1. SD&D is a mechanically minimalist way of playing through any and all D&D adventures, within the vast D&D Multiverse, with all character options (races, classes, feats, spells, etc.) available as lore.
By "options available as lore" do you mean fluff?
2. Battle (combat) is streamlined to one roll per encounter, or perhaps a series of rolls (like 4E skill challenges).
I think a series of rolls maybe would be better. Even that would remove a lot of the time devoted to combat, but keep it interesting enough to make it worth while. Otherwise, with a single roll, if you want to follow "typical" D&D the players should only "lose" maybe 10% of the time, often with severe consequences.
3. SD&D is vastly simplified mechanically, but not lore-wise. All character options are are still there...as lore. Though the core presentation of SD&D may stick to the core races and classes from xD&D, there would be some sort of SD&D "complete character option compendium" which converts not only the entirety of official 5E character options into SD&D, but also all character options from all previous editions (races and racial traits, classes and class features, subclasses, backgrounds, kits, prestige classes, proficiencies, skills, feats, spells)...as lore. This is doable because the mechanics are almost entirely stripped out. Abstracting the mechanics enables these features to co-exist in a single "edition" (SD&D). In this regard, SD&D may be more rich and nuanced than D&D 5E.
I am failing to see how fluff will be impactful without mechanics. Otherwise, they are just "things about you" and "things you can do". Is that your thrust?
4. Mechanics are either completely mathless (e.g. Advantage/Disadvantage instead of adding modifiers), or very math-lite (like the Monster Slayers kid's D&D published by WotC).
5E (anyway) is already fairly math-lite IMO, so I am not sure how much lighter you are thinking here. Could you provide an example?
5. All "bean-counting" is done away with: XP, GP, encumbrance, etc.
Does this include AC, HP, and Level?
6. The SD&D character sheet has a box to draw in a sketch or symbol of each character feature or piece of equipment. A visual sigil helps with quickly remembering and seeing what the character can do.
Frankly I would think this is overkill and only fun for people who might enjoy drawing. Having a character sheet with slots for writing things down (if you had enough "boxes" you could use them I suppose) on an outline of the PC would be better and more functional IMO. If you think about the PCs with slot systems for encumbrance, that would be a fair starting point--just make the slots large enough to draw something if you wanted to?
7. SD&D leans into the leading progressive edge of D&D, such as the trend toward freely mixing and matching racial traits. Which is also the way it was in Tom Moldvay and Lawrence Schick's
Original Known World (OKW) campaign of 1976-1979: "
A note about the races in OKW: they’re much less hard-edged and distinct than in Middle-earth or World of Greyhawk. It’s better to think of them as tribes or ethnicities. All the breeds of humanoid mortals in OKW are inter-fertile, so wherever they’re adjacent there’s a fair amount of intermixing. If you self-identify as an elf, you’re an elf."
Since this is still simply fluff material, sure. Or players could adhere to traditional D&D definitions of racial traits if they wanted to.
8. SD&D is explicitly set in the D&D Multiverse. The setting is not simplified. In fact, the presentation of the D&D Multiverse may be even more nuanced and complete than we've seen in 5E so far. For example, SD&D lore-books will explicitly refer to all worlds and planes from previous editions. Encyclopedic sources such as the 2E Spell Compendiums, 2E Encyclopedia Magica (magic item compendium series), and Echohawk's research into official monster lore from previous editions, are valued resources in SD&D...for lore (rather than for mechanics).
Ok.
9. SD&D is adventure-centered, rather than rulebook-centered. There must be a straightfoward way of converting any and all existing D&D adventures into SD&D. SD&D conversion documents might also provide bullet-pointed encounter summaries and story summaries for helping a DM prepare the adventure.
Since most of D&D is combat-centered, really the big thing you would need to develop is a way to translate various encounters from all editions of D&D into SD&D. Frankly, I could envision anything from super-complex to insanely simple.
10. Though each officially published D&D world exists in the SD&D Multiverse, the default world is a sandbox, hex-crawler homebrew world of the SD&D DM's creation. Based on the 2E World Builder's Guide and the 2E Spelljammer planet-creation book: Practical Planetology. World building is part of the game from the start. Just like rolling up a character. The world is "rolled up" too.
IME "rolled up" worlds don't work so well, but perhaps SD&D would come up with a viable system for doing it. Having all material in your setting is fine, of course, and most DMs IME use material from various editions in their own worlds anwyay.
11. SD&D must aesthetically look like D&D. SD&D sticks closely to official D&D terminology, though it may draw from terminology from previous editions. But SD&D doesn't draw from, say, Pathfinder terminology.
Sure, you would want cohesion.
12. To fulfill the hankering of each generational flavor of D&D nostalgia, the final SD&D PDF will be available in different "edition themes" which mimic the fonts and graphic design of each edition of D&D: OD&D manila, Basic Holmes/Sutherland, B/X Otus, BECMI Elmore, 1E orange-spine Easley, 2E Easley, Rules Cyclopedia Easley, 2.5E Skills & Powers black framed Easley, 3E Henry Higgenbotham gears and gems, 4E Wayne Reynolds, and 5E. But the text is the same. Only the graphic design differs.
Since this would be the final stage, you can pretty much do it however you want to format it, but for the sake of sanity please make it better organised than history has given us.
