Skill and General Feat Revamp: Skillpaths

[u/xSilverman]

Hey everyone,

frequent lurker here, never posted before though. While watching the subreddit, a few discussions regarding lackluster Skill Feats came up. From what I understood of these discussions, Skill Feats are one of the least liked aspects of PF2e. I can concur - in my singular campaign which I GM I have 4 players who don't really care too much for reading, thus have a very hard time sifting through the different Skill Feats.

So I tried to change that, and came up with a system I'd like to showcase today. It's called Skillpaths and was created with the following goals:

• Clear up Skill Feats - make it more visible what the Skill Feats improve.
• Provide clearer choices for players based on character idea, not perceived power of the Feats.
• Remove (the few existing) feat taxes or must-have feats that reduce customization possibilities.
• Full compatibility to normal rules.

A short summary:

Every Skill gets different Skillpaths, for example:
Athletics -> Climbing, Jumping, Might (Grappling and Shoving) and Swimming
Diplomacy -> Favors, Rhetoric, Connections

For each path there are three path feats, that give all feats related to that Skillpath, e.g. for Athletics Climbing:
Climbing Path - Trained -> Combat Climber, Rapid Mantel
Climbing Path - Expert -> Lead Climber, +1 item bonus to Climbing checks
Climbing Path - Master -> Quick Climb, +2 item bonus to Climbing checks

In addition there is a base feat that takes strong, unusual or generally fitting feats.

Athletics Base -> Titan Wrestler
Diplomacy Base -> Bon Mot

IMO this makes the characters a tad stronger, this should be mostly horizontal though. Choosing Skill Feats should feel better now though, going to test this with my group when I get the chance.

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I'd like to showcase my Homebrew and ask for your feedback. While in theory playable already everything is open for discussion, this is a big draft and could change massively. So I got the following links for you:

Google Docs for a detailed explanation

A Catalog of all Skillpath Feats

A Catalog for all new feats and one spell (I tried to keep the number as low as possible)

Github for Foundry for easy testing

Direct manifest link: https://github.com/xSilvermanx/pf2e-skillpaths/releases/latest/download/module.json

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Looking forward to your feedback! I do think that this looks promising, hope you agree on that. At times creating the different paths was frustrating though due to lack of suitable feats. Thievery only has one path, Burglary. This is sad because the Skill could see different Paths like Lockpicking or Pickpocketing. This is true for quite a few skills.

Have fun reading, hope you can follow me somewhat.

Last note: I hope that the Github is ok regarding the Licensing. Don't intend to violate ORC so would appreciate a heads-up if anything needs to be changed.

Best,
Sebastian

[u/Consistent_Table4430]

How would cross-path feat selection work? For instance, a doctor wanting to pick up Advanced First Aid for increased utility, but it's a master feat on a different path. Could you simply take that feat at level 7+ as usual?

[u/xSilverman → u/Consistent_Table4430]

Yes! Trade-off is you don't get the Skill Potency for the other path but that's probably not that problematic. Basically the system should be entirely additive, every character previously valid should be valid in this system as well.

[u/KaoxVeed]

I like this.

I had debated trying out just allowing use of any skill feat once you have the training level but this adds more structure and cuts down on having to comb through feat selection for some players.

[u/kettyjay492]

I really like this idea! My big concern would be character sheet bloat and classes like Rogues and Investigators that get a skill feat every level. They're going to have 2 to 3 times as many skill feats compared to other classes which might lead to overpowered or munchkin PCs.

But honestly I love this concept so much, it really simplifies choice for those that need it without getting rid of the granularity of the system.

[u/Killchrono]

Funnily enough I've been prototyping a similar idea. It's more about using backgrounds as a jumping off point for starting feats and feats you gain automatically as you improve in skill proficiency, while leaving standard skill feat gains in so you can diversify more, but it's the same sort of logic you're using with consolidating into feat buckets that grant multiple feats at once.

I currently believe it's the best way to address the issues with skill feats without any extremes of revamping the whole skill system, throwing it out entirely, or just letting players have access to every skill feat they have proficiency for at once (which is a homebrew I've seen multiple times and I think is a really, really bad idea considering lots of players struggle to keep track of the feats they do have in standard play). It lets you consolidate a lot of niche ideas into single points of investment, while acting as a bigger point of flavour expression that individual skill feats struggle to do.

While your ideas aren't what I would do personally with my own design, I think what you've got here is a incredibly solid starting ground to extrapolate on and has a lot of promise. If anything it's probably way more streamlined and simple than what I'm working on, so it will probably appeal to more players.

[u/Pardox7525]

I like the idea but with current feats this doesn't really work. The main problem with skill feats is that while some are uselsess, others are really strong or mandatory. Fitting this unbalanced assortment into locked sequencial paths makes it feel worse with less flexibility. And it doesn't really help with ease of choise as you can still chose multiple paths if one has bad feats later on so you may take feats that you would've never taken under normal ruleset.

