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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[Reynard]

Or reskinning for players who want to play a Technomancer where "I load an unstable fire element bullet into my experimental multi-pistol" is simply casting Fireball as a spell, even though the Artificer covers Technomancy too.

Or just grab an "Arcane Gunslinger" from a fan site, DTRPG or 3PP resource. or make one yourself.

It is a myth that things have to be made by WotC or even by professional designers to be fun and worth playing. "But it might be unbalanced!" Oh, it will be, but so is 75% of what is in the PHB anyway.

5E is perhaps the biggest DIY edition ever, and yet some people cleave to needing official material that fits their preferences. It isn't necessary.

Want to play a sentient ooze cryomancer? Just make one.

 

[Reynard]

D&D has had to contend with video games for quite some time now.

Remember that time WoW ate like 80% of D&D groups? I do.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Or just grab an "Arcane Gunslinger" from a fan site, DTRPG or 3PP resource. or make one yourself.

It is a myth that things have to be made by WotC or even by professional designers to be fun and worth playing. "But it might be unbalanced!" Oh, it will be, but so is 75% of what is in the PHB anyway.

5E is perhaps the biggest DIY edition ever, and yet some people cleave to needing official material that fits their preferences. It isn't necessary.

Want to play a sentient ooze cryomancer? Just make one.

I desperately wish more people bought into this idea.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Remember that time WoW ate like 80% of D&D groups? I do.

You, me, and Pepperidge Farms.

 

[Weiley31]

This is why I recommend 3pp.

Case in point:

The Talent

Brains are better than Brawn! This fifth edition supplement features MCDM’s next class, The Talent — a hero that uses mind powers to battle monsters and overcome obstacles. This is the MCDM take on the psion! Characters with extraordinary mental powers not derived from prayer or magic feature in...

shop.mcdmproductions.com

 

[Weiley31]

I'm still saddened that the UA Psionics rules weren't liked by people. Yes, the method of it was weird (low number good high number bad, for some reason, is the EXACT opposite of modern D20 design), but I liked the idea that your Psionics powers could develop alongside ya. And that your subclass just influenced aspects of it or what not.

Great. Awesome!

 

[Yaarel]

The problem here is power scaling.

As I've said before and will say again how mundane you can practically be depends on your level. If you go back to AD&D at level 8 as a fighter you were literally called a superhero. Level 10 is a superhero game, period.

If you want to avoid superheroes then impose a level cap. If you want to play at double digit levels then you are either a superhero or the "mundane" member of a team of superheroes. And if you are mundane and a storm giant hits you then you're either getting hammered into the ground like a tent peg or strawberry jam. If you survive you are not a mundane character.

Most fantasies of the sort you speak of cap at about level 5. And would use liminal rangers (i.e. rangers which although they mechanically cast things like Hunter's Mark treated it as a reskin). By level 10 the "mundanes" need to be either Batman-style or Beowulf style just to hang with their allies. Or they need to be utter killers.

My preferred solution would be either a level cap or a second subclass for the mundane types to say how they manage to hang out with their team mates without being pretty obviously the mascot.

Gygax intended D&D to be a game of superheroes. A famous quote attributed to him is as follows:

"A 20th-level Fighter is Achilles, but a 20th-level Magic-User is Zeus."

Well, characters who have magic are supposed to become superheroes − as powerful as Greek deities.

But Fighters who lack magic are supposed to suck.

This is the inequality that Fighter players are clinging to out of habit, when they refuse to allow the Fighter to be magical.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Gygax intended D&D to be a game of superheroes. A famous quote attributed to him is as follows:

"A 20th-level Fighter is Achilles, but a 20th-level Magic-User is Zeus."

Well, characters who have magic are supposed to become superheroes − as powerful as Greek deities.

But Fighters who lack magic are supposed to suck.

This is the inequality that Fighter players are clinging to out of habit, when they refuse to allow the Fighter to be magical.

Or, to be fair, because they don't want to play Zeus.

 

[Yaarel]

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. Players who want to play a wizard, pick psychic-themed spells, and call their character a psychic without having the rules say “no, magic and psionics are different things, and if you don’t want to engage with this other subsystem, you don’t get to play a psychic” outnumber the ones who want to play a psion and have the rules treat their powers differently than they treat spellcasters using spells like Detect Thoughts and Tekekenesis. Sorry, but them’s the breaks.

Generally, yes.

Psionic themes without fringe mechanics is the goal.

Still the rules for spell casters still frustrate psionic fans. Things like spell components − especially costly gp components interfere with the feel psionics.

Similarly, spell points feels better − like an amount of energy that gets spent.


For me, a solution could be put in the DMs Guide, where a spell points per short rest would replace the spell slots of any spell caster class. Meanwhile destroying gp component spells forever.

Plus the player needs to be able to build ones own thematic spell list.


And there needs to be better new spells − such as a better, more intuitive, telekinesis.

 

[mamba]

Gygax intended D&D to be a game of superheroes. A famous quote attributed to him is as follows:

"A 20th-level Fighter is Achilles, but a 20th-level Magic-User is Zeus."

I literally do not care whether level 20 characters are, I have no interest in playing past 12 or so because of them being that way. Probably even sooner than that, I just wish it would stretch out to 12