Jeff Carlsen
Adventurer
Functionally, they aren't very different. Organizationally, they are.
A class has it's hit die, class skills, and other basic elements shared across all classes. Then, all class features are grouped into talent trees. So, a rogue might have Stealth tree that has talents that improve their ability to sneak, hide, and evade. He would also have a Sneak Attack tree with related talents. Instead of getting set class features at particular levels, you choose a talent. Talents may or may not have prerequisites, and may or may not be chained.
As you can see, they're very much like feat chains, except that each chain is named and grouped together in the book, and then further organized by class. In fact, in SW:SE, you get bonus feats every even level, and talents every odd. Bonus feats are simply a selection from the list of feats that are thematically appropriate for the class.
Thus, you gain a lot of flexibility within any class because classes are just thematic groups of abilities. I think the only reason feats are still separated from talents is that it's based on core d20, and the feat list is almost identical to D&D 3E. There's no reason you couldn't roll the two systems together entirely by organizing feats into talent trees.
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