“Free” to pick the Medic archetype again

To those of y’all who know me, you know me for my based takes — such as my unrestricted, seething hatred for Free Archetype. I’m sure many of my fellow, somewhat less based but still so, peers would agree, arguing that it boosts the average power of the player characters, and the worst that it unevenly does so; any player that chooses flavour over a “power-up” archetype such as the aforementioned Medic will find themselves lacking or limited in comparison to the other players’ characters. There’s also the fact that multiclass archetypes are almost always more powerful than non-multiclass ones — all of you who picked Rogue Dedication for no flavour reasons but for Sneak Attacker or Skill Mastery, please stand up and leave the premises.

 

O-okay, now come back, it gets awkward talking to just myself.

Of course, I’m well aware that the rules that the rules suggest restricting the archetype options, but people commonly just interpret the “free” part as “free as in speech” rather than “free as in beer”.
But oh well, we have a solution, no? Just simply disallow Free Archetype, that should solve the issues, right?

I’m only human, after all

Versatile Heritage. Natural Ambition. Optionally Clever Improviser and Multitalented. Sounds familiar, huh?
(The joke also would work with Ancient Elves, but you can counter players who pick that by calling them boomers. Trust!)

The thing is, even if you disallow Free Archetype (which is effectively just extra feats), you’ll still have players who optimise for extra feats. Do note that I didn’t say “optimise for extra power” — sure, some players are like that, but most, from what I’ve found, just wants the extra customisation options. General feats are the primary guilty party for being all over the place enabling certain builds that would otherwise take half a game to actually start (read: level 3-5 (don’t lie, we all know nobody plays above level 10)).

There’s also the fact that I just hate people picking humans as an ancestry. You could be anyone and yet you pick Joe Shmoe?

“Yeah, you can ignore the restrictions”

There inevitably comes a time when a player, on purpose or by accident, picks an archetype that just… doesn’t have enough feats to actually fit the Free Archetype feat slots. It might be missing a level 4 feat, it might have said feat be a skill feat, or it might just simply not have enough feats coming in a timely manner. This leads to a curious situation where GMs will typically tell the players to just ignore the restrictions: they are allowed to start a new archetype without picking up the mandatory 2 feats. Some GMs already start the players off with this restriction lifted — the most common variant I see is that the Free Archetype line of feat slots are considered entirely separate from your main class feats, and starting an archetype in one only limits you to the archetype for 2 feats in that “line”.

There’s also a curious variant of this: when a player wants to multiclass into their own class. In truth, not everyone is looking to make their character into a world-travelling factotum. You could rule that they can pick their multiclass archetype, but that’s not the same, is it? The dedication usually gives the establishing base for the class, which — being a member of that class — they already have. Their first meaningful choice would actually be a level 4, when they can finally pick up a level 1 or 2 feat of their own class. Was that worth it?

Swimming against the current

This is more of a player expectation issue, but if you don’t offer Free Archetype, you’re going against the majority of the playerbase. Now, there are admittedly several potential problems with using this poll as evidence (1. players presumably are the majority, and there are 4-6 players to a GM, 2. it’s Reddit only, 3. it’s Reddit), but it’s still a good indication that at least sixty-something percent of the voters here use Free Archetype. Builds shared online are typically planned with Free Archetype in mind, Free Archetype is often the first “homebrew” suggested to newer GMs, etc.

The parameters

So! We have quite the predicament. We can’t just throw out Free Archetype, but we also don’t wanna use it (and if you say you do wanna use it, just pretend you don’t for a moment so I can make my argument, yeah?).

We’ve got these points to watch out for:

• We do not want to give a full Free Archetype for the reasons established above.
• We do want to give some extra feat slots to players.
• We want to give at least one general feat as they’re often used as “build-fixers”.

Of course, there are many ways to approach this, but I’m here to share the way I do it in my games. I like to call it…

Booster Pack Feats

(I-it’s a joke on another joke about paid-for Free Archetype feats where I called the concept “Paid Archetype”, but ANYWAY–)

This variant rule is simple, you give your players three extra feats:

• One class feat received at level 1,
• one general feat received at level 1, and
• one class feat received received at level 2.

Each feat granted serves a specific purpose.

The level 1 class feat allows spellcasters to actually pick up a feat at the start of the game, allowing for some customisation without increasing the player characters’ power level overmuch. Level 1 and 2 class feats also generally serve as a way to “set up” a build in a few classes, and this just speeds up the process without needing to wait til one or more level ups.

The level 1 general feat similarly allows players to pick up some of the most critical general feats in a timely manner. This could be Armour Proficiency to increase their defences or Weapon Proficiency for their offence, or Toughness / Fleet / Canny Acumen to pick the power feats they would pick anyway.

The level 1 feats together de-emphasise the importance of going Natural Ambition Versatile Human without directly nerfing it.

The level 2 class feat allows players to freely start archetyping if they want to, or commit to picking more of their class’s feats if they’re satisfied with what they have.

The class feats together give spellcasters some class feat options before level 4. The inspiration for this variant rule actually came from a real situation I had with a relatively newer player, where she decided to pick a spellcaster with a class archetype. It was only then that I realised that her first actual class feat choice would be at level 4, which got me thinking — I didn’t really want to throw Free Archetype at newer players, no matter how brave they are.

