D&D 5E 50th Anniversary and beyond

[Jfdlsjfd]

Height range for average humans tell a lot about the setting.

However, the only which kind of offends me, and this is so dumb, is losing age/weight/height, because like, I guess not including that sort of detail just flummoxes me. Like, can't you tell me the typical ranges for a species or whatever? And then we can decide whether to be inside or outside them. Literally never stopped people before. I've never had a DM say "HOLD UP! That Dwarf is two inches too tall!" or "Stop right there, that human is outside the rolled weight range!!!" or the like, and age ranges seem pretty immutable. So anyway I feel like an idiot that this irks me, but it does.

I agree that i never heard that. However, the replacement is worse than removing reference altogether : "Also, rather than suggesting height and weight in a race, we provide the following text: “Player characters, regardless of race, typically fall into the same ranges of height and weight that humans have in our world."

So, the iconic image of a tall and slim elf, a pair of slightly less-tall humans, a short and bulky dwarf and a handfull of small and not particularly heavy halflings is no longer a thing. Everyone is build within the much smaller range of humans. It is even more "rubberhead ear" than before. The "problem" it fixes is the complaint about "how can a 60 cm tall halfling have 16 STR when the 2m10 minotaur has the same starting STR? It's not realistic". The answer is: "because they have the same size and muscle/fat ratio. Your minotaur can't be taller than the halfling since both fluctuate within the same (modern Earth human) range". It's a logical consequence of floating ASIs, I'd guess.

 

[Geoff Thirlwell]

Your minotaur can't be taller than the halfling since both fluctuate within the same (modern Earth human) range". It's a logical consequence of floating ASIs, I'd guess.

I think I’ve finally cracked it. The only logical reason for these changes is that they are going to produce a crappy range of 6” rubber monsters and characters all with the same body mould with a different head stuck on

 

[Lyxen]

The Dhampir, Hexblood, and Reborn in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft and Custom Lineage from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything are called Lineages. It's right there in the books.

And it's the only place where they exist officially, and they no longer appear in any subsequent publication, and they are not in the SAC on Creature Evolutions where races are. So my guess is that they will disappear, which would be a good thing because it's silly to call a "lineage" something that does not come from your ancestry.

My point is that WotC have been trying things out, and that some things will make it in the revision and others won't. Same thing with alignment, which disappeared from a time and is now back with some changes.

And the same thing with the totally stupid thing on races size and weight. And after seeing stupid things like this, there are still people around here believing that these idiocies are not linked to things happening totally outside of the game ?

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I think I’ve finally cracked it. The only logical reason for these changes is that they are going to produce a crappy range of 6” rubber monsters and characters all with the same body mould with a different head stuck on

Absolute, complete nonsense. Less than a month after this new revision of the 3 Core Rulebooks were announced, we got an Unearthed Arcana for 6-limbed Psychic Ant People, the first Ooze race in 5e, Spacefaring Robot Gnomes, and Swashbuckling Space Monkeys with Flying Squirrel Skin-Flaps. If WotC suddenly decided to simplify D&D's races into "6" rubber monsters and characters all with the same body mold with a different head stuck on", they never would have published even a playtest version of those races, and given very specific cultural differences that would exist between those races due to their inherently non-human nature (the Hadozee with their monkey-based social structure, Thri-Kreen with their sleeplessness and psychic powers, autognomes from their strange relationships with their parent race, creators, and constructed nature (which I like to call "the Pinnochio Effect"), and Plasmoids with being literal sentient oozes with amorphous bodies and social structure).

You're entitled to your opinion on whether or not you like these changes, man, but don't make up BS about the motivations or direction of the game because of your dislike for the changes. It's clear to me that WotC still wants races to be diversified from one another, they just want it to be done in different ways from the standard (and perhaps cliché) stereotypes that used to be reinforced in 5e's (and all previous editions') PHB, DMG, and MM.

So, no. You're wrong. Utterly incorrect in this vast leap of "logic". Keep whatever opinion you want, just don't make nonsense up, please.

 

[Lyxen]

You're entitled to your opinion on whether or not you like these changes

And you are entitled to yours, but honestly it should not become such a sensitive subject that it totally deprives you of any sense of humour. That was obviously only a joke, and a deserved one since these modifications are utterly idiotic.

 

[Bolares]

Oh look, it's this conversation again!

 

[Stormonu]

My big concern is what will happen to D&D Beyond. I've invested a fair bit of money into it now, and I use it for quite a number of things to help ease making my own D&D adventure content run smoothly.

 

[Lyxen]

My big concern is what will happen to D&D Beyond. I've invested a fair bit of money into it now, and I use it for quite a number of things to help ease making my own D&D adventure content run smoothly.

Again, only a wild guess, but unless 5e starts doing really badly in the coming 2 years, they will not kill the golden goose, there will be a few clarifications, some options will be pruned out and others added, so overall the game will be a bit more streamlined than today, but no major change and certainly no incompatibilities, which means that, in turn, it should not be too hard for DDB to survive the change. And the same thing with the other digital implementations. They are a big part of what makes the D&D ecosystem work, and again it would be very foolish for WotC to make them suffer too much, they would be hit by the backlash.

 

[DEFCON 1]

There's probably a lot of minor things in the game that at the time they wrote and released back in 2014 they thought it was going to be important for balance and/or fun reasons. But now over time they (like all of us people on boards such as this) have probably realized over the years that their initial instincts were wrong. So now can be the time to fix them.

For instance... warlock patron spells only adding to the warlock's spell list and not given as free always known/prepared spells (as the Cleric's domain spells are.) They probably thought the really minimalist Spells Known was going to be an important balancing point, but I think we all know at this point that giving Warlocks a couple more Spells Known is not going to be any big issue. And it allows them to actually have the spells of their Patron.

Likewise of course are the Ranger pets... which they've been jiggering with for years now. I think they now know just like we do that letting a beastmaster's companion attack in addition to the Ranger themself (so that the player gets "two actions" each round right from the beginning) is not the big roadblock they originally thought it would be (either for power or for simplicity.) It's what Beastmaster players really wanted from the get-go, and it's not nearly the difficult hardship they originally thought it might have been.

Throw in things like cleaning up the Weapon chart... putting more available interesting and varied Actions in the monster statblocks besides just weapon/natural weapon attacks... rebalancing all the Feats, plus making the idea of 1st level Supernatural Gifts a Variant normal part of character creation... more Legendary monsters... etc. etc... and at the end of the day we will be a Revision that characters originally made with the first PHB can still be played in, but a lot of the niggly details that tended to get house ruled away will be fixed. And I for one would be happy to see it (because anything new that got changed that I didn't like... I still have the old 5E way memorized and stuck in my head, so there ain't no issue in sticking with what worked.)

 

[Stormonu]

Again, only a wild guess, but unless 5e starts doing really badly in the coming 2 years, they will not kill the golden goose, there will be a few clarifications, some options will be pruned out and others added, so overall the game will be a bit more streamlined than today, but no major change and certainly no incompatibilities, which means that, in turn, it should not be too hard for DDB to survive the change. And the same thing with the other digital implementations. They are a big part of what makes the D&D ecosystem work, and again it would be very foolish for WotC to make them suffer too much, they would be hit by the backlash.

Well, the thing that would concern me is if they release 5.5/6E versions of the PHB & MM. If that would then make the originals unavailable in Beyond, I'd be mighty unhappy. From past experience, I haven't seen D&D's electronic fare continue to support retired product (other than PDF).