Expert Class UA Feats

 In the Character Origins UA we got roughly a month and a half ago (I think?) we got a number of 1st level feats - these are feats that players can takes as part of their background (or a second one if you play a human,) and the general intent was for them to be impactful but simple - things like Tough, for example.

The Expert Classes UA brings in a number of new feats. These are "4th level" feats, which means that you can't take them until you hit 4th level, when each class gets its first feat.

In addition to this, there are two other categories of feat - Epic Boons and Fighting Styles. Epic Boons are, essentially, 20th-level feats. Each class' old capstone ability is now gained at level 18 (though I imagine Paladins will be shuffled around, given that their old capstone was a subclass feature, and subclass feature levels are being standardized to levels 3, 6, 10, and 14) and now level 20 is when you get a free Epic Boon, which is a feat that's meant to be particularly huge.

Fighting Styles are special feats that Warrior classes (Barbarians, Fighters, and Monks) get, as do Rangers, despite being Experts, and presumably Paladins, despite being Priests. (I find this rather interesting given that in the 2014 PHB, the only "warrior" class that gets Fighting Style is the Fighter).

The way these work is that 1st level feats, Fighting Styles, and 4th level feats are all added to the pool of feats you can pick up as you level up and get more feats. If you hit level 8, you could take one of the 4th level feats that are generally designed to be the ones you pick up on your leveling journey, but if you feel a strong desire to get another 1st level feat or Fighting Style (and meet the requirements) you can choose those.

But, before we dive in, we should make a couple notes:

The first is that the Ability Score Improvement feature is now a feat. It's presented as the obvious, default choice for feats, but it's now considered just a first among equals, rather than a totally different game mechanic. It works the same as it did - you can raise one ability score by 2 or two ability scores by 1, to a maximum of 20.

However, you might be less inclined to take this for the following reason:

Every single 4th level feat (and again, remember that that's just a minimum level) comes with a one-point ability score bonus.

The upshot of this is that feats like Great Weapon Master (which works a little differently - let's wait to see the full picture on weapon mechanics before we lament the loss of the -5/+10 mechanic) now inch you along toward a higher Strength modifier - you're going to hit 20 strength later if you use these feats instead of the Ability Score Improvement one, but you can still get there eventually while picking up some awesome features along the way.

Feats can certainly feel costly the way the game currently works, but this encourages players to use them a little more, and I actually think you'll probably see some very powerful character builds that take a non-ASI feat every time.

Now, the full list of feats is far too much for me to go into every tiny detail. I'll highlight that I think Heavy Armor Master is way better now (reducing incoming bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage by your PB, rather than a flat 3, and also working on magical weapon attacks).

Also, several feats now include the "no disadvantage from ranged attacks while in melee with an enemy" that Crossbow Expert has - the odd thing that would often encourage spellcasters who'd never use a crossbow to take the feat. This is now rolled into both Spell Sniper and Sharpshooter (the latter of which, like Great Weapon Master, also no longer has its -5/+10 feature).

Fighting Styles' only requirement is that the character be a member of a class in the Warrior group - though Rangers, despite being Experts, can also use them (presumably Paladins will get a similar exception despite being classified as a Priest class). While I have no trouble seeing how Barbarians will benefit from having Fighting Styles, I'm curious to see which will look the most appealing to Monks (obviously, we're getting the Ranger-facing Fighting Style feats right now, so look forward to the Warrior UA for more). Among the options here, which are Archery, Defense, Dueling, Great Weapon Fighting, Protection, and Two-Weapon Fighting, the only one that I could imagine being useful for a Monk would be Dueling (most work as they normally do, though Protection is a little different).

Epic Boons are also limited by class group - as such, we're really only seeing the ones with no prerequisites or that are available to Experts.

In a very real sense, these are "level 20 feats," and while obviously in most situations you're not going to have other opportunities to pick them up, as with the old Epic Boon mechanics, if you earn a bunch of XP at level 20 (or, I suppose, you hit milestones your DM deems appropriate) you can get these multiple times.

While the level 20 feature is not simply "feat," it effectively is - you can choose lower-level feats to pick up at 20 if you really want to - though I think the Epic Boons are strong enough that you would probably be best off taking them. (Interestingly, the Epic Boon of Fortitude raises your max HP by 40, which technically makes it identical to the Tough feat given that you're level 20 - but you can pick up both, raising your max HP by 80 total if you want to be an absolute damage-sponge). (This one actually exists in the DMG already).

As a last little observation: Lightly Armored is a new 1st-level feat added in this UA. It's significantly buffed - it now grants Training (a new term for being able to use armor, given that "proficiency" with armor didn't use your proficiency bonus) with Light as well as Medium Armor and Shields. Essentially, this combines Lightly Armored and Moderately Armored from the current game. I actually think this is huge, because some classes really struggle to get a decent AC, especially if they're not a Dexterity-based class, and taking this feat at level 1 makes it pretty easy to get an AC of 18 from the word go.

As is evident here, feats are obviously no longer an "optional rule" in One D&D, which is probably fine given that I don't think I've ever played in a 5th Edition game where they haven't been allowed.

In the long run, I think this will make it a little more challenging for new players to build their characters, even if it doesn't technically make things more complicated than they already are. I love that 4th-level feats come with an ability score bonus, as it makes them less punishing to pick up. But at the same time, that makes it harder to ignore them and just go with a full ASI.

Still, I think this is a net positive for the game.

Class Groups, Spell Lists, and Future-Proofing One D&D

 5th Edition has been highly conservative when it comes to adding classes to the game. To a large extent, this is mitigated by the fairly constant release of subclasses.

Coming into D&D as a World of Warcraft veteran, the idea of subclass was not new to me - in WoW, each class has a number of "specializations" (typically 3) that can change the way you play. WoW has fairly strict group roles, so, for example, the Paladin has the Holy, Protection, and Retribution, which are designed to allow you to be a healer, tank, or damage-dealer, respectively. But other classes, such as the Warlock, for which all three specializations ("specs") are damage-dealers, nevertheless distinguishes each of its specs through a different emphasis and vibe - Affliction is all about using damage-over-time abilities to achieve a death of a thousand cuts, while Demonology is all about summoning a swarm of demonic minions to attack your foes, and Destruction is about landing massive, devastating spells that blast your foes away.

In WoW, they've added a total of three classes over their 18 years (with a fourth new class coming in November with their next expansion). But they don't add new specs to existing classes (the only time they did that was to separate out a single Druid spec that, depending on how you built it, would be either a damage dealer or a tank, but didn't work with a redesign to how specs worked.)

D&D, in 5th Edition, has gone the other route. Generally, they've added new subclasses to the classes, but have only introduced a single brand-new class to the game.

I wonder, though, if they're planning on doing more of that.

The Artificer will, unfortunately, not be showing up in the new PHB (at least that seems to be the current plan, but I wouldn't hold my breath). However, the playtest documents do refer to the Artificer with some of the new tags: They are an Expert class that uses Arcane spells.

If the Bard and Ranger in the new playtest document are anything to judge by, it looks like class spell lists are going away. Instead, we'll be using those three spell lists - Arcane, Divine, and Primal - but certain classes will be limited in what schools of magic they can use.

Thus, we can sort of approximate class lists - the Bard, for example, has always been limited a bit in what kind of spells they can cast (outside of Magical Secrets). They're full casters, but they don't get Fireball, because that's not really what a Bard is meant to be using.

Now, I think you could make an argument that restricting Bards to half the schools of magic is a blunt way of approaching this (not letting them cast Summon Fey seems wrong) but what it does do is it makes it very simple for WotC to add new spells to the game. Xanathar's Guide to Everything (and, to a lesser extent, Tasha's) has pages just listing all the spells that various classes can use - pages that they wouldn't need if each of these spells just has two tags: their school of magic and the type(s) of magic they are.

Fizban's Treasury of Dragons introduces, among other things, a spell that Artificers can use. Thus, it's making a reference to a class that they cannot assume all players have access to. Not the end of the world, to be sure, but slightly inelegant.

But also, this creates a pressure whenever they add new spells to the game - do we give it to the weird class that's not in the PHB? Indeed, what classes do we give it to?

If Artificers were introduced after these changes go into effect, you could probably use some basic rules about their spells: maybe it's Arcane Spells that belong to the Abjuration, Conjuration, Evocation, and Transmutation schools (or whatever). Now, adding spells to the game no longer requires you to consider Artificers specifically - if they fit in those categories, you're golden.

The same applies to feats. If they add more of these to the game, the fact that Artificers are already Experts means that you can just grab any new thing that is given to Experts.

So, let's say that I want to add another class to the game. We'll say Shaman (which is a WoW class). The Shaman would obviously be a Primal spellcaster. Maybe, like the Bard, we'd want to limit them to a certain type of spellcasting to push them into particular group roles. Perhaps not so much Enchantment or Illusion, but they'd have full access to the other Primal spells that a Druid gets.

    Side note: I assume that Clerics and Druids, being the only full casters of their respective spell categories, will simply get access to all Divine and Primal spells, respectively. I'd assume that Wizards will get all Arcane spells. What I'm less sure about is if Sorcerers will be limited (perhaps emphasizing things like Evocation over, say, Conjuration) and likewise Warlocks. Notably, the Eldritch Knight Fighter and Arcane Trickster Rogue already kind of work this way, though they use the Wizard spell list rather than the Arcane list (obviously, because it's only now being introduced).

We haven't yet seen new magic items, but in a similar manner, by linking these to class categories rather than, perhaps, specific classes, you can easily make an item that works for any Priest, which means that it'd work for Clerics, Druids, or Paladins, but also our new Shaman, which would probably fall into that category.

This really frees them up to throw out new classes with less infrastructure than you typically need to bring to make them work.

Now, will they actually do that? I don't know. But this at least leaves the option open in a simpler, easier way than they had in the past.

New subclasses could also make use of these. Much as the current Divine Soul Sorcerer gets access to Cleric Spells, that would simply be "Divine Spells" now. You could imagine redesigning the Storm Sorcerer to now have access to Primal Spells (perhaps limited by school).

Oath of the Ancients Paladins could get some Primal spells. A hypothetical "Circle of the Cosmos" Druid might get access to Arcane spells.

