Retraining Feats Question

[Horselord]

If I take Adopted Ancestry at 3rd level as a General Feat, can I retrain my 1st level Ancestry Feat to one that uses Adopted Ancestry to access?

[Baarogue]

No

Retraining, SF PC p.433, emphasis mine wrote:

When retraining, you generally can't make choices you couldn't make when you initially selected the original option. For instance, you can't replace a skill feat you chose at 2nd level for a 4th-level one, or for one that requires prerequisites you didn't meet at the time you took the original feat.

[Finoan]

Agreeing with Baarogue.

The rule of thumb that I use is: If you could rebuild the character over from scratch without using any Retraining, then the result rebuild is valid for retraining your existing character to. If you couldn't build the character the way you want without changing things as you go from level to level, then you can't use Retraining to get to that result.

[Perpdepog]

Finoan wrote:

Agreeing with Baarogue.

The rule of thumb that I use is: If you could rebuild the character over from scratch without using any Retraining, then the result rebuild is valid for retraining your existing character to. If you couldn't build the character the way you want without changing things as you go from level to level, then you can't use Retraining to get to that result.

It's one of the quieter benefits of using a system like Pathbuilder to help with characters, IMO. It lays everything out by level for you so you can see what you could take, and when.

[Conscious Meat]

Finoan wrote:

Agreeing with Baarogue.

The rule of thumb that I use is: If you could rebuild the character over from scratch without using any Retraining, then the result rebuild is valid for retraining your existing character to. If you couldn't build the character the way you want without changing things as you go from level to level, then you can't use Retraining to get to that result.

Right, with one notable exception:

It is legal to retrain in such a way so that you no longer meet the prerequisite for a different feature you took later. You do not have to retrain the second one immediately. However, it is now inactive for all purposes, including when it comes to being a prerequisite for other features.

Concretely -- if you have a chain A->B->C and eventually replace them with D->E->F, it is legal to retrain A and replace it with D. B and C would no longer work in any way when you no longer have A; but this means that you don't need five weeks of downtime (replace C with unrelated G; replace B with unrelated H that does not depend on G; replace A with D; replace G with E; replace H with F).

[Finoan]

Conscious Meat wrote:

Right, with one notable exception:

I'll accept the technical correction. You are fully right in that regard and your example.

I will mention that regarding my rule of thumb, it likely doesn't make any practical difference to most players. I don't expect many are going to intentionally do retraining in such a way that their character has useless feat selections remaining and then leave the character that way indefinitely and consider the retraining process to be completed. So for determining if the final result is a legal character, just looking at the D->E->F chain and what level they are at would be enough.