D&D (2024) Do you plan to adopt D&D5.5One2024Redux?

[Aldarc]

Replacing "Mother-May-I" with "Mother, you don't have the right to forbid me" features is no solution either...

Fact of the matter is that WotC has said that they want to give players more abilities that they can reliably use while also removing those that they can't. Spells are reliable features. Background features are not.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Fact of the matter is that WotC has said that they want to give players more abilities that they can reliably use while also removing those that they can't. Spells are reliable features. Background features are not.

Both are written as reliable features.

But it is easier to accept if it is "magic".

In that regard I do agree with @Hussar . Just removing features because they are not magic is bad. So what I want to see are feats/features that help mundanes or just general exploration things everyone can do (with reasonable skill/tool use*).

*whuch usually means lowering DC by 5 for many tasks.

 

[Micah Sweet]

D&D has rarely handled languages well. In some campaigns, you have multiple languages for the same species- maybe there's a High Elvish or an Old Common (Ed Greenwood's Thorassic Script, which shows up in old ruins). Perhaps there's a High Common reserved for court and diplomatic functions as part of tradition.

I mean we have Undercommon, so the idea of another lingua franca isn't ridiculous. Asian-inspired settings often simply call these Trade Languages (which is what they are, certainly). In my games, Drow typically have to know three languages (Undercommon, Elvish (it's true there are linguistic changes from what the other Elves speak, but I figure Drow and surface Elves can communicate with one another), and Drow Sign Language (jokingly called DSL by some of my players). And many know Common as well!

Sometimes D&D gets pretty deep into this, and characters might find that they don't have enough languages to cover their needs. Other times, knowing how to speak, say, Celestial, may never come up at all. And that's not getting into "secret" languages like Cant, Druidic, or Lawful Neutral.

I've never really known how to handle this. I could easily give my D&D games a bewildering array of languages (ie, closer to the real world) or even "six million forms of communication", but I have doubts that the juice would be worth the squeeze.

I've played a few adventures where you encounter "an unknown language" and it's supposed to be this big deal, but generally either the adventure provides the means for you to learn how to read/speak it, or the DM just sighs when the players use spells, magic items, or conjured Word Archons to handle it for them (which happened in the Midgard game I'm playing in- but by the end of the adventure we also found a Helm of Comprehending Languages anyways).

So maybe less is more. I've played on both ends of the spectrum and while it's a cool moment when you say "hey, I speak X!", it's not one that typically lasts very long or remains memorable.

You can handle it multiple ways, that's for sure. My preference is for something more realistic, hassle by damned. Logic and verisimilitude have always mattered more to me than ease of use.

Of course, that's just my ideal. Sometimes you have to bow to practicality, and I don't always get what I want anyway.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Certainly this makes sense, but again, it's something that only occasionally comes up, so I'm not sure it's worth doing. Unless you're running a game with a lot of NPC interaction and intrigue, of course. I assume most D&D games will be mostly about murdering hostile monsters so viewed from that lens, languages are mostly ways for me to interject some flavor into the proceedings "oh hey, the command word for this wand is a word in the Grell language. I didn't know Grell had a language!"

I far prefer to think about worldbuilding in terms of a logical, consistent setting and not, "injecting flavor".

 

[James Gasik]

I far prefer to think about worldbuilding in terms of a logical, consistent setting and not, "injecting flavor".

It really depends on how your players react to such things. If they appreciate the worldbuilding involved and get excited about strange unknown languages, that's great.

My experience has been that such things are just a hassle for most players to come up with some way to acquire a language if it's actually necessary, and D&D offers many ways to do just that (before you even get to spending downtime to learn a new language), and this isn't something they enjoy, I tend to use it sparingly.

 

[Faolyn]

And it would be ridiculous - in a well-designed D&D setting with decent rules. Not my fault 5e gives us neither; so I have my own setting.

It's not like Basic or AD&D did it any better.

Let's face it: much like almost every other fantasy or science fiction franchise out there, D&D has to rely on a "Planet of Hats" for the races because otherwise, it would be complicated and take up too much room.

True; though the alignment is merely a tendency and the different statblock is to reflect actual measurable differences between the species.

But then we are left to wonder why high elves and wood elves, or mountain dwarfs and hill dwarfs, are so biologically different as to give different bonuses, yet humans from the woodlands, the desert, and the tundra are all the same.

Nope. Not even all PCs are literate; except Mages, where it's automatic (otherwise how could they read their spellbooks).

Nope. Most non-adventuring NPCs don't, and not all PCs do either, if the player chooses such or if the character only knows its native language (which can never be Common).

