WotC has posted a video discussing initial feedback on the One D&D Druid/Paladin playtest, along with survey results from the Expert playtest. Some highlights for discussion:
Druid: The developers recognize that the template version of wild shape is contentious. If they retain this approach, they would plan to add flexibility to those templates. If they revert to monster stat blocks, they might allow Druids to choose a limited number of options, with a default selection provided.
Paladin: The new version of smite is still intended to work with critical hits. If ranged smite persists, its damage may be adjusted through the internal balance/playtesting process.
Ranger: The updated Ranger scored very well in the playtest. Some players did miss the choice of options in the Hunter subclass.
Bard: All of the Lore Bard's features scored welll, but the overall subclass rating was mediocre. They attribute this to the loss of Additional Magical Secrets, which many saw as the key attraction of this subclass.
Rogue: The change to limit sneak attack to the Rogue's own turn scored poorly. The developers generally like moving actions to a player's own turn to keep the game moving quickly, but in this case, the change doesn't seem to be worth the loss of tactical flexibility.
Feats: With the exception of epic boons, all the feats in the Expert packet scored well. The developers are still loking at written feedback for fine tuning.
Conspicuously not mentioned were the Arcane/Divine/Primal spell lists, which were the focus of a lot of discussion during the Bard playtest.
Again it's one thing to say something. It's another to write the mechanics.
That's where the trouble starts.
The number one problem with the nonmagical spellless ranger is resources. Spells have a resource. So the mechanic would need a resource and no one can agree whether its time, gp, environment, or X/day.
Same thing with Wild Shape. At a certain point you have to write the mechanic and then a chunk of the community is very unhappy. Templates, PHB statblocks, or MM statblocks.
I did write the mechanics, and for me they're resourceless (outside of the poison variants). Balance comes from being unable to use them repetitively on the same person.
IIRC (its been like 3 months since I opened that excel sheet tbh), I had it set that a poultice fades within 1d4 hours or when the character goes to sleep, whichever comes first. (This isn't a Rest based system either, for context)
Amd while that's just a long way of saying X/Day, I think the logic in it is more sound and makes a better blend of the fiction with the mechanics than just arbitrarily limiting it.
After all, the Poultice as a Ranger specific ability should reflect that its at that level.
If we're going to go out of our way to limit it, or bury it in gathering and crafting mechanics, then it should be accessible by anyone with whatever skills we want to tie into those mechanics.
If we're going to keep it as one of the things a Ranger can do and no one else, then limiting it is just falling for the same tired trap of "martials have to be realistic" that nobody likes except caster mains.
It would not be difficult to give fans of spellcasting rangers (and paladins) exactly what they like right now, while also giving the people who like rangers without magic an option that they currently don't have.
It’s impossible without making half-caster subclasses or otherwise rebuilding how subclasses, Spellcasting, or both, work.
1/3 casting is frankly terrible. Look at the two existing examples. One is good because it gives quite a bit more than the casting, and the other is generally considered “fine” at best.
so, you either get a rangers subclass that is just “the spells ranger” and that’s thier entire archetype, or you have hard to balance subclasses that try to fit a whole identity alongside the Spellcasting. There isn’t room in a subclass for that.
Just burn slots to make your potions or whatever, or figure out an alt system that can swap in for Spellcasting without making subclasses not work.
3e and 3.5e were financially successful. They got replaced.
Financial success is an irrelevant standard. Every edition has financially succeeded. We have actual statements from former WotC employees explicitly to that effect. "Many of us think it is a great version" is subjective and squishy: How many? What proportion? Is it thoroughgoing, top-to-bottom, every-single-piece-is-perfect "great," or is it (as I'm almost certain you will agree) a hell of a lot more nuanced than that? If it is nuanced, what parts were good, and what parts weren't?
That last thing is where this is a criticism. 5e went overboard in a number of ways, and even its actual designers admitted this--years ago, in some cases. Mike Mearls explicitly said that he regrets how the Fighter ended up, for example. More in its thematics than mechanics, but still. The Ranger, as exemplified by this very thread, has been a Problem Point for basically the edition's entire run, and both the Sorcerer and Warlock have been highly controversial, and are the poster children for "they gave the design ONE SHOT and then eliminated it, never to see the light of play again."
