The Customization Bottleneck

[Captain Morgan]

Kerobelis wrote:

Captain Morgan wrote:

I've always felt 5e has really good feats, with the major failing being how high the opportunity cost is for taking feats resulting in often getting very few of them. (Or at the very least, not getting them until high levels.) I think having 5e level feats delivered on a pathfinder feat budget would be really fun.

There is a big difference though. 5th edition D&D feats are rare and come at a cost of sacrificing your ability score advancement. Due to these two reasons, they need to be great. I also do not consider this a failure, i think it is a very meaningful decision in the development of a 5th edition D&D character. One of the few that gets made as 5th edition doesn't have a lot of character decision points as they level.

With all the feats in PF2, i cannot see how you could make that many that all have such a high power level as 5th edition.

Respectfully, why not? The assumption here seems to be that you need to keep Pathfinder on a similar power curve as 5e. Which is definitely not true numerically, given how much fast proficiency scales, and I don't see why it needs to be true for the caliber of feats. What I liked about Pathfinder 1 was that if I knew the system well enough I could build a super hero. My hope for PF2 is that you can make a super hero with a much lower threshold for system mastery, and it is harder to make a really bad character.

I guess you could also argue that 5e level feats might also be too complicated than players could handle, but I don't know that breaking everything up into multiple feats make it simpler. Like, because animal companions are 4 separate feats, the mechanics section on how an animal companion grows is much harder to understand than if they just had a single progression. Sundering spells vs enchantments on items being two separate feats is another example. Just make one feat that does both-- having to tell a player "you can't disrupt the enchantment on this item because you only have the spell disruption feat" is confusing and disappointing.

I think every feat you take should feel significant, and there's probably ways to do it without breaking the game or making it too hard to learn.

[Fuzzypaws]

I am definitely a fan of meaningful feats and scaling feats.

One thing they could potentially do is have a higher power tier of Uber feats over (hopefully still meaningful) class feats. These would be the big ticket items like a scaling animal companion. The cost could be handled a couple ways:

* The easiest option is that you get one and only one, as a bonus for being a 1st level character.

* Alternately, you have to pay a general feat to get them (and in turn, general feats happen at 1st level and then X levels thereafter). You can use a general feat to get one Uber feat from your class, or pick up multiclassing or whatever if you want to do that instead.

(The boring general feats currently in the playtest would be alternately moved to skill feats, or heavily shored up and improved.)

* Alternately, if skill feats remain their own progression separate from skill increases (and I do want them to be combined), pay both your class feat and skill feat at a given level to get the Uber feat.

[ShadeRaven]

So many mixed emotions on this subject.

1) I really disliked the Super Hero aspect of PF1 that Captain mentioned, but really not because of the Super Hero build itself, but because of the disparity it created between the haves and have-nots. That specific aspect almost made PF1 unplayable within this community until we found a balance that worked for everyone - and even that was unfortunate because I have some players who literally scaled down their characters to be more compatible with the others who weren't as good or as caring about maximizing efficiency.

So in that regard, I want to echo what Captain said in his post: a lower threshold for mastery and a higher floor for non-optimizers would be welcome.

2) There is some interesting aspects to the PF2 approach with more feats broken into different categories. Players are enjoying more customizing options. However, there's definitely been commentary on how some feats just seem to be lacking and that's the problem with so many options - breaking them up into segments sometimes leaves a disparity in what was a key feature and what was rather mundane. Now there exists some feats that feel highly desirable with others being very, very meh.

[Vic Ferrari]

ShadeRaven wrote:

So many mixed emotions on this subject.

1) I really disliked the Super Hero aspect of PF1 that Captain mentioned, but really not because of the Super Hero build itself, but because of the disparity it created between the haves and have-nots. That specific aspect almost made PF1 unplayable within this community until we found a balance that worked for everyone - and even that was unfortunate because I have some players who literally scaled down their characters to be more compatible with the others who weren't as good or as caring about maximizing efficiency.

So in that regard, I want to echo what Captain said in his post: a lower threshold for mastery and a higher floor for non-optimizers would be welcome.

2) There is some interesting aspects to the PF2 approach with more feats broken into different categories. Players are enjoying more customizing options. However, there's definitely been commentary on how some feats just seem to be lacking and that's the problem with so many options - breaking them up into segments sometimes leaves a disparity in what was a key feature and what was rather mundane. Now there exists some feats that feel highly desirable with others being very, very meh.

Spot on, my sentiments, exactly. So, PF2 should have more customisation/feat options than 5th Ed, not quite as macro, but not as micro as many are, currently. I think they could pull that off.