One thing? Only one?
OK, I overhaul the feat system.
Problem: Feats interact strangely with class features, and seem out-of-place in the game.
1. Many feats overlap, conceptually, with class features and skills. (E.g., who's more athletic: the dude with high Strength; the dude trained in Athletics; the dude with the Athlete feat; the Champion fighter with Remarkable Athlete ability; the rogue with a lousy Strength but Expertise in Athletics; etc.)
2. Many feats have non-obvious mechanical implications, relating to class choices: some feats make you better at things you can already do; others are poor choices UNLESS you have class features that can make good use of them; some feats are purely redundant with class features.
3. Using the feat system means a whole ton of new rules that you have to learn, and which the game designers need to design and balance.
Solution:
1. I like the notion of sacrificing ability score increases to gain feats. That's elegant and seems to work. We're keeping it.
2. Any special ability worth having in the game, becomes a class feature or subclass feature. Every single one. Alert? Combine this with the barbarian's Danger Sense, or make it a ranger class feature. Athlete? Combine this with the Champion fighter's Remarkable Athlete, or make it a rogue feature, maybe part of Thief subclass. Actor? Combine this with the Assassin's Infiltration Expert ability, or make it a Bard feature, possibly part of a new "entertainer" subclass. Charger? This feat is lame as
, but it could be rolled into a Battlemaster maneuver, or maybe part of a Totem Warrior pick.
...I could go on, but you get the idea; move all the mechanical special bits into classes and subclasses.
3. The feat system allows you to sacrifice an ability score increase to gain
a class feature from another class or subclass. Not just any old class feature; some are too powerful or class-defining to hand out to other characters without multiclassing (e.g. barbarian rage; wild shape; paladin smite). So there'd be a big list of which features you can take as a feat, and how they differ from the core class features.
For example, maybe you can take Channel Divinity: Turn Undead as a feat. You can use it once per short rest, it works just like the cleric ability. But you don't get any more uses as you level up, and without a cleric domain, you can only use your Channel Divinity to turn undead.
You can't take features you already have as feats. For example, if you are already a cleric and want to become even better at turning undead than other clerics, tough crap. There's no feat for that. Just choose the Light domain and blow them up with radiant damage. The reason for this rule is to prevent players from feeling like they NEED to take a feat in order to be the "best" at something. A better example might be two-weapon fighting: if we combine the Dual Wielder feat with the Two-Weapon fighting style, then that's all you need to be a two-weapon guy. You just write "Two-Weapon Fighting Style" on your character sheet, pick up a pair of weapons, and BAM you are as two-weapon-fighty as it gets. If players want higher-level options for two-weapon-fighting, well, we can bake that into the fighting style, or make it the purview of additional class features or subclass features. The point is that you do NOT have to give up an ability score increase on order to get them!
The trade-off now becomes: If your class is giving you all the special abilities you want, then use all your ASIs to increase your ability scores. If you want to branch out into things other classes are better at, you can give up ASIs to make your character more interesting or broader in scope. This should
greatly reduce the trade-off between ASIs and stuff ability score increases are meant to do anyway; this should make feats slightly
easier to balance because there's less direct comparison against an ASI.
For example, if you want to play a really awesome archer, you're probably going to pick a class like ranger or fighter. Under the current feat system, you then have to select periodically between increasing your Dex (which is +1 to attack, damage, AC, and a bunch of other good stuff) and Sharpshooter feat (which also contains some really good stuff, that may or may not be equivalent to +2 Dex). Under my proposal, Sharpshooter would be combined somehow with Archery fighting style (not exactly in their current forms; that would be overpowered; but in some fashion). So you'd pick that and be done with it. You wouldn't have to give up Dex to get these special archery abilities, unless you were playing some other class and wanted to dip into archery a little bit. Like, an elven wizard who is trying to do some "arcane archer" concept might find it worthwhile to sacrifice some ASIs for the archery special feature.
A few feats might still exist independent from any specific class in order to gain extra proficiencies. E.g. Skilled feat, Resilient feat, armor proficiency feats, and we'd do something more intelligent about Weapon Master (hell, I think proficiency in all simple and martial weapons is worth a feat, but that's just me).
Overall, my goal for the feat system is to allow
optional flexibility in character creation. You're not straightjacketed into your class if you can snipe features from other classes. The class system is really fantastic for new players, or if you want to create a PC quickly. But it can feel very restrictive and make it hard to model certain characters from fiction (including D&D fiction!). My version of the feat system attempts to address this.
Other people view the feat system as a way to allow
optional complexity in character-building; a place for the designers to stash cool abilities that don't belong on a class and which not everyone will want in their game. I disagree with this approach. I think subclasses are a better place for that sort of thing (for example, the classic contrast of Champion fighter versus Battlemaster fighter).
Furthermore, the design I propose doesn't preclude feats from heading in that direction later, if we change our minds. The feat system in the PHB would be as I described above -- nearly every feat would be an existing class feature from some other class. But a feat system in some later book could reverse that balance, and have nearly every feat in that source be original material. Like I said, I dislike this approach, which is why I'd relegate it to a supplement rather than the PHB. Still, I know some people like it, so this option would be for them.
