Would you allow the following?
An alchemist player took Armor Proficiency at level 3, Prescient Planner at 7, and Prescient Consumable at 11. They're now level 19, and their armor proficiency has increased to Master, making their 3rd-level armor proficiency feat (and heavy armors in general) obsolete.
The player asks to retrain his 3rd-level feat for a higher-level 11th-level feat. Normally, this is not permitted. However, the player argues that Prescient Planner and Prescient Consumable could have been taken at 3rd and 5th-level, respectively, so that everything remains build legal. In effect they want to retrain one feat while shifting two others in the time it would normally take to retrain 1 feat.
Would you...
A) Allow it as described?
B) Allow it with a little extra time to account for the sliding feats?
C) Disallow it without first spending the retraining costs for three feats?
D) Take some other course of action. Please explain.
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A, especially if the campaign has downtime issues. IF there's a ton of downtime anyways I might go with B.
Generally like being a bit loose with retraining because I don't see a lot of value in leaving a player with feats they don't like or don't benefit them anymore.
Plus I really dislike the way Paizo built certain options to have level breakpoints where they might be useless because of goofy scaling quirks.
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The most RAW way to do this would be to retrain the three feats. I personally would probably handweave it. It would feel really bad if I forced a played to spend 3 weeks to have their character be exactly the same afterwards.
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Yeah, I think C would be RAW but I would certainly allow A since the feat swap does not actually result in the character having an excessive number of high-level feats, which is the actual balance concern.
C unless Downtime is tight, then I go with A.
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I would allow it, but give every other character an amount of "extra downtime" sufficient to retrain three feats.
Indeed, I meant to say 7th-level, not 5th.
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Oh, yes definitely.
It's not just the extended downtime when you're only actually changing one thing, it's that the steps get unnecessarily complicated. Characters suddenly lose abilities that they aren't actually planning on retraining out of, and sometimes have to pick up placeholder feats they don't want while you sort out the prerequisites.
So they have Armor Proficiency at 3, Prescient Planner at 7, Prescient Consumable at 11.
They want to have Prescient Planner at 3, Prescient Consumable at 7, and Incredible Investiture at 11.
Going from one legal build to another, where the only actual difference is one feat.
If we're going to strict about retraining one feat at a time... how?
They can't retrain Armor Proficiency to Prescient Planner, because they already have it. They can't retrain Prescient Planner to Prescient Consumable, because they already have it and they're losing the prereq.
Step 1) Retrain Prescient Consumable to Incredible Investiture.
So after one week, this character has successfully picked up their new feat. They haven't actually lost the feat they're trying to retrain yet, which isn't that bad, but they have lost a feat they're keeping, breaking character continuity as somehow retraining a feat has caused them to temporarily lose an ability they already had and are keeping. There's no rules problem here, but it kinda breaks verisimilitude.
We have Armor Proficiency at 3, Prescient Planner at 7, and Incredible Investiture at 11.
...now what? We can't retrain our level 3 feat to Prescient Planner, because we already have it. We can't retrain our level 7 feat to Prescient Consumable, because we won't meet the prereq.
We have to train the level 7 feat to something else entirely, as a placeholder.
Two weeks into retraining, we're... farther away from our objective? We still have the feat we're trying to retrain, the character has temporarily lost two abilities they're trying to keep, and they've temporarily picked up some other, probably unrelated feat they don't want.
Armor Proficiency at 3, [placeholder] at 7, and Incredible Investiture at 11.
Now we can finally actually retrain Armor Proficiency for Prescient Planner.
We probably didn't have three weeks of uninterrupted downtime, so we've gone adventuring without Prescient Consumable (an ability this character already had and is keeping, but inexplicably can't use for a while) and possibly without Prescient Planner. And likely still with a feat that doesn't do anything for us, the one we were trying to retrain in the first place.
Then we can retrain the placeholder for Prescient Consumable.
That's four weeks to retrain three feats, when we only wanted to swap one out and gain another. During that time the character temporarily gained and lost abilities unrelated to the two feats they were swapping, for no in-character reason.
As a GM, my rule is certainly that if you're not actually gaining or losing any abilities and the character is legal either way, making little adjustments like moving feats to other legal slots is fine. (Also might apply during level up--Investigator level 2 to 3 can be awkward, with a skill feat at both levels but restricted to a certain list at 3.)
(There are some official rules that work this way. For example, the level 9 Athamaru ancestry feat Moray Eel Mount makes more thematic sense if you already had the eel pet feats, Elver Pet and Growing Eel Friend, and that eel is the one that grows into your mount. Therefore, while they aren't prerequisites, Moray Eel Mount explicitly says that the three feats can refer to the same animal, and that you can then immediately retrain the lower-level feats that no longer do anything.)
The retraining rules do say, "You might need to retrain several abilities in sequence in order to get all the abilities you want," but even if you're going to be more strict about that... taking an extra week because you have to temporarily gain a placeholder and lose abilities you already have is mechanically awkward and worse in character.
Even if you're going to require them to retrain them all, I'd say let themretrain all three at the same time in three weeks.
I don't consider 'sliding' a feat from one slot to another valid slot at a different level to even be Retraining since it makes no actual changes to the character and what feats they have. I charge zero cost in Downtime or money to do that.
Shuffling around Armor Proficiency up to the level 11 feat slot and moving Prescient Planner and Prescient Consumable down to lower level feat slots is not Retraining.
