Editing Epic6 (section)

=== On Allowing Feats ===

There are 3 philosophies on what feats to allow in an E6 game, each more generous than the last:
#The Cautious Approach
#The Gestalt Approach
#The Lean Upward Approach

The Cautious Approach is exactly what it sounds like – a GM chooses what feats to allow in his E6 game very, very carefully.  This GM does not make exceptions or new feats to accommodate player character concepts - he chooses what feats to allow and the players agree to work within that framework.

The Gestalt Approach dictates that if a given ability can be learned under 6th level, then it’s learnable via some chain of feats.  The Gestalt Approach usually means all WotC sources are available, as well as a few extra feats to provide ways to learn class features. These can be done on an ad-hoc basis for a given player or they can be gathered from sources like the Book of Unusual Feats. The Gestalt theory is the one used in play-testing.

The Lean Upward Approach looks at the Gestalt Approach and says “6th level plus many feats is clearly more powerful than 6th level. Thus, it won’t be game-breaking to allow feat chains that bring characters from 6th level to 8th level, although this progression should be quite slow.” GMs who like the Lean Upward approach might have feats to bring BAB to +8, or to gain 4th level spells, or 8th level class features, additional hit dice, and so on.