D&D 5E Is Tasha's Broken?

[Zardnaar]

Tasha's cauldron has a lot of OP to broken stuff in it from the custom race, variant class, race and archetype rules and several spells and feats are also up there.

Twilight cleric is also a big one peace is also great and the other subclasses are often better than the phb as well.

The more I see it in play the less I like this book. Didn't get that from Xanathars.

So after seeing it used there's multiple things I don't want used.

Anyway that's just me. Your thoughts?

 

[Shardstone]

Other then twilight cleric, none of that is broken or OP, and twilight cleric has yet to be a problem for me or in any of my games (though I acknowledge others have different experiences).

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I think dump twilight cleric. What the hell is it anyway?

this happens with bloat eventually. They start reaching and include stuff that is not archetypal and just weird or over/underpowered stuff. It’s inevitable.

that said there is a lot of good stuff here. I think the feats are fun, the optional class abilities hurt nothing.

my group dumps floating ASIs and the racial stuff. But spells and feats seem fun.

 

[Ondath]

While Twilight Cleric (rightly) gets the majority of flak, I think magic items that allow non-Warlock spellcasters to increase their spell save DC are also a major sign of power creep. Earlier 5E design direction was adamant on keeping options to increase your save DC limited for full casters, mostly because high DCs can make casters completely overpowered when they target a monster's weak saves. The only exception to this was the Warlock, who got the only magic item that increases save DCs in the form of the Rod of the Pact Keeper, and this was justified by Warlocks having very limited spell slots (and thus needing to make sure that their few spells actually hit when they did).

Come Tasha's, we have magic items for all full casters that increase spell save DCs to various degrees (from only a +1 bonus on uncommon, which is easy to craft if your game uses crafting rules, to a major +3 bonus which can be game-breaking under 5e's bounded accuracy). I can't help but think that these spells were the result of a slew of new designers looking at what magic items they could put in the book and going "Huh, it looks like the old guard made items that increase a Warlock's spell save DC but none for other casters. That's odd, let's just add those!" without thinking why that option was not made available in the first place.

I find many of 5E's aesthetic design choices post Tasha's to be sensible, but I think mechanics-wise the game got really bad after this, from uncounterable signature NPC spells to busted subclasses. While I'm curious to see what kind of an edition this new guard will design once they get to overhaul the entire system in 2024, I get the feeling it won't be the kind of game I'm interested. Luckily for me, the old design principles are still here (and expanded upon in a direction I like in games like Level Up!).

 

[Li Shenron]

Tasha's cauldron has a lot of OP to broken stuff in it from the custom race, variant class, race and archetype rules and several spells and feats are also up there.

Twilight cleric is also a big one peace is also great and the other subclasses are often better than the phb as well.

The more I see it in play the less I like this book. Didn't get that from Xanathars.

So after seeing it used there's multiple things I don't want used.

Anyway that's just me. Your thoughts?

Yes. The book is designed to break 5e and open the gates to a revised edition.

 

[humble minion]

Bits of it are. I wouldn't allow a twilight or peace cleric at my table without some modifications, but they're the obvious ones.

Tasha's is an experimental book. On the player option side of things, Xanathar's was (imho) more about filling in fairly obvious conceptual gaps that wouldn't fit in the PHB because of space restrictions. The non-evil death cleric, the celestial warlock, the swashbuckler and so on. And from a power level, it's pretty conservative. Classes like the Mastermind and Arcane Archer look to me like they were designed very cautiously to the point of being underpowered, presumably WotC was being reeeeeal careful to not introduce too much broken stuff in their very first player-facing supplement. Tasha's get a bit out-there and creative both mechanically and thematically - new uses for wildshape for instance, a big block of quasi-multiclassing feats - and some of the blindfolded darts it hurls miss the mark pretty significantly for mine. That happens when you push the boundaries.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think dump twilight cleric. What the hell is it anyway?

I believe it is meant to be the opposite of the Light Cleric, but without the implication of it being an "evil" subclass had they called it the Darkness Domain cleric or Night Domain cleric (not that those are inherently evil, but there are enough evil stuff in the darkness and at night that it could be misinterpreted). Basically the subclass for all the moon deities and the like. And because there already is the druid's Circle of the Moon they probably didn't want to cause confusion by calling it the Moon Domain either.

Is it the greatest name for deities of the moon? Not particularly, in my opinion... but it was probably the best they could decide on.

 

[Minigiant]

Outside of cleric, no. Maybe wizard too.

That's because cleric and wizard are overturned at base and poorly designed for the subclass system.

What Tasha's is, on the (sub)class side, is forced nonclassical archetypes by people not very inspired about them. That's what kept most of the subclasses from being OP.

 

[Composer99]

I have hitherto not heard of any complaint of Tasha's content being broken other than Twilight cleric.

I've heard of many remarks about how folks feel that the optional rules for handling racial ability score adjustments create for them a sense of ludonarrative dissonance, but that's not the same as something being mechanically broken.

 

[Blue]

I approach this from a different direction. There may be parts of Tasha's, like any book, that I need to review and revise or ban, but Tasha's is too essential to fixing the game to ever think about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Racial ability score flexibility frees us from the tyranny of race/class combos. Now anyone can play any race with any class and make it work. Have a hankering to play a dwarven cleric (a classic combo)? You can without taking a hit compared to the other players. A half-orc wizard, to play against type? Again, go for it. As the character is the only thing under the player control, and this multiplies the race/class options without falling behind other PCs by many, many times.

(And the idea that 1 in 11 gnomes could have a 20 INT, but among all half-orcs in the world there can not be one is ludicrous. Adventurers are already the outliers. 1 in 11 is that with 4d6 drop lowest, the chance that the highest of six rolls is an 18 is 9.3%.)

The ranger needed love, and especially the beastmaster ranger. Here we have workable fixes. One of your core archetypes. The Artificer has been a popular class filling it's own niche for several editions and here's the setting-free one, for those who don't want to buy a whole setting book just for a class. Swap "subclass" for "class" and same goes for the bladesinger.

Talking about players just having their characters, having actual rules permission to reskin your spells for you is another great thematic element.

Now, of the rest some is good, some not as much. Some tables will get great use from the sidekick rules, others from group patrons, others from more advice about Session 0. None of these detract from the game if not needed.

Core book Conjure X spells often slowed things down with multiple additional combatants, now we have Summon X that will only bring in one. As a concept at least, that allows summoners characters without as many slowdowns in combat.

So if you want to rework of ban certain things, more power to you. But to toss out everything in the book because some of it doesn't fit what you want at your table discards a number of gems of the first water that would have improved your game.