It's one thing to say, "Hey, they did a good job overall." It's quite another to say, "because it sold well, we can be certain that everything in it was a good job." That's not true, but it is the only way in which your reply actually rebuts my central claim: a large minority of 5e's flaws can be directly traced to it throwing babies out with bathwater in its ruthless effort to be "traditional" über alles. (Note the quotes--many of these "traditions" only date back to 3rd edition.)
WotC has stated many times why they are updating 5e: they like it, it's very popular, but the culture evolves and the game must evolve with it, so they are adaptations.
I did not use the word "financial" so that is a straw man argument, my statement was "incredibly successful." Financially, yes, far more so than any other version of the game, but also in terms of widespread popularity, name recognition, etc. I also don't think that WotC is as slavishly wedded to tradition as you suggest.
Your post argues that 5e has a history of killing superior design ideas. I don't think that's true; when I look at the stuff that didn't make it into 5e or out of UA, I mostly agree with why things were dropped. 5e's enduring, phenomenal popularity suggests that WotC have been making generally good calls.
And when we suggest that classes have been "problem points," that is really relative to the edition. Compared to past editions, 5e has excellent class balance. We might complain that monks feel underpowered, but I'm playing one right now and it is fine. It could use a bit more, and I have argued for that, but it isn't an embarrassment. It just needs some tweaks. Rangers are unspectacular, but plenty of folks play them and do fine; in fact, with the tweaks offered by Tasha's, the consensus is that rangers are in a pretty good spot.
Have to agree for the most part, the reason why the druid and ranger both feel off and don't work is due to the deletion of things or underused or half-baked rules for terrain, and crafting. This could be a way to put in crafting(herbalism ) and go into more with explorations and wilderness survival and environmental things like terrain and such. But this is a complexity that with the current 5e will not work as they wanted it streamlined and super easy, which leaves out these classes and also causes others to become just casters or melee classes with some odd mechanics. I suggest like what I did take from some of the older editions and shore up the faults of the current one, adding in the older systems of crafting and survival and explorations to help out those classes.
So it's not perfect then. Which your argument depends upon in order to actually be a rebuttal. Because if it isn't perfect, it is possible for 5e to have faults; and if it has faults, those faults had to come from somewhere. Hence, "well people like it" cannot actually be a rebuttal to "it has flaws, and a solid chunk of those flaws come from X" unless it is followed by "and they like it because there's nothing to dislike in it."
No, it isn't. 4e was financially successful. Believe it or not: every single edition of WotC D&D has outsold the previous edition. 3.5e outsold 3e, 4e outsold 3.5e (indeed, it outsold both combined if I recall correctly), and 5e outsold 4e. The standard is irrelevant if every single edition has met it.
No, it didn't. It has performed better in broadening the game's reach, but every WotC edition has outsold every previous WotC edition. What 4e did not do was meet Hasbro's expectations. But that's not at all the same as not being successful. It did succeed.
Well, that is just a claim with nothing to back it up, so it can also simply be dismissed outright. You would need to first make a case (not just a claim) for this to need to be countered.
Uh...no? I literally gave three examples. But here, since you want them.
The Ranger: Wedded as it is to having to do everything for everyone, it fell into a hole. They had to try to please every single group, to keep up that so-called "traditional" ranger with spellcasting and pets and hunting and terrain and.... And it clearly didn't work. It took them until the Drakewarden to finally get a subclass that wasn't bad.
The Sorcerer: Did you do the D&D Next playtest? This (and the Warlock) were some of the extremely few classes where they tried something new, distinct, different. The playtest Sorcerer was built around spell points (essentially, they only had what are now called "Sorcery Points"), and as they spent from their total SP for the day, they would slowly transform. The example was a Dragon Sorcerer, which would slowly gain defensive and melee bonuses until, if they were out of SP, they had become a fairly tough melee character. This implied a whole host of fascinating subclass ideas, where each would transform into a different kind of being as they spent SP. But this allegedly didn't poll well. According to inside sources (which are, of course, unverifiable), if an option didn't poll over 75% it would be discarded for something that did. And y'know what happened? They never playtested the Sorcerer again. As a result, the class we got is weak, even for a full spellcaster, and doesn't fit together well.
The Warlock: Same deal, except here the idea was that the Warlock would actually make pacts...genuine exchanges, where they would give up some aspect of themselves in order to gain something else. The examples given were fey-related, creepy and yet understandable, and (again) implied a whole host of fascinating background concepts. But it didn't reach the arbitrary polling-approval threshold with the very first packet it appeared, so it was instantly erased, never to be seen again...until we got the Warlock we ended up with, which WotC itself has explicitly said, on more than one occasion, is weak and needs a review.
