D&D (2024) One D&D Cleric & Revised Species Playtest Includes Goliath

"In this new Unearthed Arcana for the One D&D rules system, we explore material designed for the next version of the Player’s Handbook. This playtest document presents the rules on the Cleric class, it's Life Domain subclass, as well as revised Species rules for the Ardling, the Dragonborn, and the Goliath. You will also find a current glossary of new or revised meanings for game terms."...

Screen Shot 2022-12-01 at 3.48.41 PM.png


"In this new Unearthed Arcana for the One D&D rules system, we explore material designed for the next version of the Player’s Handbook. This playtest document presents the rules on the Cleric class, it's Life Domain subclass, as well as revised Species rules for the Ardling, the Dragonborn, and the Goliath. You will also find a current glossary of new or revised meanings for game terms."


WotC's Jeremey Crawford discusses the playtest document in the video below.

 

log in or register to remove this ad


log in or register to remove this ad


Is . . . is that a bad thing? I mean, I'm not a huge fan of D&D's giants (they're mostly pretty boring, hopefully Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants changes that), but they definitely have more flavor than "Extra Big Humanoid". "Tall person" just feels even more boring than "tall person with some magical traits".
Usually the Goliath PC will stand out as the largest person in the party, and even the species name itself 'Goliath' strongly implies that these are big folk. It kinda breaks with that if the species self-image is that they're undersized giants. I guess you could play it as a dwarf in a halfling party; temporarliy the biggest one around, but still a dwarf.
 

Levistus's_Leviathan

5e Freelancer
Usually the Goliath PC will stand out as the largest person in the party, and even the species name itself 'Goliath' strongly implies that these are big folk. It kinda breaks with that if the species self-image is that they're undersized giants. I guess you could play it as a dwarf in a halfling party; temporarliy the biggest one around, but still a dwarf.
. . . They're still really tall. And don't look identical to their "True Giant" relatives. Original 5e Goliaths are related to Stone Giants, and they look very different from their distant ancestors. I'd imagine that Fire Goliaths look mostly the same as Stone Goliaths, but with red hair and orange eyes.

This adds more variety.
 


The issue is, people who like the alternative seem to proselytize it.
There's nothing wrong with that, though. People who like a think talk about how the thing is good, and why.

Eberron's religion design is a lot more compatible with D&D, ironically, than 1E/2E's design. That's the key issue with Eberron. Eberron is a setting custom-designed to fit around D&D, specifically 3.XE. 1E and 2E had deeply confused and conflicting ideas about every single to do with deities/divinities. Nothing was consistent, nothing made sense, it was all clearly layers of whimsy from specific designers, many of whom, frankly, hadn't thought anything through, and were just spouting off half-formed thoughts as canon.

This becomes ultra-clear in 2E, with the various FR-centric god list books and Planescape, both of which work incredibly hard to try and square the circle of "How do gods work, actually?". Neither really succeeds, and a huge, huge problem is the repeated insistences from lazily-written power-trip-oriented* material for 1E where the gods definitely physically exist and definitely care about you, personally, mostly in a negative way. They also struggle with the fact that a lot of the gods from 1E have alignments which are wildly at odds with their actions/ethos. Even into 2E though you had designers randomly coming up with absolutely idiotic bollocks like the Wall of the Faithless (something Ed Greenwood has expressed his distaste for repeatedly, I note), which compounded these issues rather than helping with them.

And the amateur-hour approach is a huge problem, because it creates a situation that is both:

A) Incoherent, confusing, and obviously conflicted.

That doesn't work well when "gods are real and you can go bother them" is also true. If gods were just bad-tempered superheroes like in Greek Myth, it might work, but the confused and conflicting designer approaches mean most of them are trying to both be that, and to be some kind of Abrahamic god, and simultaneously trying to be some kind of "spirit of an idea", and it just doesn't work.

and

B) Not compelling or engaging.