The possibilities really open up here, and even though it's jarring to see class spell lists being phased out, I think this is the sort of change that might feel weird now, but wind up being really good for the game.

Expert Class: The Rogue in One D&D

 Turns out these write-ups aren't quick and easy!

In his interview with Todd Kenreck, Jeremy Crawford identified the Rogue as one of the classes that most players find satisfying from the 2014 PHB. As such, the intent here was not to reinvent the wheel, seeking to retain most of what works about the Rogue and just make little tweaks here and there.

First off, the Rogue somewhat infamously currently has to wait for 9th level before they get their second subclass feature (consider that Artificers get their third at that level,) which has been a bit of a frustrating element to the class. Well, with subclass features now all showing up at 3rd, 6th, 10th, and 14th level, that's no longer an issue.

Rogues also, interestingly, get access to any martial weapons with the finesse property, which... might actually be the case already.

Sneak Attack, the core of the Rogue class, is, as far as I can tell, completely unchanged. However, at higher levels (13) the two modes of sneak attack - either having advantage on the attack or having a non-incapacitated ally within 5 feet of the target - combine, so that now the ally being there gives you advantage, which is great for getting to hit with your one attack.

Another change noted with Rangers is that the bonus attack you get with a Light Weapon while dual-wielding no longer takes your bonus action, but simply comes as part of the attack action (still only once per turn). Thus, you can still use your Cunning Action while being a dual-wielding Rogue (which is practically like having advantage on your Sneak Attack).

Now, some things have been shuffled around a little. Evasion doesn't come online until level 9, compared with level 7 - which is now when you get your second Expertise (which is odd, given that Bards and Rangers get it at 1 and 9).

Slippery Mind now also grants Charisma saving throw proficiency - which is rare, but will protect you against things like Bane or Banishment.

Interestingly, Blindsense is gone, which is certainly a nerf (though you're also getting Subtle Strikes - the aforementioned advantage on attacks against targets within 5 feet of an ally).

The phrasing on Stroke of Luck is simplified, but seems to introduce a new oddity: it changes the roll of any failed d20 test into a 20. Naturally, getting to use this on saving throws is nice (a kind of legendary resistance, in a way) but also... does this mean you can automatically crit once per short rest? Somehow this reminds me of the ending of Big Trouble in Little China (though that's of course really more of a Deflect Missiles thing). Like all level 20 capstones, this now comes at level 18, with 20 being the level for Epic Boons.

So, when all is said and done, the Rogue looks almost unchanged, except for a little shuffling. That works out.

Now, I'd kind of hoped to see the redesigned Assassin, which I think is in dire need of big changes, but instead we got the Thief to check out.

    The Thief:

Fast Hands has been subtly shifted around, clearly defining picking a lock as a Sleight of Hand check that also uses Tool Proficiency with Thieves' Tools. It also allows you to use the Search Action as part of your Cunning Action, which entails all manner of Insight, Medicine, Perception, or Survival checks (the Rules Glossary actually does a really good job of distinguishing Perception and Investigation as being part of the "Search" versus the "Study" actions).

Second Story Work now explicitly gives you a climb speed. It also allows you to use Dexterity rather than Strength when taking the Jump Action (interestingly, Acrobatics now seems to be more associated with Strength, though this means you don't have to worry about that).

Supreme Sneak does away with the requirement to move at half speed, and now simply gives you advantage on Stealth checks as long as you're not wearing medium or heavy armor (which I doubt most Rogues would be wearing).

Use Magic Device has been somewhat substantially changed. First off, you get to attune to a fourth magic item (still not beating Artificers, but not bad). You can also potentially avoid spending charges when using a device that has charges - you roll a d6, and on a 6, no charges are expended. Finally, you can use any spell scroll with a cantrip or 1st level spell, and then you can attempt an Intelligence (Arcana) check to cast higher-level spells with a DC equal to 10 + the spell's level. On a success, you cast it with Intelligence as your spellcasting ability. On a failure, the scroll crumbles.

Considering Reliable Talent and Expertise, by this level, with Proficiency in Arcana, you could automatically succeed on this check, which is pretty cool.

Finally, Thieves' Reflexes has been rather dramatically redesigned. This now lets you take a second Bonus Action per turn if it uses one of your Cunning Action options, which you can do a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus per long rest.

While there are certainly cases where this will be a life-saver - maybe letting you Disengage and Dash on the same turn to get away from a deadly enemy - I do feel like this is mostly a nerf. The nova-damage potential of a whole second turn on the first round of combat is a big thing to give up.

In comparison to the other classes in this UA, this one is certainly the most familiar - which is probably fine, given how effectively designed the Rogue already was. I'm very eager to see how the other subclasses look. I'm very happy to see subclass features coming earlier here, too (I still think Soulknife is my favored subclass to play if I play one, but it'll be very nice to get Homing Strikes at 6 instead of 9).

With that, we're through the class overviews. There are still a ton of feats to cover, as well as the Rules Glossary, which is arguably the most important part of these documents.

I suspect we'll be seeing classes previewed by Category - I wonder which one we'll see next.

Expert Class: The Ranger in One D&D

 Well, well, well. The Ranger has suffered in 5th Edition with the impression that it's underpowered - fairly or otherwise. This will, I think, probably change that.

While still built on the chassis of "basic martial abilities plus spellcasting" as a damage-dealer, the weird, idiosyncratic abilities of the 2014 PHB have been mostly replaced with the more broadly-applicable ones from Tasha's - something that one might be tempted to lament, but remember that this is why the class is so unpopular in the first place!

Let's start with Spellcasting:

There are two big changes here. The first is that, like Artificers (and, one presumes, Paladins once we get a look at them) you now get Cantrips and you also get spells starting at level 1.

The second is that you now prepare spells each day, rather than only learning a set number. This means that by level 20, you'll be able to prepare 15 spells, rather than the current 11, and of course, you'll more flexibly be able to swap between them.

Rangers can prepare any Primal spells they have spell slots to cast, except Evocation spells. Compared to the Bard's restrictions, this is pretty generous - you'll still be able to grab all those fun Conjuration, Enchantment, whatever spells. Just no Call Lightning (EDIT: whoops, that's not evocation. Imagine I said Moon Beam) and its ilk (note that healing spells have largely been reclassified as Abjuration, so no worries there).

Notably, because you can pick up Primal cantrips, this makes it very easy to pick up Shillelagh if you want a Wisdom-built Ranger (though your bonus action economy might be a little taxed).

Now, the one Ranger replacement-feature from Tasha's I really didn't like was Favored Foe. It felt like a poor man's Hunter's Mark that was overly restrictive and would become irrelevant at level 2.

The new Favored Enemy feature recognizes this and synthesizes it into something straightforward: You now simply automatically learn Hunter's Mark at level 1 (it doesn't count against your spells prepared). But even better, you don't have to concentrate on it to maintain it - Hunter's Mark simply lasts its full duration unless you end it as a bonus action or you become incapacitated.

This is excellent - it's still limited by your spell slots, so you might choose at higher levels to forgo it, but the lack of concentration on it means you can use it along with all manner of other spells - solving one of the biggest issues with Favored Foe. At level 18 (all the level 20 capstones were moved to level 18 to allow for Epic Boons as level 20 feats) Foe Slayer now simply raises the bonus damage to a d10 for you, rather than a d6 (while other people using the spell will be stuck with d6s).

Fighting Style is now technically a kind of feat - usually these are reserved for Warriors (Barbarians, Fighters, and Monks) but Rangers get an exception (presumably Paladins will as well,) and while you get one for free at 2nd level, you can also pick up additional ones at each feat level.

Roving from Tasha's is buffed slightly, giving you 10 feet of extra movement instead of 5. (You don't get the bonus if you're in heavy armor, but Rangers usually aren't).

You now get Expertise at levels 1 and 9, like Bards and Rogues.

Nature's Veil (from Tasha's) has been made baseline, though it now expends any spell slot instead of having limited uses per day.

You also get 30 foot blindsight at level 15.

As you can see, the class is not so dramatically changed, but a lot of the fat has been cut out and it's now built to play into its strengths a lot more.

Given the emphasis on Hunter's Mark, the changes to Light Weapons are also quite nice: rather than using a bonus action to make your off-hand attack, you now get that attack as part of your attack action, though still only once per turn. This means that a dual-wielder can now much more easily cast and then reapply Hunter's Mark without giving up their off-hand attacks. Given how synergistic that extra attack is with Hunter's Mark, that's quite nice.

Now, one of the ways in which Rangers have actually caught up in power since 2014 has been in the design of subclasses. I wouldn't be shocked to see the Beast Master as pretty similar to what we got in Tasha's, but let's take a look at the Hunter:

    Hunter:

While the Hunter has always been, in theory, the no-frills Ranger option, the various sub-choices within the subclass were often heavily weighted to a single choice being best. Here, the fat is cut out and we get buffed and revised versions of the various best Hunter features.

At 3, you get two things. Hunter's Prey is basically Colossus Slayer, dealing an extra d8 once per turn to a creature you hit that's below its maximum hit points. This works on weapons as well as unarmed strikes.

Also at 3, you get Hunter's Lore. When you mark someone with Hunter's Mark, you automatically know its Immunities, Resistances, and Vulnerabilities, if any. This takes one of the best aspects of the Monster Slayer - I love having a mechanical way to discover those elements of a monster (I wonder if immunities includes condition immunities?)

At 6 (remember, all subclasses get features at 3, 6, 10, and 14 now) you get Multiattack. This one's weird: You automatically know Conjure Barrage, which doesn't count against your spells known. But the weirdest thing is that you can now "downcast" it, using 2nd or 1st level spell slots, and subtracting a d8 for each lower spell level.

Finally, at 14, you get Superior Hunter's Defense, which lets you use your reaction to take half damage against an attack that hits you, but then also lets you redirect the remaining damage of that attack to another target (other than the attacker) within 5 feet of you.

Putting it all together, a 9th-level Hunter Ranger could do the following: get Hunter's Mark up on their target, cast Elemental Weapon at 3rd level, and then hit with a longbow for 1d8+1d6+1d4, plus 1d8 on one of their attacks. Not too shabby.

