D&D (2024) "The Future of D&D" (New Core Books in 2024!)

The online D&D Celebration event, which has been running all weekend, comes to a close with The Future of D&D, a panel featuring WotC's Ray Winninger, Liz Schuh, Chris Perkins, and Jeremy Crawford, hosted by Elle Osili-Wood.

D&D is exploring the multiverse
Revisiting classic settings. 1st of 3 settings (Ravenloft) released this year. Next year, the other two major classic D&D settings come out. Both in formats they've never published products before.

Plus a "little peek" at a third classic D&D setting - a cameo.

In 2023, yet another classic setting is coming out.

Evolving D&D
Because of new players, they're always listening. Exploring new styles of play (like no combat needed in Wild Beyond the Witchlight). Also presentation of monsters and spells. New product formats. More adventure anthologies.

Making products easier to use. Ways to create the best experience. Experimenting and looking into technology.

Approaches to Design
Wild Beyond the Witchlight has interior design and tools to make running the adventure easier. Story tracker, guidance.

Beyond the books, they want to make different and varied products - packaging and form factor. Things different to hardcovers and boxed sets.

A blog post is coming soon detailing some of the changes, with more to come in future posts.

50th Anniversary in 2024
They've begun work on new versions of the core rulebooks. Recent surveys tie into that. They're still making plans, but expect more surveys. More will be said next year.

They will be completely compatible!

New experiences in the digital arena.

January Gift Set
Rules Expansion Gift Set -- Xanathar, Tasha, and a new book: Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse. All in a slipcase. Was intended for the Holidays, but global production issues mean January instead. There's also an alternate cover version.

D&D 5E - A Closer Look At January's D&D Rules Expansion Gift Set

WotC earlier announced a D&D Rules Expansion Gift Set for January, which includes three books - Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, and the new Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse. These were intended for the holidays, but the global production issues...

www.enworld.org

Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse
A treasure trove of creature related material from previous products compiled into one book and updated.

Opportunity to update material with a feel for how the 50th Anniversary books will be.

Improvements based on feedback, rebalancing, new and old art.

Over 250 monsters, and 30 playable races. All of the setting agnostic races that have been published outside the Player's Handbook.

Some content from Witchlight, Fizban's, and Strixhaven was influenced by Mordenkainen's.

Available first in the gift set, but separately later in the year.

Monsters alphabetized throughout rather than using subsections.

D&D 5E - Zooming In On Monsters of the Multiverse [UPDATED!]

Earlier, WotC announced Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse, a new D&D compilation of monster material from previous products updated to a new format. These screen grabs are as good as I could get them. They're not terribly clear, but you can make more out than in the original...

www.enworld.org

Stat block changes --

Spellcasting trait is gone. Spellcasting action, slimmed down. Spellcasting monsters need less prep.

Spell slots are gone for NPCs. Regular actions that would have once been spells.

It was too easy for a DM to use spells which result in the monster having a too low effective CR.

Monsters can be friends or foes, and some magic will help rather than hinder PCs.

Where are we going?
More adventure anthologies. Another classic setting fairly soon.

Two all-new settings. Completely new. In development stage, an 'exploration' phase, testing the viability of them. They might not see the light of day.

Retooling nostalgia and blending it with new concepts. A blend of things that you know, and things that they have never done before.

In the short term -- more news next month about a new product for 2022 which goes into a new scary place we've never been before.

Boo the miniature giant space hamster
Below is an sketch from Hydro74's alt cover, which features Boo the miniature giant space hamster.

 

[Iamoutofhere]

So... player characters shouldn't be awesome?

I prefer that there should be dynamic unpredictable changes over time to characters and a struggle through adversity, battling to overcome their limitations...the key being....they should have proper limitations and flaws.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Especially since wizards has often backed up the specific thing in question, ie that the majority of players don’t take feats (and if they do it’s late in a campaign), don’t choose options for optimization value, and tend to choose the classic and simple options over more complex stuff.

