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Which feats shouldn't be feats
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6106143" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>I loathe kits, subclasses, specialties and archetypes and pretty much anything of the sort. I believe the ideal number of specialties in a system is exactly 0. How many orders of magnitude of disagreement is that? <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite1" alt=":)" title="Smile :)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":)" /></p><p></p><p>Consider the fighter archetypes in the Pathfinder Advanced Player's guide (easily purusable from the PrD). Suppose I want to be something of an archer, but I also want to be a bit more versital and fight as a free hand fighter some of the time. If the class abilities of the archetypes were feats, I could essentially be a 10th level Archer/10th level Fencer, mixing and matching feats to build up the particular sort of fighter I want. But if we make the feats in to fixed unconfigurable progressions, then I'm locked into to whatever ideas the designer thinks I should pursue and worse yet I can't even get around this by multiclassing.</p><p></p><p>There is no advantage to a 'specialty' over a feat tree unless you've badly designed your base classes to begin with (in which case, they exist as a way to retcon your earlier poor design choices). Specialities can't be shared between classes (remember 2e splat books with identically named kits for rogues, fighters, bards, etc.). Specialties are inflexible. You can't choose what portion to take. Specialties lock a player into a choice at chargen. Specialties are redundant with feats. Specialties make design and balance more difficult by forcing all archetypes to be assumed to be of the same scope and power. With feats, a concept can be captured in 1, 3 or 11 feats depending on its utility and scope. A kit/specialty/archetype is one size fits all, and as such tends to lock out small archetypes that represent a narrow portion of your ultimate abilities ('Master Ventriloquist', for example) or else force the kludging together of several smaller archetypes ("Every Master Ventriloquist must also be a Master Juggler"). Specialities multiply even faster than feats in the long run, especially in terms of page count they consume, because to make everyone happy you have to end up mixing and matching. There are nearly as many specialties as there are combinations of feats. </p><p></p><p>All a speciality is as a fixed progression of bonus feats that someone thinks is related and wants to pigeon hole your character into. If you can envision a kit, specialty, or archetype, then you can envision transforming that idea into a small feat tree and provided you've designed your base classes well it will just work better. Feats mitigate against the problems of a class based chargen system. Specialties magnify them.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 6106143, member: 4937"] I loathe kits, subclasses, specialties and archetypes and pretty much anything of the sort. I believe the ideal number of specialties in a system is exactly 0. How many orders of magnitude of disagreement is that? :) Consider the fighter archetypes in the Pathfinder Advanced Player's guide (easily purusable from the PrD). Suppose I want to be something of an archer, but I also want to be a bit more versital and fight as a free hand fighter some of the time. If the class abilities of the archetypes were feats, I could essentially be a 10th level Archer/10th level Fencer, mixing and matching feats to build up the particular sort of fighter I want. But if we make the feats in to fixed unconfigurable progressions, then I'm locked into to whatever ideas the designer thinks I should pursue and worse yet I can't even get around this by multiclassing. There is no advantage to a 'specialty' over a feat tree unless you've badly designed your base classes to begin with (in which case, they exist as a way to retcon your earlier poor design choices). Specialities can't be shared between classes (remember 2e splat books with identically named kits for rogues, fighters, bards, etc.). Specialties are inflexible. You can't choose what portion to take. Specialties lock a player into a choice at chargen. Specialties are redundant with feats. Specialties make design and balance more difficult by forcing all archetypes to be assumed to be of the same scope and power. With feats, a concept can be captured in 1, 3 or 11 feats depending on its utility and scope. A kit/specialty/archetype is one size fits all, and as such tends to lock out small archetypes that represent a narrow portion of your ultimate abilities ('Master Ventriloquist', for example) or else force the kludging together of several smaller archetypes ("Every Master Ventriloquist must also be a Master Juggler"). Specialities multiply even faster than feats in the long run, especially in terms of page count they consume, because to make everyone happy you have to end up mixing and matching. There are nearly as many specialties as there are combinations of feats. All a speciality is as a fixed progression of bonus feats that someone thinks is related and wants to pigeon hole your character into. If you can envision a kit, specialty, or archetype, then you can envision transforming that idea into a small feat tree and provided you've designed your base classes well it will just work better. Feats mitigate against the problems of a class based chargen system. Specialties magnify them. [/QUOTE]
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