I think it's interesting to see this idea of leaning into class mechanics as spells - Favored Foe in Tasha's seemed to really go out of its way to avoid simply being Hunter's Mark, and here they've just acknowledged that that's what it should have been in the first place (while also meaning that Hunter's Mark can play well with other concentration spells now!)

This class redesign is probably going to be the most radical, but nevertheless it has me very excited to see what is coming with the other classes.

Expert Class: The Bard in One D&D

 The Bard is one of the three classes that has been released for testing in the second One D&D playtest document.

Bards retain their support-role focus, with Bardic Inspiration remaining a major class feature gained at level 1. The overall shape of the class is going to look familiar, but there are a few tweaks.

First off: let's look at how Bardic Inspiration works.

The biggest change here is that, rather than giving it to an ally on your turn as a bonus action, you now use a reaction to immediately give it to someone who fails a d20 test. This means that you're basically never going to have a BI die sitting around doing nothing because the non-Bard player who has it has forgotten it exists (or has been hoarding it for a "really important" roll).

Additionally, BI can now be used to instantly heal someone as a reaction when they take damage. This is huge because you can hold off on using this until they take a blow that reduces them to zero hit points (you need to be able to see or hear them, but they don't need to be able to see or hear you, which means that works!) This can be an absolute life-saver and do a ton to keep a character from dying and keeping things working in the party's favor.

Later on, at 7th level, you get BI back on a short rest - which is two levels later than before. Also, you now get PB BI dice, rather than your Charisma modifier, which means a little less early on, but ultimately more (and favors a multiclass dip). However, in addition to this, if the roll is a 1, you don't expend the die (the +1 bonus is still applied).

Next, another big change: Spellcasting.

Bards now get to prepare spells each day, rather than learning a set array of them. Also, as mentioned in an earlier post, they now get access to the entire Arcane spell list... but only half the schools of magic. Bards can prepare any Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, or Transmutation spells.

Note that Cantrips (0-level spells) are also "prepared."

The number of spells you can prepare is equal to the number of spell slots you have - which is actually true of the spells known for the 2014 Bard. However, you now can only prepare a number of spells per spell level that you have of that spell level - rather than taking, say, 5 1st level spells to give yourself more options, you'll need to take 4 1st level spells and, say, 2 2nd level spells if you're level 3.

Magical Secrets has been redesigned, where you can pick any of the three spell lists and prepare up to two of the spells from those lists, with no restriction on school. You get this twice. But these are flexible as you prepare new spells, so this is pretty versatile.

Songs of Restoration seems to replace Song of Rest, and comes at 2nd level. This works similarly to "Domain Spells" in that you get with Cleric subclasses (at least in the current system). These spells don't count against your prepared spells, and add Healing Word, Lesser Restoration, Mass Healing Word, Freedom of Movement, and Greater Restoration - spells you'd typically not be able to get outside of Magical Secrets.

Interestingly, this really makes every Bard an at least halfway decent healer (coupled with the healing use of Bardic Inspiration).

Bards historically have only gotten subclass features at 3, 6, and 14, making them the least subclass-influenced class. Now, subclass features levels are standardized across the board, and they'll be getting them at 3, 6, 10, and 14.

One subtle change is that Jack of All Trades only applies to ability checks that would normally use a skill proficiency you don't have - meaning that you don't get to add half your PB to Initiative rolls.

    So, before we get into the College of Lore, let's talk about this.

I think the most impactful element here is the change to Bardic Inspiration. It's going to feel much more impactful this way. The reactive healing is also incredibly powerful.

Bards here, as mentioned above, now have a pretty enormous array of really great healing capabilities. And if you take Divine or Primal Magical Secrets (and you're bound to get one or the other at least eventually, if not both) you can get the resurrection magic you'd need to really be a full healer (and because you don't have to pick them out when you gain the feature, but only when you prepare the spell, you have every reason to do so).

    College of Lore

So, a few things:

Cutting Words no longer affects damage rolls, but you get to wait and see if the target succeeds before you try it. Also, being immune to the charmed condition no longer prevents this from working.

At level 6, you get Cunning Inspiration, which gives you quasi-advantage on your Bardic Inspiration rolls (roll twice, take the higher number).

There's no Additional Magical Secrets, which makes sense given how flexible the new version of that (which you still get twice) is. Instead, you buff your Cutting Words later on to deal psychic damage to a creature you use it on (this is optional, so you can still use this in a social encounter where you don't want to actually harm the recipient). The damage is equal to the roll plus your Charisma modifier, so not shabby - some pretty hefty, automatic damage.

Peerless Skill is also buffed in a couple ways: like the new BI, you get to see if the check fails before using it, and on top of that, if it still fails, you don't expend the die.

    Overall Impressions:

This feels like it's a buff in most cases. Losing, say Countercharm is not exactly a huge loss given how underpowered that was in the first place. I still think I'm not quite inclined toward the class just as a matter of flavor, but I do think that the core features feel much more usable and effective.

So much of this redesign feels like it's catching those moments of "oh, crap, I forgot to use this ability" and redesigning them so that you can, in fact, use them (the changes to the Guidance spell, which we'll eventually get to, while certainly a nerf, are of the same ilk). Bardic Inspiration is going to make a difference far more than it has in the past.

The flexibility of being able to prepare spells is also a really major change (one we'll also be seeing in the Ranger). While I can imagine some people will lament the identity you can carve out with your selection of spells, I think that this will give players the opportunity to try out spells the might otherwise avoid.

So, my feelings here are overwhelmingly positive. Generally I've had that impression for the One D&D playtest in general, with a handful of issues (critical hits, a change which has notably been reverted in this UA) but overall a feeling of optimism.

Personally, I cannot wait to see the Mage UA, particularly to see how Warlocks are going to look.

Dragonflight Launches November 28th!

 This blog might be in hardcore D&D mode for the next several... time. But WoW's next expansion is coming out on November 28th, which likely means that the pre-patch is going live some time in the next couple weeks.

I've been hearing good things about the expansion, though I haven't been in the Beta test myself.

After falling off during an expansion I had thought would be one of my favorites, I'm erring on the side of cautious optimism. But hey, new class expansions have historically been the best ones!

Expert Classes Unearthed Arcana Overview

 The second One D&D playtest document is out and it's an absolute feast.

Weighing in at 37 pages, this shows the revisions for the Bard, Ranger, and Rogue, along with a sample subclass (with their own revisions) for each. It also includes many new feats: 4th level feats, Fighting Style feats, and Epic Boons (aka 20th level feats). It also has a big Rules Glossary.

For this post, I'm going to talk about broad concepts and trends, and we'll delve into the specifics in later posts.

Spell Lists and Spell Preparation

The first really major thing is that, at least in the case of the Bard and Ranger, the spells they gain access to are now based not on a specific class list, but instead bounded by spell category and school.

For example: Bards have access to Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, and Transmutation spells from the Arcane spell list. Likewise, Rangers can choose any spell from the Primal spell list that is not Evocation.

While I had in fact stated otherwise analyzing the previous UA, it does look like "class spell lists" are going to be a thing of the past. But it also looks like this means that classes will use spell schools to limit what they can pick up within those lists.

Additionally, Bards and Rangers, who previously only learned a limited number of spells, now get to prepare spells after a long rest. The number of spells you can prepare is equal to your spell slots, and limited to how many spell slots of that level you have (so, for example, you'll only ever have one 9th level spell prepared at a time).

I don't know if this is going to be the plan for other "learned spells" classes like Warlocks and Sorcerers, but we'll see. Unless those classes are limited to certain schools, I feel like this would kind of take away the biggest appeal to the Wizard. But we'll have to wait until a future UA.

Class Groups

We now know the four Class Groups.

Experts: Bards, Rangers, and Rogues. Artificers are also considered Experts, which means that they can make use of any feature that requires they be an Expert, even though they aren't going to be in the PHB.

Mages: Sorcerers, Warlocks, and Wizards

Priests: Clerics, Druids, and Paladins

Warrior: Barbarians, Fighters, and Monks

Notably, Rangers get to pick up the Fighting Style feats despite not being Warriors. I'd assume the same will be the true for Paladins. (This does not, however, apply to Epic Boons, it seems).

Subclass Features Standardized

Subclasses now all gain new features at levels 3, 6, 10, and 14. For older subclasses, you'll simply get those features at those levels, except in the case of the Bard, which had only three levels with subclass features, who will just follow the old progression.

I'm not sure how this will work for classes with 1st level subclasses (mechanically this makes more sense, but it's hard to explain lorewise how a Warlock has their power before they pick a patron).

All 4th-Level Feats Include a 1-point ASI

Technically, Ability Score Improvement is now a feat, so that's not strictly true. But every feat you get after level 1 will now give you a 1-point bonus to an ability score.

This, frankly, makes Feats way, way more appealing. You might have to slow your progression on primary stats, but you won't just flat-out miss out.

The Rest Gets more Nitty-Gritty

That's the top-level stuff. There's a ton to get into regarding the class specifics. But my impression is generally:

Bards are going to be a bit more effective, especially making Bardic Inspiration easier to use.

Rangers feel like a good and proper, powerful class (indeed, they worry it's too powerful right now)

Rogues are the most similar, which is fine because they were in good shape already.

Last Minute Hopes for Bards, Rangers, and Rogues

 Obviously, "last minute" is a bit of an understatement, given that we've got anywhere from fifteen to twenty-six months before the thing currently codenamed (guys, relax, it's a codename) One D&D is released.

But with the "Expert Classes" UA due to arrive some time tomorrow (hopefully early) I thought I'd put forth a couple ideas for what I'd like to see of these classes.

Bards:

Ok, first, confession time: I have never really gotten into the Bard. I know there are people who absolutely love them, and who swear that they're a really powerful, good class. But I have never been able to wrap my head around why they say so.

I have, at the very least, been able to run a campaign for over two years in which my best friend plays a Bard, so I now have a fair amount of second-hand knowledge. As a DM, the ways in which he manages to kick ass tend to be mass crowd-control with spells like Confusion and Hypnotic Pattern. But these aren't exclusive to the class.

Anyway, long story short, this is the class I have the least real insight to provide. Bardic Inspiration is a big deal, and at higher levels it can be quite powerful (adding a d12 can really swing a roll) though classically, players forget to make use of it.

