D&D (2024) Jeremy Crawford Gives an Overview of the New Unearthed Arcana

The upcoming Unearthed Arcana playtest packet for One D&D gets a preview from WotC's Jeremy Crawford. This is apparently the largest of these playtest packets so far, and the biggest Unearthed Arcana they have ever done, at 50 pages long.

It contains 5 classes, new spells, new feats, a revised rules glossary, and the new weapon mastery system.

​

 

[FitzTheRuke]

@GMforPowergamers did they just admit it’s not back compatible without adjustments?

Well, I mean... the game is big and complicated. It will be backwards compatible for the Adventures without any adjustments (barring, perhaps, newer versions of the monsters that are printed within the adventure, though I suspect that you can just USE those). There will obviously be some adjustments to make if you want to cram an old subclass onto a new baseclass. I don' think anyone has ever denied that. They just plan to make that easy for people, with advice on how to do it.

 

[Bolares]

Which Begs the Question: How did the Druid pass muster?

Maybe the druid is the reason they are raising the bar on what goes in to UA?

 

[HammerMan]

Interesting that they say “this is the most fun I ever had as a fighter” and “this gives the fighter round by round interesting things to do” like they are admitting the problem.

I can’t wait to read the design notes

 

[Bill Zebub]

Maybe the druid is the reason they are raising the bar on what goes in to UA?

Do you think it was the druid itself, or is that the druid revealed how incapable people are of understanding the concept of "early draft"? WotC is all, "Ok, we misjudged the fragile emotional state of long-time players. No more throwing half-finished ideas out there for public comment."

 

[HammerMan]

Well, I mean... the game is big and complicated. It will be backwards compatible for the Adventures

but that is what a few of us have been saying. It’s not player side backwards compatibility it’s adventure and DM side.

It sounds like they are saying that outright

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Maybe the druid is the reason they are raising the bar on what goes in to UA?

I think that's likely it. I think that they released the Druid to see what people thought of the general direction (Fixed statblocks) and weren't ready for the pushback on the execution, which they weren't all that worried about. (It's not the final Druid! Don't panic!)

But they've realized, in this day and age, Panic is the new cool. So, in spite of being very specifically PLAYTESTS, they have to be closer to "ready for prime-time" than they otherwise would be, or the true feedback is going to get lost in the "noise".

That, and they've got to be extra careful right now to not give fuel to any hate-fire.

 

[Digdude]

When crawford is talking about backward compatability, it sure started sounding like word gymnastic corp speak to me.

 

[HammerMan]

They said that as the books gets closer to be completed they will check to make sure that nothing in the new class rules interferes with old rules. He goes on about how all of their adventures are created just assuming they you are playing a class but that the internal abilities of a class has no bering on how many adventure has been build so they should be plug and play

So again the adventures will work but no promise of player favoring content.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Do you think it was the druid itself, or is that the druid revealed how incapable people are of understanding the concept of "early draft"? WotC is all, "Ok, we misjudged the fragile emotional state of long-time players. No more throwing half-finished ideas out there for public comment."

HAW! That's basically what I said. Yeah, I think you're right here.

 

[darjr]

I dint like the feat option to give everyone some weapon mastery.