Ancestry feats more often?


Rules Discussion


So, A lot of races feats are really, really weak, and don’t scale well. especially when compared to their NPC/bestiary counterparts. Most early ancestry feats are quickly obsolete with a little gear, and most upper level ones are similarly useless by the time you get them. I Given how weak most of them are, it makes sense to me that an ancestry feat every odd level wouldn’t really affect the game other than to add a bit more flavor. Maybe handy if captured and stripped down (yay! I can use my 1d6 bite since they took my 5d8 flaming sword away), but to a decked out 17th level character, they are mostly useless.

Yada yada yada game balance. PCs of almost all uncommon/rare ancestries must be considered severely handicapped by their kinsfolk. Wings an can’t fly. Spider fangs with no venom, etc. etc. Gotta be awkward when you are like 15th level, and walk into your home town and the typical child is doing things you haven’t been able to figure out after years of adventuring, like fly or whatnot.


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It's because on a boardy game balance comes before flavor.

The rarity system, as well as overall balance in terms of accessibility, is meant to give players and dm a solid ruleset to play with.

Then, if some groups find themselves not at ease with ancestries/classes/etc... not being good as they expected, they can tweak them themselves.

Everybody can come up with any modification they want, but it is required for the game to be balanced ( otherwise we'll have random stuff, and a whole community striving to get things balanced ).

ps: your comparison with 1d6 bite and 5d8 flaming sword is kinda off, as it would be 4d6 +1d6 fire bite ( probably finesse and unarmed ) vs 4d8 +1d8 ( siccatite? ) fire damage.

So, you'll be trading 5 average damage for being able to get a free hand, use your DEX in place of STR, and immunity to disarm.

Seems quite neat to me.


Plus the Ancestry feats, since they're on the PC side of the equation, aren't meant to outperform other options of a similar level. So when you say that you could get that ability with gold, yep, that's correct. Or spells, some class abilities, and so forth could provide the same or similar since that's the level when such things become available. Obvious advantages would be obvious imbalances.

As for the natural attacks, yes, they're subpar if your PC's not built around them, but as HumbleGamer noted, they can be competitive IF you can use that free hand, etc. Ex. A warrior who wants to use a shield, do Athletics maneuvers, climb, cast from scrolls, and move items & allies around could make excellent use of a natural weapon. Yes, they're paying a price in offense for that, but it's competitive (and opens up some character concepts tied to said Ancestries).


HumbleGamer wrote:


ps: your comparison with 1d6 bite and 5d8 flaming sword is kinda off, as it would be 4d6 +1d6 fire bite ( probably finesse and unarmed ) vs 4d8 +1d8 ( siccatite? ) fire damage.

Seems quite neat to me.

Are you suggesting that it’s somehow possible to enhance something like an Anahi’s fangs? From what I’ve read, the rules disagree. Do you have a reference?

Horizon Hunters

Handwraps of Mighty Blows adds to every Unarmed Strike you have, not just punches. Fangs are an Unarmed Strike, so they would also be improved.

Horizon Hunters

So yes, if we take it to the extremes a fully upgraded Fangs strike would deal less damage than a +3 Siccatite Longsword. However the cost of the Handwraps would be significantly less.

+3 Greater Flaming Handwraps of Mighty Blows - 46500g
4d6 Piercing + 1d6 Fire - 17.5 average damage per strike

+3 High-Grade Siccatite Longsword - 55000g
4d8 Slashing/Piercing + 1d8 Fire - 22.5 average damage per strike

So that 8500 gold gets you 5 extra average damage per strike, AND it needs your hand to be occupied. The benefit of Anadi fangs, for example, is access to the Venomous Anadi or Snaring Anadi heritage, which can further modify your fangs. Having Grapple and Trip on the fangs allows you to either use those actions while in Spider form, or use them with your hands full while in Hybrid form. Venomous Anadi adds an additional 2d6 poison damage to your Fangs strike, and with the additional feat can make the enemy Flat Footed for a round on a failed save. All this for 0 extra gold.


Cordell Kintner wrote:

So yes, if we take it to the extremes a fully upgraded Fangs strike would deal less damage than a +3 Siccatite Longsword. However the cost of the Handwraps would be significantly less.

+3 Greater Flaming Handwraps of Mighty Blows - 46500g
4d6 Piercing + 1d6 Fire - 17.5 average damage per strike

+3 High-Grade Siccatite Longsword - 55000g
4d8 Slashing/Piercing + 1d8 Fire - 22.5 average damage per strike

So that 8500 gold gets you 5 extra average damage per strike, AND it needs your hand to be occupied. The benefit of Anadi fangs, for example, is access to the Venomous Anadi or Snaring Anadi heritage, which can further modify your fangs. Having Grapple and Trip on the fangs allows you to either use those actions while in Spider form, or use them with your hands full while in Hybrid form. Venomous Anadi adds an additional 2d6 poison damage to your Fangs strike, and with the additional feat can make the enemy Flat Footed for a round on a failed save. All this for 0 extra gold.