Personally, if I had my druthers, I'd want Bards to get a fourth subclass feature level. They're the only class that only gets these features at three levels (most get subclass stuff four times, and a couple get them five times) but I also imagine this would really fly in the face of backwards compatibility.

Frankly, I also think the following redesign of Bardic Inspiration could make the class feel way more effective and powerful: Rather than as a bonus action on their turn, and lasting for 10 minutes or until used, if a Bard could give their Bardic Inspiration as a reaction when a friendly creature within range that can hear them makes a d20 test - perhaps letting the roll happen, but before the results are complete (a little more in line with the Artificer's Flash of Genius) this would make the feature way easier to use.

But that's pretty much what I've got.

Rangers:

So, Rangers got buffed in a number of ways in Tasha's, giving a lot of options that made them more versatile.

Favored Foe was a... noble idea that just fell apart in execution. I think you could potentially fix it in a few ways. The first would be to allow it to persist without requiring concentration. After all, Rangers are half-casters, and a feature that prevents them from using concentration spells that isn't, itself, a concentration spell, seems like an odd 1st-level, baseline feature.

What I'd be tempted to do is actually fold in Foe Slayer at level 1, rather than level 20. I might then borrow some of the concept of Favored Foe - namely, being able to designate someone as your foe a limited number of times per day, to keep the power of this under control.

Let's try this as an example:

When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can choose to mark them as your Foe. While marked in this way, you deal additional damage with your weapon attacks equal to your Wisdom modifier, including the attack that marked it. The foe remains marked until you mark a different foe, your marked foe dies or you finish a long rest, whichever comes first. You can mark a foe in this way a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier, and regain all uses of this feature when you finish a long rest.

Until higher levels, you're unlikely to see this adding more than one or two damage (though a Druidic Warrior/Shillelagh build could get a lot out of it) but it emphasizes the Ranger as a real single-target-focused character, which feels right.

As an Expert class, we know that they'll be getting Expertise (which they already effectively get on one skill with the "Canny" part of Deft Explorer form Tasha's). The Ranger, of course, is the character who should be really reliable on guiding the party through wilderness. I don't know if this will simply be accomplished by giving them more traditional Expertise or if they need something else.

Rogues:

Rogues are honestly, I think, a pretty well-designed class for the most part. In combat, missing out on Sneak Attack can be pretty devastating. I also think a lot of players don't totally understand Sneak Attack - I've had to explain numerous times that having an ally in melee with the target is only necessary if you don't get advantage on the attack.

Here, I'm eager to see, most of all, the Assassin subclass revisions. On its surface, the Assassin ought to be one of the absolute core Rogue subclasses. But the Infiltration Expertise and Imposter features are ludicrous - they're basically not features, because they explain stuff that any creative player should be able to do. Now, to be fair, Assassinate and Death Strike, the other two subclass features, are really powerful when they go off, but it feels like this should all be balanced out a bit better.

    Ultimately, of course, we're going to get a much better sense of what to expect tomorrow.

48 Subclasses, You Say?

 One of the tidbits mentioned in the Expert Classes interview between Todd Kenreck and Jeremy Crawford is that the new PHB will have 48 subclasses included.

With 12 classes, that gives us an average of four subclasses per class. But we should also bear in mind that some classes came with a lot more than that in the 2014 PHB.

Let's do a count. In the 2014, original 5th Edition PHB, we had:

Barbarians 2: Berserker and Totem Warrior

Bards 2: Lore and Valor

Clerics 7: Knowledge, Life, Light, Nature, Tempest, Trickery, War

Druids 2: Land, Moon

Fighters 3: Battle Master, Champion, Eldritch Knight

Monks 3: Four Elements, Open Hand, Shadow

Paladins 3: Ancients, Devotion, Vengeance

Rangers 2: Beast Master, Hunter

Rogues 3: Arcane Trickster, Assassin, Thief

Sorcerers 2: Draconic Bloodline, Wild Magic

Warlocks 3: Archfey, Fiend, Great Old One

Wizards 8: Abjuration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, Transmutation

Total Subclasses: 40

So, that means we're looking at 8 new subclasses. Granted, it's not obvious that these subclasses are going to be brand-new. They could easily reprint some of the options from Xanathar's or Tasha's, especially the popular ones.

We're also likely to see some changes to the subclasses to go along with class changes.

As we can see, the 2014 PHB favored Clerics and Wizards pretty heavily - arguably to an absurd degree. With Wizards, I think they were sort of bound to the concept when they made a subclass for each school of magic. For Clerics, I don't know that the class necessarily needed so many subclasses, but the divine domains were also useful for world-building. If you're making a homebrew setting with its own gods, you'll want to ensure there's at least one deity for each domain. (You might notice that I didn't include the Death Cleric or Oathbreaker Paladin - because these aren't in the Player's Handbook, I'm not considering them part of this group).

Let's make the conservative assumption that every subclass in the 2014 PHB is going to be included. Thus, we have 8 additional subclasses to apply. We'll also make the assumption that they'll use existing subclasses from supplementary materials to include (something I think is less of a guarantee, but possible.)

I think the obvious thing here would be first to grant a third subclass to any class that currently only has two in the PHB. That means one for Barbarians, Bards, Druids, Rangers, and Sorcerers. That leaves just three additional subclasses to put in there.

Even though there are certainly some Cleric and Wizard subclasses I could easily see them adding, I think the options are already quite broad for these classes, so I'd assume other classes will get them.

Let's start by picking a subclass for each of the two-subclass classes.

Barbarians: While I think I might favor the Zealot here, in my play experience, I've seen more players drawn to the Ancestral Guardian. Not only does this play into the Barbarian's notion of being tied to the primordial, inherited past, it also works quite well as a "tank" option that can help protect allies, which emphasizes a major strength of the class.

Bards: There are a number of good options here. Glamour Bards fit a pretty classic Bard archetype, really emphasizing the idea of the Bard as a performer. I'd also be a little tempted to replace Valor with Swords. I also think the Eloquence Bard is really great. But I do think returning to the Glamour Bard, this subclass gives us the true Rock Star Bard, allowing Lore to be the knowledge-sponge and for Valor to be the swashbuckler.

Druids: First off, I expect Circle of the Land to be seriously re-worked, as I really don't see many people being drawn to that one. While I really like the recent Circle of Stars and Circle of Wildfire, I think that the Circle of Shepherds from Xanathar's really emphasizes a Druidic archetype that you don't get much from really any other subclass - the one who really calls upon the natural world. Shepherds is also a pretty good healer, which would be a nice strength to emphasize.

Rangers: Ok, well. Is it that it's flavorfully another classic archetype, or just that it's really powerful? I'm talking about the Gloomstalker here. Another option I'd push for would be the Monster Slayer, which I personally think is a really cool subclass at least on a conceptual level - it plays into that Witcher/Van Helsing/Solomon Kane archetype.

Sorcerer: While I'm hoping Sorcerer subclasses will all get the expanded spell concept that the Clockwork Soul and Aberrant Mind got, I think the obvious choice here is Storm Sorcery. Storm Sorcery is fairly iconic, and also feels like a good option for "pure magic" in a way that is not quite as unpredictable as Wild Magic.

So, that leaves three subclasses left to apply. And with a third subclass for those five classes, we can now put anyone other than Clerics or Wizards up to 4 subclasses.

Hexblade: Let's mention this off the bat. I actually think Hexblades are a problematic subclass, because they are just so, so much better at pulling off the Bladelock than any other Warlock subclass that it retroactively made the Pact of the Blade feel like it should only work for them. Now, if we roll the "Charisma for attacks and damage" and possibly the "Medium Armor and Shields" into Pact of the Blade, we then have the problem where it feels like there's very little reason to play a Hexblade Warlock. Still, it's obviously very popular, so depending on how much they're willing to change, I could see this making the cut.

Swashbuckler: The Swashbuckler is one of those subclasses that I think really embodies a truly classic archetype, and makes it almost surprising that it didn't exist in the PHB. I think this one's a bit of a no-brainer.

Kensei: Now, this one I'm not super confident about. I think the Kensei does manage to really carve out a clear niche for itself, being the "weapon monk," but I don't know how popular it is. Still, I think it could potentially be a strong hook to get people interested in the monk, especially if they're not really into the unarmed combat aspect of it.

We're obviously a long way from knowing whether any of these predictions will come true. But we should know a little more tomorrow!

Class Categories and a More Flexible Future for D&D

 In the Character Origins UA, the new concept of spell categories took shape - magic was divided into Arcane, Divine, and Primal spell lists. The concept had already existed to a certain extent in the lore of the game - it was clear that the kind of magic a Wizard casts is quite different from the kind of magic that a Paladin casts. The spell lists contain overlaps, of course, with Mending, for example, in both the Arcane and Divine lists.

While we still don't have the Expert Classes UA available to peruse just yet, we can now see a similar concept being introduced: Class Categories along with Spell Categories.

Like the Spell Categories, this is a new tag that does not seem to be overwriting any previous tags or categories. What it does is creates hooks on which to hang new modular game concepts in an elegant way.

In the 8 years of D&D 5th Edition, only one full class has been added to the game in officially published material. The Artificer, first published in Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and then reprinted with a few revisions and a new subclass (which happens to be my favorite sublcass) in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, is in a bit of an odd position. Because 5E has been designed under the assumption that you should never need more than the 3 core rulebooks to use any other book they've published (counting Spelljammer: Adventures in Space as a single book that happens to be in three volumes in this case,) the Artificer had to be wholly complete in both printings. While books like Fizban's Treasury of Dragons bent some of these rules (providing a new spell or two that Artificers can use,) adding a new class presents the following two problems:

First is that you cannot expand upon that class, at least not in ways exclusive to that class. We'll have to see if that remains the case when we get things like The Book of Many Things, which I assume will be the next Xanathar's/Tasha's-style rules expansion book. The class and spell categories here don't really change this fact, which is why I'm frankly disappointed that the Artificer is not seeing print in the new PHB.

However, the second problem is one that this can potentially solve: We've explicitly heard that the Artificer does count as an Expert class (note that "Expert" here is a group role - it's not meant to imply a higher difficulty or that it comes online at higher levels like old prestige classes). As such, new features that are added to the game in the 2024 PHB and beyond that serve Expert classes will also work for the Artificer.

