Focus Feat Unlocks

[siegfriedliner]

So I was wondering if there was a place for basic boosting some combat feats by requiring a focus expenditure in the fashion of some of the skill unlocks and mythic feats of 1e.

My first thought is something like whirling throw which lets you throw an enemy as an action with a successful athletics roll could be unlocked by paying your focus point to ignore size limitations and allow you to chuck 1 enemy into another (like skittles).

What do you think ? Any mileage in that sort of approach.

[Sanityfaerie]

It's certainly possible to use focus points as currency for "make this thing more awesome", but there are a number of potential issues with it.

- Balance. You're proposing not just one new way to spend focus points, but lots and lots of new ways. Balancing them all so that they're not seriously overpowered is likely to be tricky. If you also want to make sure that they're not just a waste of a focus point, that's even more.

- Balance again. Not everyone gets focus points. Fighters don't. Barbarians don't. Rogues don't.. and so on. Requiring that those classes unlock focus points (by investing in archetype feats until they get a focus spell) while the classes that get it naturally just have them available rather skews the balance in one way. If you just say that no, it's cool, everyone gets focus points to play with, then that's skewing it the other.

- Balance a third time. If you're offering a bunch of different ways to spend focus points that come for free with otherwise desirable feats, then that kind of devalues the feats that only give focus spells.

Okay, so most of the potential issues are in getting it balanced, but trying to put together some sort of a comprehensive version of this and keep it reasonably well-balanced is going to be a heck of a load to shoulder. It sounds like it would wind up being pretty cool if you could pull it off... but it also sounds like it'd be really difficult to manage properly.

[breithauptclan]

For similar ideas that already exist that you could use to balance things with, check out the Monk feats Wild Winds Initiate, Clinging Shadows Initiate, and Wind Jump. Those all use focus points to unlock new attacks or abilities for a limited duration. Also, the feats that grant the focus spells would also give or increase a focus pool, so there is no need for archetype characters to already have a focus pool in order to take the feats and use the abilities.

[Sanityfaerie]

breithauptclan wrote:

For similar ideas that already exist that you could use to balance things with, check out the Monk feats Wild Winds Initiate, Clinging Shadows Initiate, and Wind Jump. Those all use focus points to unlock new attacks or abilities for a limited duration. Also, the feats that grant the focus spells would also give or increase a focus pool, so there is no need for archetype characters to already have a focus pool in order to take the feats and use the abilities.

I believe that the proposal was to add focus power effects to existing feats. Having existing feats also grant focus points while also having special effects that could be unlocked by focus points would make them significantly stronger. It's not like Whirling Throw was weak to begin with.