Thursday, July 25, 2024

How Backwards Compatibility Will Work (As Far as I Can Tell)

 The 2024 Core Rulebooks are, officially, not a 6th Edition. The designers kept a major goal in their rework, which is the preservation of what has come before. Everything you have for 5th Edition that you've gotten since 2014 should, theoretically, still work just fine.

But compatibility goes farther than you might think. According to the folks at WotC, you should be able to have characters built by the 2014 rules able to sit next to characters built with the 2024 rules.

There's actually an analogous situation I have in my Ravnica game - when Monsters of the Multiverse came out, I allowed players whose races (now species) appeared in that book to convert to the new version of it. Our Changeling Artificer swapped to the new version, which among other things now has the Fey creature type (and boy have I been having a field day with that lately). We also have two Goblins in the party (fitting given how common Goblins are in the worlds of Magic the Gathering, including Ravnica) but in this case one of them, the Rakdos Bard, updated to the new version of the species while the other, the Boros Fighter/Paladin, stuck with the old version. The main difference is that the Boros character can, at this level, pump an additional 17 damage into an attack using Fury of the Small, but only once per (short, I think?) rest, while the Bard only does 6 extra damage, but can use it 6 times before they need to recharge (essentially he has nearly twice as much potential damage from it, but must spread it out).

Now, there is a hazard here, which is that players might forget what they have - the newer Goblins have Fey Ancestry, giving them advantage against being charmed, while the old ones do not. I could imagine a scenario in which some monster does some kind of mass charm, and the Bard remembers they have advantage with it, which might cause the Fighter/Paladin to erroneously think that they do as well.

This problem won't necessarily go away, because the choice of which version to use is presented as a player one, not a table-wide one.

So: how do we prevent cherry-picking to take all the most overpowered options?

The general rule will be that if you want to use anything from the newer books, you have to take them as package. Essentially, if you want to play the updated Oath of Devotion, you'll be forced to take the new Paladin (hooray bonus action Sacred Weapon, but sadly you're going to be using the nerfed Divine Smite).

Now, officially you can just allow players to make their own choices. But I think I'd recommend that you instead talk with your group and collectively decide if you want to embrace the new rules or not. (Generally, I'd recommend that you do). This way, the carefully rebalanced versions of the classes, subclasses, spells, and such should fit together well.

When you do this, you effectively eliminate the older version of any option that previously appeared in another source. If you opt into playing the 2024 version of the Wizard, you can still play any previously-published subclass except for the Schools of Divination, Evocation, Abjuration and Illusion, because each of these has been replaced with the Diviner, Evoker, Abjurer, and Illusionist. If you want the old version of those subclasses, you need to play the old version of the Wizard. Likewise, if you play the new Wizard, for any spell in a previous book that gets a new version in the 2024 PHB, you need to use the new version. However, if there's no update to the option you want - maybe you want to play a School of Conjuration Wizard and take a spell I assume isn't coming in the new PHB like Ashardalon's Stride, you can still pick both that subclass and that spell as they appear in the 2014 PHB and Fizban's respectively.

In most cases, there should be little friction in figuring out exactly how the pieces fit together. There are a couple of common-sense adjustments, though. All classes now get their subclass at level 3, so Druids, Wizards, Clerics, Sorcerers, and Warlocks will need to delay these features. The Cleric presents two extra wrinkles to this: 2014 Clerics get their second subclass feature at level 2. It appears that in the new versions of the subclasses, you'll just get what you previously got at level 1 and 2 both at level 3, and so I assume if you want to play, say, Twilight Domain, you'll just delay when you get Domain Spells, Eyes of Night, Vigilant Blessing, and Twilight Sanctuary to level 3.

You might notice that I didn't mention "bonus proficiencies," one of that domain's 1st level features.

Clerics, again, have a weird wrinkle, in that some features that used to be tied to subclasses, like armor proficiencies (now called training) and weapon proficiencies (still proficiencies because they involve your proficiency bonus) are now a separate choice made within the base class. Likewise, all pre-2024 Cleric subclasses have either Divine Strike or Potent Spellcasting. Using the new Cleric, this is replaced with a choice in the base class called Blessed Strikes (which also comes a level earlier!)

Backgrounds in 2024 will carry a bit more heft than they did in 2014. Here, I don't know what the official guidance will be on using old backgrounds, but I imagine they'll essentially take on the new role as source of ability score bonuses and also an Origin Feat. There will apparently be guidance on creating custom backgrounds in the DMG, so it shouldn't be very hard to use that guidance to tweak existing backgrounds.

Now, what about adventures?

Well, here's where I'm really curious to see the game in action: the new Monster Manual promises to have every monster that appeared in the 2014 one (though I'm curious to see how it handles "Orc" now that Orcs are a core playable race). All the old adventures should still be runnable, but now when you have a bunch of werewolves to fight in the Svalich Woods while running Curse of Strahd, you can just use the werewolves that appear in the new Monster Manual instead.

    I honestly think that it should be pretty smooth transitioning to the new books. Here's how I'd recommend handling it:

If you're running an ongoing campaign and considering converting, you should let players ultimately decide which way they want to go with it. While I do think most people will enjoy the new versions of classes and species more than the old ones, there are two major factors that can make changing mid-campaign a problem.

The first is simply familiarity. I'm over four years into an ongoing campaign - that's nearly half the lifespan of 5th Edition! Big changes can be tough to deal with, especially when players are already deeply familiar with a character they've taken from 1 to 17. I'm not ruling out converting to the new rules systems, but I really want everyone to feel enthusiastic and on board, and don't want to force anyone into changing.

The second reason is that some things will just get flat-out broken. For example, while it's not a build I've seen much of, in the 2014 rules a multiclassed Barbarian/Paladin is pretty viable - swing in with Reckless attack and then divine smite because you're critting more often.

But because Divine Smite is now a spell, the 2024 version of this build will never be able to Smite while Raging. And that kind of breaks the entire multiclass combination. If you had a player who built a character like that, forcing them to convert would basically mean breaking their character.

So proceed with caution and respect.

However, I think that for any new campaigns, you'll be pretty well-served just running the new version of the game. Let players build and strategize around the new way things work. In this case, I think it'd be reasonable for a DM to mandate that players play the new version of each class (obviously allowing the "outdated" Artificer because there hasn't been an update to it here). And from that, requiring that they use the new versions of spells and subclasses. But this doesn't eliminate other options that haven't been updated - feel free to allow species from Monsters of the Multiverse (except, perhaps, the old Orc, Aasimar, and Goliath) and subclasses like the Kensei Monk or the Undead Patron.

This is going to require a bit of homework. While the bones of the game will remain pretty much unchanged, there are going to be enough subtle distinctions that I, for one, plan on reading the new core rules cover-to-cover.

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