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]

Of course it needs a beyond natural explanation. But that explanation need not be “magic.” It’s the sort of thing a powerful figure in a fantastical world could be capable of, through intensive training or what have you.

Please provide us your definition of "magic", because at this point I just don't see what you're trying to get at.

 

[Reynard]

Cutting a mountain in half with a sword (like, in one slice like a giant birthday cake?) is equally ludicrous and needs a beyond natural explanation the same as flight. You don't train and one day wake up and split K2 in twain. Not unless you already got some supernatural backstory explaining where that potential came from.

Well,you see, I drew it with speed lines and really big eyes.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I'm not finding that fighters and rogues who don't pick a supernatural sub-class suck. And I note that Battlemasters are widely considered the best fighter subclass (Echo Knight aside, probably), and fighters themselves are generally considered one of the stronger classes. As well as being by far the most popular. To you, they might suck, but that certainly does not appear to be the widespread opinion.

The question you're skating over is at what level? Level scaling matters - and at levels 1-2 I'd argue the sorcerer is the weakest class. Battlemasters are considered good (where they rank compared to Eldritch Knights, Echo Knights, and Rune Knights is open to debate) - but their "glory levels" are 1-6. Maneuvers are great at level 3 when you get them. But the ones you pick up at level 7 were the ones not good enough for you at level 3.

Indeed the entire Battlemaster L7-10 period is kinda bad.

• L7 gets you two maneuvers that weren't good enough for you at L3, an extra superiority dice (good - but each is less useful than the last), and a barely used ability
• L8 gets you your third feat/ASI - two choices that weren't good enough before. But it will still be good; you're still in the top tier martial feats category. So will everyone else's but most other people get something else like a spell slot and a spell known.
• L9 is Indomitable. It sucks.
• L10 is your sixth and seventh maneuver - again they weren't good enough for levels 3 or 7. It also increases your superiority dice by one step ... which is frequently just +1 damage.

The Battlemaster may very well be the strongest fighter subclass from levels 3-6 (especially if you ignore Crawford's rulings on the Echo Knight) - but by level 10 I'd put them behind any of the three Knights.

Fireball is fantastic when you have lots of low level enemies clumped together, no doubt. It generally does't do much for you against a typical BBEG, but it'll often be great against the guards. Against the BBEG, it will usually be much handier to have a pure damage dealer. Like a fighter.

The thing here is that Fireball means that the fighter isn't a "pure damage dealer" and doesn't have a particular strength at "damage dealing". It means that they are a pure single target damage dealer, which is a whole lot smaller of a niche. The mages are better at multi-target damage.

Even for single target damage against a BBEG (which is basically their specialty) the fighter is barely ahead of a full caster (or warlock) who summons after level 6.

 

[Staffan]

The problem is that it working this way is mutually exclusive with it allowing people to reskin a Diviner as a psychic. And the reskinners have won that battle.

How many people want psions as reskinned diviners?

I mean, I see three main groups when it comes to opinions about psionics:

1. People who actively dislike psionics. They'd rather not have them in the game at all.
2. People who don't care much either way. They don't mind the concept but would prefer it if it doesn't get too much space. For them, reskinned diviners is "fine" because it gives the psi fan something to shut them up without taking too much in the way of resources.
3. People who like psionics, preferably (flavor-wise) something close to the way they were in 2e and 3e: at least one and ideally more actual psi-based classes, breadth on par with arcane or divine magic, psionics takes up a significant part of the game world.

I really don't see any psi-fans for whom reskinned diviners (or bards for that matter) are the preferred method of doing psionics. At best, it's "fine".

A Psionics system is a wholecloth variant system for the use of magic. Many fans like it because that is how they see magic, as opposed to "Vancian" spell slot magic. Both ideas fight for supremacy over their impact in a campaign setting, especially a D&D IP setting where psionics isn't an existing part of the published society in that campaign setting. Both systems need to be able to do the same things as the other, but many psionic fans want those same things to be different.

I actually don't think they need to do the same things, any more than wizards and clerics need to do the same things. Ideally, wizards and psions would do different things. This would require nerfing quite large parts of the wizard spell list in order to give the psion a niche in which to excel without breaking the game.

 

[Charlaquin]

Again, vague terms allow us to talk past each other.

A normal man, born of normal parents, cannot cleave a mountain in twain, no matter how hard he trains or how many orcs he kills. He needs something to separate him from the normal folk, the common farmers and NPCs.