Now, in a sense, this is philosophically similar to the very concept of classes versus subclasses. In older editions of D&D, what we'd now call subclasses were either Prestige classes or just wholly separate classes. The Avenger, in 4th Edition (I believe) is more or less what the Oath of Vengeance Paladin is today, including features like Vow of Enmity.

In a certain way, the base classes of 5th Edition have served as broad categories for the subclasses that would be published throughout the edition. They're an existing framework that allowed for the introduction of, say, new Eldritch Invocations, which anyone in the "Warlock" category could use.

Indeed, I think that the Class/Subclass system in 5E has worked out extremely well - we all know at a basic level what a Rogue can do, and each time they want to make a new flavor of Rogue, they don't have to fully go back to the drawing board.

But, as we've seen with the Artificer, even if the twelve original classes do a really good job covering the bases of the various fantasy archetypes that one could want to embody, sometimes none of them are quite the right fit, and it's useful to have some working space to allow for the creation of new classes.

What will be interesting to see is how much WotC makes use of these new capabilities. I think it possible that we might see new classes added to the game more frequently than we did in the past. I don't think that this will prevent new subclasses, but if there are places where a new class makes sense, it'll be easier to do so.

Expert Classes UA: One D&D's Second Playtest Document

(UPDATE: The UA doesn't come out until tomorrow, the 29th)

 So, caveat to begin with: as of 10:30 AM on the west coast, we don't actually have the new UA yet, but we do have the interview between Todd Kenreck and Jeremy Crawford, which has given us some details about what to expect (for readers of this blog, expect a lot of posts today).

This UA is going to focus on the three PHB "Expert" classes, which is a new category that will be used to group classes similar to the three new spell categories from the previous UA. We don't have a full list, but Bards, Rangers, and Rogues (and Artificers - though sadly they've just been confirmed as not coming in the PHB) will be considered "Experts." While this won't dictate that their gameplay features be too similar, it does mean they're all going to get the Expertise feature, and are meant to play a group role where they can reliably perform their given tasks.

The only other role I head mentioned in the interview was the "Warrior," which I imagine includes Fighters, Paladins, Barbarians, and possibly Monks. (I'd assume we'll also get Mages for Sorcerers, Warlocks and Wizards, and then maybe Mystics for Clerics and Druids, but I'm just making those latter terms up).

Class roles will serve as, for example, prerequisites for feats, or even magic items.

The UA will include a new Rules Glossary, with experiments to how certain things will work. One notable thing here is that the Critical Hit changes from the Character Origins UA have been reverted, but there will, of course, be some new things to look at as well.

Another change we're seeing is that Ritual Spells, in this UA, no longer require a class to have some special talent to cast Ritual Spells - all classes that can cast those spells can now do so ritually.

Going back to the Class Categories:

Philosophically, I think we're seeing a shift toward "future-proofing" One D&D. I've made it pretty clear on this blog that I adore the Artificer. But you'll note that a lot of older elements of the game, such as the older version of Magic Initiate, don't really interface well with the class.

By creating these broader categories like the Arcane/Divine/Primal spell lists or these class categories (to one of which the Artificer explicitly belongs) WotC is making it easier to handle the complexities of adding new classes to the game.

Anyway, once we have the document itself, you can be sure I'm going to go over it with a fine-tooth comb.

Wrath Classic and WoW Nostalgia

 I graduated from college in 2008. That summer, I drove out with one of my best friends to Los Angeles, where I still live today. I'd been playing WoW about two years - I started in September of 2006, my junior year of college, after seeing my roommate take his Orc Warlock around Durotar. While I played in the very tail end of Vanilla and then through Burning Crusade, it was Wrath of the Lich King where I became really fully engaged in WoW as a game and community.

I found my guild tanking a PUG Oculus, and after two abortive runs at Karazhan later in BC, I really learned the raid-tanking ropes in Naxxramas.

To me, Wrath will always be something special. The Scourge are my favorite WoW villains - indeed, they instilled in me an affinity for undead adversaries when I run D&D and write fantasy fiction - and this expansion was a huge part of why.

2008 was also a fairly tough time to go out into the adult world - the financial crisis struck right about as I was starting a job hunt. Wrath of the Lich King was an opportunity for me to feel a sense of control and, honestly, self-esteem in the midst of a really dehumanizing and demoralizing experience.

As a piece of art and entertainment, Wrath expanded the idea of what an MMO could be. In Vanilla and BC, it was rare for them to let NPCs really move around much - Thrall's appearance in Nagrand was exceptional (too bad the ultimate effect of his encouragement of Garrosh turned the guy into a fascist nightmare). After Illidan had been broadly advertised as the exciting antagonist of Burning Crusade only to basically never be seen by most players, Wrath made sure that every player had a personal stake in taking down Arthas - and even, thanks to the Halls of Reflection dungeon, allowed players to confront him, even if they didn't get to defeat him.

Wrath saw WoW's first cutscenes - which was actually a little against the grain, given that a lot of games at the time were playing with the idea of removing cutscenes in favor of having everything happen within uninterrupted gameplay (2004's Half-Life 2 being a prime example). The subsequent Battle of Undercity was also a remarkable use of new phasing technology (one that sadly disappeared with Catalcysm, given the massive re-work of the entire Old World).

It was also notable for a real shift in design philosophy. While Burning Crusade started to chip away at this, there was still something of an assumption going into Wrath that, for example, each tank was really only good for a particular niche. Warriors were the main tank, Paladins tanked adds, and Druids were off-tanks who would switch to cat form to DPS. With the addition of a new tank class (the first of three, eventually!) the developers pitched the Death Knight as the anti-magic tank, though when the expansion itself came out, the exciting truth emerged that every tank could perform these different roles.

While some specs lagged, a lot of options that were previously seen as "traps" suddenly became viable. The introduction of dual-spec then allowed players who mained as tanks or healers to have a much easier time playing solo (I leveled up to 80 entirely as Protection on my Paladin).

Now, I haven't really been into Classic. And honestly, I don't think I'm going to play much of Wrath Classic. I love Wrath, but I was there. I could imagine younger or newer players, who may not have even been alive when Wrath came out (and holy shit does that make me feel old) wanting to experience it. I think that the ever-changing nature of MMOs is a double-edged sword, and Classic as an ongoing project to restore the chance to experience these things is a noble one.

But I was there. And I don't think I can feel like I'm 22 again just because they come out with this expansion again.

The Profundity of Shillelagh and the new Magic Initiate

 Magic Initiate in the 2014, current iteration, works the following way: you pick a class - namely Bard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, Warlock, or Wizard, and you pick two cantrips from their spell list and one 1st level spell. You can then cast those cantrips at will, and you can cast that 1st level spell for free once per day - but only just that one time unless you have another way to cast it.

More importantly for our purposes here, you use the spellcasting ability of the class whose spells you took. If it's a Bard, Sorcerer, or Warlock spell, you use Charisma. If it's a Cleric or Druid spell, you use Wisdom, and if it's a Wizard spell, you use Intelligence. (Naturally, there's some overlap here, but you choose your class first, before your spells, and it's that class whose ability you use).

This does limit things somewhat - if you want to pick up, say, Guiding Bolt as a Wizard, you'd still have to use your Wisdom to cast it.

However, if we look at the Character Origins UA version of the feat, the design is significantly different.

First off, this is one of the free feats you can get as part of your background, which means it's far easier to justify picking it up.

Second, you can re-cast your leveled spell if you have spell slots to do so.

Another really big change is that, rather than dividing things by class, they instead sort spells into three categories - Arcane, Divine, and Primal. Rather than picking a class, you instead pick one of these three categories. There's also some overlap between these.

But, as you'll note, while the two classes that are generally "primal" casters both use Wisdom (Druids and Rangers) there are also instances where classes use different abilities - Clerics use Wisdom, but Paladins use Charisma, despite both being Divine spellcasters.

As such, the new version of Magic Initiate simply lets you pick your spellcasting ability for the spells in question.

And that opens things up significantly... and largely through a little spell called Shillelagh.

Shillelagh is a Druid cantrip. It's sort of a damage cantrip, though it doesn't actually do any damage on its own. Instead, you use it as a bonus action to empower a club or quarterstaff you have in hand - the wooded weapon grows more gnarled and bigger, and now, instead of using Strength to attack with it, you instead use your spellcasting ability. Its damage die also become a d8. Also, the weapon becomes magical for the 1-minute duration.

Because this is restricted to Druids, the main intentional use for it is that Druids can use it to get a bit more useful in melee situations, even though they're not built to be melee combatants (well, not as a baseline class at least).

Tasha's introduction of the Druidic Warrior fighting style, which would allow them to pick up this cantrip, is pretty great, as it allows a player to really focus in on being a Wisdom-based character (a good match for the updated Beast Master, who use their spell attack modifier to govern their pet's chance to hit).

But by adding it to this new feat, you open up a ton of possibilities:

Paladins would typically have to multiclass into Hexblade Warlocks if they wanted to be able to use Charisma as their melee weapon ability - a powerful combination, to be sure, but one that requires delaying or losing various paladin class features (most profoundly, delaying an Aura of Protection that is likely to be more powerful with a maxed-out Charisma).

This could also allow an Eldritch Knight Fighter to pour everything into Intelligence.

This also, in fact, opens up a lot more options for Pact of the Blade Warlocks. Bladelocks have been strongly incentivized to go with a Hexblade patron for their subclass ever since Xanathar's Guide to Everything came out. And while there's a thematic reason for that, it also limits your options. Taking the new Magic Initiate would make such a build much more viable for non-Hexblade subclasses (though it's tough to turn down medium armor and shields as well). Indeed, Warlocks have long used Pact of the Tome to get hold of a Charisma-based Shillelagh, but this locks them out of invocations like Thirsting Blade, which grant Extra Attack.

This would also likely be of real use to Valor and Swords Bards, who can fully invest in Charisma to boost their spellcasting and, thanks to their proficiency in Medium Armor, they only need 14 Dexterity to fully boost their AC.

A Bladesinger Wizard could also pick this up - because they only ever get light armor, they'll still probably want some Dexterity eventually, but early on they can really focus on Intelligence and still be quite effective in melee.

