Reducing Feat Taxes

Description

There are a number of combat-related feat chains that make the effectiveness of specialised characters lag significantly behind simpler characters. For example, it takes an entire chain of feats to bring a character wielding two weapons up to the effectiveness of a similar character wielding a single weapon in two hands—which requires no feats at all.

The goal here is to smooth out the progression, eliminating some feats and combining others, so that a non-fighter character may benefit from multiple combat styles instead of needing to spend all of their feats to have access to one.

The Elephant in the Room

Fortunately, Mathew and Michael Iantorno have done an incredible service to the Pathfinder community and created a set of rules that rectify the issue almost entirely. These rules may be downloaded at The Elephant in the Room.

House Modifications

All of the rules in the linked document are applicable, with the following changes:

• Greater Two-Weapon Fighting provides a matching offhand attack each time a character's BAB grants them an iterative attack, instead of only at +6 and +11.
• Improved Two-Weapon Fighting is rewritten instead of being removed entirely. In lieu of granting an extra attack, it reduces the penalties for fighting with two weapons by 2. When the character reaches a BAB of +11, the penalties are eliminated entirely.
• Unarmed Combatant doesn't improve the damage die of unarmed strikes all the way to that of a first-level monk. Instead, unarmed damage with this feat is increased to 1d4 for medium characters, and 1d3 for small.
• Light weapons are still referred to as "light weapons," and mêlée weapons for which a character may use their Dex bonus in their attack rolls are still referred to as "finessable." This is for the sake of clarity, as there isn't really a need to change the terminology, and it avoids any confusion between a weapon with the agile (ie. "finessable") inherent property and one with the agile psionic modification.