I think that throwing in the Siccatite is just confusing the issue. Effectively, you have two different choices. The cost of the fangs is basked into your ancestry, and the cost of the longsword is that it consumes a hand. The longsword deals 4 additional damage and is versatile S/P (swords). The fangs Are piercig only, have finesse, and can be further enhanced with heritage.

Then, if you chose longsword, you can dump a fair chunk of money into adding another +1 to your damage by going Siccatite.

Also worth noting that those stated numbers (17.5 vs 22.5) are ignoring a lot of static bonuses that kick in (strength, weapon mastery, other property runes...) which tend to make that +4 or +5 a bit less significant.


Cordell Kintner wrote:

Handwraps of Mighty Blows adds to every Unarmed Strike you have, not just punches. Fangs are an Unarmed Strike, so they would also be improved.

Interesting. Odd, but interesting. Not sure I would let a pair of gloves affect a bite attack (or even a kick), especially when the description heavily implies they are meant for hand attacks, but it is ambiguous enough, I can see people doing it.


JstCurious wrote:
Cordell Kintner wrote:

Handwraps of Mighty Blows adds to every Unarmed Strike you have, not just punches. Fangs are an Unarmed Strike, so they would also be improved.

Interesting. Odd, but interesting. Not sure I would let a pair of gloves affect a bite attack (or even a kick), especially when the description heavily implies they are meant for hand attacks, but it is ambiguous enough, I can see people doing it.

Handwraps are a generic item meant to give all unarmed attacks its bonuses.

If you expect paizo to put an item meant for:

- head
- tail
- horns
- kicks
- fangs
- claws

Bad news for you.

It's kinda exhilarating either "it is ambiguous" And "I can see people doing it".


JstCurious wrote:
Cordell Kintner wrote:

Handwraps of Mighty Blows adds to every Unarmed Strike you have, not just punches. Fangs are an Unarmed Strike, so they would also be improved.

Interesting. Odd, but interesting. Not sure I would let a pair of gloves affect a bite attack (or even a kick), especially when the description heavily implies they are meant for hand attacks, but it is ambiguous enough, I can see people doing it.

You can always require them to wrap them around their teeth instead.


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

There's a variant rule in the GMG that gives you two ancestry feats at 1 and an ancestry feat at odd levels.

Can confirm it doesn't really change game balance much, but it does tend to lead to a lot more versatile heritages, because a lot of post-core ancestries just don't have very many feats to pick from to begin with.

JstCurious wrote:
Cordell Kintner wrote:

Handwraps of Mighty Blows adds to every Unarmed Strike you have, not just punches. Fangs are an Unarmed Strike, so they would also be improved.

Interesting. Odd, but interesting. Not sure I would let a pair of gloves affect a bite attack (or even a kick), especially when the description heavily implies they are meant for hand attacks, but it is ambiguous enough, I can see people doing it.

There's nothing ambiguous about it. It's literally what the item is designed for.

Houseruling them to not work on other forms of attack is just nerfing those attacks into uselessness.

Like, do you think Paizo intended for Dragon Stance monks and ancestral natural attacks to be functionally useless past early game because they mention legs or mouths? Doesn't make sense.


Note: The Ancestry Paragon variant rule does what you ask for receiving more ancestry feats. Characters start with 2 Ancestry feats at first level and gain ancestry feats at all odd levels afterwards. Personally, I run all my games with Ancestry Paragon.

As mentioned, damage scaling typically requires either Handwraps of Mighty Blows or Automatic Bonus Progression to keep up. Comparing an unmodified unarmed attack to a fully runed weapon is a bit off - since a common dagger without runes will be just as ineffective for your high level character in that scenario (part of why I always play with Automatic Bonus Progression).

As for special abilities, yeah, it is kinda hard to make a balanced ancestry that gives something like unlimited flight at first level - so that will always be a noticeable issue. That said, I wouldn't agree that it applies to "almost all" of the current uncommon/rare ancestries.


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JstCurious wrote:
Cordell Kintner wrote:

Handwraps of Mighty Blows adds to every Unarmed Strike you have, not just punches. Fangs are an Unarmed Strike, so they would also be improved.

Interesting. Odd, but interesting. Not sure I would let a pair of gloves affect a bite attack (or even a kick), especially when the description heavily implies they are meant for hand attacks, but it is ambiguous enough, I can see people doing it.

