Spelljammer: Adventures in Space comes out tomorrow (I'll have to see if my local game store has the standard covers, which they sometimes don't get in until the next day, as I think I prefer those over the special one this time). Two days later, WotC is having a new "Wizards Presents" announcement thing that'll be focused on the future of Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons.
Big announcements are coming, which is always fun - I'll confess I'm a total addict for news about nerdy stuff, and this sort of marketing event breezes past all my disdain for consumerism. But oh well.
WotC announced over a year ago (two years? What is time?) that 2024, which will be the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, will see a new set of core rulebooks. We know a little about what to expect:
The new rulebooks will be backwards compatible with all 5th Edition content - you should be able to run Hoard of the Dragon Queen with them.
The new design philosophies that we've seen in books like Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and Monsters of the Multiverse will be standard moving forward. This includes making ability score bonuses independent of race choice, and spellcasters will have simpler stat blocks to make it easier for DMs to run them.
Given the massive success of 5th Edition, it makes sense not to rock the boat too much. As a 5E native, I am sometimes shocked by how alien even 4th Edition sourcebooks can be, and 2nd Edition content is barely comprehensible (AC and "THAC0" in 2nd Edition was so horribly overcomplicated. You actually wanted a lower AC to make yourself harder to hit).
So, I honestly would feel a bit of anxiety around the notion of a 6th Edition if not for the assurances of this compatibility.
Monsters of the Multiverse was a reprint of the races and stat blocks from many earlier 5th Edition sourcebooks, primarily Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (though I realized that a few blocks from Volo's, like the various Orcs associated with other Orc deities, are missing.) While some stat blocks were considerably redesigned, especially those that relied heavily on spellcasting, ultimately the book was a fairly conservative revision of existing content - updating tons of monsters and race options to be better in line with recent developments.
While the 2024 Core Rulebooks (5.5 or 6th Edition, whatever they wind up calling it) are obviously 2 years away, I suspect that we're going to be learning a bit more about the philosophies and guiding principles going forward. After all, we've now had several months with Monsters of the Multiverse, and I imagine they're iterating on their approach to that book to see how best to update stuff.
The latest couple Unearthed Arcana strongly hint at two books or products coming in the next year:
First is a Giant-themed sourcebook. We've seen subclasses, feats, and spells themed around giants. After Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, depending on how successful they feel that book was, they might feel motivated to do a similar project to flesh out Giants - another iconic fantasy creature.
I actually loved Fizban's, and it gave me a lot of ideas of how to incorporate dragons into my fantasy world in a way that I had always struggled - despite the game being called Dungeons & Dragons, these giant flying lizards have always had to fight for a place in the spotlight. I'm actually literally in the middle of running a boss fight involving a Storm Giant Quintessant (using the updated stat block) and have figured out on the fly their most deadly playstyle (One with the Storm legendary action, then warp in and strike someone twice their lightning sword, then bamf out at the end of the next turn). But for as iconic and important as these giants are, there's still only two stat blocks for most of the major giant types - a standard one (which is basically "I have a lot of hit points and hit hard, but that's about it") and a more interesting, weird one from Volo's. There's not really enough to build a whole society for them without homebrewing and tweaking.
The giant book will likely have a lot of options and such built around runes and that style of magic, including the Rune Carver background.
The other book that seems likely is a Planescape one. This fills me with giddy excitement the way that I felt when it looked like, and was later confirmed, we'd be getting a 5th Edition Ravenloft book (which is now my favorite thing they've published). It looks like 5th Edition has decided to get out of its Forgotten Realms comfort zone, and between Ravenloft and Spelljammer, it looks like they're comfortable exploring the more otherworldly and strange settings, and nothing's stranger than Planescape.
Going back to the new core rulebooks, though:
Monsters of the Multiverse demonstrated the ways in which D&D is looking to evolve the modular elements of the game, but they didn't really change the game at a fundamental level. The only real change that I'd say is that significant is the updated rules on ability score bonuses introduced in Tasha's - a pretty giant change that opened up tons of race options one might not have considered because you couldn't get your main stat to 16 at level 1.