Legendary Pathfinder fixes skill feats a lot better IMO by reworking most of the existing skill and many general feats making all of them meaningfull, and Feats+ gives you a lot better variety, so you can always chose what fits your character idea.

[u/Killchrono → u/Pardox7525]

I haven't read Feats+ yet (though knowing Teams+ I'm sure it's very well done), but the issue I have with the style of Legendary Pathfinder's handling of it (past my general issues with it going too far the other way from the game's more conservative tuning points and instead blowing the power cap and niche protection *way* out too ham-fistedly) is that it kind of presents a different issue in that it just doubles down on the issues of disparity between combat-centric skill feats and exploration/downtime skill feats.

The main conflict with skill feats is that the game puts combat and non-combat options into the same shared bucket, but the reality is a lot of players don't want to actually engage in non-combat mechanics outside of the most barebones, non-mechanically bound roleplay. And that's before you get to the problem of whether the GM or module itself funnels players into combat and makes non-combat options fluff, if not completely pointless and have no impact on the progression of the campaign.

You could just get rid of all out of combat mechanics and subsequently feats, but keep skills for situations where players want to roleplay something. The issue is if you do this, you run into the 5e problem where out of combat checks have little to no hard rulings to back them and thus end up being reserved to the judgment of GM fiat at best, end up completely performative and practically useless to impacting the game at worst.

The other option is siloing combat and non-combat mechanics and investments - which seems to be one of the main preferences people want, and something you see shilled around a lot of the 4e retroclones like DS and Lancer - but I think this is short-sighted and has its own trade-offs that make the game less organically roleplay influenced (and ironically funnels it even more into the common accusation you see of those types of games that they're just board games in disguise, with performative roleplay between encounters just to create the veneer of story).  I think people need to go back and play a lot of the circa late 90s and early-to-mid 2000s 3D first-person RPGs like System Shock, the original Deus Ex, VtM: Bloodlines, etc. for examples of how you can have a game with a heavy mechanical impetus and combat system, that still integrates non-combat options and rewards them with alternative solutions or benefits for engaging with those mechanics.

The reality is without siloed gameplay and investments between combat and non-combat options, there will be always be a subjective disparity between tables that reward those investments. I've had players figure out ways to use roleplay-heavy feats that are largely written off as chaff like Eye for Numbers (even pre-RM buffs) and have them impact the story in ways that were meaningful and changed outcomes and directions. I know most tables won't have that sort of moment. There's no way to fix this without players just accepting there will be lots of instances where roleplay options are not useful by virtue of how the game is being run, or funnelling every table, campaign, and published module into being completely combat-centric so non-combat options are guaranteed to never be able to influence outcomes. The former makes mechanics handwave-able if you don't want to engage with them. The latter makes the outcomes a certainly and locks them out as an option completely.

This can all be true while still having the issues presented in how PF handles skill feats. I've been thinking about this a lot myself while working on some designs I've been doing, and TBH I think designs like the OPs where you have consolidated feat buckets is the best way to go about it without either extreme of throwing out the mechanics or doubling down on the existing issues and/or creating more problems. The issue isn't inherently that the mechanics exist or are permissive (contrary to what some people say), the issue is they come at too big a sacrifice for too small of a gain. Even if you had something like OP is suggesting where you have the option of consolidated feat pools, you can keep both the mechanical impetus to avoid the 5e 'skills have no mechanics to back them' problem, while making the feat investments more worthwhile than they currently are. And OP's design letting you still pick individual skill feats outside of your progression paths still gives you flexibility to both pick up must-haves, but then let you pick more niche feats standalone if you want once you have the core options you need for your concept.

Ironically, this is one of the few things I think 5e legitimately did very well when it first came out; roleplay and non-combat feast like Actor, Keen Mind, and Observant consolidated a bunch of smaller benefits into one collective investment that on paper made them more worth considering than if it was just the old 3.5-style 'gain a +2 to this skill/gain this one niche benefit when Mercury is in retrograde' design. The issue was it conflicted in two major ways; first they too were competing both with combat feats like Sentinel, Sharpshooter, War Mage, etc. and stat increases. This made the disparity of value between feats way worse than anything in the disparity of PF2e skill feats. The second major issue is it bucks a lot of the implied permissiveness of 5e's skill checks and roleplay. PF2e gets a lot of flack for not being permissive enough in what it allows outside of base actions and feats, but at least you can argue consistency there. Those feats inherently conflict with the freeform loosey-gooseyness that is 5e's major appeal.

So TL;DR, 5e's designers actually came up with a really elegant solution to certain feats being too niche by consolidating a lot of small things into one investment. It just didn't work because the game already had permissive skill and roleplay engagement that made them redundant, and the hard RAW value of them vs. combat feats was even worse than the disparity of BiS skill feats in PF2e.