Daily Feats?

[OmegaMan950]

I've been looking over the Pathfinder SRD over the past week, and I'm beginning to wonder why feats (more specifically martial feats) can't be changed at the end of the day/adventure. If martial feats were treated the same way as dailies/Vancian slots would it be particularly game breaking?

This retraining would make martial characters a lot more flexible and adaptable to new challenges, and also allowing PCs to try new things without the fear of being stuck with a bad feat. Has anyone playing 3.5/Pathfinder tried this before? If so, how did it go?

 

[the Jester]

I think the problem is one of immersion. Why should my greatsword wielding Power Attack-and-Cleaving fighter forget how to Power Attack and Cleave and instead suddenly remember that he gets +4 initiative and +2 Reflex saves? It runs right over some peoples' suspension of disbelief.

In a game with a style where this isn't an issue, I don't think it would be unbalancing, but remember, a lot of feats/prestige classes/what have you have feats as prerequisites, so there are chain effects sometimes (e.g. "I use my Shock Trooper maneuver to- wait, damn it, I don't have Power Attack anymore, so I don't qualify for it... what's that do for my prestige class? I need Shock Trooper to qualify for it!")

 

[Ahnehnois]

I considered something like that, but I realized the issue is how would you rationalize losing the ones you trade in? If you do something useful one day, and the next day you want to do the same thing and can't, it's implausible, unsatisfying, and casts your hero as being inept.

 

[the Jester]

I considered something like that, but I realized the issue is how would you rationalize losing the ones you trade in? If you do something useful one day, and the next day you want to do the same thing and can't, it's implausible, unsatisfying, and casts your hero as being inept.

There are certain cases that make it even harder to justify.

What if you're only alive because you got a +2 to your save against a finger of death for having Great Fortitude? What if you would have been slain by damage, but you just happened to have extra hps from one of the Toughness line of feats?

But like I said, if the group can look the other way on these things, while it definitely gives the fighter more power via tailoring feats to the challenges he thinks he's going to face, I don't think it's a huge power up.

 

[Ahnehnois]

But like I said, if the group can look the other way on these things, while it definitely gives the fighter more power via tailoring feats to the challenges he thinks he's going to face, I don't think it's a huge power up.

I didn't say it was overpowered. Significant boost? Yes. Game-breaking? No.

What I do think is okay is the action point rule that allows a character to temporarily use an extra feat that he qualifies for. That way you get some flexibility, but without the foolishness of losing your existing abilities.

 

[Li Shenron]

It would be hardly overpowered... I am not even sure how much of a boost it would be, since most feats are not very situational (at least in 3e, not sure in PF). Sure, there might be a rare occasion when the PCs know in advance that they are going into a snake-monsters lair and will pick every possible feat designed to protect against poison, but IMO it's not going to happen that often. It's certainly a flexibility boost, but I don't think it will be comparable to the flexibility of spells.

OTOH, the problem of this idea is solely the nightmare you're going to have if every player needs to switch feats in the middle of a session, unless you restrict the list of feats for each PC (but then your flexibility boost will be gone, and your house rule won't have much effect on the game at all), otherwise it'll take ages for them just to pick a few feats. This would suggest to make feats switchable at the end of an adventure rather than on a daily basis, unless you sync the sessions with the adventuring days.

 

[Umbran]

What if you're only alive because you got a +2 to your save against a finger of death for having Great Fortitude? What if you would have been slain by damage, but you just happened to have extra hps from one of the Toughness line of feats?

So, what? The resulting fiction does not know from Hit points or saving throws. One day, you manage to shrug it off. The blows were just short of lethal. The next day you didn't, and they weren't. It isn't that you "forgot" how to pull off some maneuver between one day and the next - it is that you didn't try, or couldn't quite get the setup right, so you have to try something else. The situation on day 2 is different, so maybe you cannot manage to accomplish the same thing.

The real argument against it is how much time and fiddly-bit math would be involved each time the character swapped things around. Spellcasters are bad enough, to have the whole party doing much the same could be a burden. I don't honestly think the feats are written well for this kind of application. I think you'd need a full rewrite, with things beyond the basic fighter attack done as "manuvers", and each manuver takes a manuver slot, just like a spell slot.