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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[Henadic Theologian]

"Race" in the fantasy sense has ALWAYS meant species.

Tolkien NEVER intended elves and hobbits to merely be varieties of the same species in the way "caucasians" and "asians" are here on Earth.

Of course that has never stopped fantasy fans from allowing (or encouraging) cross-breeds like half-elves.

And the change in the PHB is not about this. It never was. It was always to be avoiding the term "race" which got tainted by associations from real life.

Not always, are Warforged, Autognomes, and Shardminds Species? Doesn't Species refer to biological organisms?

Heck despite having traits that are biological like, Celestials and Fiends are really more spiritual entities capable of mimicing some biological processes then biological creatures themselves.

So species would really only apply to Humaniods, Fey, Plants, Beasts, Giants, Dragons, and some Abberations, Celestials, Fiends, Constructs, and some Abberations aren't truely biological and there for can't be species. Undead are a state of being so really Undead should be a subtype, not a creature type. A Dracolich is an undead Dragon, it should have the Dragon type with the Undead subtype.

 

[Steampunkette]

There are various videos online of people doing things that I would consider physically impossible. Heck, just watch an old Jackie Chan movie where he's doing all of his own stunts. Have you ever seen what Simone Biles the gymnast can do? It looks like she defies physics, it's pretty amazing. On the other hand I don't expect D&D to be particularly realistic. They shoot for action movie logic unless magic is involved. As far as how much you can do in 6 seconds, I just explain that 6 seconds is an average and not to get too concerned about pulling out a stopwatch. YMMV of course.

What I don't want is Celtic, Greek demigod, or Paul Bunyan mythic. It's just never been the imagery supported by D&D, with the exception to a degree with 4E. I don't want to play Anime the TTRPG, I want to play D&D,

I meeeeeeeean...

Tome of Battle: Book of the Nine Swords. 2 full years before 4e dropped.

And that's just the first example off the top of my head. I'm sure there's plenty of "Mythic Heroism" in 3e beyond Deities and Demigods and the Epic Level Handbook.

But yeah. It's definitely possible in a perfectly choreographed stunt fight to do stuff that you probably couldn't do in reality even if you -were- Jackie Chan.

I'm just saying: D&D isn't meant to be realistic. It's meant to be heroic fantasy/action hero fantasy. Not FATAL. And accepting that buy in is easy for pretty much every player and DM there is because that's just how D&D works even if it's practically superheroic compared to reality.

The idea that anything -beyond- the already superhuman nature of D&D Martials somehow requiring a big narrative explanation or 'Being Magic' rather than it just being more "Yeah, this is just a thing some people can do" seems weird to me.

Also:

But fighters aren't realistic. They can go toe-to-toe with dragons and other fantastical monsters.

Yeah, that.

A Fighter in Full Plate with a Shield has a 20% chance of an Adult Red Dragon hitting their armor but not hurting the person underneath it. A Predator the size of an Elephant will hit you and not hurt you.

That's some superhuman stuff, right there!

If the game is going to have any semblance of balance, high level fighters need Goku levels of power to keep up with high-level casters. If you want a more grounded setting, you need to cap caster’s’ capabilea as well as martials. Something like E6 works well for that.

Or: Take Away/Severely Nerf the Wizard's damaging spellcasting. They'd still be able to go to the Demiplane of comfiness or whatever, but no Orbital Laser.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I suspect quite a lot of us are thinking more in terms of Conan, Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones. Badasses, to be sure, and folks who are more than capable, at elite levels, of altering world events. But not gods or superfolk. A class that feels basically mundane, depending on the sub-class choice.

Sure ... when the wizards feel basically like Gandalf and barely cast any explicit magic. Remember, according to Dragon Magazine Gandalf was a fifth level magic user. And he was of course far the most powerful member of the Fellowship of the Ring.

If you want that Lord of the Rings style you're talking about then hard cap wizards at level 5. Because right now what you are asking for is for the fighter players to play the hobbits while the wizard players play people who make Gandalf seem weak.

When you have wizards from anime and Harry Potter it's a complete genre mismatch to force the fighters to be from Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings.

Speaking of which, I also find it odd that this discussion, which we have over and over, tends to focus on the most mundane version of classes like fighter, as if you don't have an option to play an Echo Knight or Arcane Trickster or whatever.

It focuses on the base class. And as I always do I'm going to say level matters.

Hard cap at level 5 and you can have your Lord of the Rings fantasy. For that matter for most fantasies with mundane characters you probably want to ban the wizard, cleric, druid, sorcerer, and even the bard. Gandalf after all sat out most of Lord of the Rings, and Aragorn the Ranger was the main healer.

What I don't want is Celtic, Greek demigod, or Paul Bunyan mythic. It's just never been the imagery supported by D&D, with the exception to a degree with 4E. I don't want to play Anime the TTRPG, I want to play D&D,

Celtic Myth isn't anime. And when the wizards stop snapping physics over their knee I'll say the imagery isn't supported. As it is we get wizards-and-muggles.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm just saying: D&D isn't meant to be realistic. It's meant to be heroic fantasy/action hero fantasy. Not FATAL.

Lmao FATAL isn’t exactly a shining example of realism either. I daresay it’s far less realistic even than D&D.

Or: Take Away/Severely Nerf the Wizard's damaging spellcasting. They'd still be able to go to the Demiplane of comfiness or whatever, but no Orbital Laser.

Yeah, that would also work.

 

[Neonchameleon]

But fighters aren't realistic. They can go toe-to-toe with dragons and other fantastical monsters.

Indeed. Fighters are armed with nerf swords and can take ludicrous amounts of damage. You can air drop them without parachutes from orbit.

But this is the only way fighters aren't realistic. At level 20 they are still moving the same 30' a round they were at level 1.

 

[Steampunkette]

Lmao FATAL isn’t exactly a shining example of realism either. I daresay it’s far less realistic even than D&D.

No, it isn't. But it -tries- in the most disturbing ways possible. Still the only system I know of where you can die in character creation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Except in a world where anything that exist is no longer supernatural, ghosts would no longer be supernatural. Kind of like how people once though gorillas were a myth. The words supernatural and magic have meaning for the players of the game, that's all that matters.

I find supernatural and magical useful for describing things. In general anything supernatural is unaffected by dispel magic or antimagic zones because those supernatural things were not brought into existence by direct manipulation using a spell. There are exceptions to every rule including this one of course. So a +1 sword is magical because it was created by a wizard casting a spell of some sort artificially imbuing it with power. A ghost is just a ghost, something we would consider a supernatural being.

This is exactly what I have been talking about this whole time.

 

[Cadence]

No, it isn't. But it -tries- in the most disturbing ways possible. Still the only system I know of where you can die in character creation.

Traveller has that too

 

[Steampunkette]

Traveller has that too

Cool to know!

Thank you, Cadence!

 

[Clint_L]

I think there's a lot of black or white arguments being made, when the crux of the problem is largely one of feel. So folks on both sides are trying to prove their position more logical, but this is really a discussion about what feels right to most players of D&D.

This is sort of like the 4e debate. A lot of folks have expressed that that edition didn't feel enough like D&D to them, for a variety of reasons. Explaining to them why they are logically wrong to feel that way is not convincing. Similarly, explaining to folks that they are logically wrong to not want super-powered fighters, or strictly mundane fighters, or whatever, is not going to convince anyone.

For me, this discussion comes down to personal taste and experience. In my experience, martial classes are not struggling to keep up. Someone else's experience might be different. There isn't going to be One True Way, so it makes sense to try to find as much of a consensus as possible. That won't make everyone happy.