While I've been spending the past two and a half days riding around on dragons in Azeroth, another of my great nerd obsessions is going to be dropping their next playtest document for the 2024 revision of 5th Edition D&D (whatever it eventually winds up being called - for now the development name is One D&D).
While most of the information we've gotten in the latest Jeremy Crawford/Todd Kenreck interview video is about the survey for the Character Origins UA that came out months ago (apparently 39,000 people filled the whole thing out, and the core D&D team is only like 20 people,) we did get a preview of what we can expect to see tomorrow:
First off, the Dragonborn and Ardling from the Character Origins document are getting revised. Ardlings will lean more heavily into their "beast-person" identity (I wonder if they might not even be linked to the Upper Planes anymore?) while Dragonborn are getting some tweaks - I wonder if we'll see their breath weapon changed to match the Fizban's version.
We will also be seeing the Cleric class. We got a little bit about class spell lists - Crawford mentioned that in the case of the Cleric and the Wizard (and I have to assume the Druid,) these classes will get full access to the Divine and Arcane (and presumably Primal) lists respectively.
However, it does not look like we'll be getting all three Priest classes tomorrow, part of the intent being to have a smaller document to test (hopefully also meaning more frequent releases).
A few other notes:
Eldritch Blast is still going to be part of the game, and still part of the Warlock's gameplay, even if it's not on any spell list.
Feats like Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter had their bonus damage nerfed because they were just too powerful, and supposedly Warrior classes are going to be able to do interesting things with different weapon types.
There's a move to try to remove "Mother May I" class features, where the player is reliant on the DM to allow something to work - this is the motivation behind removing "Use an Object" as a bonus action for the thief, as this is often left for DMs to adjudicate how that counts. (We'll likely see similar revisions to the Wild Magic Sorcerer and, I'd have to assume, the Illusion Wizard).
Bastions will be a new rules system for a party's home base.
WotC is aware that some of the things they throw out there are tough sells - the Ardling, for example, came out of nowhere. But they're trying to see what people think of the ideas they throw in, and will sometimes throw in conflicting concepts in subsequent UAs to get a sense of how people think about the two possibilities in comparison - the Character Origins D20 Test stuff (like crit success and failure on ability checks) is an example.
When the UA drops tomorrow, I'll do a full review of it.
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