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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8109431" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The main concerns will be the same as they always are with this: universal options require universal design, and mass chapter-flipping to put your character together. Obviously the first is the greater concern, but the second shouldn't be discounted. Cutting down on page-flipping is a good thing at the table. 5e gave up 4e's all-in-one stat blocks, and while this wasn't a huge sticking point, it was definitely a criticism I saw frequently at launch that...never really got an answer. Replicating that choice further without a specific reason seems unwise.As for the "universal design" thing: while it is nice in an abstract, conceptual, symmetry-focused way to have such universal "pools" from which everything else draws, in practice it really can be a problem. That ship has already long since sailed with spells, but consider subclasses. If 5e's designers had to make every subclass compatible with every class, well, firstly we'd have a hell of a lot fewer subclasses, but more importantly those subclasses would have to be much blander and more self-contained. They couldn't do special things with class-specific resources, actions, or features, because odds are pretty good that those features won't be present, even if the subclass is intended for one specific class or set of classes (e.g. a divine-focused "generic subclass" couldn't presume the existence of Channel Divinity, and would thus either have to have its own CD features, or forego any benefits related to that feature).Reductionism and "one-stop shopping" organization are popular ideas with often-ignored downsides on both design and play-experience levels. If the breadth/reuse of the knacks is sufficiently high, and if there's not much need for class-specific knacks, then collecting them together and condensing them down may be worth it. We shouldn't presume that these conditions will be met--it's worth thinking about, keeping an eye out for as it were. But I find that an awful lot of "pop design" (for lack of a better term) has incentives that are much more driven by an aesthetic desire for structural symmetry, consequences be damned, and am thus skeptical that these conditions will be met.</blockquote>

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