One of the big appeals to the 2024 revamp for 5th Edition was the promise of refinement and balance.
Balance is, I think, really important to an RPG, and for the following reason:
The whole point of a game like D&D is to be able to build a character - not just a "game asset," but a character. And that means that you should be able to make choices about how that character works grounded in the story of that character.
Now, there are limitations, of course: you can't design every class to embody every fantasy of that class for every player. But I do think you owe players, to the best of your abilities, to allow them to make choices for their character that make sense for that imagined, virtual person, that don't unduly punish them by making them underpowered.
Like: ok, sure, you might have an idea for a Paladin who is stuffy and uninspiring, which might lead you to try to make one with a low Charisma. That's probably not great for the mechanics of the game, but it's also, I think, reasonable for D&D to be designed with Paladins benefiting greatly from Charisma. If I was DMing for such a player, I think we could approach the problem in various ways: perhaps their Charisma is not one of a charming knight in shining armor, but more of an intimidating boss. Alternatively, maybe they aren't a Paladin at all, and are simply a Fighter (or other such class) with the strong ethic and righteous drive of a Paladin.
But outside of this, I think that if you're going to design a game like D&D, you should at least try to make the various class and subclass options work well.
They don't need to be as good at everything as everyone else - you can still specialize (and specializing is part of what makes the party, as a unit, an exciting and dynamic thing,) but you should be good at what you set out to do.
I think that the 2024 Player's Handbook improved things: while some classes might fall behind a little from others, the biggest complaints I have about it are that there are classes (mainly one, the Ranger) that didn't get the glow-up that some others did. Even if the 2024 Ranger is probably a lot better than the 2014 one (though we already got some improvements in Tasha's,) there's a bit of a sense that they could have gone farther to make the Ranger truly feel like a good and exciting choice for players.
But again, the subclasses - now granting four per class, which gives more options to most classes - were actually pretty well-balanced. Many popular D&D Youtubers, like The Dungeon Dudes and Treantmonk's Temple, rated the subclasses fairly well with one another (while perhaps not as rigorously mathematical as Treantmonk's Temple, the Dungeon Dudes' letter-grade rating system, which suggests that you want most options to land in the A or B tier, and actually calls out the S-tier as being probably too powerful, is a pretty good ranking system). Even some of the dubious subclasses, like the new College of Dance or Circle of the Sea, have some appealing ideas.
So, following the core rulebook updates, I was fairly optimistic about the future of D&D in this new era.
Heroes of Faerun... made me a little less sure.
The subclasses in... HoF? Are we calling it that? Anyway, the subclasses in HoF are a mixed bag. You have the new Bladesinger, a good subclass that probably... didn't need an update from its Tasha's version (though I think it's overall better - just, I don't think it needed to be better) and then the possibly-overpowered Oath of Noble Genies Paladin, but then some sad disappointments like the Scion of the Three Rogue, which is hamstrung by features that are far too limited in use.
Anyway, there's a kind of sense that HoF is truly the successor to Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. But while SCAG's bevy of terrible subclasses had the excuse that it was the very first major supplement to 5E, Heroes of Faerun should have learned from the last ten years.
We do have a preview of the revamped Artificer coming in Forge of the Artificer, and I'll do a more thorough review when I get access to it tomorrow (which is technically in 7 minutes as I write this sentence, but I suspect we'll have to wait until 10 am or something). The preview makes it seem that very little from the UA playtest has been changed, and I... I don't know, I'm a little worried.
I love the Artificer on a conceptual level. I love the idea of a technological hero amidst all these magicians and knights. And I do think that the 2019 Artificer (which was not changed very much in the Tasha's printing) did have some flaws and some missing "tech" that would be wonderful to see integrated. In particular, I think that this is the best opportunity to fix the Alchemist subclass, which at my tables has been the most popular subclass but is, in my opinion, by far the worst (the long-playing Artificer in my Ravnica game is an Artillerist, which I think is basically good).
One of the major changes is actually the level 20 capstone. While I know that most players will never see it, and as a DM who is fully expecting to have a 20th level Artificer for the last chapter of the campaign I'm running and is thus terrified of the Artificer suddenly getting an additional +6 to every saving throw (actually +7, because the whole party got a boon from the Fey Court the Artificer technically belongs to as part of a wedding present, and can attune to an additional magic item), I also know that a change like this will make it less likely for this player to actually choose the updated version of the class. And that's a shame.
