In a video released today, Jeremy Crawford went over the survey results of UA Playtest 8, noting that the scores have been extremely good (with the Monk averaging in the 90s in terms of satisfaction - noting that they typically consider 70% to be where they think things are working pretty well) but also that testing for the Player's Handbook has moved entirely to internal testing.
Another important note is that the May release date seen on the Fighter class art from the PAX Unplugged panel he hosted was both a surprise to him and also fully inaccurate - he says that they will still be working on the book in May, so there's no chance we're going to see it release that month (or, as I understand it, for months after).
Frankly, I think this puts the release date probably some time in the fall. I think they probably want to get all three of the core books out this year if only to hit that 50th anniversary window, but I don't know what we can expect in terms of the cadence.
As I've said before, I think it's most likely that we're going to see the PHB come out first, likely followed by the Monster Manual, and then the DMG. But whether there will be two months between those releases or just a week or two, I don't know.
One thing of note that Crawford suggested might get put out as a later UA is a new encounter-building system that is meant to be more streamlined. Personally, I've been using MCDM's system from Flee, Mortals! recently, which simply gives a CR budget-per-party-member based on the difficulty you're looking for - so if you have, for instance, four 5th level characters, and you want a standard difficulty encounter, you get 1 1/2 CR per player, so a total of 6 - meaning you could have three CR 2 monsters, a CR 4 and two CR 1 monsters, six CR 1 monsters, etc. (There are somewhat different rules for solo monsters, and there's a CR cap - just because you have six players doesn't mean you should use a monster that's going to insta-kill them).
The system that was introduced in Xanathar's Guide to Everything was a big improvement on the one in the DMG, but had a couple of issues - one was that there was no difficulty variation in it - you sort of had to eyeball what you needed to do to reduce or increase the challenge - and it also had somewhat skewed scaling - if you had a slightly less powerful monster you could suddenly have twice as many in an encounter, for example, even if that made the fight way harder in reality.
Frankly, I expect that this will look very similar to the FM! version (I have to imagine that the folks at WotC follow what MCDM is up to, which is only fair).
Still, the upshot here is that we're not going to be seeing any more playtests for classes and subclasses for the 2024 PHB. That's a little bittersweet, as I've really enjoyed the bi-monthly treat of going through all the proposed changes, but I'm also eager to see these become official.
Testing overall isn't done - the team at WotC is going to be doing a bunch of internal testing - but the overall goal of the UA process, which is basically to ask the audience "hey, are we on the right track with these things" has been accomplished, and the tweaking and fine tuning is going to go back to the closed doors of the sausage factory.
What I don't know is how extensively they plan to test stuff in the DMG and MM. Can we expect to get more "One D&D" playtests, or is it going to be a dry spell from here until the new books are out?
Now, looking ahead, I'm also curious to see what new things we have on the horizon. Between Monsters of the Multiverse and these new books, there has been a lot of revising and redesigning of game elements.
Given that we're not going into a full new edition of the game, there's a lot that is already covered. Even if there are a handful of things I'd like to see revamped (like the Necromancer Wizard) I think it'd be best if the game goes in the direction of the new.
No comments:
Post a Comment