| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
To make a more well rounded, multi-dimensional characters. As well as limit how many things you can stack.
Also, yes. If you had 30 feats from the same bucket, it would be nearly impossible to go balance all 30*29*28*27*26...
= 265252859812191058636308480000000 combinations of feats. Split them into different buckets, and you have a lot less interactions to worry about.
Also, stuff like Ancestral Paragon exists. So if you want to trade your general feat for an extra ancestral feat, you can.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As you said, helping make it easier to balance is one reason. If one pool ia full of extremely powerful options, you can only get into so much trouble with a limited number of feat choices in that pool.
The other, probably more important, reason is that it allows you to make choices that would be sub-optimal if it were open season.
Every character gets skill feats so that they can customize that aspect of their character. If a person who likes non combat skills joined a game of combat focused optimizers, they would be ridiculed for spending valuable character resources on Cooking, for example.
It's the same for the ancestry feat pool, everyone gets ways to express their ancestry without falling behind the meta of optimized "take only the powerful feats to trivialize one aspect of the game" that frequently crops up.
The skill system is better for it, and Ancestries are more engaging for it, and classes are more varied for it.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
One of the things I immediately found odd/confusing with second edition is there are all these feats—so many feats!—but I only get this many ancestry feats, that many general/skill feats, that many class feats. Why can't I just get feats and take them from any bucket? If I want to be pathetic at skills and focus on being a paragon of my ancestry, why not?
The obvious answer is that the system wasn't designed that way and you could be brokenly powerful if you were able to take 30 druid class feats (for example), but that leaves the question of why the system was designed the way it is. Maybe it just wouldn't be possible to balance things around an open feat pool.
It's because in 1E, all your feats competed for space from one pool. Other than as a prerequisite for another feat did any one ever take Deceptive or Awareness (+2 two skills)? When your choices are keep up with the monsters and be effective in combat or take an interesting skill feat that has no application in combat, the combat feat will win out almost every time.
Even for classes that have 2 feat buckets with talents or powers every even level, those talent/power buckets also compete with regular feats. Just look at the 1E rogue. Weapon Training, Combat Training, Weapon Finesse, Improved Steal, and "Feat" talents are all feats that eat into an ostensibly separate feat pool.
This guarantees a well rounded PC and helps to alleviate the feeling that you have to choose between building an interesting character OR one that is effective in combat. Now you can have both.
|
Plus some buckets have better options than others.
The various [Ancestry] Lore feats make you Trained in 2 skills and a Lore, with no requirement other than being a member of that Ancestry.
Compare that to the Skill Training feat, which has an Int requirement and only makes you Trained in 1 skill.
Since the [Ancestry] Lore feats exist only in the Ancestry "bucket", it now competes for attention with unrelated feats.
|
I don't mind there being separate buckets for feats. Skill feats existing is a good thing, as it encourages characters that wouldn't have invested in Skills before to do so. General Feats, I think, are vastly underused in the system. There are relatively few General Feats that aren't also Skill Feats, and I feel compelled to try to use them, due to the limited number of General Feats a character can take. But that's at least one place where there is some flexibility.
What I really miss is having Combat Feats. I'm not a fan of defining classes by fighting style. I would much rather they be defined by the abilities they grant than whether they are good for two-weapon fighting or two-handed fighting or whatever. Archetypes were supposed to fix that, but I don't think they have. I want to be able to spend my class feats on class things, not trading away multiple class feats just to get marginally better at fighting with a particular type of weapon. Yes, some class abilities will be combat oriented, but many of them are just combat feats disguised as class feats, which is why they keep getting reprinted (sometimes under a different name with a slight variation) across several classes.
What I really miss is having Combat Feats. I'm not a fan of defining classes by fighting style. I would much rather they be defined by the abilities they grant than whether they are good for two-weapon fighting or two-handed fighting or whatever. Archetypes were supposed to fix that, but I don't think they have. I want to be able to spend my class feats on class things, not trading away multiple class feats just to get marginally better at fighting with a particular type of weapon. Yes, some class abilities will be combat oriented, but many of them are just combat feats disguised as class feats, which is why they keep getting reprinted (sometimes under a different name with a slight variation) across several classes.
Free Archetype is great for this!
I prefer double class feats, though, so you can choose to double down on your class's schtick if you want instead.
So you want more combat-usable general feats?
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I remember in 1E, getting people, particularly new people, to play was always a challenge because they would simply be overwhelmed by the sheer number of choices.