The "Warlord Fighter": From almost the beginning, WotC promised that there would be support for this. Ignoring their crappy, edition-war rhetoric, they explicitly said that they recognized that this is a valid niche, but believed it was best served by the Fighter. Then, they developed the so-called "Specialties" system, which were (essentially) feat chains you bought into at character creation and which would be doled out to you over time. You could always build your own, but the idea was that this system would act as a second layer on top of subclasses. Subclass would loosely shape your playstyle in a specific direction, and Specialty would focus you in on the particular things you really wanted to do. They went all in for this, and unlike the previous things, they tried to keep it for several packets running...but it just never worked out. Unfortunately, at this point, they were only about a year out from 5e's actual release date, and no longer had the time to experiment with some kind of new replacement, so Specialties were relatively quietly dropped...even though 100% of the effort put into the "Warlord Fighter" had been switched to Specialties. And guess what? After that point, they never mentioned the "Warlord Fighter" nor martial healing again.
Proficiency Dice: Something you may or may not know is that Mike Mearls really loves rolling dice. Lots of them. He just genuinely loves the feel of grabbing a fistful of dice and throwing them to find out what happens. The more dice you roll, the better. Have you ever wondered exactly why it is that Proficiency starts at +2 instead of +1? It's because, originally, it was a proficiency die, and the bonus you got from said die went up (more or less) as proficiency does now. It was just a random bonus instead of a static one (1d4=2.5, 1d6=3.5, 1d8=4.5, 1d10=5.5, 1d12=6.5.) But this didn't poll well with players. The swinginess of the "proficiency die" benefit was not to most players' liking. Yet...despite having been consistently not well-received...it remained the official rules until fairly late in the process, because it was Mearls' baby. They never even axed it completely--it remains as a "variant rule" in the DMG.
The Fighter: As I mentioned before, Mearls explicitly said he regretted how the Fighter ended up. He understood that people wanted a lot of different things from it, but he wished he had been able to give the class more flavor, more distinctiveness, more of a "yes, that's what a Fighter should be." It ended up being an ultra-bland nothing specifically because they were actively courting the most traditionalist parts of D&D's fanbase, and because they were too preoccupied with never rocking the boat rather than producing something good in its own right.
I did not use the word "financial" so that is a straw man argument, my statement was "incredibly successful." Financially, yes, far more so than any other version of the game, but also in terms of widespread popularity, name recognition, etc. I also don't think that WotC is as slavishly wedded to tradition as you suggest.
"Strawman" requires that I be inventing an argument completely unrelated to yours. You did say "successful." I was not tilting at a fake thing. I figured that's what you meant. Making accusations like that when they don't actually apply doesn't do your argument any favors.
You need only look at the spoilered things above to see how WotC has been shackled to "do things the way 3e did it, with some 2e flourishes when possible to court those fans." There's a very good reason a number of people refer to 5e as "AD&D 3rd edition."
Your post argues that 5e has a history of killing superior design ideas. I don't think that's true; when I look at the stuff that didn't make it into 5e or out of UA, I mostly agree with why things were dropped. 5e's enduring, phenomenal popularity suggests that WotC have been making generally good calls.
See above. The pattern was set by the D&D Next playtest. They've only rarely deviated from it since. Psionics, for example, has had several cool ideas, but they never bother to iterate past the initial presentation, so those ideas can never get better.
Also, now who's putting words in whose mouth? I never used the word "superior." If I were actually going to describe it, I would say that the ideas were fresh, exciting, and still in rough-draft form, and thus needing some polish. But because the concepts were too new, too different, they got canned.
And hey, aren't we seeing exactly the same thing with the actual topic of the thread? People responded very negatively to the Druid wildshape limitations, even though those limitations are almost certainly necessary to make the class not super wonky and swerving unbalanced. Tradition (which, as usual, means "how 3e did it") preserved, damn the consequences.
And when we suggest that classes have been "problem points," that is really relative to the edition. Compared to past editions, 5e has excellent class balance.
We might complain that monks feel underpowered, but I'm playing one right now and it is fine. It could use a bit more, and I have argued for that, but it isn't an embarrassment. It just needs some tweaks. Rangers are unspectacular, but plenty of folks play them and do fine; in fact, with the tweaks offered by Tasha's, the consensus is that rangers are in a pretty good spot.
