A fair number of people I've talked to about the One D&D playtest have said that not only have they not been following it, but they've also more or less ruled out actually getting the books or implementing their rules.
I've never been through an edition turnover, but I can imagine how it can fracture the community when it's a significant rules overhaul. So many people started playing D&D in 5th Edition (myself included,) so the prospect of tumult and transformation into something new, requiring the re-building of characters and re-learning the game could be a scary one.
And, I think that's why WotC has taken such a conservative approach to One D&D (a term they're phasing out in favor of just the 2024 Core Rulebooks).
Now, to be clear, that approach hasn't been without its big swings. While I'm hoping we'll see a design that's more similar to its 2014 incarnation, the Warlock in the previous playtest UA was pretty seriously reworked.
But the most recent UA, playtest 6, has reined in a lot of the bolder ideas from previous playtests, and seems to be acting more as a coat of polish on the classes and subclasses rather than any dramatic redeisgn for the most part (there are some exceptions - the reviled Four Elements Monk has been completely redesigned and might actually be a good subclass now).
The message is clear: WotC doesn't want to alienate people who have loved 5th Edition. And that makes perfect sense - there are probably more people who have played 5E than people who have played any of the previous editions put together. 5E is D&D to most people, and the cadences and systems that make it up are something we've spent 9 years getting familiar with (well, 8 for me).
But looking at, for example, the Monk in the latest playtest, I have a kind of opposite concern. Are they changing enough?
I'm planning on a series of posts going through the seven classes presented in Playtest 6 and comparing them with their 2014 versions. My initial read of the Monk is that the class is barely changed. Now, perhaps in a closer reading I'll discover that the many small changes add up to something big, but compared with some of the bold ideas I had had for it (such as subtractive damage mitigation) I don't think that the existing problems for the class are going to go away. I think in the hopes of avoiding too jarring a change, they're leaving problems we've known about since 2014 in place.
Furthermore, this raises another question: why are we getting these new core rulebooks in the first place?
We've seen class tweaks in the past - Tasha's Cauldron of Everything presented alternate rules for various classes, which included a lot of changes to make the Ranger a more versatile class. Some of these are being enshrined in the new versions, but are we really getting enough to justify the purchase of a whole new trilogy of books?
I do think a lot of the design is for future-proofing. The creation of the Arcane, Primal, and Divine spell lists is, I think, meant to make it easier for them to add new classes to the game. New spells can be categorized as one of those three, so that if you add something like the Artificer and say "they're an Arcane spellcaster" and then you add new Arcane spells in a later book, you don't have to call them out as specifically Artificer-appropriate.
So, if anything, we're getting more systematic rules - some of the more flavorful, but also more open-to-interpretation rules, like with the Bard College of Glamour, are getting re-worked into more clear-cut rules and features. I can imagine some people might not like that - that it sands down the edges of the game and makes things a little less unique and cool. I don't know that I agree with that objection, though. I think there's still a lot of room for interpretation in the game, and the way I run it, the rules are subservient to story - I reserve every right to have "cutscene magic" move the story forward. (Spoilers for my campaign, not that I think any of my players read this, but I'm planning a plane-wide memory-wipe following the defeat of the ninth guild-themed villain in Ravnica, in which I'll have the entire plane forget that House Dimir even exists, so that they'll assume they've fully defeated the conspiracy they've been fighting the whole campaign - I've even told the players they'll hit level 17 when they've defeated all of the "Praetors," and I'm going to let them do that before the Dimir one is taken care of, because hey, there's only nine guilds, right?)
Now, while it's easy to be underwhelmed by the degree to which WotC has been willing to change things when you examine everything on the micro scale, it might also pay to take a step back and look at the overall shift. We are looking at changes to Races/Species, the level 1 feats, Weapon Masteries, and actually a fair number of class changes. With the changes to monsters in Monsters of the Multiverse, I'm very curious to see how some of the classic monsters (such as the Lich) look with new design philosophies.
Indeed, while I think most classes are looking a little more powerful, we should also be seeing (at least in the higher tiers) more powerful monsters.
In a certain way, though, the real proof in the pudding here will be what post-Core books they come out with. What will the next "of Everything" book look like? Might we see full new classes more easily added to the game now that there are universal things to latch onto, like class groups and universal spell lists?
See, I think the game has got the standard stuff well-handled. When it comes to new settings, adventures, and features, I really want to see some outside-the-box thinking. If the new rules make that easier, I'm all for them.
No comments:
Post a Comment