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."

Claim Unearthed Arcana now! - D&D Beyond

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

 

[Maxperson]

Or is it Ice cream is good, and Steak is evil?

Steak is good and fake meat is evil.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I see Eberron as far more "different" than "objectively better", but as I've said before, the story of a setting is more important to me than how easily it facilitates a special group of player-controlled heroes running around.

Just more proof of how out of step I am, I guess.

I know that if I told my players and all future possible players that the story of the world and novels is more important than their characters are, I'd probably have a much harder time finding people to play with.

 

[Maxperson]

Levistus didn't say that Eberron's design said the other settings were bad; they said that Eberron looked at the stuff that was bad in other settings and tried to fix it.

That stuff being bad, though, is also subjective and not fact. Therefore Eberron fixes nothing. It's just different.

No D&D setting is perfect, and they all have a lot of flaws. For instance, in the Realms, there are so many super-high level NPCs around that the PCs often feel insignificant next to them.

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. No PC has ever felt that way in my game despite those NPCs being around. The NPCs aren't a flaw. DM's running them incorrectly is the flaw.

As someone, somewhere online once joked, in Greyhawk, when you reach level 10, you become the ruler of your own keep and lands. In the Realms, when you reach level 10, you do fetch-quests for Elminster.

Yes. It's a joke and not at all true unless the DM is a bad one.

So Eberron has made it so that NPCs are not very high level and don't dominate the world, and NPC actions aren't going affect the world in game-changing ways--that's what the PCs are there for.

So it "fixes" a problem that doesn't exist unless the DM creates it. Or maybe it's that Eberron is just different.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

That stuff being bad, though, is also subjective and not fact. Therefore Eberron fixes nothing. It's just different.

It fixes the problem that metaplots often create by ruining settings. Eberron doesn't have that problem because it (wisely) has no "canon" beyond what's printed in the RPG books and the timeline never officially advances.

DM's running them incorrectly is the flaw.

And that possible problem is even less likely in Eberron because it doesn't have high-level characters capable of solving the problems the PCs should be dealing with. That's an improvement on the Forgotten Realms and other settings.

 

[Incenjucar]

Some people like playing in a world where they're trying to catch up to veritable rock stars. The whole point of having diverse settings is to meet diverse preferences. I have my own beef with FR and and things like the intro adventure where Elminster plays with a puppy to disguise how he's helping you solve your adventure, but some folks eat that stuff up and that's fine.

 

[Li Shenron]

Picking your subclass for a cleric is picking who you worship.

That's just not true.

This was only briefly the idea followed during 5e playtest, when a Cleric would choose a sort of deity archetype as a subclass.

In 5e the domain has been a representation of your duties within a religion. Clerics of Apollo might split duties between healers (Life), oracles (Knowledge) and theologians who attune themselves to what their deity represents (Light).

That's not to say this is the only way to make Cleric subclasses, but it's the 5e design choice.

 

[Maxperson]

It fixes the problem that metaplots often create by ruining settings. Eberron doesn't have that problem because it (wisely) has no "canon" beyond what's printed in the RPG books and the timeline never officially advances.

While I don't like the Spellplague or Sundering, there are those that did. "Ruining" a setting 1) is subjective and not objective, and 2) didn't require a new setting to "fix." They could have just reprinted the old Realms, and Greyhawk and some others have never been updated.

And that possible problem is even less likely in Eberron because it doesn't have high-level characters capable of solving the problems the PCs should be dealing with. That's an improvement on the Forgotten Realms and other settings.

Solutions should fix problems. Solutions in search of problems that don't exist should be avoided. If the "problem" requires a DM to go out of his way to create it, it doesn't need to be "fixed." Especially by a new setting. That's just overkill when a paragraph explaining to DMs how to run those NPCs would be sufficient.

Eberron does not fix anything from any other settings. It was not(unless you can supply citations) created to do so. Eberron was just a nifty new setting that does things differently.

 

[Neonchameleon]

In order for something to be good, it has to be in contrast with something bad. Eberron's take on religion is good because that of the Forgotten Realms and similar settings is overly simplistic and bad. It's not enough for Eberron to just exist as its own thing when it shows that the typical approach is bad and could use improvement. I wouldn't be surprised in the Dawn War Pantheon being more nuanced and interesting than the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance's takes on religion was a consequence of the designers looking at how Eberron used religion and trying to apply that to a setting where the gods definitely exist.

The thing here is that the Dawn War Pantheon's approach to religion is almost diametrically opposed to that of Eberron. Eberron starts out by assuming that the gods never manifest and might not even exist, but there are a collection of them that are worshipped and that the faith provides the power. What sort of gods would be worshipped? (And you've got the classic Greek/Roman "these two gods are really the same", fitting the gods of other cultures to theirs). Eberron theology is basically polytheistic of the sort we saw in ancient societies in the real world where we're pretty sure that the gods do not in fact exist.

