Paths of Heroism (PF2E Proof of Concept)

 As part of my current exploration in PF2E, I'm collecting a set of houserules that I would use which I am currently calling PathfindOSR.  I like many of the things PF2E is doing, and it's useful to me to have the large amount of content that it has, but there are also a lot of ways that I would like it to be more like an OSR game.  This post is a proof of concept of one of those ways that have the placeholder name of Paths of Heroism.

So one common thing I see with people is that PF2E has too many choices with its feats for them and they would prefer to make fewer choices; not no choices, or just one choice, but fewer.  Paths of Heroism are a set of feat packages that cover a tier of levels so that players can make one choice covering multiple feats, reducing the number of choices for class feats from ten (ish) to three.  With names stolen from Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard for now, I'm calling them Novice Paths of Heroism (levels 1-6), Expert Paths (levels 7-14), and Master Paths (levels 15-20).  (Really, it's levels 8-14 and 16-20, since class feats show up at even levels, but it feels better to me to list the whole set of levels.)  Each path is given a Role, which right now I'm just using the 4E roles (striker, controller, defender, leader).  If feats involved in a path require or work best with a certain skill or set of gear, that's included in the Path description as a recommended thing to have or use.

It's also possible to create Paths for skill feats or general feats to help optionally trim down character building choices even further, but that's beyond the scope of this current proof of concept.

As a proof of concept, here's a few Novice Paths for the fighter class.  Fighters get class feats at levels 1, 2, 4, and 6.  There is no guarantee that these paths are optimal or good, but they demonstrate the concept.

Fighter Novice Path - Tempest
Role: Striker
Recommended Gear: Two weapons, at least one of which can deal piercing damage
Feats: Double Slice (1st), Lunge (2nd), Twin Parry (4th), Revealing Stab (6th)

Fighter Novice Path - Wrestler
Role: Controller
Recommended Gear: A free hand
Recommend Skill: Athletics
Feats: Snagging Strike (1st), Combat Grab (2nd), Slam Down (4th), Dazing Blow (6th)

Fighter Novice Path - Blocker
Role: Defender
Recommended Gear: Shield
Feats: Sudden Charge (1st), Aggressive Block (2nd), Powerful Shove (4th), Shield Warden (6th)

And so we can see that with a little work, we can turn one gun into five guns.  Which actually went the other way around when Moe said it, just like these choices, where we turned four choices into one choice.

These are pretty easy to make, but of course they can't cover every possible combination of choices (ignoring that there are some feats that make no sense to be taken together, and also ignoring archetypes and other out-of-class options, and also assuming that you always take a feat at the maximum available level, there's 10,560 possible novice paths to put together here for fighter) and they shouldn't be expected to or intended to.  Paths can cover some common character goals with a set of feats that's good enough to fulfill that particular fantasy.  If a player wants to be more specific with their character build, they can pick feats themselves, or they can take most of the feats from a path but swap one or two of them out.

The intent of paths is to simplify choices, not to restrict players, and a player can always just go back to picking feats themselves if they want to.  But if they don't want to think too much about it and just make one choice that works well enough, they can pick a path and be done with it.