Pathfinder 2E Skill feats shouldn't give you abilities that normal people have

[stonehead]

I know that "skill feats are boring" is an overused complaint at this point, but I had a realization about why so many of them seem so underwhelming. Many skill feats give you abilities that normal people already have. I can estimate the number of items in a group, I can make an impression on two people at the same time, I can skim read. Because of this, it's really hard to come up with scenarios in which having the feat would do anything. Imagine in a game, your character gives a speach at a big banquet, and the GM asks "Alright, and which individual creature would you like to make an impression on?" It would never happen, the default assumption is that everyone can do it.

The other type of boring skill feat interacts with a system that no one uses. Quick Coercion, Quick Identification, etc all interact with time in a way that would never come up in a game. Most survival feats interact with tracking, hunger, and overland travel, which no one ever uses. Many feats, like Hobnobber, interact with the Gather Information activity; maybe it's different at other tables, but all of that stuff is handled informally in every game I've played. No one I've played with uses the RAW rules for npc attitudes. I understand the intention of these feats, and I don't exactly blame the designers for them being useless, but in reality, the only system most groups (that I've seen) interact with is "roll d20, add modifiers, compare to dc" and it's hard to interact with that system mechanically.

A good number of well-liked skill feats are just combat buffs in disguise. Titan Wrestler, Bon Mot, Battle Medicine, etc. They're all great, but they're basically class feats. They actually do something and are worth taking, so they're much better than the feats that do nothing.

Then there are a few skill feats that give you new and interesting abilities. The gold standard. Not in terms of power, but in terms of design. Wall Jump gives you a cool new ability that most DMs wouldn't assume you already had. Legendary Thief lets you literally steal the clothes off someone's back. Even Legendary Survivalist, lets you no longer need to eat or drink, even if that's not useful at level 15.

In my opinion, this is what skill feats should be. New utility options that exist on the edge of realism. Wall jumping doesn't exactly work in real life, so I wouldn't assume every character could do it, but it's close enough that you can take a feat for it. This realization was followed by another: it's really hard to come up with abilities like this. I spent hours trying to come up with better ideas for skill feats in the back of my mind, but the best I could come up with is a Performance feat to let you change your voice to sound like someone else. Pretty sure that's already a spell somewhere, but utility spells are their own separate conversation.

Skill feats are a cool idea, even if the implementation is a bit lacking. I now have more sympathy for the implementation, because it's hard to do. If you can come up with any better ideas let me know, it's more difficult than it seems.

 

[Staffan]

Some of your examples have been fixed or at least reduced in the Remaster. To take your first example, Make an Impression now explicitly allows for targeting up to 5 people at a -2 penalty, with being able to target more being up to the GM. The feat was buffed to start at 10 targets at Trained, and ending at 100 people at Legendary.

But your basic point is well taken. I like to think of it as the Exalted3 problem. In Exalted, the default character type is the Solar Exalted, who are defined by being hyper-competent. They get to pick a number of Charms that define what stuff they are hyper-competent at. In earlier editions of Exalted, a notable issue was that because most of the rules of the game (like many games) revolved around combat, so did most of the Charms. You had maybe a couple of dozen Charms for Melee, many focusing on different ways to enhace your skill (defense, hit hard, counterattack, multi-attack), but like five for Bureaucracy – simply because there weren't many rules for Bureaucracy so there wasn't much for Bureaucracy charms to affect. When making Exalted 3, they identified this as a problem... and "solved" it by making a lot more rules for Bureaucracy, just so there could be more things for Bureaucracy charms to do. PF2 does more or less the same thing: it reduces the scope for basic skills, in order for Skill Feats to have something to do.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yes, that is kinda a problem with skill feats in general, and it existed with feats 3rd Edition D&D and Pathinder 1, too. Finding non-combat feats that don't just suddenly act as if they forbid ordinary things from being done without the feat. Splat books could give a lot of scool stuff, but could also give precedent for normal stuff suddenly requiring a feat to even attempt, and you never have enough feats.

The example of Legendary Survivalist is also interesting - if you're actually playing some kind of Ranger because you want to play with the exploring and adventuring in the wild, removing any challenges of that with a single feat can be unsatisfying. (Of course, skill feats aren't the only thing that can do that, at 15th level, there will also be a lot of spells that make it superflous).

There is also a class of skill feats that seem really weak - like Lie to Me. Most characters that

One thing that might work: Instead of providing ways to use skills that you expect anyone should try, maybe give them a tiny bonus for doing so, but also reward them for having done so.
Examples
Lie to Me: Once per adventure, gain a hero point when you successfully see through a deception.
Legendary Survivalist: You don't need food or water to survive, but once per day, when drinking a ration of water or eating a ration of food, treat it like a Healing Potion appropriate to your level.

Something that makes you go out to actively use these skill feats, too.

 

[Seramus]

It's a problem with Feats and things like them in any system. Before a Feat is introduced, most DMs assume you can do something a normal person can do. They assign a difficulty and arbitrate it however they feel - this tends to go well, but certainly does introduce a big helping of "DM May I?" into the situation.

The benefit of the feat is usually cutting down on a lot of "DM May I?" since it will dictate an action, a DC, a specific skill, etc. Sometimes they let you do completely unique things! But some DMs can decide you CANNOT do the thing (if you ever could) without the feat, even if a perfectly normal person could do them. Other DMs will allow you to do the thing, just worse than the Feat in order to validate the existence of the Feat. This second option is probably the fairest one, but it can sometimes land you in a situation where you were doing X just fine before the new book/edition/whatever got released and now you're suddenly bad at it.