This is in part because feats have been designed to fail. If your primary stat is below 20 then increasing your primary stat by means of an ASI is always a competitive choice and can be treated as the default even by people who like feats. Ignoring (a) variant humans, (b) fighters, and (c) rogues if you are using the Standard Array you're likely to have a 16 in your primary stat. Which means that most people and most classes regardless of optimization approach take feats at levels 4 and 8. And have the first chance of a feat therefore at level 12. And 90% of campaigns end by level 10.

Feats simply get outcompeted unless they are exactly what you want until late in most campaigns.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This is in part because feats have been designed to fail. If your primary stat is below 20 then increasing your primary stat by means of an ASI is always a competitive choice and can be treated as the default even by people who like feats. Ignoring (a) variant humans, (b) fighters, and (c) rogues if you are using the Standard Array you're likely to have a 16 in your primary stat. Which means that most people and most classes regardless of optimization approach take feats at levels 4 and 8. And have the first chance of a feat therefore at level 12. And 90% of campaigns end by level 10.

Feats simply get outcompeted unless they are exactly what you want until late in most campaigns.

I doubt that is the case for most players. They just don’t want to go through the feat list and choose one when they can just increase a stat and move on.

 

[Cadence]

Not enough so to cast any serious doubt on the data, no.

<insert something on some kind of cognitive bias or another>

Not really, because within a campaign, content can be shared, so it’s not “users who have spent money on the game” but rather “users who have spent money or who are in a campaign where someone has spent money on content”.

In MtG, for example, isn't the common WotC statement that the vast majority of paper players don't play in groups composed of whales and don't do tons of stuff online or even play a recognized format? Thus something like using EDHrec to tell about what's actually widely used or popular across all players shouldn't necessarily be taken as representative of the majority of EDH players.

Has WotC reported how many D&D Beyond users there are?

so unless you can make a compelling argument that people who want to use ddb are different in playstyle from people who don’t, rather than play styles being varied in the same ways amongst ddb users as amongst VVT users and amongst non digital tool users, there is no reason to doubt the data provided as largely representative.

It feels like the burden for arguing that a non-randomly chosen sample is representative of a population is on the person making the argument, not the person doubting it in polling or medicine or whatnot. Why is it different with DnD?

<insert Dewey wins graphic again, the differences in heart attack or drug efficacy symptoms between men and women, and similar things>

Especially since wizards has often backed up the specific thing in question, ie that the majority of players don’t take feats (and if they do it’s late in a campaign), don’t choose options for optimization value, and tend to choose the classic and simple options over more complex stuff.

It feels like arguing X <<< 50% in the non-random sample is also true in the population, is a lot easier to swallow than trying to argue that the X ~ 2% < Y ~4% < Z ~8% differences in class popularity for the non-random sample also holds in the entire population.

 

[lingual]

I don't think the Dewey thing applies to DnDBeyond statistics.

Any argument that DnDBeyond is generally representative of the player base also freely acknowledges that it is not a perfect representation with no margin for error.

 

[Cadence]

Any argument that DnDBeyond is generally representative of the player base also freely acknowledges that it is not a perfect representation with no margin for error.

Margin of error and bias get at two different things though. Assuming the numbers WotC reports for classes and races are simply a tally of all "active" DnD Beyond characters, then there is no margin of error for measuring what was "actively" most used on DnD Beyond when the snapshot was taken. But that wouldn't mean the numbers could tell us what would be most popular if all the DnD Beyond players had full access to everything.

To go more broadly to all DnD players (not just on DnD Beyond), the lack of margin of error on the DnD Beyond stats wouldn't help deal with the potential differences between the players that use DnD Beyond and those that didn't. I assume the differences between those two aren't nearly as big as, say, those between in person voters and mail in voters, for example, but I'm not sure why they couldn't easily be a few percentage points.

So, from the early 2019 WotC post on popularity, I probably wouldn't argue if someone wanted to claim that human+variant human were more more popular among all DnD players than anything else, and cited their combined DnD beyond 22.8% vs. 11.2% for the second place High Elf + Wood Elf combined. But the difference between Dragonborn at 7.2% and Mountain Dwarf+Hill Dwarf at 6.6% seems small enough that a bit of misalignment between those who use DnD beyond and DnD players could easily switch the conclusion and have them not even particularly close.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

<insert something on some kind of cognitive bias or another>

LOL sure. Definitely the person you disagree with that has the bias, not you.