Splitting things into buckets in 2E makes things much simpler, less intimidating, and less time consuming. It means that if you're making a 1st-level fighter, you only need to look at five or ten class feat options, not a thousand.
As 2E continues to grow, I have a feeling those buckets are going to do more to combat the impression of rules bloat than anything.
I imagine it makes game development easier too. Developers can generally focus more on balancing new options with other options in the same bucket, rather than against everything ever produced.
|
|
So you want more combat-usable general feats?
I want more General Feats that aren't skill feats. There are only 14 1st level General Feats (4 of which I would describe as Combat Feats - the proficiency feats, Incredible Initiative, and Shield Block, though you could throw Toughness and Diehard in with them if you want).
You could shift some of the feats that are in classes over to be general feats. If shield block belongs there, then Attack of Opportunity could as well (just give it a prerequisite of being Expert in at least one weapon so it's still becoming accessible around the same level).
I think what I want is a separate bucket of Combat Feats. So Fighter could work more like Rogue does for Skill Feats. So everyone gets a certain amount of Class Feats, Skill Feats, and Combat Feats, and you could use your General Feats to take any of those. As opposed to General Feats just being Skill Feats plus a few other options, and Class Feats having to cover both Combat and Class abilities.
Fighter would then just get a Combat Feat every level, or have to option to take a Combat Feat instead of a Class Feat.
That way if, for example, my Alchemist wants to get a little better a shooting his alchemical crossbow, I just take Point-Blank Shot at whatever level it's available, instead of having to take proficiency in Shortbow/Longbow and then Point-Blank Shot and losing two Alchemist abilities for the privilege of doing so. Plus being locked out of another dedication unless I trade away another Alchemist ability first.
Or an Investigator who just wants to get better with a shortbow could do the same, without having to trade away 2 Investigator abilities and picking up proficiencies they already have.
It is way more difficult to explain to someone that if they want to shoot a crossbow a little better they have to take an archetype and jump through hoops than it is to tell them to take Point-Blank Shot with their level 1 feat.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Pathfinder 1st edition had a problem where sometimes a race got a neat, and flavorful racial feat but even if you like it the opportunity cost for taking it would be that you don't get a really efficient combat related feat instead.
Also, people would never take things like Alertness or Deceitful over things that help your combat schtick unless it was free or it was a prerequisite for something they wanted for their combat schtick.
By putting all the things in different bins I can now have a halfling archer who is an excellent liar and has possibly supernatural luck, because "archery", "lying", and "luck" are all in different bins. Previously I would have to go all in on archery (a feat intensive thing) and either get the other stuff from a class or just wait on it. Additionally "I progress in at archery, lying, and luck at about the same rate" is more natural than "I master one then move on to the others."
Having the different buckets also helps to balance feats.
In 1E, there was one giant bucket called feats and everything was in it. The only way you could control when someone got a feat was stacking ridiculous prerequisites on top of it. Even then a Fighter was getting it 5-10 levels ahead of anyone else. Prereq-s also mean that a player has to plan out their PC from level 1 to 20, because if you take the wrong level 1 feat, your build doesn't come online until level 11 instead of 7. Now you have to slog through 4 more levels of boring play because you didn't review all 10,000 feats across 100 books at level 1.
In 2E, it's not only Class, General, Skill, Ancestry. It's Class 2, Skill 1, General 3, Ancestry 5 etc. Since the Designers know 100% the earliest you can get a feat, they can better balance it with the expectations of the game design. It also means that you can easily compare it to other same bucket/level feats for balance. Instead of comparing to 100000000000 feats, you are just comparing to all level 9 Ancestry feats. This makes it much easier to see if it is significantly better or worse than other same/same feats. Is it the best feat in the bucket? Maybe bump it up to level 13 instead of 9, etc.
It helps with game design and with leveling up. You hit level 2, pick from these 5 feats. You hit level 10, pick from these 5 feats.
Typically there is a value progression. Class Feats are restricted the most tightly and are typically the best
Class Feats > General Feats > Ancestry Feats > Skill Feats
But it is no where close to definitive and there are ways of swapping.
I sort of like it as it forces players to make different types of choices and focus on their skills as well as direct combat abilities.
The APG gave us a lot more but also mudied the waters:
There are more Skill Feats that are offensive combat abilities.
There are now Skill Feats that are dependant on an Archetype, and don't show up in the normal Skill Feat lists.
There are now a lot of Archetypes that are not MultiClass Archetypes.