I've never done it, but I don't think it would be incredibly game breaking. Almost every build wants for more feats. It does cheapen fighter bonus feats a bit, but even with fighter builds I have wanted for more feats.
If applying to NPCs too, it should be fairly balanced, but unless you are choosing super basic feats, that's a lot of extra work on the game master to give the monsters a powerful selection of new feats.
Honestly it sounds like less of a power boost than gestalt, and gestalt is a pretty popular and functional ruleset.
I've always felt that spellcasters need more feats.
Elemental Spell is the example I am going to use. Wizards get 10 Feat slots total, Elemental spell takes one, he chooses a single element, with that feat he can now change his fireball etc, to that single element. If he wants to change it to another element, he has to buy the feat again. Not to mention the spells take a higher spell slot.
Or, he can just pick the Admixture school and do it for free at 1st level.
Now why does it take 4 feats (and higher spell slots) to match a level 1 class ability?
it seems to me that they originally considered some of the feats way more potent than they actually are, so to balance this - simply give them for feats
Some types of character (a typical paladin or stock wizard) need very few feats. Others (switch-hitter archer, TWF) need many more. So increasing feats makes a lot of new builds practical, though you may find some weird exploits coming online as well.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
If a person had the time and energy to do it, rewriting the poor feats to make them good would be the way to go. I like the idea of feat trees, but if you have to take feats that are useless, it drains the fun away.
you might review the iconic wizard Ezren or the published NPC wizards... your 'stock wizard' seems highly impractical and mischaracterized.
There are a lot of spell lines that are feat hungry. Summoning, blasting, and especially any kind of polymorph requires a lot of build considerations. A lot of the published NPC Wizards like to fill their spell preparations with blasting or summoning spells, but without taking the feats that make those spells good. Ezren is particularly bad, and is mechanically one of the most confused iconics with his spell selection and build just being completely mismatched.
But you can absolutely build highly effective Wizards that require zero feat support, and you do it by focusing on spells that are really good without feat support. Stuff like Grease, Create Pit, or Haste are always solid spell selections, and there are more than enough spells to fill a Wizard's spellbook with that don't require feats to be good. I think this is what is being referred to as a "stock" Wizard, that just focuses on using spells that are highly effective and require no feat support to be very good.
Every class has dedicated feats, and they can alternate between general and class feats. It should be up to the GM.
What fighters need is gateway feats free to them as class features. Power attack and point blank shot for instance.
What fighters need is gateway feats free to them as class features. Power attack and point blank shot for instance.
Fighter is completely fine with advanced weapon training. Advanced armor training is also pretty good. Their biggest problem may be that so many of their archetypes trade them out of this.
While feats can make a wizard more effective, there is some validity in the idea they can be effective without them. That wizard might not be as effective as a wizard that used the feats but can still be effective. The real key to a wizard's effectiveness is spell selection. As long as the wizard has a good selection of spells in his spell book and chooses wisely on what spell he memorizes he will be effective.
I cannot find any feat called school focus. If you are talking about Arcane School that is a class feature not a feat.
I could take a human wizard and take the exploiter wizard archetype and replace the human bonus feat with Unstoppable Magic. At 12th level he would have 3 exploits. Take Potent Magic, Dimensional Slide and Quick Study. Give him a large selection of spells and a fair amount of warning about what he is going up against and he will be a fairly effective character without using any feats including scribe scroll which he gets for free. Would the character be more effective if he spent the feats? Of course, he would but that does not change the fact that the character is effective without feats. The character still has access to up to 6th level spells and can boost the save of those spells by 2. He also has a caster level of 14 to overcome spell resistance. He can change out his spells memorized as a full round action. And can teleport 120 feet without provoking an AoO for moving. If I used the Arcanist class instead of Wizard the character would have 6 exploits and be even more effective.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I don't know about getting a feat for every hit die/level.
One thing I've seen with certain video games, however, which I like, is the concept of getting a feat (by another name) by way of something other than gaining a level (the more recent Assassin's Creed titles are a good example of this). Given the variety of ways there are for spellcasters to get extra spells and spell slots, then, I'm kind of surprised that there aren't more items that afford you a feat. Not just as a virtual feat (as with a Training enchantment), but in the same way that a Manual of Physical Health grants your character a permanent inherent bonus to his Constitution.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
A few APs give bonus feats as you progress through the story. They are pulled from sublists of feats though.