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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 8143536" data-attributes="member: 6801252">Most the feats in the game don't have this problem, because they allow you to do something in a certain way, or are mindful about applying bonuses to 'checks to do this thing' even those that give access to special downtime activities don't preclude you being able to do it through other means, they just offer a specific method, one that tends to be easier.  For instance, compare <a href="https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=1935" target="_blank">Dandy Dedication</a> to <a href="https://2e.aonprd.com/Feats.aspx?ID=106" target="_blank">Sow Rumor</a>, they overlap heavily in purpose but offer a different mechanical implementation, and neither actually suggests its the only way to spread rumors-- obviously if you walk around town and manually lie to people spreading stories, you could probably pull it off, but you wouldn't get to use either of these tailored implementations. The GM would be determining whether and how you could do that, which is the normal procedure for skills, the feats just take the GM by the hand and say 'don't worry bro, here you go' and the player knows that they're getting a writ-in-stone mechanical way of doing the thing when they announce that they sow rumor or some such-- which makes sense, since both features are a part of mechanic packages that demand being able to do so with consistency and balance, whereas a one-off plan can even vary between instances with the same GM. Off the top of my head, the GM could use victory points to let a player tarnish someone's reputation with rumors, or run it as a 4e esque skill challenge (x successes before y failures.) Its totally up to the GM, unless the player has something that the GM can hone in on like "oh it says you can do that? rad."What you're talking about comes up a lot with languages in a lot RPGs that feature them, on optimization boards, there's an assumption that the GM will give you a means of translating need to know information, so whats the point of investing in languages? Hence they're exclusively marked as trap options in guides and such. But to get there, you have to treat your GM as a constraint on the metagame of your table-- you might very well miss treasure, or something in my game, by doing that (the sandbox and freedom of approach in my game softens the consequences to the point they're usable in an impactful way) whereas another table could dump languages (or encumbrance, or whatever) safe in the knowledge it isn't used. It's endemic to the genre, but I like that PF2e has explicit ways to do something a player can draw on to not have to worry about their GM mucking it up, or to make it easier to perform, or whatever.</blockquote>

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