D&D (2024) WotC Fireside Chat: Revised 2024 Player’s Handbook

In this video about the upcoming revised Player’s Handnook, WotC’s Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins reveal a few new tidbits.

• The books are near final and almost ready to go to print
• Psionic subclasses such as the Soulknife and Psi Warrior will appear in the core books
• Named spells have art depicting their creators.
• There are new species in the PHB.

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[Micah Sweet]

for a character concept, absolutely. If you tell me you like that level of granularity, there is nothing wrong with that, I just do not see the concept being at this level.

As @Parmandur said (I am paraphrasing) this level of detail maps a hundred different configurations onto the same concept, it does not really increase the number of available concepts

Sorry, @Parmandur blocked me a while back. What do you mean by, "this level of detail"?

 

[mamba]

Sorry, @Parmandur blocked me a while back. What do you mean by, "this level of detail"?

having lots of skills and skill levels to fiddle with so you can be good at climbing and bad at swimming (but still able to) rather than either being proficient in athletics or not

 

[Micah Sweet]

having lots of skills and skill levels to fiddle with so you can be good at climbing and bad at swimming (but still able to) rather than either being proficient in athletics or not

Ok. This level of detail certainly cuts concepts finely, but sometimes what you want is very specific, so there's value IMO to rules that let you do that.

 

[Maxperson]

I wouldn't say every 5e build will work, but it's very hard to mess up a single class character. It's only when you dabble in the dark arts of multiclassing, or making very specific combinations of non-core races with certain classes, that you run into problems.

If you're just talking about builds that work well in play, then yes, 5e is better than 3e in that regard. When talking about achieving a concept, even one as simple as a divine necromancer, 5e falls very short.

You can't make a divine necromancer in 5e unless you think being able to cast animate dead and a few other necromantic spells makes you a necromancer(It doesn't). In 3e, though, I can make a Master of Shrouds, a Pale Master, or a True Necromancer to name some of the ways. Which one of those, or maybe even a different way, depends on the finer details of my concept.

 

[mamba]

Ok. This level of detail certainly cuts concepts finely, but sometimes what you want is very specific, so there's value IMO to rules that let you do that.

if you like that, there is nothing wrong with it, as I said. I just do not consider the same build one time being good at climbing and the other time at swimming to be two separate concepts, they are the same concept to me, I see concept at a much higher level than that

If for some reason you prefer to play one over the other (or one that is equally skilled) this time, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, my issue is purely with the term concept. I’d probably call that something along the line of it not fully representing how I envision my character,

Personally I am not interested in that level of granularity, but that does not make it wrong to want it

 

[Maxperson]

for a character concept, absolutely. If you tell me you like that level of granularity, there is nothing wrong with that, I just do not see the concept being at this level.

As @Parmandur said (I am paraphrasing) this level of detail maps a hundred different configurations onto the same concept, it does not really increase the number of available concepts

No it doesn't. It maps 100 different concepts that are somewhat similar, but still distinctly different like the various types of divine necromancers. None of those are the same. In a general divine necromancer sense they are the same, but concepts generally have more nuance than that. That nuance is what causes 98 of those 100 ways to fall short and leave you with 2 ways to pick from.

Perhaps you and @Parmandur are okay with just a broad Divine Necromancer concept and don't go any deeper, but a lot of us do go deeper and that's where 5e falls waaaaaaaaaaaaaay behind 3e.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't actually believe in RPG bloat. More material is better than less. If you don't want something, just don't include it.

For the most part I agree with you. However, there comes a time when you release 20 books a month and an extra 5 on Sunday, where you start running out of ideas and we end up with things like Magic of Incarnum.

 

[Micah Sweet]

For the most part I agree with you. However, there comes a time when you release 20 books a month and an extra 5 on Sunday, where you start running out of ideas and we end up with things like Magic of Incarnum.

I still don't see that as a bad thing. You can just not buy those books.

 

[Maxperson]

having lots of skills and skill levels to fiddle with so you can be good at climbing and bad at swimming (but still able to) rather than either being proficient in athletics or not

Suppose my vision is that of a desert thief. One who sneaks into places like a Sultan's castle and makes his lair in a cave high in the mountains. He has never been in water his entire life, so he would be terrible at swimming. Climbing, though, would be a necessity for such a character. It's not being fiddly to be bad at swimming while being great at climbing. It's working to fit the concept. Being good at both is a large blight on the concept, since now I have this fantastic swimmer when my PC has never been in more water than a bathtub.

 

[Maxperson]

I still don't see that as a bad thing. You can just not buy those books.

It's a bad thing because once a company starts failing badly at book sales, the edition starts to have its plug pulled. They went too far the other way with 5e, but 3e had a release rate that was insane. Had they cut it by 2/3(still multiple times as fast as 5e) the edition would have lasted 3x as long as it did before the gas ran out.