"Not an embarrassment"? Really? That's the standard we're using for "excellent class balance"? Absolutely not. "Excellence" should not mean "you avoided embarrassing yourself." Likewise, "it's playable" is the second-worst (sincere) defense of anything in game design ever, second only to its cousin, "you can have fun with it."
If a piece of game design is so horrifically, awfully bad that it is physically impossible for anyone to enjoy it, then it is so far beyond the pale it has become an actual weapon of psychological warfare. "You can have fun with it" is not something worthy of praise; it is the absolute, rock-bottom, barest minimum for something to be potentially acceptable. "It's playable" is only a hair's breadth higher, since it at least doesn't imply that you've somehow hijacked the player's brain and denied them the ability to feel joy about something. But something legitimately unplayable should never see the light of play; that's what 3e's Truenamer was, and it gets roundly (and rightly) lambasted for being genuinely too mechanically unsound to function, a dubiously unique honor among 3(.5)e options.
And yes, I already recognized Tasha's. It laid the groundwork for the actually-halfway-decent Drakewarden subclass.
Call me a weirdo, but I would create a core ranger that had no spells and move the spells to one or more subclasses. Iconic abilities would be made class abilities, rather than spells.
Do the same thing with paladins.
And for druids, make the templated wildshape the core version of the class and make the Circle of the Moon the subclass that goes digging through the Monster Manual.
This really seems like the obvious way to go to me. I can't fathom why they go the way they do. With subclasses in place, you don't really need to find the best fit "between" two siloed groups of players - you can just give both of them what they want.
It’s impossible without making half-caster subclasses or otherwise rebuilding how subclasses, Spellcasting, or both, work.
1/3 casting is frankly terrible. Look at the two existing examples. One is good because it gives quite a bit more than the casting, and the other is generally considered “fine” at best.
so, you either get a rangers subclass that is just “the spells ranger” and that’s thier entire archetype, or you have hard to balance subclasses that try to fit a whole identity alongside the Spellcasting. There isn’t room in a subclass for that.
Just burn slots to make your potions or whatever, or figure out an alt system that can swap in for Spellcasting without making subclasses not work.
Yes, it would require subclasses to be given more design space. It absolutely could have been done, though. But it's probably not in keeping with OneD&D's mandate to remain 5e compatible.
Bringing back some weight to the Exploration pillar could be done, though!
Can't 90% of Ranger spells be refluffed as non magical? A poultice can be a material component of a spell or a chemical concoction that does exactly the same thing as a spell. They could probably create a spell-less Ranger with one page of adjustment for new spell fluff and a more limited spell list.
But again, if the game isn't happening at the climate/terrain you choose, or DM isn't into the whole survival thing, doesn't that mean ranger still got dead level?
Unless they just provide gerenal bonus like resistance or something .
That is a tough problem for designers to address. If the DM isn't into survival, resource management, traps, combat, or any other piece of (or entire) pillar of play assumed by the game, it is going to reduce the effectiveness and fun of playing certain classes and subclasses. How do game designers address this without chiding DMs on engaging in bad-wrong-fun?
The first thing is to ensure that all classes are able to meaningfully contribute to all pillars of play. I think this is where the designers have been giving most of their attention. The main issue I have with their attempts is that I feel that their is less themetic flavor to the classes because by removing the need to have a certain class, you are spreading competency in all areas to all classes. At higher levels, magic users can basically outshine other classes or negate the need for other class's core thematic abilities. This would be less of an issue if magic wasn't so reliable and safe in D&D. If you had some risk to casting spells, like DCC imposes, then you would more likely want to rely on the thief or ranger to do their things rather than risk a bad result or losing a spell for the day. You still have the option to let magic solve an issue when in dire straits, but it wouldn't be your default choice.
The second thing is to have well designed mechanics for all pillars of play that make it feel more core to the game as well as more interesting to run. Some groups are just not going to be into hex crawls and detailed resource management. I find 4e-inspired group skill challenges are a good way to still make exploration-pillar skills meaningful without have to spend a lot of time on playing through travel, hex by hex, for groups that are not into that.
no it does not need to be perfect, and as I pointed out I am not rebutting your ‘argument’, because you did not make one. You made an assertion and I gave it all the attention it deserved by ignoring it (and whatever you quoted in spoilers now is not even in the post we are in a reply-chain to)
No, it isn't. 4e was financially successful. Believe it or not: every single edition of WotC D&D has outsold the previous edition. 3.5e outsold 3e, 4e outsold 3.5e
