The Gaming Den

A new UA for 1D&D has dropped https://media.dndbeyond.com/compendium- ... lasses.pdf

My first impressions of this are good.

• They've cleaned up a bunch of feats and gated some of them to higher levels.
• Bardic inspiration as a reaction is an improvement, as is unifying spell preparation across casters.
• Rangers are fixed by not being dedicated racists, and just getting a movable, concentration-free "I'm thinking of you as prey" debuff
• Adjustments to hiding and light weapons reinvigorate rogues, though their class features haven't undergone dramatic change
• Standardizing subclass levels is good
• Climb speeds and blind sight are much more available. Interesting.
• Even more impressive, it looks like they're sneaking real DCs for skills in by defining many actions more carefully.

I'll write up more thoughts after a work deadline passes.

The thing where your feats are set by what stat you have to push to 20 to be competitive is, ... I mean, probably better than choosing stats or a feat, but it's also poorly indexed for that purpose. Like, if you're going to be a Stronk, finding out what options you really have isn't easy.

Then, how do you judge any of this?

POWER LEVEL
The character options you read here might be more or less powerful than options in the 2014 Player’s Handbook. If a design survives playtesting, we adjust its power to the desirable level before publication in a book. This means an option could be more or less powerful in its final form.

Like, playtesters will tell them they like and are using the powerful and useful stuff, and then the designers will nerf it all for printing. Whereapon no one will like it any more, they will instead like whatever other thing ends up being powerful and useful.

They keep doing this with D&D designs, think people like a mechanic because of the way you roll dice or whatever, and the bit where it just happens to give you +5 to your everything and make adventuring easy is ignored. I'm pretty sure even 3.0 PC grappling rules would've been used if the output was just better than the alternatives, rather than much worse and also really slow.

Like they took off the +2s everywhere and gave Advantage a go, and yeah it "feels better", because it fucking works more often, so now everything's Advantage. Uck. Bet people would've liked flat +5 for every damn thing better than Advantage.

I saw Hasbro put a new person in charge of D&D. Does that matter?

Link

What,they replaced Dick Cocksmith or whatever his name was? Travesty!

erik wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 06, 2022 8:03 pm

What,they replaced Dick Cocksmith or whatever his name was? Travesty!

damn, I have to steal this name for the Fighting Fantasy LP

erik wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 06, 2022 8:03 pm

What,they replaced Dick Cocksmith or whatever his name was? Travesty!

Chris Cocks seemingly did so well at handling WotC that he was given the keys to the kingdom and is now Hasbro's CEO.

Unfortunately, reading the new head's curriculum, all I see is the other shoe dropping. Forget about DnD as a game whatsoever, that's not coming back. The new guy's job is to monetize digitally for all he's worth.

People will buy anything. It's just his job to find the suckers.