High level fighters are not normal folk. What exactly sets them apart from normal folk varies from character to character. They may come from some supernatural ancestry, or be chosen by the gods, or fate. They might have gained power through exposure to some magical energy. The rules don’t prescribe the means, so that players have the freedom to define it for themselves, as suits their concept.

You can call that whatever you want, but it's something other than "training" and "fantasy". That's like saying Superman's power comes from "comic book".

It seems like I can call it whatever I want, as long as I want to call it magic. Because any time I dare suggest a character be capable of superhuman things by means other than magic, we end up having this same argument.

The alternative is that everyone has that sort of potential and realizes it in different ways. The fighter might cleave a mountain, the cleric might summon an angel, the thief teleports in shadows, the farmer yields crops three times bigger than an Earth harvest, the king's land withers and blooms based on his mood, etc. All use the same mythic potential in different ways.

Of course that’s the case. Like, literally, that’s what high-level PC abilities do.

But you don't wake up one day and your humble farmboy is splitting mountains just because he got enough XP.

Getting enough XP (if your DM even uses XP; it seems like few do anymore) necessarily entails going on fantastical adventures, delving into mysterious and magical places, fighting monsters and faeries and perhaps even gods. One does not do such things and remain a humble farmboy. What exactly causes the transformation from farmboy to hero varies from story to story.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Frankly, I’m not terribly interested in what you would do. I’m talking about what D&D does. And what it does is differentiate between “magic” which is enacted by a person or other magical entity to create a specific effect upon the world, and other things which would not be possible in real life but are a normal part of how the fantastical worlds of D&D operate. If dragons can fly and giants can exist, naturally, without a magical entity consciously working their will to make it so, then powerful mortals should be capable of other physics-defying acts, without needing to rely on “magic.”

I disagree with your conclusion here. Dragon flight and the existence of giants are obvious examples of innate supernatural power, but they in no way can be automatically extrapolated to physics-defying acts for all and sundry without further explanation.

When you say 'magic', what are you talking about?

 

[Charlaquin]

All spells are magical, but not all magic is spells. In a magical world, it only makes sense that many creatures would develop a way to use magic passively and innately for their own benefit. It's just like how lifeforms on Earth will evolve to exploit any energy source available, be it solar or thermal or radiation.

Then it’s part of the nature of the fantastical world, just as solar and thermal energy are part of the nature of our world.

 

[Charlaquin]

Dragons are magic in every sense. I was reviewing the 2014 Monster Manual.

I read this to mean the Dragon breath is explicitly magic. "Dragons are also magical creatures whose innate power fuels their dreaded breath weapons and other preternatural abilities." It can also be understood to mean that its preternatural method of flight is likewise explicitly "magical", because the magical creature does it in a magical way.

Meanwhile, in a Variant textbox: "Dragons are innately magical creatures that can master a few spells as they age, using this variant." Here the magic of a Dragon can extend to casting spells innately, but typically includes nonspell magical traits.

The Lair Actions including features like "magical darkness" and "magic fog".

"The region containing a legendary ... dragon's lair is warped by the dragon's magic." "A legendary white dragon's innate magic deepens the cold in the area around its lair." And so on.


All of these "preternatural" traits are explicitly "magic" according to the rules of D&D 5e.

It seems unsustainable to posit such high tier features except by the means of magic.

Ok, now find me the part where it says magic is what makes giants able to not collapse under their own weight.

 

[Charlaquin]

Ok, but in no way are either of those abilities not supernatural.

Indeed, but they need not be magical to be so.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then forget JC and the weave. Dragons fly despite that making no physical sense. Giants exist and can move around in flagrant defiance of the square-cube law. Trolls regenerate limbs in seconds with no apparent energy expenditure. And all of these things are treated as normal parts of how the material plane works, rather than magical effects created by some will-worker. The fact of the matter is, there exist in D&D’s worlds some beyond-natural things that are magic, and some beyond-natural things that are simply part of the nature of these fantastical worlds. That being the case, we should be able to imagine characters who lack magical ability but can still perform feats that are beyond what is possible in real life. If a giant can exist, there should be no reason Goku can’t.

All of those beyond what is possible in real life things are magic, but only some of them are spells. The ones that aren't spells but are instead part of the innate magic of the world I call "supernatural" so they can be easily differentiated, but those things IMO need to be called out when they appear (and aren't obvious like giants and dragonflight), and not just assumed as stuff that anyone in the world can do.