projectile... FUN things that make my turn different, and give me versatility.

I find PF2 lacking in this regard, but not for the reason you speak about; anyway I'm slightly optimistic because I'm pretty sure that the situation will improve when more feats will be realeased, with the CRB and with the later books.


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No I just want feats to be relevant, I didn't say it has to be through numbers.

Relevant such as choosing street style over outslug style or viceversa.

Feats that do something noticeable, and you can use often.


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WatersLethe wrote:
I'm okay with the Class, Ancestry, Skill, General "silos". They make it easy to create certain kinds of feats that aren't immediately discarded by optimizers.

I don't see how this helps.

D@rK-SePHiRoTH- wrote:

No I just want feats to be relevant, I didn't say it has to be through numbers.

Relevant such as choosing street style over outslug style or viceversa.

Feats that do something noticeable, and you can use often.

I kinda agree. I feel each time you pick a feat it should be to "do a cool new thing" rather than just add numbers to stuff.

Comparing such feats is a bit harder so maybe harder to min max but at the same time you could run into instances where the feat is worthless.


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I have no issue with Silos in game design and I don't think what we see in the playtest is excessive... Just confusingly organized and poorly presented (and that starts with almost everything being labelled a feat in my opinion). It's also cumbersome that Skill proficiency has it's own system (which is refreshingly straightforward/universal) but that the other proficiency "Silos" work differently.

One thing I like about the playtest (after Update 1.2) is that it allows - well, really, basically forces - characters to be good at a variety of things. This isn't just good to cut back on minmax characters but it's also good for new players and for variety in general. It was too easy in the past to devote all character options to a single goal - forcing characters to diversify builds verisimilitude.


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If you want to throw everything at the 'I hit it with my sharp piece of metal' target you can still do that in PF2. Underwater marauder & similar are skill feats with no use outside combat, and I'm sure more of them will be made in PF2's future. Siloed feats don't necessarily promote diversity.


Here's a crazy idea:

What if you did away with Skill Feats completely, and rolled some of the abilities you gain through them into that actual skills themselves? They'd only be usable at Expert/Master/Legendary, depending. And then increase the number of skill trainings you get.

For example, roll the benefits of Quick Jump into the descriptions of High Jump and Long Jump, with a line like "If you are Expert in Athletics, you can Long Jump as one action". So you're still choosing what cool, new things you get to do with your skills, but it consolidates things a bit.

One thing I found while making higher level characters was that I would cherry pick what Skill Feats I wanted and then determine my skill trainings retroactively. Or conversely, I would train up whatever skills I wanted to have the highest bonus and then only focus on choosing Skill Feats for those skills. This I think shows that there is some overlap between these two "silos" when determining my character's design. So perhaps overlapping silos can be combined?!

EDIT:
OR maybe vice versa!
Roll skill trainings into the Skill Feats.
When you choose Quick Jump, you become an Expert in Athletics.


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I like Skill feats since they let you differentiate between different aspects of a single skill- 2 people equally proficient in the skill can have different strengths. Climbing vs. Swimming, Coercion vs. Demoralize, Lying vs. Disguise, etc.


Franz Lunzer wrote:

Actually, 1.4 removed Heritage Feats, by replacing them with Heritages. (Heritage feats were Ancestry feats you could only take at first level)

Heritages are one time choises for your character.
I'm glad they lost the feat-label so it's easier to notice that you only gain them when creating the character.

---------------

As for the power-level of different feats: Yeah... I don't know.

Yes Class feats are different from General feats are different from Ancestry feats.

Skill feats all have the "General" trait, so you can take Skill feats when you gain a General feat (but not the other way around).

Thanks to the siloing, that means that an Ancestry feat doesn't have to be as good or useful as a General or Class feat, since you can't choose it at the same time (usually). Light flavourful additions to a character don't have to compete with a +1 to Initiative or a Saving Throw. I think Ancestry feats should be renamed as something else, since people are still assuming that an Ancestry feat should be equal to other feats.


Bardarok wrote:
thorin001 wrote:
There is another term for siloing: feat tax.
That is blatantly wrong. Feat tax is when you need to take a feat you don't want in order to get something you do want. At worst you could say siloing causes wasted feats if you literally cannot find any skill feat worth taking on your character.

like having to take Fighter Dedication to get power attack (for instance)?


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Rob Godfrey wrote:
Bardarok wrote:
thorin001 wrote:
There is another term for siloing: feat tax.
That is blatantly wrong. Feat tax is when you need to take a feat you don't want in order to get something you do want. At worst you could say siloing causes wasted feats if you literally cannot find any skill feat worth taking on your character.
like having to take Fighter Dedication to get power attack (for instance)?

So just rename the class feat to one that doesn't resemble a feat from the previous edition? Its not like it does the same thing.

It really is a lot more like vital strike anyways.

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