I'm not sure if those specific rules would've been featured, but my plan (though obviously things changed when I took a job working on Magic) was to use what became Tasha's as the first product to expand what 5e could do.
You might remember two UAs I wrote:
- Greyhawk initiative, a variant system that used the action you chose for the round to determine the die you rolled for initiative
- The ranger variant, the proposed retooling of the ranger
If you think back to Tasha's, it had a section of optional class features that you could add or swap into the core classes. My plan was to make that mechanic a lot more robust. Some choices, like the monk's martial arts or the barbarian's rage, would have alternate versions that would give you radically different characters.
For instance, an alternate rage might be Dex-based and make you better at two-weapon fighting. An alternate martial arts feature would be Str-based and let you throw or grapple using ki.
Once that infrastructure was in place and tested, you could do the D&D Tactics book that gave miniatures combat rules and alternate class features that plugged into the core. You wouldn't need to do new classes, just give alternate ways to build the existing ones. You could then do the same thing with a social conflict-based book, a domain game expansion, etc.
This ties back into Greyhawk initiative because you could then give an alternate rule and some class feature patches to support it in the core classes.
(As an aside, you might notice that the 5e system very rarely - ideally never - refers to specific class features in general rules text. That approach means that the classes are like preconstructed Magic decks. You can swap out a lot more than you might think.)
). Any goals / plans for when you might publish the system?