Previews of Spelljammer have shown that the two new backgrounds in the Astral Adventurer's Guide come with feats at level 1. I know Wildspacer gets Tough, though I can't recall what Astral Drifter gets. Still, between that and the backgrounds showcased in the Heroes of Krynn and Wonders of the Multiverse UAs, it seems very clear that going forward, Backgrounds will grant a feat at level 1.
This, I think, will do a lot to make feats feel impactful in a way they sometimes don't. One could imagine simply ruling that everyone starts with 15 gold and gets to pick two skill proficiencies and either an extra language or an extra tool proficiency, and that would cover almost every background. Tying a feat into these could make them a bigger deal.
But I also think that making only specific feats available to get as part of a background might be an important distinction. If a background comes with Warcaster, for instance, it's going to be really hard for any spellcaster to pick something else. Then we wind up with the same problem we had for races back before Tasha's.
Right now, the bandaid for backgrounds that grant a level 1 feat is to give players who take older backgrounds a curated list of other options - usually fairly non-disruptive but clearly helpful ones like Tough or Skilled.
This does represent power-creep, even if only a little. But 5th Edition player characters have always been pretty powerful in comparison to the monsters they face.
When it comes to combat, I think they need to rethink some of the assumptions made in the DMG. For example, the amount of monster-fighting the DMG expects players to encounter in an adventuring day is pretty extreme. I think perhaps with many players getting into D&D thanks to actual-play stuff like Acquisitions Incorporated, Critical Role, the Adventure Zone, and Dimension 20, many players enjoy a more narrative-focused game where fights are climactic events that you'll have maybe three or four of in a truly packed day, and often face fewer.
Likewise, I think that the monsters encountered at higher levels (specifically, those that are higher CR) feel built with a more grueling adventuring style in mind. Another blogger wrote that a Wolf at level 1 is a bigger threat to a party than a Balor at level 19, and I think that is something of a problem.
Challenge Rating is a useful tool in theory, but its scaling doesn't really seem to match the actual difficulty - my level 13 party was able to defeat a CR 23 legendary creature after preliminary phases that sucked out resources and HP without a lot of difficulty.
That actually brings up another thing I might like to see addressed - the DMG has some very byzantine and complex rules about building encounters based on the number of monsters the party will face, and I think the Xanathar's system is a lot better. But I do think that the way combat runs does start to break down with particularly large parties. The session I'm running tonight, I expect to have seven players, and that's only because two of our regulars can't make it (though one of the players is someone who had to step away from the campaign about a year ago when he became a dad, so I don't know if he's going to be back for good or just for a bit while the wife and kid are out of town).
Matt Colville's MCDM studios have a new supplement they're producing called Flee, Mortals! In it, they create different categories of monster that can play different tactical roles - from artillery to bruisers to skirmishers, etc. I don't really know precisely how these function (I don't have the book,) but I think perhaps creating a little categorization for monsters could be useful to DMs to help them build dynamic and interesting encounters. I've tried to get better about doing this - the current fight I'm running has a homebrewed hulking, gargantuan creature that gives the melee something to engage while the Storm Giant hurls auto-hit Wind Javelins from far away, with several lower-level minions to distract and score some hits against the party.
I'd like to see a bit more practical advice on building and running interesting encounters - while I love the worldbuilding and lore stuff in the DMG, I will say that the critique that "Running the Game" doesn't come until one of the last chapters is a little absurd.
I'd also love to see guidance on making interesting non-combat content. How do you build a good D&D mystery? How do you make a dungeon crawl more interesting than "new room, I do a Perception and an Investigation check?"
I'd also love to see something akin to the Heroic Chronicle from Explorer's Guide to Wildemount reproduced in a setting-agnostic way to help with backstory-building (I realize there's something like that in Xanathar's, but maybe just get it into the core rulebooks).
And, as always, Artificers in the PHB so we can get more than four subclasses.
I only expect to get the basics on what new products are coming from the Wizards Presents event on Thursday, rather than these specifics. Still, it'll be interesting to see the direction they envision for the game.
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