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 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...

Since the days of AD&D you've had race and class that you can choose. Way back before that, for old fogeys like me that remember it, Elf and Dwarf were essentially a character class you chose to play. I think what 5e does with race is interesting, although I'm going to propose some changes, but first up, I'm going to change the name. They're not races, they're species. And I'm going to call them that. If a bunch of White Supremacists lose their knickers over this, tough. I'm going to look, in at least some species, at more interesting things to do with sex and gender too. Sexual dimorphism isn't the only rule on the planet, just because it's the most common. And in a fantasy world, Trimorphism, asexual reproduction and more should be out there I think. Gender fluidity - we see this in various fish and amphibians for example should be there too. Some will say that's just window dressing, but to communities where that matters, having it built...