The point is, this little change to an existing feat can really revolutionize character builds for half-casters and other classes that wish to mix spellcasting and melee combat. Shillelagh is a cantrip that is somewhat forgettable when limited to Druids (except maybe in a Circle of Spores build that wants to make use of the bonus poison damage) but as soon as it branches out to other classes, it can be really good.

What's Next for One D&D Testing?

 One D&D, the development code-name for what we were previously calling 5.5 or 6E (similarly to how 5th Edition was "D&D Next") is officially in testing as of a few weeks ago with the Character Origins UA.

I've gone into fine detail about that UA document, with a general feel that it's mostly good except perhaps for the changes to critical hits.

Now, it's certainly possible that the next bit of playtest material will be a revision of what we just got - perhaps addressing issues that players have put forward.

Of course, UA is only partially for playtesting. It's also marketing - a type of marketing that I really don't mind, as it genuinely reaches out to the community and makes us feel connected to the game. But the fact that it's marketing is one reason that I think we'll be getting different content. It also might be easier to put out revisions after they've done a few of these, and leave out the stuff that they aren't changing (I don't think anyone's likely to object to, for example, Tool Proficiency).

Now, the three main choices one makes when building a character are race, class, and background. Again, I'm pretty heavily in favor of changing "race" to "ancestry," because it's straightforward, distances the game from a concept that's grown outdated, and also has the elegance of making character creation "A, B, and C."

But, more to the point, if the playtesting elements they plan to focus on are starting with character creation, classes could be next.

But classes are big - of those three initial choices, your class really defines your capabilities as a character in a way that race and background don't.

Given the complexity and enormity of what a class represents, though, I suspect that they can't just knock them all out in a single (granted, large) document like the previous UA.

It might, then, be easiest to start with classes that are unlikely to see major changes.

Personally, I think the Paladin is one of the best-designed classes in 5th Edition - it does what you want it to do, and it's quite good at the job. If anything, I could imagine the class receiving some nerfs, though I hope not. Really, the only change I think is really needed is changing the name of Improved Divine Smite to something else, because the feature doesn't actually interact with Divine Smite in any way - it just adds d8s of radiant damage.

Thus, if it's getting minimal changes, those changes could probably fit into one of these initial documents.

On the other hand, if they wanted to get major changes into players' hands as quickly as possible, perhaps we'll see a UA dedicated to only one or two classes, with a full detail of the changes. The Ranger, for example, could turn the Tasha's revised changes into baselines for the class (though hopefully redesigning Favored Foe). The Monk could also maybe use a few tweaks to let it more effectively perform its roles (I think a d10 or even d12 hit die would go a ways toward improving the class).

Now, on the other hand, we could have a radically different possibility:

There are some game systems that are somewhat underdeveloped. The one that I think really needs the most robust build-up is crafting. In the Character Origins UA, one of the potential 1st-level feats is Crafter, which explicitly makes you better at crafting things.

But crafting is one of those things that's pretty vaguely defined in 5E - to be clear, there are rules in Xanathar's for crafting even magical items, but these rules rely on Downtime - something that many, in fact, most campaigns that I've played in haven't really made use of. The longest-running campaign I've played in had us going on a journey constantly, and rarely if ever returning to locations we had been to. Even though my Fighter had the Arcana skill proficiency, which is required to make enchanted items, I don't think I ever got a single day of downtime, much less the weeks (or tendays, as this was the Forgotten Realms) required to craft something (I really wanted to make a Headband of Intellect so that I could stop worrying about my spell DC and just focus on Strength and Constitution).

Item crafting - and in particular, magic item crafting - is a potential Pandora's Box for DMs, to be sure. If you let players make all the magic items they want, they can potentially become far more powerful than they otherwise would (it also sort of steps on the toes of the Artificer, which is basically a class built around making the magic items that you want).

But at the same time, it's clear that this is a system players expect to have, and that the game seems to partially support. I don't know if this means just working the Xanathar's rules into the new PHB or DMG, or if they want to go back to the drawing board and figure out how it will work.

But, given its potential impact, I think it would be a good thing to get in front of playtesters.

What Might Be the Default Setting of One D&D?

 For those of us who got into D&D with 5th Edition, the Forgotten Realms, as a setting, is somewhat intrinsically linked to the game. Of all the published adventures, the vast majority of them are set within the Forgotten Realms, and more specifically, the continent of Faerun (and most of those being on the Sword Coast).

The Forgotten Realms are technically the oldest D&D setting, given that creator Ed Greenwood came up with the setting when he was a child in the 1960s, but it wasn't the original setting. I believe (and D&D historians can correct me if I'm wrong) that the first setting sourcebook was for Greyhawk, created by Gary Gygax. Numerous other settings have been put together as well. Dragonlance is a particularly famed one, but there are also ones like Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Eberron. There are some that I could not even begin to tell you about like Mystara, Birthright, or Gamma World, because I don't really have any idea what their whole deals are. And, of course, Matt Mercer's Exandria setting is one of the most recent additions to the canon.

Of course, for my part, one of the great joys of being a Dungeon Master is being able to create your own setting. While I'm pretty sure I've spent more hours running my Ravnica game than I did my original campaign (while the old campaign ran from 2015-2019ish, we did not play as consistently) I do feel a strong attachment to my Sarkon setting, and I'm going to be splitting the difference a bit when I eventually get my Sunday group up and running to do a Spelljammer campaign in my expanded, thousand-years-later science-fantasy version of Sarkon and its set of linked Wildspace systems I call the Celestial Expanse.

The Forgotten Realms is a perennial favorite, though. I believe that it was the most common setting during 2nd Edition - the era that gave us games like Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Icewind Dale. 3rd Edition, though, I believe, pushed things toward Greyhawk. 4th Edition gave us Nentir Vale, which was part of their revamp of the D&D cosmos that created the World Axis as opposed to the Great Wheel.

However, with 5th Edition acting in large part to recapture much of what people loved about older editions, the classic Forgotten Realms and Great Wheel were both restored.

And the Forgotten Realms is a pretty good setting for D&D - it's built on the concept of all these different eras of past civilizations (the eponymous realms) that provide plenty of ancient dungeons for parties to explore and excavate. Meanwhile, though, the political landscape is fairly stable, allowing for characters to travel to fabled and familiar sites.

The Forgotten Realms is a suitable place for all manner of adventure, which has the unfortunate side effect of also rendering it a little generic - it's the "everything but the kitchen sink" fantasy setting, and thus I think would be hard to pitch the way one can with, for example, Dark Sun ("Mad Max meets Dune") or Ravenloft ("the horror setting.")

Now, of course, One D&D is not officially a different edition than 5th, but WotC has made it clear that they feel they've done so much in the Forgotten Realms that they're willing to take an extended break from it.

One thing I have noted is that D&D's recent releases are hinting toward something that has also been a growing trend in the zeitgeist: the multiverse.

Obviously, in pop culture we have things from Marvel Studios' newly-announced "Multiverse Saga" to indie films like (the excellent) Everything Everywhere All At Once. D&D's recent releases have included Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, which presents the eponymous hub-city in the Deep Ethereal Plane connecting many other nations and locations on the Prime Material. Spelljammer: Adventures in Space might not have given us a lot of "setting" information (the biggest failing, in my mind, of the product) but it provided a consistent way to allow DMs to run multiverse-spanning campaigns (especially when you consider that the Astral Plane contains portals to the Outer Planes). In 2023, what might be the final 5th Edition release before One D&D comes out is going to be a Planescape sourcebook (official title TBD) which is, of course, all about planar travel in the D&D multiverse.

As such, I think it's not that crazy to imagine that One D&D might actually make the broader multiverse a big part of its setting presentation.

Now, how would that work?

One of the benefits of having most of 5th Edition's adventures take place in the Forgotten Realms is that there's a certain degree of continuity. NPCs like Artus Cimber or Volothamp Geddarm can show up in multiple adventures. The Bryn Shander in Storm King's Thunder has the same characters as that in Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden.

Even though it's unlikely players take the same characters through those adventures (given how character advancement works) it's something that the players can latch onto.

In previous editions, of course, the stewards of D&D (whether they be TSR or Wizards of the Coast) published a lot more material - each setting got its own product line, rather than a single (or in the case of Ravenloft and Exandria, two) books per edition. Thus, a play group that loved Planescape could really focus on those books and get a number of published adventures for that plane-hopping stuff. Not only that, but it created room to flesh these places out considerably.

This year we'll be getting Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. But this is not a campaign sourcebook - it's an adventure book that happens to be set in the world of Krynn.

I do wonder, then, if we might visit many established D&D worlds in this manner - getting an adventure book that gives us a taste of what's going on there. Dragonlance will give us some new backgrounds and feats (playing into the new way that backgrounds work with One D&D, especially the feat they come with) and thus give us a little bit of material for campaign building outside of that adventure.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some adventure set in Dark Sun, or other popular D&D settings.

If they wanted to make the "default setting" be "the multiverse," they could potentially have multiverse travelers show up in these adventures.

I guess the question is how that would be received. Personally, while I have nothing against the Forgotten Realms, I was often frustrated being stuck there. I like the reality-warping strangeness of non-Prime-Material settings. But I know that there are plenty of people who want to preserve the "fundamentals" of D&D - fighting goblins in a pseudo-medieval setting looking for treasure.

There are, of course, plenty of settings to do that that aren't the Forgotten Realms. But maybe we're ready to embrace the weird and go for a multiversal primary setting.

In Praise of D&D's Redundancies

 In the Player's Handbook, every class that has the spellcasting feature (and also Pact Magic, which is technically a different one) has a lengthy explanation for how you calculate the saving throw DC of your spells. It's a lot of repeated words, always following the same formula: you take 8, add your proficiency bonus, and then add your spellcasting ability, which of course is different for different classes.

This fairly substantial block of text takes up a good half a page or maybe a little more in each of the class descriptions - and it's really almost all of them because even the Rogue and Fighter have subclasses with the Spellcasting feature. Likewise, Monks get a similar explanation for their Ki saving throws. So Barbarians are the only ones without this description, meaning there's about five and a half pages dedicated to repeating this.

And I think that's a great thing.

