makes sense, thanks.

would a non-infinite but very high cap (say, 300) impact performance noticeably? just curious how far it could be pushed before it became a problem.

So far, I'm only aware of a single bug report from someone who found a build that allowed them to be trained in enough lore skills that they wanted to exceed the current 30 skill limit, and even that character was designed solely for trained lore skill count, and was an exercise in testing the system's limits, not a character designed to be played. If you have a use case for expanding this, please present it, so we can weigh the benefits, against the cost of increasing resource usage for every PF2 character out there.

I'm not sure specifically if there's some sort of cutoff. The issue really lies in that there's a lot of moving parts of various impacts on characters, so it's less an issue of skills themselves being problematic as a ton of skills plus items plus feats etc. Usually if we add limits its to keep things within realistic boundaries so one can't just add 50 lore skills for the sake of pushing the system (also table bloat is concern in this case), when a normal character will never reach that point. Things like this wind up causing issues for the server, which then trickles down to affecting general performance. It's also why weapons have a limit on the number you can add. It's not that we *want* to limit them, it's that they have a LOT of processing behind the scenes so cases where a bunch get added to a character and never used just puts excessive strain upon that character. It's all done in the interest of keeping performance smooth and timely, both for individuals and as a whole.

per Daniel V further up the thread, "We avoid automatically adding lore skills that can't be removed if they're optional, since there's a finite number of skills that can be present on a character."

however based on what you're saying, it sounds like hitting the skills cap is very unlikely unless a user is going out of their way to try and do so.

so in that case, why not automatically add the lore skills after all? it would save on user confusion when expected lore skills from feats etc don't appear, and apparently the risk of this causing problems with the 30-skill cap is small-to-nonexistent.

edit: to be clear, i'm not asking for the cap to be raised. i'm asking for lore skills added by feats etc to be automatically added to the skills list. the questions about the cap were to try and find out whether that is feasible or not. it seems to me that it is in fact feasible, unless i'm missing something?

For the feats that only allow you to select from among 2 or 3 lore skills, we've got a project on the to-do list already to examine what we can do in terms of adding those to the hero automatically when you add the feat - we should be able to add them in a way that lets the user delete the ones they don't pick, if they want to reduce the clutter, but still delete the whole set if the user deletes the feat/background/whatever that added them in the first place. It wouldn't help for things like Terrain Stalker, which can select from among 10+ different terrain lores, or the raised by belief background that can potentially select from many dozen deity lores, but it should be feasible for the 2-3 choice ones.

But just a caveat - the project on our to-do list is to explore this - to check how easy it is to run up against the limit, and make sure that if you do run up against the limit the issue is handled smoothly, and then check how this ends up working if you add two different feats that can each select several lores, and they have some amount of overlap in those lists - what happens to the lores if you change your mind on one of those feat choices, but not the other?

Yeah, as Mathias said we've got some space to explore presenting options and allowing them to be removed if not selected. What we want to avoid though is cases where a feat allows you to get training in one of 3ish lore skills, and you pick one and the other two are just forever dead skill slots on your character taking up space, without the ability to be removed. That would potentially make it much easier to hit that cap. In cases where a source just gives training in one lore skill, we do add that skill automatically since no choice needs be made, so no unused selection will be present as clutter.

why would all of the potential lore skill choices need to be added upfront? can you instead add a dropdown selection menu on the feat, and only add whichever lore skill the user selects?

I'm not sure it's feasible to have an option that can both select from among existing items (in case the list of skills already added includes one that qualifies here) or create a new selection. The capability to accomplish this isn't available at this time.

I'm not sure if y'all have looked at the Strength of Thousands AP yet, but there is a layered academia system for players specific to that AP that is going to result in all the players being trained in multiple lore skills above and beyond what they will receive through class progression and background. Add to that the AP using the free archetype option, and I'm guessing the number of extra lore skills will be 4 or 5 by the end of progression.

Ah, yeah I don't think we've had a chance to look there yet. Pretty swamped with all the hard covers in the pipeline haha. But yeah, given that info, we might have to assess how we want to handle it. In most cases it should still be alright, as you'll still need probably another 6-7 or so after that and background before you hit the limit, but we'll have to discuss it. Thanks for the heads up!