Potential problems with deferring feats

[kardar233]

I'm considering allowing my players to defer taking feats in the next game I run. What potential problems might this cause?

[Flickerdart]

It's very easy to get many feats at level 1 - a human fighter with 2 flaws gets five. If players bank some or all of these feats, they can score a high-level feat chain somewhere down the line once they've met its complicated prerequisites.

The other problem this causes is it encourages players to cripple themselves now in order to be better later. This is a very bad thing to do, since the players that choose to bank feats are going to be annoyed at the players who didn't, and once they cash them in, that will turn around. It's like the fighter and wizard in earlier editions, where the fighter was great at the early levels but then suddenly became a chump. Setting things up so only a portion of the party is happy at any given time is not a good approach.

You should let players defer taking ToB stances, though, because those progressions are just awful.

[Story]

You could let them retrain instead. Unless the entire goal is to make builds possible that wouldn't be possible normally (since retraining still has to meet prereqs).

[kardar233]

I was considering ruling that you can only have one deferred feat at a time, to avoid stocking up and getting lots at the same time. I was primarily thinking of it to help avoid moments where your qualifications for feats don't match up with your feat-gaining levels. Seeing how some builds jump through hoops to try to get feats on levels off the every-3rd-level progression (such as Frostblood Orc SotAO Mystic Rangers) I thought it might be a nice quality of life change.

[DarkSonic1337]

You should let players defer taking ToB stances, though, because those progressions are just awful.

Rather than deferring stances, you should just fix the progressions.

It's litterally just bumping each stance gain back one level.