See, I was doing some character building for Starfinder - just to help me wrap my head around it in case I ever need to help others do so. I was building a Soldier, and took the Bombard fighting style (fighting style in Starfinder is the name for Soldier subclasses) that, at least at first, focuses on grenades. The cheapest grenades - a reasonable thing to stock up on at low levels - deal 1d6 piercing damage in a 15-ft radius, and thanks to the fact that my Soldier has an 18 Strength and is a Bombarder, I can throw them an additional 20 feet, for a total of 40 feet away.

But I had to search through the Core Rulebook to find any explanation of what the saving throw DC was for those grenades. This is true for a lot of abilities - class abilities will refer to abilities forcing a saving throw, but there's no explanation there, or even in the general class description.

When I was first looking at the rulebook when I bought it initially, I actually made a cheat sheet for each class because I didn't want to have to flip back and forth through the book before I'd memorized them.

Now, part of this is certainly due to the fact that I have seven years of experience with 5E D&D and have never actually run or played Starfinder. I'm sure this would become second nature over time. Starfinder also has variable DCs in some cases. For example, the Operative (rogue equivalent) has one DC that foes must meet to succeed on saving throws against your abilities (which is 10 plus half your Operative level rounded down, plus your Dexterity modifier) but a different DC for features that have enemies make a skill check against you (10 plus one and a half times your Operative level, plus your Dexterity modifier).

Indeed, there's really no place in the Soldier class description that makes any mention of how to calculate a saving throw, despite their capstone feature, Kill Shot, requiring one. So, one needs to look to the "Key Ability Scores" section on page 58 to find that, ok, it's 10 + half your soldier level + your Strength or Dexterity modifier (whichever is higher - like Fighters, Soldiers can focus on Strength or Dexterity).

D&D, given that it separates out the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, has a bit more room, but I really think that the format here, where the book frequently reminds you how to calculate these things, is a lot more user-friendly.

Anticipating One D&D Class Changes

 The survey for the Character Origins UA previewing One D&D - the 5.5th Edition we're going to be seeing in 2024 - has now gone up. We don't actually know what the next one will be - it could be a revision of some of the items here, or possibly more Rules Glossary-like clarification and changes.

But I think the most impactful thing we're likely to see is any and all proposed class changes.

Classes, after all, are the most impactful choices you make when building your character.

What we saw with Races in the previous UA was largely an attempt to preserve the overall shape of the existing options - with the exceptions of removing the Half-Elf and Half-Orc (with the intent on making mixed heritage possible between most races, but no longer reflecting that mechanically) and the addition of the Ardling, as well as new non-Infernal legacy options for Tieflings.

If you were already using the Tasha's rules regarding ability score bonuses, in most cases you'll see only minor changes and tweaks.

One D&D is being designed to be, where possible, backwards-compatible, meaning that we should be able to use subclasses out of Xanathar's and Tasha's (and the few subclasses that didn't get reprinted in Tasha's like the Chronurgist, etc.)

What this will require is that, at the very least, classes will have subclass features come online at the same levels, most likely. Personally, I find that a little disappointing specifically for the Bard, who only gets subclass features at three different levels - 3, 6, and 14. Most classes get four, while Fighters and Clerics get five (though in the Cleric's case, the level 8 one is just one of two options that each subclass gets one of or the other).

Where I think we'll see changes is going to be more fundamentally in the general class features.

What changes do I think we have evidence that we'll see?

First off, let's talk Artificers. I really, really hope we see this class printed in the Player's Handbook so that, moving forward, they can add more subclasses and Artificer-specific spells. What I think makes this possibility ambiguous is that, in the Rules Glossary part of the Character Origins UA, when describing Arcane spells, the entry says "Bards, Sorcerers, Warlocks, and Wizards harness this magic, as do Artificers." I could read this two ways: one is that saving Artificers for last is backward-looking and making sure that readers who might never have gotten Tasha's or ERFTLW (just "Eberron" feels too vague for a shortened name, though this isn't great either) realize that they're a thing too, or it's keeping them last because they're categorically separating it as an "other" class rather than one of the primary, PHB ones. So, really, who knows? (I mean, Jeremy Crawford for one, but I doubt he's going to blurt it out outside of an official announcement).

The only other piece of - again, pretty vague - evidence that I can note is the absence of Eldritch Blast from the Arcane (or any other) spell list. Eldritch Blast is a common choice for people who pick up the Spell Sniper feat, or Magic Initiate. But the new Magic Initiate, while arguably a lot more flexible (Shillelagh with Charisma for Paladins, guys!) can't get you Eldritch Blast because it's not on the list.

So, is Eldritch Blast gone? Hell no. It's iconic and so central to the way that Warlocks work. Barring some insane redesign of the Warlock (not that that's entirely off the table, but I'd be skeptical) I think Eldritch Blast must remain part of its toolkit.

The way I see it, though, is that as written in PHB 2014, not taking Eldritch Blast, unless you're a dedicated Bladelock (which I still think works too well with the Hexblade to try it with any other subclass,) feels like a trap. When the Warlock was introduced in 3.5e, Eldritch Blast was a class feature - cantrips were not, I believe, a thing yet, and so other spellcasters like Wizards would have to rely on things like light crossbows if they wanted to preserve their spell slots.

Making Eldritch Blast a class feature does a few things: the first is that no new player is going to forget to pick it up. It makes sure that no matter what, all Warlocks have access to their best damage cantrip and are "armed" properly.

The other thing this could do is encourage players to stick with Warlock for more levels.

Warlocks are a popular multiclass dip - they often have very powerful front-loaded abilities (the Hexblade in particular) that can be very valuable to a character with just one or two levels invested in them. One of the reasons for this is that picking up Eldritch Blast (and especially going to level 2 for Agonizing Blast, along with two short-rest 1st level spell slots) can be very valuable. And because it's a cantrip, Eldritch Blast doesn't care about class levels, only total levels when determining how may blasts it does. Thus, a Sorcerer can dip into Warlock for one or two levels, get Agonizing Blast, and then ignore Warlock and still see their Eldritch Blast grow in power.

If Eldritch Blast is a class feature, you could restrict its growing number of attacks to Warlock class levels, and thus encourage players to stick with it if they want to get their higher blast numbers.

I suppose another change that I noted in the previous post about what changes we could see to the Monk, Unarmed Strikes are a bit different. One thing of note is that an unarmed strike now seems to be something separate from a Weapon Attack (which was always confusing, given that you sort of expected all weapon attacks to involve, you know, a weapon). On top of making that a separate thing, it also folds Shove and Grapple attacks into Unarmed Strikes.

This means a lot for Monks - if we assume that Martial Arts continues to let you use Dexterity for your Unarmed Strikes, this now makes Monks a lot more effective and Shoving and Grappling. (Though keeping a Grappled target grappled might not be very easy, as the escape DC is set by your Strength.) Actually, Grappling requiring a free hand means it'll be harder for people with full hands (using a two-handed weapon or going sword-and-board, etc.) to do so - Monks might actually be the best at this, though I think it'll also give us an opportunity to see more people using the versatile property of weapons like the Longsword, Battleaxe, or Warhammer - you could attack with a Warhammer two-handed (d10) most of the time, but swap to single-handed (d8) when you're grappling someone.

This doesn't necessarily portend any specific Monk changes, but it does open some capabilities up. I also wonder if some of the Open Hand Monk's Open Hand Technique options are altered or re-written. Naturally, these combine the damage from a Fury of Blows hit with the secondary effect, whereas the new Unarmed Strikes makes you choose between one of its three modes (the first being damage,) so this is all still technically a bonus on top of existing rules. But there's enough overlap that I could see them rewriting some of this or tweaking the functionality.

Beyond this, I don't think we've got anything very solid to go on, to be honest (and even these are extrapolations of fairly minor details).

As far as radical class redesigns go, the one that feels the most plausible is the Fighter. The folks at WotC have repeatedly said that they really love the Battle Master design - it's one of the few subclasses that got expanded with Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, and I can imagine that WotC would want to open the door to create new maneuvers in future publications much like they do with Eldritch Invocations for Warlocks. But Eldritch Invocations are a class, not subclass feature.

The Fighter is an odd class - it's a pretty basic chassis on which you can build a lot of different concepts using feats and subclass features. There are basically only three universal Fighter abilities (four if you count their 3rd and 4th Extra Attack). Admittedly, the subclasses and the extra ASIs to help you pick up feats add a bit more, but I wouldn't be shocked if they made Maneuvers a classwide thing and then designed subclasses in the future that work with maneuvers, perhaps even providing unique ones. (Eldritch Knights could be redesigned to have a bunch of magic maneuvers either to supplement or even replace their 1/3 Caster spellcasting capabilities.)

The survey for the Character Origins UA is up for the next two weeks or so, and so I expect we'll see the next One D&D UA either when that ends or perhaps a couple weeks later. Looking forward to it!

Rethinking the Monk in One D&D

When I first got my hands on the Player's Handbook when I bought the core D&D rulebooks in 2015, I found myself surprised that some classes that I'd never been all to excited about in other RPGs were actually very exciting to me - the Warlock was probably the biggest case, but the Monk was another. I'd never been a huge fan of unarmed combatants in other games, but the Monk in D&D has so many cool things - fast movement, deflect missiles, timeless body, etc.

But as a class, they don't always perform the way you'd expect them to. There's a perception that Monks aren't really strong enough.

The extent to which this is true is up for debate - I haven't done the math, and I think the three attacks per turn for free is honestly not bad - though it falls behind the Fighter.

But I wanted to talk about my vision for the Monk moving forward.

First, let's discuss the elephant in the room - Stunning Strike.

This is the most powerful Monk ability, but that might actually be the problem. I think that WotC is afraid to make the Monk a really powerful tank or damage-dealer because of Stunning Strike's power. While monsters often succeed on their saves against it, a stunned enemy is a really insane shift in the battlefield, especially in fights with only a few monsters.

Stun means advantage on attacks and the monster cannot do anything on their next turn - a devastating blow to their action economy.

I would suggest that we rein this in - either apply something like the new Slowed condition, or perhaps give the monster disadvantage on attacks and give others advantage on attacks against it. This is undeniably a nerf, but it frees us up for the buffs that I'm going to propose beyond.