Implementing it in Foundry

Now, because most of you play in Foundry, and I’m a Foundry “specialist”, I’ll also demonstrate two ways you can implement this in your games.

Using campaign feats

A relatively rarely used feature of the PF2 system on Foundry is “campaign feats” — extra feat slots to use in your games. As a GM, create a temporary macro, and paste this in there:

const FeatCategories = [
    {
        id: "boosterPackFeats",
        label: `Booster Pack Feats`,
        slots: [
            {
                id: "extraGenFeat",
                label: "GEN"
            },
            {
                id: "extraClassOneFeat",
                label: "CL1"
            },
            {
                id: "extraClassTwoFeat",
                label: "CL2"
            }
        ]
    }
];

game.settings.set("pf2e", "campaignFeatSections", FeatCategories);

The code above simply sets a system setting, that of the “campaign feat sections”. This is a list of elements, and we give it a list of one item — our boosterPackFeats. The label is used to determine what gets displayed on the player sheets, and the slots simply define what, well, feat slots shall appear in this new feat section. When all is done, set the type of the macro to “script”, and run it. Note that you should definitely not run random scripts found on the net, so maybe get this code checked out with someone you trust, but I assure you it’s nothing malicious.

When all’s said and done, you should get a result that looks like this:Of course, this solution has several problems. One, the feat slots appear even when the player is not of the correct level — see the “CL2” feat slot. Two, because these mix a general feat and class feats, you cannot set up filters for them, which means that if the players press the magnifying glass icon next to the slots, they get an unfiltered view of all feats and features.

These two problems can be somewhat fixed by separating the feat categories into two:

const FeatCategories = [
    {
        id: "boosterPackFeatsGen",
        label: `Booster Pack Feats - General`,
        slots: [1],
        supported: ["general"]
    },
    {
        id: "boosterPackFeatsClass",
        label: `Booster Pack Feats - Class`,
        slots: [1, 2],
        supported: ["class"]
    }
];

game.settings.set("pf2e", "campaignFeatSections", FeatCategories);

The problem that still persists however is that you have no way of filtering down the class feat slots to class — they will instead show feats for every class you have.

ChoiceSet + GrantItem: the Derry Special

You can also instead make two custom features that each ask the player what feat or feats they want to pick. This solution presumes enough knowledge of the system to know what rule elements are, so be warned. The first one would ask about the first level feats, with rule elements like so:

{
  "key": "ChoiceSet",
  "choices": {
    "filter": [
      "item:category:class",
      "item:trait:{actor|class.slug}",
      "item:level:1"
    ],
    "itemType": "feat"
  },
  "adjustName": false,
  "flag": "classFeat",
  "prompt": "PF2E.SpecificRule.Prompt.Feat"
}

{
  "key": "GrantItem",
  "uuid": "{item|flags.pf2e.rulesSelections.classFeat}"
}

{
  "key": "ChoiceSet",
  "choices": {
    "filter": [
      "item:category:general",
      "item:level:1"
    ],
    "itemType": "feat"
  },
  "adjustName": false,
  "flag": "genFeat",
  "prompt": "PF2E.SpecificRule.Prompt.Feat"
}

{
  "key": "GrantItem",
  "uuid": "{item|flags.pf2e.rulesSelections.genFeat}"
}

Most of the fields presented here are relatively self-explanatory if you know about rule elements.

The {actor|class.slug} might look curious, but it simply gets some data from the player character, the “actor”. It gets its class, and from that, the class’s slug — which is usually an all-lowercase version of the class’s name, with spaces replaced with hyphens, and most special characters removed. This is not an exact definition, but it suffices.
The thing to note is that this same format is also how traits are stored, so this will match up most classes with their respective traits.

The other two fields that might merit an explanation are flag, which stores a custom value on the item (which then the GrantItems look for and use to determine the UUID of the feat to grant — this is how your picked choice is granted to you), and prompt, which is usually ordinary English text that instructs the user what to do, but here, we use PF2E.SpecificRule.Prompt.Feat, which in the system will display “Select a feat.” translated to the user’s language.

After this is done, you need a second feature that does something similar, but it only uses the class-feat-granting ChoiceSet and GrantItem, and the former is changed like this:

{
  "key": "ChoiceSet",
  "choices": {
    "filter": [
      "item:category:class",
      "item:trait:{actor|class.slug}",
      {
        "lte": [
          "item:level",
          2
        ]
      }
    ],
    "itemType": "feat"
  },
  "adjustName": false,
  "flag": "classFeat",
  "prompt": "PF2E.SpecificRule.Prompt.Feat"
}

“LTE” stands for “lesser than or equal” — this is a check for the feat’s level to be either 1 or 2 (or 0, but don’t make level 0 feats, please).

When you’ve made these two features, you will need your player to give them to themselves — the person who drags the feature to a character gets asked about their choices. You will also need to do this again when they reach level 2 and the second feature must be added.

That’s all, folks!

Despite my (admittedly partially comedic) hatred for Free Archetype, I do still suggest using it for games where it would thematically make sense; Strength of Thousands is a really good example of one such case. However, for other games where you’d pretty much only use Free Archetype just because, why don’t you give Booster Pack Feats a go, and see if it helps?