Saturday, August 10, 2013

Pathfinder feats

    I like Pathfinder, I play it, and I think it is a great improvement over D&D 3.5.  Except, there is one thing that has always bothered me about it, the feats list.
    Not feats themselves, I like feats well enough (though there are certainly some that seem rather useless or overly-specific) - what bothers me is how they are always listed in alphabetical order.  Which is just stupid.  Sorry to call a spade a spade, but it is stupid.  Feats have prerequisites, you can't just take whatever ones you want.  So that feat beginning with A might need you to be level 18 before you can take it.  A far more intelligent and useful way would be to list feats by groups, and then by level within those groups.
    So I decided to do just that.  I was reading a post at one of the RPG blogs I follow (can't remember which one) talking about how hard it was to make a character and how many feats you had to choose from, and suddenly there I was copying-and-pasting from the Pathfinder SRD website (which I have saved on my computer, am I a geek or what?).  I went through the Core Rulebook, the Advanced Player's Guide, Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat.  The material was there for the Advanced Race Guide, but the feats were not listed in a convenient table and I've wasted enough of my life on this that I don't feel like typing them all in by hand.
    I was amazed by what I found.  Between the books I covered there are just over 700 feats (and another estimated 150 in the Adv Race Guide), and a 1st level character could possibly qualify for just over 300 of them.  That is a lot of choosing, and a lot of front-loaded choosing.  I guess it is hard to make a character.  Playing and making games are what I do for fun, so it never seemed that bad to me.
    Anyways, I decided I would share the documents I have made, in the off chance they would be helpful to someone else.  These are very terse, all I took was the one-line abbreviated descriptions for each feat, so you will still need the books to look up the specific details.  I created a class of "0 level" feats, which just means they have no prerequisites, and I tried to determine the the lowest possible level you could qualify for each feat - mind you, I may be off so double-check for yourself.  I created over 70 categories, broken down into 5 main ones of Combat feats, Spellcasting feats, Character feats (for general stuff like Toughness and skill feats), Racial feats, and Class-specific feats.  These are PDF files (love you LibreOffice) with a linked Table of Contents, so just click on the ToC to go to a page (you have to get back the long way).

    I have two documents.  The first one is the full feat list, you can find it on my Google Drive here:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7TR7SbGiuQbVVNHMVJoUkJFZGM/edit?usp=sharing

    The other one only has the feats that a 1st level character could qualify for, so it might be good to give to a new player who is having trouble wading through the big tables:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7TR7SbGiuQbN2I5QVh0TTR3SG8/edit?usp=sharing

    I hope these help somebody, for all the hours I put into them.  I'm sure someone else has done a better job of this already, I'm afraid to Google it and check (it has taken a whole lot of time to put these together).  If you have any questions, comments, or whatever feel free to say so in the comments section below.
    Happy gaming and remember, don't drink the demonic outsider's blood - the GM might do something bad to you for that ;)

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