D&D (2024) First playtest thread! One D&D Character Origins.

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

@AcererakTriple6 and I discussed background as providing (part of) the initial ASI years ago it seems.

Yeah. I still prefer that version, but this one is better than the 2014 and Tasha's variant, IMO.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Can I just say I hate the name ardling? While I realize there's probably enough people who made assimar jokes to warrant the name change, ardling just makes me think they're, like, half aardvark or half aardwolf.

Ditto for me, but it also applies to "tiefling". I've always hated that name and thought it was silly since I joined the hobby.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Apparently a lot* of folks since they really want it to go with background instead of floating?

* Edit: Ok, some/several

Probably because now backgrounds are just a container for other potentially floating things.

The default is that after you pick your species, you pick your ASI, skills, tools and languages to represent your background, but you can also pick a pre-built package of those in the form of a background.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I am one of those players, and I really dislike the fixed ASIs by background. Let them float free!

I'll go even more radical. I think you should just get 3 extra ability score points to spend as you will. You want to put them all in one score go ahead. Just one less complication I have to explain to people rolling up their first character.

Attaching them, nominally but not really, to backgrounds is just going to stress out new players for no good reason. They think they're making it simpler for people, and for people who don't really understand or care that these scores are pretty consequential they probably are. But for new players who've ever been anywhere near anything like an RPG before, and know they should probably optimize their numbers for the things they want to do, the nominal but meaningless association of ASIs with backgrounds just adds extra stress and confusion.

 

[SakanaSensei]

Removing explicit half-races is a problem, because some settings make them a distinct culture, e.g. Eberron's Khoravar. It also messes up some of the dragon marked races.

It's also throwing out something that's been part of the game since 1978. May as well throw out the rogue at that point.

You mean the thief, right?

 

[Haplo781]

As I was just saying to a friend, Eberron was amazing in 3e because the world was custom tailored to the details and quirks of the system, down to the smallest details. But then the problem became that editions changed and Eberron was forced to choose between major retcon updates or carving out exceptions to protect its core nature. They went with the latter, and I can't say that was the wrong choice, but it means with every new edition Eberron becomes more of a city in a bottle. Preserved in time against the changed of the ages.

What I'm saying is, Eberron has handled this before and will handle it again.

As for throwing out parts of the game... friend, I don't know how to break this to you, but Rogues were only invented in the year 2000. Before that we had Thieves, and they died so the Rogue could live. As did the Assassin class. We also used to have race-as-class for the non-human races, an entirely different type of multi-classing, alignment limitations on classes, rolls for Wizards to be able to learn a new spell, percentile Strength, and the list goes on.

Lots of long standing game features have been deemed flawed or obsolete and let fall aside in an edition change over. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they live on in spirit, and sometimes people discover they don't miss them all that much. If half-races live on as a cosmetic choice instead of a mechanical differentiator that inspires endless debates about why some crosses get stats and others don't, well, I'll be ecstatic.

Rogue is literally just a renamed and updated thief.

 

[Charlaquin]

It feels like one of the biggest simplifications for chargen would be to do something with the base ability scores - give them out based on class (subclass?) by default, for example.

So now they could skip the determining ability score step. Pick race, pick background, pick class, write down the default class equipment, and you're done.

They kinda do already. The text of each class recommends where to assign your highest and second-highest score, and the standard array gives you a set of scores if you don’t want to generate them yourself.

 

[tsadkiel]

It’s not that farmers have +2 Con by default. It’s that a farmer with +2 Con is one example of a background a character might have. And while you may not want to make a lot of choices at character creation, it cannot be true that you want to make as few as possible, since you want to make one more than they are providing you the opportunity to make. Which is perfectly valid of course.

I'm going to put the ASIs where I want them regardless. Having to pick a background with the boosts I want for the character I want to play, modify an existing background, or write a new one is not making fewer choices than just placing the ASIs directly. At most the fixed ASI by background is a difference in order of operations, but for me it adds work rather than making things easier.

Other brains may differ, but I've got to deal with the brain I've got.

 

[Parmandur]

Were any of these changes things that are unexpected based on recent trends?

Thinking of the future UAs, are there any big things that have been telegraphed about the classes? Or are all of those changes likely much smaller?

I recall Crawfod talking about how he would redo Warlocks from the bottom up to make the Patron more of the primary choice, and roll the pact more into those. I also recall the designers talking about choosing Subclass after Level 1 not really working the way they thought, at all. I think we will see some serious overhauls at least proposed.

 

[Charlaquin]

As I was just saying to a friend, Eberron was amazing in 3e because the world was custom tailored to the details and quirks of the system, down to the smallest details. But then the problem became that editions changed and Eberron was forced to choose between major retcon updates or carving out exceptions to protect its core nature. They went with the latter, and I can't say that was the wrong choice, but it means with every new edition Eberron becomes more of a city in a bottle. Preserved in time against the changed of the ages.

What I'm saying is, Eberron has handled this before and will handle it again.

Yeah, Eberron was very much “what would the world that all of 3.5e’s rules are ‘simulating’ actually look like?”