Xanathar's Guide Shows Up In The Wild!

Xanathar's Guide to Everything comes out this week (November 10th) for some stores (and a couple of weeks later, on November 21st, elsewhere - check with your local game store!) The book has been showing up in the wild - several bloggers and live streamers have received copies and are posting initial thoughts and reviews, and it has shown up at GameHole Con. Photos courtesy of Dave Rosser.

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You can also pre-order it at Fantasy Grounds for it's November 10th release. They've posted some awesome previews/screenshots. Here's one, but click through for the rest! Also, FG is offering a free copy to a lucky winner in this giveaway.

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Mike Adkins on Twitter has his copy, signed by some of WotC's employees.

Mike Adkins
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As has the similarly named Michael Atkins!

Michael Atkins
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It looks like Melvin Smif has the first review up. He says that "this is the first book I would claim as a “must have” for everyone who enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition".

Melvin Smif
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And NewbieDM on Twitter has a review copy and his sharing his general thoughts, although not answering specific questions about the contents.

Purple Pawn has a couple of copies and is giving one away for free. Leave a comment on his blog post, and you might get picked at random.

 

[wilcoxon]

The thing that boggles my mind, being unchanged? Elven accuracy. This effectively gives you THREE dice whenever you attack with advantage. Sure, its just rerolling one of the dice once, but when is there a reason to ever not reroll the lower of the two dice with advantage? If you're a rogue, advantage fishing is the name of the game already. There's a few ways to get advantage as a ranger. Monks routinely get advantage from all the prones and stuns they inflict. Warlocks and sorcerers get added advantage on their attack rolls as well when messing with darkness spells.

We're talking about increasing critical chance of 15% (well, 14.3%) as well as extra accuracy with dex-based weapons, like a longbow with SS. And that's before you boost Dex, Int, Wis or Cha by one as well. Sure, we're talking diminishing returns, but going from roughly 50% to roll 15 or higher to 66% to roll the same? That's enough to bump up a very difficult roll from missing every other to missing every third. If you only need to roll 11 or higher? We're talking a 90% hit rate. You're critting more than missing!

How is this not a huge, huge thing?

It is really powerful but it generally still isn't as good as playing a Kobold (Pack Tactics but Sunlight Sensitivity) or Halfling (debatable but hiding behind medium allies and rerolling 1s is huge). Of course, if you play a Kobold, you can't play anything from XGE in AL. Maybe a Monk high enough to get lots of prones/stuns and rogue for the rest for crit-fish damage?