Those are your house rules though--the AD&D books are pretty silent on the subject, unless you use the (optional!) nonweapon proficiencies in 2e. In 3e, everyone was literate save the barbarians (unless they multiclassed, at which point they magically became literate), and in 5e, literacy is assumed for everyone, including barbarians. I don't know 4e's opinion, but I'm guessing it's closer to 3e and 5e than AD&D. Unrealistic? Well... there is some evidence that medieval people were quite a bit more literate than we had previously thought--I found another site which suggested that by 1500, half the population could read, although not necessarily write.

(Plus, that's a rather humanocentric view of a setting. Why would elves, dwarfs, and halflings be as illiterate as humans?)

And, of course, this assumes a standard medieval time period. Eberron is higher-tech and has schools--my upcoming Victorian-ish game is like that as well. In a setting where there's gods of writing or knowledge (such as Deneir in the Realms), it's logical to assume that a duty of the clergy might be to go around and teach as many people to read as possible.

Until recently I had a sailor character in my game, and his being a sailor came up constantly while the party was on the coast. A few sessions ago it was relevant whether the party had a leatherworker in its ranks (they didn't) to make little booties for their sled dogs. And so on.

OK? I don't think that having proficiency in leatherworking is a feature in any 5e background--a proficiency, yes, but not a feature.

 

[Faolyn]

I feel I explained this in the post this particular discussion started with, so I doubt this will help much... Adventurers pretty much always have weapons, so if that is enough for the feature to not work the GM could decide it pretty much never works, which seems rather contrary to your position on features

Then you clearly don't understand my position on features.

It's a matter of presentation. Which of these two people do you think an average commoner is going to be more likely to want to help (as opposed to "forced to help under duress), based solely on what they know after having met them two seconds ago:

I'm going to guess that Average Joe Peasant, who mostly knows about adventurers from stories of stalwart knights and evil assassins, is going to pick the second one.

You don't go to a job interview in sweatpants and you don't go expecting help from average folk if you're bristling with weapons and dripping with other people's blood.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Then you clearly don't understand my position on features.

It's a matter of presentation. Which of these two people do you think an average commoner is going to be more likely to want to help (as opposed to "forced to help under duress), based solely on what they know after having met them two seconds ago:

View attachment 360843
I'm going to guess that Average Joe Peasant, who mostly knows about adventurers from stories of stalwart knights and evil assassins, is going to pick the second one.

You don't go to a job interview in sweatpants and you don't go expecting help from average folk if you're bristling with weapons and dripping with other people's blood.

Oh no, definitely the opposite. The former looks like they might be from the lower classes, whilst the latter is obviously some sort of aristocratic oppressor.

 

[Faolyn]

D&D has rarely handled languages well. In some campaigns, you have multiple languages for the same species- maybe there's a High Elvish or an Old Common (Ed Greenwood's Thorassic Script, which shows up in old ruins). Perhaps there's a High Common reserved for court and diplomatic functions as part of tradition.

I mean we have Undercommon, so the idea of another lingua franca isn't ridiculous. Asian-inspired settings often simply call these Trade Languages (which is what they are, certainly). In my games, Drow typically have to know three languages (Undercommon, Elvish (it's true there are linguistic changes from what the other Elves speak, but I figure Drow and surface Elves can communicate with one another), and Drow Sign Language (jokingly called DSL by some of my players). And many know Common as well!

Sometimes D&D gets pretty deep into this, and characters might find that they don't have enough languages to cover their needs. Other times, knowing how to speak, say, Celestial, may never come up at all. And that's not getting into "secret" languages like Cant, Druidic, or Lawful Neutral.

I've never really known how to handle this. I could easily give my D&D games a bewildering array of languages (ie, closer to the real world) or even "six million forms of communication", but I have doubts that the juice would be worth the squeeze.

I've played a few adventures where you encounter "an unknown language" and it's supposed to be this big deal, but generally either the adventure provides the means for you to learn how to read/speak it, or the DM just sighs when the players use spells, magic items, or conjured Word Archons to handle it for them (which happened in the Midgard game I'm playing in- but by the end of the adventure we also found a Helm of Comprehending Languages anyways).

So maybe less is more. I've played on both ends of the spectrum and while it's a cool moment when you say "hey, I speak X!", it's not one that typically lasts very long or remains memorable.

In my upcoming game I have languages based on the various countries/city-states, something called Contract, which is, well, the language primarily used for legalese, including merchant contracts (and thus is close to being a trade tongue), and a magical language called Tower. Although I haven't really put much thought into it, Thieves' Cant and Druidic would be less languages and more collections of slang.

 

[mamba]

Then you clearly don't understand my position on features.

It's a matter of presentation. Which of these two people do you think an average commoner is going to be more likely to want to help (as opposed to "forced to help under duress), based solely on what they know after having met them two seconds ago:

if your answer is not neither, then I guess we just won’t see eye to eye on this