Hecate Thinks about 6e D&D

This post will not give a hard, mechanical breakdown of every feat that will be in my hypothetical 6e PHB. There's way too much balancing that will go on for that to be feasible. It will, instead, try to theory-craft what makes a good feat, how to build good feats and outline some ideas around that to give possible feats for 6e. When looking at feats, we have the whole of the 3e/3.5e ecosystem and the 5e ecosystem to look at. I skipped 2e completely but I understand that there were feats in 2e as well. We also have, although it's structured differently, Pathfinder and Pathfinder 2e. We have a few ideas to bear in mind here:  Core or Optional : 5e gave us feats as an optional rule, every other system has them as a core rule. Complexity : 5e made them simple. In essence they rely on a simple proficiency at most, although a few are tied to being a given race. Pathfinder 2e goes for Ancestry (race equivalent), general, class, level, tree-like prerequisites (you can only take this f...

I have, scattered throughout these posts, strongly implied the idea that you more or less kit-build your character. It started way back in the  first post  with the idea that for my 6e we'd use the 5e as the essential building block for all characters, and it got a bit further developed scattered around in various posts. In essence, your class gives you quite minimal class features, in 5e, but balances a bit what you can get access to, and your subclasses, how many HP and MP you get, but most importantly what class training you get access to. That class training, there need to be more options than you can actually ever take, lets you define your flavour. So lets say, for the sake of example, there are 5 picks available at every level, in every class (that seems like too many, but we're playing make believe here). You only get to take three of them... so you can opt for tank, more tank, yet more tank, or attack, attack, more attack or something in between and make your fighters...

I outlined in  this post  that I was leaning towards to a skill points system. Im brief, I outlined the idea that you'd get a fixed number of points + Int modifier for free spend, and then your Initiative modifier for a more restricted spend. Your free spend points can go on skills, tools, vehicles, languages, weapons or spells, your restricted spend ones generally must go on weapons or spells. Your skills, tools, vehicles, weapons and spells (and I guess for completeness it should apply to languages) would have five tiers of skill, giving you a +1 to +5 bonus. Expertise for a few classes (or via feats) would let you extend that, possibly at high as +10, certainly to +7.5 (which would round to +8). A couple of things need to be shaken down fully here. If we have the current 18 skills, and you can get 21 raises, and we say you get 3 points, + Int mod + another mod, that could be 63+30+24+120=237 points to spend on skills, but only 90 points worth. Of course a chunk will be rest...

Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy author and teacher of writing, described two core magic systems in fantasy. The first is a hard system, in which there are clear rules. The characters do x and y is the result. Magic is essentially a kind of science or engineering, even if they don't understand it that way, and it achieves basically predictable results. The second is soft, where magic works in mysterious way and no one (possibly not even the magicians, certainly not everyone else) is entirely sure what's going on to achieve it, nor necessarily quite what the outcome will be. He says some other things too, about what the effect of this in your storytelling, which are quite interesting, but not entirely relevant here. If you'd like to read more, there's a  wiki link .  In broad terms, something like the Dresden Files or most of Sanderson's own stories use Hard Magic because it's predictable while Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones use soft magic because it's mys...

D&D promulgates a fairly modern, liberal democratic attitude to its laws, usually on top of an idealised Western European quasi-Feudal society.  To say the two don't match is an understatement. Without doing a deep dive, you might like to consider how recently your country abolished slavery, and also made it illegal. The two are not synonymous - in the UK, slavery was abolished in 1833, but it wasn't actually made illegal until 2010. If someone owned slaves and came to the UK they were ok for 177 years... but now they face up to 14 years in prison. You might also like to look at the pattern of emancipation, that is giving people the right to vote. For example, in 1780 you had to own property (which didn't automatically mean you were a man, but inheritance laws and property laws made it very hard to be a woman and own property) worth £10 (£1,807 in today's money) but  before you think this is not a huge bar to voting, it should also be noted the electorate was actual...

I've picked the title world-planning, as distinct from world-building, because this isn't about building your own campaign directly, it's more about thinking about your setting in some general terms. That is, it's not about designing continents, cities, countries, NPCs, dungeons and the like, it's more about the philosophy of your world and how it all fits together. Take, for example, the long-espoused concept of PC exceptionalism. Weigh that against the relative ease that, as a DM, you can level a party from first to twentieth level using ONLY monsters that are humanoid from playable races. I'm not suggesting you should do this, but you certainly can do it. You can comfortably go from first to about thirteenth or so fighting only humans. Also consider, for a group of first level characters, if they encounter a pack of wolves of equal size four times, over the course of their life time, they'll reach second level. Five bandits and a bandit captain twice, eve...

In 5e there is almost nothing devoted to this, the renown system is the closest we get, and, to be honest, it doesn't make sense. If you do something to gain power with the faction of law and order, how does that not (generally at least) affect your standing with the faction of criminals? Also, when you're thinking about a settlement, be that a hamlet, or the capital, what keeps it alive? What makes it tick? If you can start to answer that, you can start to make your settlements feel alive. This isn't going to descend into economics, that really doesn't work for me, although if it is your cup of tea, go for it. My academic background is as a biomedical scientist, and then as a microbiologist, so I tend to think of hamlets, villages, towns and cities as broadly analogous to living things. I'm not going to deep dive here either (although personally I often do, if it's a campaign setting that's going to last for a long time) but if you think about what your bod...