Let's talk about what we think the Monk should be best at. As I see it, the real fantasy of a martial arts master is the idea that they can face tons of opponents and never go down. Bruce Lee, Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and other martial arts stars often come off as the most badass when they trounce an entire crowd of foes - something that is extremely unlikely in a real-life scenario (fun fact, one of the mooks that Bruce Lee beats down in Enter the Dragon is actually Jackie Chan, before he was famous).

As such, I think that reinforcing the Monk's tanky-ness makes a lot of sense. Monks should be able to wade into a crowded battlefield and hand everyone's ass to them.

The first way to reinforce this is that Monks should have a d12 hit die.

Frankly, I think it's absurd that Monks only have a d8 hit die right now. They are the only class that is obligated to fight in melee (the others being Paladins and Barbarians - Fighters can choose to go for a ranged, dex build) that has less than a d10 (Rangers probably don't need a d10, to be frank.) Now, why a d12? Well, as someone else pointed out (unfortunately I can't remember who) Monks have trained their bodies more than any other class to be resilient. I realize some might say that giving any non-Barbarian a d12 could be stepping on their territory, in which case I might concede a mere d10, but I really think that a d12 makes sense flavor-wise for the Monk

The second is to give them some sort of damage mitigation. Having relatively low AC compared to a plate wearer, I think that they should have some way to survive an influx of damage.

Flavor-wise, I see this as knowing how to deflect and block attacks, not fully avoiding them, but reducing the damage and pain they inflict. Unlike the Barbarian's rage, where the Barbarian is just going into an adrenaline-fueled state where they can ignore pain and rely on the meatiness of their muscles, I think the Monk is doing this in a more active way.

The proposal I'll put forward is that relatively early on - maybe as soon as level 1, or perhaps at 2 or 3, you get a feature called "Deflect Blows." This reduces the damage you take from attacks (and maybe we'd say only weapon attacks and unarmed strikes) by an amount equal to your proficiency bonus.

The intent here is that the Monk becomes really strong when tanking large groups of mooks. A group of zombies striking at the Monk might see some of their attacks not even wind up doing anything - 1d6+1 can give you 2-7 damage, and so an average hit of 4.5 winds up getting reduced at tier 1 to 2.5 - almost but not quite halving it.

But a Monk is not as good as a Barbarian when it comes to the blows of some massive creature - a giant's sword cannot so easily be absorbed.

The exact amount absorbed would obviously be a question of balance, but this would further reinforce the notion of a Monk being a front-liner, who can stay in the thick of combat (which feels like where they should be).

Honestly, these changes would, I think be enough to really give Monks a clear role, and make them a really appealing tank for the group. But what about their capabilities as a damage dealer?

First off, it's a small change, but I might just bump all their martial arts die up a step - tier 1 give them a  d6, then d8 at tier 2, d10 at tier 3, and d12 in tier 4. This only comes out to an average of one more damage per attack.

The thing that I think gets frustrating for Monks is that your unarmed strikes cannot benefit from the +X bonus from most magic weapons. Even if you get a +1 Quarterstaff, your unarmed strikes are never going to get beyond 1d10+5. I might introduce some item that boosts unarmed strikes in the same way to help with this.

Actually, the changes to Unarmed Strikes in the Rules Glossary does a lot to give Monks new tools - they can be really effective grapplers and shovers. It strikes me, of course, that this makes some of the Open Hand Monk's abilities redundant.

Part of me wonders if Monks should just get a bit of extra damage on their hits - maybe adding their proficiency bonus (or half of it) to damage, though that might seem too similar to Rage.

The rest of the changes might need to happen through subclasses. My hope is that by nerfing Stunning Strike, one could be more generous with features like the Ascendant Dragon's breath weapon (something I think everyone was disappointed by).

Given that Monks have three stats they really want to maximize, they really don't have a lot of room for feats, which means that customizing the class is a bit tougher to do. I don't know how I'd fix that, but at the very least, the class design should come with an expectation that it needs to work without a ton of feats.

I love the Monk, and I would be very happy to see it get a lot more play in D&D. I'll be very eager to see what they come up with for the One D&D update.

The Real Question on Everyone's Minds: Dragonborn Breath Weapon Damage Comparisons (For a Level 12 Fighter)

 My longtime D&D character, in a campaign that sort of collapsed under "most of this plot is built around the story of the character played by the guy who just became a dad and can't really play regularly anymore" issues, is/was a Blue Dragonborn Eldritch Knight Fighter (Plate + a +1 Shield + Defensive Fighting Style + the Shield spell = an effective AC of 27 until I run out of spell slots).

When Fizban's Treasury of Dragons came out last year, they introduced three "new" races - the Chromatic, Metallic, and Gem Dragonborn. Lorewise, of course, the Chromatic and Metallic were just a mechanical update of the existing Dragonborn, separating them out into different races and changing the way breath weapons work along with giving each a new (and distinct) Chromatic, Metallic, or Gem feature you can activate.

So, Jax, my Fighter, got updated with DM's permission from a PHB Dragonborn to a Chromatic Dragonborn.

While the Chromatic Warding thing is cool (if a bit situational) the thing I was most excited about was the change to how the Breath Weapon works.

In the PHB, your breath weapon starts at 2d6 damage and you add a d6 roughly once per tier (though I think you get the third at level 6 instead of 5). You need to use your action to breathe your element (lightning, in my case) and then they make a Dex save with a DC based on your Con modifier, taking full damage on a failure and half on a success. For Blue dragonborn, it's a 30-ft line 5 feet wide, though for some it's a 15-foot cone. (And for Silver, White, and Green Dragonborn, the save is Con instead of Dex, as is typical for cold and poison effects).

At level 12, therefore, to use my breath weapon, I spend my action and deal 4d6 damage (average of 14) with a DC of 14 (despite being a tank, he only has a +2 to Con, though I do have the Tough feat, so his max HP is 124). And I can do this once per short rest, so practically speaking about twice a day.

With his +1 Battle Axe and being a level 12 Fighter, he can make three attacks a round, with an attack bonus of +10 to hit, and dealing 10.5 damage on each hit, for a total of 31.5 average damage if all hit. As such, to make the breath worth it for damage output, I'd need to hit three targets (and even then, the low DC means the damage would often be an average of 7 instead).

Now, the Chromatic Dragonborn, which I switched him to, works differently.

First off, the dice are simpler - it's 1d10 per tier of play, so at 5 it goes to 2d10, at 11 3d10, and at 17, it's 4d10. Damage-wise, this starts off slightly below the old version, but by level 5, you're pulling ahead. My Fighter at his level would get 3d10, which is 16.5 damage on average - a slight boost.

Next, the use of the ability is now PB times per long rest, rather than once per short rest. In practice, this means that, past tier 1, you'll likely get more or at worst the same number of uses per day (I don't think I've ever seen a D&D day with three or more short rests - indeed, I think in Adventurer's League at least, they never let you take more than one per module).

So, my Fighter gets 4 uses per day instead of, realistically, 2.

But then, the most important change: rather than a full action, the breath weapon now only takes one of your attacks. For classes that don't get the Extra Attack feature, this makes no difference, but for a Fighter in particular, this is huge:

So, Jax can now breathe as his first attack for 16.5 average damage (hopefully hitting a secondary target with it too) and then follow up with two strikes that each do 10.5 average damage, giving me, on a single target, 37.5 damage per round when I use the breath.

So, more uses, higher damage - clear upgrade. The "as an attack" aspect of this is also particularly good for a Fighter. A Paladin with similar equipment would, of course, at this level, be getting their Improved Divine Smite d8, and miss out on fully half their regular attacks. So, we'd see one breath (16.5) and one attack (2d8+6, or an average of 15). This is still a little better than two regular attacks, but not the very clear boost that the Fighter gets. We should also note that a Great Weapon build would see things a bit differently - with the Great Weapon Fighting Style, a +1 Maul, for example, would hit for 14.33 on average. Three attacks would thus be 43 average damage, compared to Breath/Weapon/Weapon, which would be 16.5 plus 28.67, or an average of 45.2 - still slightly better, but again not as dramatically (again, hitting a second target with the breath makes it much more powerful).

Now, the One D&D Character Origins UA (I told you we'd be talking about this until the next one comes out) rebuilds the Dragonborn once more.

This Dragonborn embraces simplicity, returning to the model of the PHB Dragonborn while indisputably (unless you're a very short-rest focused party) buffing them.

Perhaps to compensate for returning to the PHB simplicity, these Dragonborn have Darkvision - the catch-all that I think maybe a majority of playable races have?

But again, the way that the breath weapon works has been redesigned.

First off, it once again requires an action to use - which, again, means nothing to classes without the Extra Attack feature, but is a definite nerf to my Fighter, if I were forced to switch to this version. (Given that I haven't actually had a chance to play with the new, Chromatic Dragonborn version, I'd be very sad.)

Another change that is easy to miss is that now, regardless of your element, the shape of the breath is always a 15-foot cone, and the save for it is always Dexterity. This is, honestly, kind of a big deal for a Blue (or Brass, Bronze, Copper, or Black) Dragonborn because it is far easier to hit two or more targets with a 15-foot cone than it is with a 30-foot line (though it's also easier to avoid friends with a line).

Like the Fizban's ones, the breath weapon is now PB times per long rest, which I consider a buff.

The damage has changed as well - but now, it scales at every level. The damage is 1d10 + your level.

So, let's compare it at different breakpoints. At level 1, it's 1d10+1, or 6.5 on average - lower than the original PHB version, but higher than Fizban's. At 6 (remember, the PHB doesn't quite use tier breakpoints) it's 11.5, compared with 10.5 with the PHB version and 11 for the Fizban's version.

For my guy at level 12, it's 17.5, compared with 14 in the PHB or 16.5 with Fizban's. At at level 20, it's 25.5, versus 17.5 in the PHB or 22 with Fizban's.

So, the damage is definitely a buff. The damage range is also much narrower - indeed, the higher level you get, the larger portion of the damage is already known.

But, again, it takes a full action. 17.5 damage is definitely more than 16.5, but the fact that the 16.5 comes with two additional weapon swings makes this, to my character, a pretty profound nerf.

    And that's sort of the oddness of this: if you showed me this version of the Dragonborn with only the 2014 PHB version to compare it to, it'd be a clear upgrade. But the Chromatic, Gem, and Metallic versions out of Fizban's are a lot more appealing.