It's tough, of course: if players get to pick whether or not to update their characters to the new versions of classes or subclasses, they're incentivized to only do so when the option has been buffed. And that means that you've created, essentially, a ratcheting system for power creep.
I have sympathy for WotC's decision not to just make a fully new 6th Edition. 5E has been by leaps and bounds the most popular edition of D&D ever, bringing, basically, millennials into the hobby (sure, there were a few elder millennials who played earlier editions, but freaking no one I knew growing up was playing D&D) and probably a fair number of Gen Z (I have a long-term plan to get my nephew into it. He's among the youngest of Gen Alpha. He's also only one year old at this point, so it'll be a while).
People are invested in the way things work now. I remember a Penny Arcade comic from when 5E came out, and in it, Gabe is uncomfortable with the changes to how the game works, while Tycho notes that Gabe hasn't ever experienced an edition conflict before. Creating a true 6th Edition would have certainly led to a splitting of the D&D audience, and could risk something like what happened in the late 2000s, with Pathfinder overtaking 4E largely by sticking more closely to the 3.5 design.
Of course, the irony is that that's happening anyway: while I'm far more familiar with Draw Steel's rules and kind of would prefer to make that my "D&D alternative," I think the massive fanbase of Critical Role has made Daggerheart the biggest of the D&D alternatives to come out in the past couple years. (Mind you, I'm a big CR fan, keeping up to date with campaign four, and I'm really excited to try Daggerheart, but that sense of balance that I was talking about at the start of the post here really seems to be a core of Draw Steel's design, or at least that's the impression I get).
But again, I do think that by building for backwards compatibility, WotC has removed the big safety rail that prevents power creep.
And... like, power creep is bad, but what makes it far worse is when it's uneven, upsetting game balance.
But buffing need not creep power - the key is that if you fix the underpowered options, while keeping popular, powerful options, pretty much the same. That, to be honest, is what a revamp ought to do. While Colby over at D&D Deep Dive came up with disappointing numbers for a straight-class Monk with his build (which honestly surprised me a little, though I think the Monks' true buffs came more to their survivability and resource efficiency) I do think that it was a really heartening thing to see the Monk get some real improvements in 2024. Likewise, the Warrior of Elements took the broad concept of what might be the worst subclass in all of 5E (though it has competition, like from the Battle Rager Barbarian) and made something that honestly could be argued as the best Monk subclass. It'd be nice if the Warrior of Mercy didn't get a small nerf to demonstrate the right way to do this: leave the functional stuff alone while fixing what's broken.
I'll be honest, I don't really have a great sense of what is going on "under the hood" over at the D&D team. Notably, former lead designer Jeremey Crawford has left WotC and gone over to Darrington Press to work, I imagine, primarily on Daggerheart. And while I don't know if I always trust Crawford's design choices (I've very often been disappointed when he claims that a class or subclass has been "enhanced" only for it to have the tiniest of tweaks that sometimes don't even seem to make it any better) I do think at least that, outside of the marketing-forward interviews that we got in the run-up to the 2024 revamp, there's a breadth of experience there that WotC of course now lacks.
That being said, Crawford wasn't designing the whole game alone. While he and Chris Perkins were the most public-facing folks on the D&D team before moving as one to Darrington Press (evidently Crawford dragged Perkins out of retirement - they must like working together, which is kind of heartwarming) there are still people who have been working on 5E for a good long while that are still around.
I don't know - maybe I've just become more of a curmudgeon. Maybe my mind has been poisoned by watching too many build-optimizing videos when that's not really my mode of playing the game (I'm nearly allergic to multiclassing, though I'd be tempted to start off a Bladelock with one level of Fighter).
Generally, I think that if the DM follows the guidance on balancing encounters in the DMG, most parties will do just fine. And the randomness of the dice are going to throw some chaos into the plans of the most overpowered, optimized characters, while a Long Death Monk might sometimes get the crit that kills the boss.
Still, I think the best game design lets it all run smoothly with as little need to optimize as possible.
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