 

[SpellObjectEnthusiast]

Instead of retreading the exact same conversation that tons of people have had about pf2, here's a relevant, short video from the lead designer of the system on the subject.

 

[stonehead]

Yes, that is kinda a problem with skill feats in general, and it existed with feats 3rd Edition D&D and Pathinder 1, too. Finding non-combat feats that don't just suddenly act as if they forbid ordinary things from being done without the feat.

At least earlier editions had loads of "+<number> bonus to <thing>" feats. The designers decided that they didn't want players to be able to specialize their bonuses. Every level 3 character will have a bonus in their trained skills within +/-2 of eachother.

I think the big difficulty is that feats need to interact with something, but most people run non-combat very loosely, without any concrete systems beyond roll a d20 and add a number.

One thing that might work: Instead of providing ways to use skills that you expect anyone should try, maybe give them a tiny bonus for doing so, but also reward them for having done so.
Examples
Lie to Me: Once per adventure, gain a hero point when you successfully see through a deception.
Legendary Survivalist: You don't need food or water to survive, but once per day, when drinking a ration of water or eating a ration of food, treat it like a Healing Potion appropriate to your level.

Something that makes you go out to actively use these skill feats, too.

Hero points are a great idea, because it is a system that most people use, and it gives you something to play around.

I know there are a lot of useless "utility" spells in this system, like Befitting Attire. Maybe some of them would work better as skill feats than slotted spells. (although, Befitting Attire itself would probably still be too weak for a skill feat).

Although there, part of the struggle is that the designers seem to shy away from giving outright supernatural abilities to non-magical skill feats. Improvise Tool is a perfect example. As written, it interacts with the Craft downtime activity, and basically gives you the recipes to a small number of mundane items. So, it basically does nothing. Crafting in downtime is clunky and rarely comes up, and more importantly, anyone good at it will have a recipe book (or play in a campaign where recipes aren't tracked). It's easy to imagine though, a version of Improvise Tool that instead said "you're always treated as having these items on hand, unless the DM says it would be physically impossible." I don't know if that would be a very strong feat, but it would at least be more interesting.

 

[BryonD]

I'm reminded of this same conversation all the way back to 3E. "A wizard can't hit something with his staff with all his might because the Power Attack feat exists and he doesn't have it." I 100% agree with the answer provided that anyone can try anything and the feats just represent the character gets optimal results for "whatever this character's reason happens to be".
But there are constraints because the alternative has to be reasonably inferior to the feat taking optimized character. And that often left too little room for a really satisfactory result.
In PF2E the math is just so intensely tight, that the conflict stands out even more. Yes, you can rule on the fly for anything so on that level problem solved. Full stop.
The question becomes, does the system allow enough room for really satisfying nuance?

 

[payn]

I'm reminded of this same conversation all the way back to 3E. "A wizard can't hit something with his staff with all his might because the Power Attack feat exists and he doesn't have it." I 100% agree with the answer provided that anyone can try anything and the feats just represent the character gets optimal results for "whatever this character's reason happens to be".
But there are constraints because the alternative has to be reasonably inferior to the feat taking optimized character. And that often left too little room for a really satisfactory result.
In PF2E the math is just so intensely tight, that the conflict stands out even more. Yes, you can rule on the fly for anything so on that level problem solved. Full stop.
The question becomes, does the system allow enough room for really satisfying nuance?

Yes, this. I feel like both 3E/PF1 and PF2 didnt find the Goldilocks zone for trained untrained, feat no feat. I think the 5E bounded accuracy is a better shot at it, but that game lacks anything beyond tools to interact with the skill system.

 

[stonehead]

I'm reminded of this same conversation all the way back to 3E. "A wizard can't hit something with his staff with all his might because the Power Attack feat exists and he doesn't have it." I 100% agree with the answer provided that anyone can try anything and the feats just represent the character gets optimal results for "whatever this character's reason happens to be".
But there are constraints because the alternative has to be reasonably inferior to the feat taking optimized character. And that often left too little room for a really satisfactory result.
In PF2E the math is just so intensely tight, that the conflict stands out even more. Yes, you can rule on the fly for anything so on that level problem solved. Full stop.
The question becomes, does the system allow enough room for really satisfying nuance?

That's why the sweet spot for feats is "theoretically possible, but most people can't." Wall Jump is a perfect example, and IMO the platonic ideal of a feat. Real people can't jump off walls, and if your character tried to, most GMs would just rule that you fail. A character with Wall Jump, and (kinda-sorta but-not-really a few real people) can though, because they have a special ability that lets them. Legendary Linguist is another good example. In real life, and in most games*, if your character encounters someone they share no languages with, you can try flailing your arms around, and maybe the GM will let you attempt a check, but most of the time, there will be some comically over-the-top misunderstanding.

Examples like these are really hard to come up with. That is the realization that inspired my original post. Not just "skill feats are bad because they're useless and boring" but what the bad options have in common, and how we could try to make better ones.

I think Power Attack is a bad example of the arguments in earlier editions, because there were things like Spring Attack, that were much more reasonable to argue about. Power Attack is a numerical bonus, just like Skill Focus, which would make a decent skill feat in 2E, except that the devs don't like feats that give numerical bonuses.

 

[BryonD]

OK,
I still think power attack demonstrates the point in a clear and simple way. I you think others are better, that's fine too.
As to the numerical bonus issue, that is a core flaw in PF2E. The math is just so deeply overtuned that nothing can really be expressed. But really, that is a much bigger issue and well covered elsewhere.