In MtG, for example, isn't the common WotC statement that the vast majority of paper players don't play in groups composed of whales and don't do tons of stuff online or even play a recognized format? Thus something like using EDHrec to tell about what's actually widely used or popular across all players shouldn't necessarily be taken as representative of the majority of EDH players.

Has WotC reported how many D&D Beyond users there are?

Wotc doesn't know how many DDB players there are. You'd need to go to fandom for that information, the company that owns DDB.

We have two separate sources of information telling us what is common and what is uncommon amongst dnd players, and both have much more information available to them than you or I do.

It feels like the burden for arguing that a non-randomly chosen sample is representative of a population is on the person making the argument, not the person doubting it in polling or medicine or whatnot. Why is it different with DnD?

If feels like? I'm not sure what to do with that, honestly.

You seem to have a strong desire to discount data that disagrees with your perception, even though both of the two companies with access to large amounts of player data agree on the results.

But that wouldn't mean the numbers could tell us what would be most popular if all the DnD Beyond players had full access to everything.

Sure it does. If you have a group of a few hundred thousand, and take thousands with a slight different circumstance to see the effect of that circumstance on the larger group, you have useful data about what the larger group would look like if they all had the same circumstance as the sample group.

You seem to want to argue against some idea of this data being definitive and beyond doubt, but that isn't what anyone is saying. It's indicative and useful, which is all survey data can ever be without the sample size being equal to the whole, which never happens.

To go more broadly to all DnD players (not just on DnD Beyond), the lack of margin of error on the DnD Beyond stats wouldn't help deal with the potential differences between the players that use DnD Beyond and those that didn't. I assume the differences between those two aren't nearly as big as, say, those between in person voters and mail in voters, for example, but I'm not sure why they couldn't easily be a few percentage points.

A few percentage points wouldn't change the rankings of most popular subclasses. It certainly wouldn't change which is at the top, which is at the top by a decent margin. It absolutely wouldn't erase the fact that Wizards, which is a wholly separate company, agrees that the data supports the fact that Champion Fighters are very much the most popular class, standard human is the most popular race option, and the simplest and most classic forms of each class are the most played forms of each class.

So, from the early 2019 WotC post on popularity, I probably wouldn't argue if someone wanted to claim that human+variant human were more more popular among all DnD players than anything else, and cited their combined DnD beyond 22.8% vs. 11.2% for the second place High Elf + Wood Elf combined. But the difference between Dragonborn at 7.2% and Mountain Dwarf+Hill Dwarf at 6.6% seems small enough that a bit of misalignment between those who use DnD beyond and DnD players could easily switch the conclusion and have them not even particularly close.

And yet, we also have the earlier DnD Beyond (which again, is separate from Wizards of The Coast) data which also put Dragonborn in roughly the same place, so we can easily and safely conclude that Dragonborn are in the top ten of popularity, but that nothing challenges the standard human for popularity except perhaps variant human.

Since wotc has also said repeatedly and with complete confidence that standard human is the most played race option by a significant margin, and we can observe from their behavior and the art they use that Dragonborn are quite popular in spite of being disappointing mechanically, and online discussion in places not known for being home to a lot of optimization talk seems to run in the same direction, it really seems like personal bias is the only reason to doubt that data.

 

[Bolares]

I prefer that there should be dynamic unpredictable changes over time to characters and a struggle through adversity, battling to overcome their limitations...the key being....they should have proper limitations and flaws.

well, sure. I just don't get how 5e doesn't allow this to happen.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yeah, Kenku are pretty bad. They're also extremely annoying. I'd personally prefer if they weren't a race at all, or if they have to be a race, have them be Kenku that still have their voices and wings.

I love Kenku

 

[Bolares]

I love Kenku

Seconded