Almost like it's maaagic


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I really like Ancestry Paragon. Makes Lineage feats much more appealing.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

The flying thing bothered me too, even though I can fully understand the balance implications behind the decision.


at least for pixies they bothered to "justify" the flying thing within their lore.

and it's a pretty cool explanation why you dont get to fly from the get go, sounds fairy-ish enopugh to me at least.

other flying ancestries, not so much.

but yeah, fly from level 1 would simply make the race completly unavailable from most tables imo.


In retrospect, the hand wraps make sense for people who want to fight without “weapons”. It does seem like the generic catch all to make sure the game allows for them. I’m still getting used to what is a very different magic item system. I’ve played many different versions of dnd in the past, but pathfinder is new to me. In my last campaign. my monk didn’t need magic items. She was one. I didn’t realize how heavily this system requires PCs to have things like striking magic items to stay relevant. Likewise, we had a fighter, who wanted to be the world greatest swordsman, without using magic weapons, and he was doing it. Pathfinder is different.


The whole "unlike other Strix, you suck at flying" doesn't need to be justified in general, it needs to be justified for that specific PC. Like "you left your village to find fame and fortune because you were the worst flyer in the village and a bit of a pariah" works just fine. If you were a good flyer you would have stayed home at your Strix village and done Strix things.

All PCs are outliers, after all.


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PossibleCabbage wrote:
The whole "unlike other Strix, you suck at flying" doesn't need to be justified in general, it needs to be justified for that specific PC. Like "you left your village to find fame and fortune because you were the worst flyer in the village and a bit of a pariah" works just fine.

Yeah, but it's very strange that every adventuring Strix is bad at flying. And this is kind of unavoidable.


Errenor wrote:
Yeah, but it's very strange that every adventuring Strix is bad at flying. And this is kind of unavoidable.

Sure, but my understanding is that there are generally <50 PCs active anywhere in the world at a given time, so there just are not very many Strix who are adventurers. Like you get 1 every 4-5 years maybe.


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Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Meh, it is still an immersion-breaker for me, which quite nearly makes it a deal breaker.

I generally don't play nonsensical ancestries like that.


PossibleCabbage wrote:
Errenor wrote:
Yeah, but it's very strange that every adventuring Strix is bad at flying. And this is kind of unavoidable.
Sure, but my understanding is that there are generally <50 PCs active anywhere in the world at a given time, so there just are not very many Strix who are adventurers. Like you get 1 every 4-5 years maybe.

Almost all members of Pathfinder Society are adventurers, and they don't have monopoly on adventuring :) So the number more likely in thousands if not tens of thousands or more.

This doesn't contradict the assumption that the number of Strix adventurers could be very low though. Which itself still doesn't help with the strangeness of non-flying Strix adventurers.


The bottom line, is that all PCs from at least the uncommon and rare ancestries, whatever they are, are looked at by their people as unfortunate cripples.


JstCurious wrote:
The bottom line, is that all PCs from at least the uncommon and rare ancestries, whatever they are, are looked at by their people as unfortunate cripples.

I think that fits with how in so many fairytales and fantasy stories the protagonist is the person that doesn't fit in with their village and is thus driven to prove themselves in other ways.

Like there's the opposite problem with "why did your Dwarf PC leave their homeland and their family? Surely you could have chosen to do something to support your people instead."


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Errenor wrote:
PossibleCabbage wrote:
Errenor wrote:
Yeah, but it's very strange that every adventuring Strix is bad at flying. And this is kind of unavoidable.
Sure, but my understanding is that there are generally <50 PCs active anywhere in the world at a given time, so there just are not very many Strix who are adventurers. Like you get 1 every 4-5 years maybe.

Almost all members of Pathfinder Society are adventurers, and they don't have monopoly on adventuring :) So the number more likely in thousands if not tens of thousands or more.

This doesn't contradict the assumption that the number of Strix adventurers could be very low though. Which itself still doesn't help with the strangeness of non-flying Strix adventurers.

Cabbage said PCs, not adventurers though. Plenty of NPCs qualify as adventurers and can be built with whatever rules you want.

PFS doesn't try to pretend every player character is canonically coexist, do they? Given you have multiple groups playing the same scenarios that can't work out.

Generally the number of player characters in the world is just however many are currently sitting at your table plus whatever other games they've run in the same canon.


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Yeah, I would say the only PCs are "games that you participate in". So if you have a home game that has 5 PCs, and a PFS group that has like 20 PCs then that means there's 25 PCs in the world, plus presumably a few who retired after finishing their story but who are still around somewhere. You don't have to take into account PFS groups running the same scenarios in different cities just like you don't have to take into account home games running the same AP in different cities.

There are a huge number of parallel versions of Golarion that coexist (how many different kings or queens did we get out of Kingmaker across all versions of that story?), so however many PCs there are total in ongoing games of Pathfinder are divided across Parallel versions of the world. Like my WotR game in which the PCs hunted down Baphomet and Deskari and killed them permanent-like doesn't have to be reflected in anybody else's version of Golarion, and by the same principle I don't have to acknowledge your PCs existing (unless we're in the same game.)