So the only Retraining in this scenario is switching out Armor Proficiency for a new feat in the level 11 feat slot.
I'm just allowing my players change up feat choices at level up.
Like at level 3 one player got magic crafting with a general feat.
At level 4 I allowed getting magic crafting in the level 4 skill feat instead and choosing a different general feat for level 3.
Wow. That's way worse than I imagined, Super Zero. No way would I inflict that needless headache on a player.
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Okay, I knew it was clunky but hadn't considered that it was that clunky.
Maybe because in practice I've never had to do it "the hard way" like that - in home campaigns my usual GM was far more relaxed about retraining, we didn't really count downtime days since nobody cared much about Earn Income and such anyway. Also, because in a campaign like Agents of Edgewatch you're going from level 1 to 20 in the span of one summer festival.
And in PFS, on the face of it, retraining would be this hard. But in practice there's been several campaign-wide rebuilding opportunities because of the remaster and such. Also, there are some boons you can buy with achievement points (points you get for playing/GM, with more points gained at conventions), that let you do it more often/faster.
I would allow option A. I think being permissive about retraining is helpful for my planning as a GM as well as for the player.
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Maybe a good perspective to judge these things is: how many feats will the Before and After character differ in?
As opposed to: how many edits does it take to get from Before to After? (Which is what the book rules focus on.)
I value the first comparison more. If the Before/After builds are very similar it doesn't seem right to make someone pay through the nose for it.
Considering the feats could be "slid" around I would simply pretend that's the case, and pretend the only need to retrain the armor proficiency for another feat that they could have selected at level 11.
I'm only of this opinion though because they could have taken the other feats rather than taking armor proficiency. In the end the build is still legal and the character only have 1 different feat.
If you follow RAW it's a huge headache to reach essentially the same result.
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If one were being a real stickler, I think it'd take 4 sets of downtime to retrain those feats as strictly described.
1.) Retrain Prescient Consumable into the desired level eleven feat.
2.) Retrain Prescient Planner into some intermediary feat. We'll say Toughness as an example.
3.) Retrain Armor Proficiency into Prescient Planner.
4.) Retrain Toughness into Prescient Consumable.
I don't think there's a RAW way to do it in only 3 retrains.
All that being said, I'd definitely allow A. In my games, the difference between one week of downtime and four weeks of downtime is rarely significant.
So Three characters with the identical feats would take a different amount of time to retrain a feat still ending up identical in the end? Just because of the order they where built???
A. Allow them to reorganize the character sheet remining legit then retrain.
What is important is they have:
one feat level x or lower
one feat level x+2 or lower
one feat level x+4 or lower
...
The level slot build method is just an easy way to enforce the above requirement.
I'd go with A or B unless I started seeing someone abusing it, and then I'd go to C (though I've never seen this kind of abuse in actual play so that's just hypothetical).
But in a typical scenario this isn't really a problem: they have a feat that no longer does anything and want to swap it out to something useful. The end result is entirely legal. There's a tiny bit of "you get to move things around in a way that benefits you", but that's not a big deal.
I'd probably just increase the time for the one retraining by some extra amount and leave the cost alone since they already know how to do two of these things. That accounts for the shuffling around of things a bit so its slower than someone who isn't doing that, but its not really going to cause them grief and we just move on.
This is one of those things where if the player is acting in good faith, you don't really gain anything by making it difficult.
I'd go with A or B unless I started seeing someone abusing it, and then I'd go to C (though I've never seen this kind of abuse in actual play so that's just hypothetical).
If you're going with A (or even B) I think that alone would go a long way towards curbing any tendencies towards abuse.
What would even be left to abuse? Taking illegal feats that you don't meet the requirements for, or at the wrong levels? That's really all I can think of.
Just swap the feats down and retrain one feat. Most groups I've been in hand wave retraining so long as your just doing small fixes and not complete overhauls. The option is there to help players, no need to beat people with it who aren't trying to abuse it.
But to the wording of "retraining low level feat for a higher one", no that's never ok. Every feat must be equal or lower then the level you got it.
I'd go with A or B unless I started seeing someone abusing it, and then I'd go to C (though I've never seen this kind of abuse in actual play so that's just hypothetical).If you're going with A (or even B) I think that alone would go a long way towards curbing any tendencies towards abuse.
What would even be left to abuse? Taking illegal feats that you don't meet the requirements for, or at the wrong levels? That's really all I can think of.
Probably taking Canny Acumen early, swapping it out for something else when you get expert, then going back into it again later and trying to shift things around so you're putting it back in that first level 3 feat slot you retrained out of it in earlier, while trying to shift around some other feats so you were getting the benefit of extra things.
Otherwise, I don't really know. Like I said, I've never had this be a problem in practice. :) I just tend to reserve the right to change my mind if I feel like someone is abusing a ruling that is trying to be player friendly.
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tbh I don't even really blame them. Canny Acumen literally does nothing once you hit expert naturally, and some of the other listed options aren't that much better.
It'd be great if we played a version of PF2 where characters didn't end up with suddenly dead feats because of goofy scaling quirks and conservative feat design, but since we're in that world I can't blame people for wanting to ditch bad options.
More than any other system I've played PF2 really suffers from the issue of having characters that you'd just build completely differently depending on starting and endpoints, because so many things have awkward or irregular scaling. It kind of sucks.