Cosmopolitan feats

[Aspect of Sorrow]

There is bigger fish to fry, but they can have their own thread, this one is specifically about Cosmopolitan feats.

[mrm3ntalist]

Why should skills be locked behind classes?

Skills are not locked behind classes. You can still increase a cross class skill at the cost of 2 skill points, but of course you cannot max it

It makes sense for a character to excel at something due to their background, rather than their class. DnD / Pathfinder supports that. With Cosmo, there is now a lot more freedom in expressing character concepts without tainting them with random class dips.

I imagine you mean character concepts that require umd 26 instead of 16 for example, right?

You can express every character concept without the cosmo feats. What you can do with the cosmo feats is to cheaply maximize the mechanics of a build

As for mechanical implications... we can always tweak things in a way that's not in opposition to the above goal. Maybe some skills are overall too powerful and then it doesn't matter who has it, because even pre-cosmo every skill out there could have been abused by a big number of builds.

Maybe some skills should be indeed tightly coupled with a class but without any of that "dipping for skill" nonsense (plus maxing it out with Able Learner). Instead, skill bonuses could be given at certain class levels. Or, for example, "full benefit" UMD could be made available to only characters with X number of class levels (much higher than 3) and otherwise UMD works up to, let's say 6th circle.

All that you say here is that the Cosmo feats are introduced too hastily with little thought.

The design can improve, but let's be honest here - it wasn't any better before Cosmo feats.

It is worse with the Cosmo skills

[Theodore01]

But, at least with cosmo tumble, the crusader becomes somewhat playable