Eberron chucked that all away and created a carefully-crafted set of religious/faiths that make sense, don't get in the way of adventuring, and allow for compelling intrigue, religious conflict and so on.

As others have noted, the faiths themselves aren't that amazing (they're not bad, but not amazing), but they're much better designed for D&D than the incoherent and contradictory mess that 1E/2E had. I say this as someone who owns pretty much every 1E/2E book that has anything to do with the gods, note, and who really has themselves tried to square the circle. The best you can do is ignore a lot of it and go with "Gods are just Tulpas".

* = Power-trip because either the DMs brought them in to "teach the PCs a lesson" with a being with completely OP stats, or the PCs killed them (like bedecked in Monty Haul'd magic items and level 30 or whatever) to prove how muy macho they were.
 
Last edited:

Anyways why is WotC so intent on making Ardlings happen? when Aasimar just fit better for the PHB with a long legacy in D&D and multiple settings, and are one of the most popular races.
Ardlings are not Aasimar and despite a whole lot of trying aasimar are not going to happen. They've been around a long time but never even come close to gnomes in popularity.

Meanwhile animal races like the tabaxi, owlin, harengon, etc. have a niche and this is trying to combine them
 

Anyways why is WotC so intent on making Ardlings happen? when Aasimar just fit better for the PHB with a long legacy in D&D and multiple settings, and are one of the most popular races.
Because Furries are way more popular a race-concept than "angel-people". Angel people are pretty far down the list when it comes to "fantasy archetypes people want to play". I mean, they're on the list, sure, but they're far down below stuff like "Animal-person", "Dragon-person", "Devil-person" (who is VERY high up the list) and so on. This is why as noted they've underperformed Gnomes and the like in popularity.

There's a reason very few MMORPGs have an angel-person race, particularly at launch. WoW, for example, has both a devil-person race - Draenei, who are good guys but have horns and hooves and are the same essential race as the Eredar, the main humanoid demons of WoW - and also a devil-person class, the Demon Hunters, elves who have used demonic power to become part-demons themselves so they can fight demons (as you do). They also have both an undead-person race and an undead-person class, I note. And they just added a race/class (very oldskool!) which is dragon-people.
 

Aldarc

Legend
Ardlings are not Aasimar and despite a whole lot of trying aasimar are not going to happen. They've been around a long time but never even come close to gnomes in popularity.

Meanwhile animal races like the tabaxi, owlin, harengon, etc. have a niche and this is trying to combine them
It probably doesn't help that "aasimar" have the name "aasimar." I've had way too many new players ask "WTF is an aasimar?" Devas were IME the easiest iteration of the concept for new players.
 

It probably doesn't help that "aasimar" have the name "aasimar." I've had way too many new players ask "WTF is an aasimar?" Devas were IME the easiest iteration of the concept for new players.
Yeah Tiefling is at least cool to say and it makes sense for the name of a devil-race. It also somehow conjures the idea of Nightcrawler from the X-Men, who is obviously Tiefling-esque.

Aasimar is just a bunch of junk letters jammed together.

Also Tieflings have tended to "give people what they want" re: part-devil people. You want horns and hooves and tails and curses and fire and brimstone? They've pretty much always been at least an option (again 3E being the nadir here). They also had charisma and smarts in the 2E iteration (again 3E messed this up) which made instinctive sense to people's ideas about how a devil-person would be.

Aasimar did NOT give people what they want. People think angels, they think wings. Everything else is distantly behind that. Hell back on the X-Men, the X-Man Angel is defined by what? His wings. AFAIK, there's never been an iteration of Aasimar which had wings, even as an option, and what they have had has mostly been a vague mess of "glowy" powers. Even in 2E they were mess of random stuff and a small, inexplicable amount of Magic Resistance. Also all the stuff they did have was ground already claimed by Paladins and Clerics, very much unlike Tieflings (you might make a case for Warlock kind of claiming similar terrain, but not until 5E and not in a very thorough way).
 

Remove ads

Remove ads

Top