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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[mamba]

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.

of course they are not identical, to me these minuscule variations do not make them distinct concepts however, just slight variations of one concept

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.

sure it does, whether that makes 3e better or 5e is simply a matter of taste however. I prefer 5e’s approach over 3e’s fiddliness, you do not, seems to mostly be a matter of taste

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

The Aiel from the Wheel of Time series are just like this. Virtually no standing water in their homeland, but plenty of things that need climbing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Fair enough. That's a good point.

 

[Maxperson]

of course they are not identical, to me these minuscule variations do not make them distinct concepts however, just slight variations of one concept

They aren't miniscule. The differences between those divine necromancers I mentioned are significant. And I have several ways to achieve it in 3e and 0 ways in 5e. There are no divine necromancers in 5e.

sure it does, whether that makes 3e better or 5e is simply a matter of taste however. I prefer 5e’s approach over 3e’s fiddliness, you do not, seems to mostly be a matter of taste

No. It's not a matter of taste to say that 3e has far more ways mathematically to achieve a far greater variety of concepts than 5e does. That's objective math.

Where preference plays into it is if you're okay with far fewer options and character concepts that you can achieve. If you don't mind limiting yourself to the far fewer ways 5e presents, then that's great. If your concepts are like mine and are more detailed, 5e simply cannot possibly achieve many of them. It doesn't have enough variety to do so.

When it comes to character generation, I prefer a system that allows me to actually achieve the concepts I envision.

 

[mamba]

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.

I am not saying I cannot come up with why a character would be good at one but not the other. I am saying if I want to play a thief robbing sultans, then I can be that, even if my char can swim pretty well.

That simply is not a relevant factor for me, that does not mean you wanting this level of detail is wrong, it just means I can handwave that away and do not need a mechanical representation of it, in fact I prefer not having too granular a level as to me that just means things get to fiddly for no gain (as far as I am concerned)

 

[Maxperson]

The Aiel from the Wheel of Time series are just like this. Virtually no standing water in their homeland, but plenty of things that need climbing.

And I can't make one in 5e.

 

[Maxperson]

I am not saying I cannot come up with why a character would be good at one but not the other. I am saying if I want to play a thief robbing sultans, then I can be that, even if my char can swim pretty well.

Sure, because there are millions of concepts out there. I'm not arguing that you can't come up with concept that 5e can achieve. I'm saying, and this is fact, that 3e can achieve a far greater variety of concepts than 5e can. in 3e I can use the one you just mentioned or the one I just mentioned. You only use the one you mentions. Right there I have more character concepts available to me, and that's not large enough to be the tip of an iceberg.

That simply is not a relevant factor for me, that does not mean you wanting this level of detail is wrong, it just means I can handwave that away and do not need a mechanical representation of it, in fact I prefer not having too granular a level as to me that just means things get to fiddly for no gain (as far as I am concerned)

Handwaving = kludging. You're settling for something that isn't really the concept, but you are okay with that and don't see the value in a more accurate representation. That's fine. You not seeing the value in what 3e offered, though, doesn't change the math. 3e still offers orders of magnitude more character concept options than 5e does. That is mathematical fact. Those options do have value to a lot of us.

 

[mamba]

No. It's not a matter of taste to say that 3e has far more ways mathematically to achieve a far greater variety of concepts than 5e does. That's objective math.

saying it has far more variations is objective math, but not every unique variation is also one concept.

To me that is where all this detail ultimately does not matter because it collapses down to the same number of concepts, it’s just that one of the two has 50 variations of the same concept and the other 5, I still find a suitable representation of the concept in either, at least in principle, I am not going to argue about which concept exists in 3e but not 5e or vice versa, there probably are examples for both

When it comes to character generation, I prefer a system that allows me to actually achieve the concepts I envision.

as I said, I have no problem with you saying you can better represent the char you envision in 3e

 

[Maxperson]

saying it has far more variations is objective math, but not every unique variation is also one concept.

To me that is where all this detail ultimately does not matter because it collapses down to the same number of concepts, it’s just that one of the two has 50 variations of the same concept and the other 5, I still find a suitable representation of the concept in either, at least in principle, I am not going to argue about which concept exists in 3e but not 5e or vice versa, there probably are examples for both

That's just plain false unless you are saying you can't have a concept much finer than elven fighter/battle master or something. Even if every option doesn't equate to a concept, you can have concepts in 3e that 5e can't do. And the sheer number of options means you have a far greater number of concepts.

I'll say it for the 4th or 5th time now. 5e can't do a divine necromancer. At all. Simply casting a few necromantic clerical spells fails to be enough to achieve the concept of a necromancer. Any old cleric of tempus or oghma can cast the same spells. In 3e I have multiple distinctly different divine necromancer concepts.

 

[Chaosmancer]

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

You do realize that even if you don't sell a book, it still costs money to make, right? And money to store. And if you just make a small print run, then you can run into issues of greater demand the problems with the extra cost to do an emergency print run to meet demand.

Sure, on the consumer side, I'm not technically harmed by any of this. But I'd prefer the company NOT to hemorrhage money.