So I find it extremely plausible that at any given time that there are precisely 0 PCs who ware Strix, or Poppets, or Sprites, or Shoonies, or Conrau, and the only way we're going to get one is if "a human being who I share a game with wants to play one" at which point it's just up to that person and their GM to come up with the justifications for whatever happens to be true about that character.


I can hardly see it as an issue.

The rarity system, as well as the availability of some mechanics, kicks in because of balance purposes.

Knowing that by default the game says:

"Some ancestries can get XXX and YYY, but they are agoing to get it later in the game, when other sources of XXX and YYY will be available, whether they are spells, items or class feats"

It takes nothing for the group ( DM and players ) to decide something like:

"We understand the reasons behind it, but we don't think giving flying since lvl, eventually without having to expend ancestry feats, is going to do any harm. Actually, it would enhance the game, making a specific ancestry character feel equal to any other npc they may find during their adventures"

When it comes down to flavor, a group can do anything they want.

But it's always safer to have rules based on balance rather, being able to then tweak the game the way we want.


PossibleCabbage wrote:
Yeah, I would say the only PCs are "games that you participate in". So if you have a home game that has 5 PCs, and a PFS group that has like 20 PCs then that means there's 25 PCs in the world, plus presumably a few who retired after finishing their story but who are still around somewhere. You don't have to take into account PFS groups running the same scenarios in different cities just like you don't have to take into account home games running the same AP in different cities.

I don't think that counting only PCs works. Are you making an assumption that all other (Strix for example) adventurers can fly and only PCs can't? Well, you can. But it's still .. clumsy. Doesn't matter that much, of course.

But PFS question is more interesting. In fact, I don't count all players and their PCs at all. I try to count the number of lodges and required staff, and a number of possible parties to support, the number of PFS NPCs in populous adventures, I try to account for the supposed influence of the organization. When you look at 'specials' there are sometimes hundreds of PFS agents in the field and it's still not the whole PFS. So I think that the number of PFS agents is in thousands, it's comparable to a large government with at least a special forces department if not an army. Maybe I overestimate this, but that's that.


I’m fully on board with Possible Cabbage on this one. For instance, in my game, Shoonies don’t exist unless I suddenly had a player wish to play one. In which case, the Shoony ancestry suddenly finds its way out of Schrödinger‘a box and into the world. However, that hasn’t happened and a need to ever include them has yet to coalesce.

The same rationale can be used for any PC. Why doesn’t the PC strix fly at level 1 unlike all his or her peers? I guess we as the audience will find out as that character develops in play. Is it acceptable that the PC version is different than the NPC versions? 100% yes! That’s why the PC is an adventurer, because the PC is different.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
Errenor wrote:
PossibleCabbage wrote:
Yeah, I would say the only PCs are "games that you participate in". So if you have a home game that has 5 PCs, and a PFS group that has like 20 PCs then that means there's 25 PCs in the world, plus presumably a few who retired after finishing their story but who are still around somewhere. You don't have to take into account PFS groups running the same scenarios in different cities just like you don't have to take into account home games running the same AP in different cities.

I don't think that counting only PCs works. Are you making an assumption that all other (Strix for example) adventurers can fly and only PCs can't? Well, you can. But it's still .. clumsy. Doesn't matter that much, of course.

But PFS question is more interesting. In fact, I don't count all players and their PCs at all. I try to count the number of lodges and required staff, and a number of possible parties to support, the number of PFS NPCs in populous adventures, I try to account for the supposed influence of the organization. When you look at 'specials' there are sometimes hundreds of PFS agents in the field and it's still not the whole PFS. So I think that the number of PFS agents is in thousands, it's comparable to a large government with at least a special forces department if not an army. Maybe I overestimate this, but that's that.

There might be thousands of Pathfinder members, but looking at populations of various settlements in Golarion I'd be shocked if more than 15% of those fell outside of the core rulebook ancestries and only a fraction of them could possibly be strix.

Being NPCs, your average strix Pathfinder could totally fly without balance concerns, but is probably in high demand for "flier only" based missions, so it is pretty unlikely your PCs will ever interact with one.


Yeah, the thing to consider is that "Adventures" and "PCs" are different things. You can build any NPC as a PC, but you also don't have to. Strix adventurers can fly real well at level 1 when they're NPCs because those characters belong to the GM and the GM is someone we assume is not interesting in unbalancing the game for their own reasons.

Whereas if you let Strix PCs fly effectively at first level, you're going to have PCs who pick up a bow and spend every combat where things cannot reach them. Which will continue to make a normal challenge something that is nonsense until the GM makes sure every fight takes place in a room with 8' ceilings.

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