Meanwhile in the Dawn War pantheon the gods are a fact. They exist. Atheism is basically non-viable. The pantheon was made up about half of pre-existing deities (although The Raven Queen, Erathis, Zehir, Melora, Ioun, and Torog were all new). It then starts with them as powerful people who are forced to work together by outside threats - and then gives most of them relationships with each other. Whereas Eberron is based on the Polytheistic pantheons we've seen in the real world the Dawn War takes pretty huge and obvious inspiration from the Greek Gods inside the stories. They start from fundamentally incompatible points but both work because they commit.

Meanwhile the FR Gods either just sort of turn up or are functionaries put there by Ao to do their jobs and who get kicked out of heaven if they forget. (The Avatar Trilogy might be the worst divine worldbuilding I've seen anywhere).

The Dragonlance deities and setup isn't egregiously bad in the way I find the FR ones to be. And there's no Wall of the Faithless. The problem there is that Paladine is monumentally wrong on the nature of good and is supposedly the leader of the gods of Good. (No, the Kingpriest of Ishtar was not good, no the "balance between good and evil" is not something that needs to be maintained).

Hmm... I think a good fix for Dragonlance while keeping everything cannon is to declare Paladine to be Lawful Neutral - but who has decided to join the gods of Good because he knows that otherwise Takhsis would take over and leads them either because he's the strongest or because if he wasn't allowed to he'd take his ball and go home and Takhsis would win.

 

[Remathilis]

Do we have to argue Dragonlance deity morality in EVERY thread on this board?!

 

[Faolyn]

I see Eberron as far more "different" than "objectively better", but as I've said before, the story of a setting is more important to me than how easily it facilitates a special group of player-controlled heroes running around.

Just more proof of how out of step I am, I guess.

I'm reading an old review for a Deadlands book over on Fatal and Friends, and it has a few choice paragraphs on metaplots:

Let's talk about metaplot for a moment.

Metaplot, in RPG terms, is the overarching narrative of a game line. That there's going to be a connecting story through all the adventures and supplements of a game, usually regardless of the actions of the players in individual campaigns. You don't see them much nowadays, because they're a bit of a codependent concept to another very 90's idea (the supplement treadmill), but the main reason they've fallen out of favor is because a metaplot ends up meaning that you have to play your campaign the way the designers want you to, instead of how you want to do it.

It wasn't uncommon at the time to be presented with major villain NPCs that the players would be expected to constantly butt up against, but were unable to defeat due to that NPC being needed to trigger a major plot point down the road. Or for one book to have a major plot point hinge on a factoid from a different book you might not own or be able to get. Or having certain character types invalidated because of changes to said group that happened in one adventure, with every book released after that working off that idea.

(The most infamous version of that last one would probably be when White Wolf killed off the entire Ravnos clan in one book the oWoD, meaning that if you were playing a Ravnos you were either one of the last ones left on the planet and were pretty much on your own from then on out, or dead due to metaplot.)

When you're dealing with metaplot that goes through a game line, you (the GM) have a problem. See, a metaplot means that a publisher has a story they're going to tell, and your group is going to be going along for the ride.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for story in RPGs. Hell, stories are the point of RPGs. But what I'm talking about isn't emergent storytelling, it's about railroading. To wit, it's about having to bend your campaign around the tidbits revealed piecemeal through supplements instead of being able to pick and choose, and the story you're telling with a game not the one you, the GM, wants to tell, but the one the game writers want you to tell.

For example, let's say that you're playing a modern-day campaign set in Boston. You're setting your campaign there not because it's the default city for the game in question, but because it's where your group happens to live. But then in one published adventure, Boston gets nuked, and from that point on every supplement works off the assumption that Boston is gone, period. So now you have two general options:

1) You can play that as it lays. Now you have to rework your campaign around the fact that everything you'd established in the campaign is gone, forcing you to pretty much start over.

2) Ignore it, and keep playing the campaign as you were before this happened, meaning that any official supplements that came out after that were either useless or would require work on your part to shoehorn them into your campaign, which now deviated from the core game line assumptions.

Now, clearly I'm oversimplifying here, but you get my point: games with heavy metaplot are a real pain to deal with as a GM and as players.

This is pretty much how I always felt, even back in the days before I truly understood what meta-plots were--I couldn't afford to buy every Ravenloft product and had no internet access the vast majority of the time, then I read the Book of S____ netzine series and where the &$@! did Necropolis come from? Where did these new classes come from and where did the old classes go? Everything had been changed and I had no idea how or why.

See, meta-plots are plenty fun if all you're doing is reading the setting like it's a novel or a fanfic and can afford to keep up with it. But if you're actually trying to play in the setting, they're terrible. Someone in corporate you've never even met, let alone gamed with, makes a decision and you have to change your entire game to either go along with it or rewrite everything new that comes out for the setting, or simply not buy the upcoming books, which is bad for the game.

It literally is objectively better to not have metaplots because it doesn't disrupt the games of potentially thousands of players. You might not think it's as much fun to read, but it literally is better for playing--and these are games for playing, not novels for reading.