D&D (2024) New One D&D Playtest Document: 77 Pages, 7 Classes, & More!

There's a brand new playtest document for the new (version/edition/update) of Dungeons of Dragons available for download! This one is an enormous 77 pages and includes classes, spells, feats, and weapons.

Unearthed Arcana Playtest

Unearthed Arcana Playtest Materials Get Unearthed Arcana playtest content, try it out in your game, and provide feedback! Check back regularly for ...

www.dndbeyond.com

In this new Unearthed Arcana document for the 2024 Core Rulebooks, we explore material designed for the next version of the Player’s Handbook. This playtest document presents updated rules on seven classes: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue. This document also presents multiple subclasses for each of those classes, new Spells, revisions to existing Spells and Spell Lists, and several revised Feats. You will also find an updated rules glossary that supercedes the glossary of any previous playtest document.

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[Pedantic]

Like telling them in a book literally called Worlds of Design?

If only they did that...

I don't think a paid design diary is the ideal place to make the case for your product, you'd sort of expect that to be something done inside the product itself, plus the whole Orcus situation makes it very clear they definitely had some weird priorities in how they got to daily use fighter abilities.

Regardless, my real point is that there was a burden of persuasion here and they could have done better making a case for their vision. They simply didn't really put in much work to shifting the commonplaces of a bunch of their audience. If nothing else, that should be evidenced by all the explaining and justifying fans found themselves doing in the edition war years.

 

[Vaalingrade]

If only they could have made that horse drink after leading them to the water...

 

[DEFCON 1]

My equipment list just has a main gauche with its own properties, just like everything else on the list does.

Yeah, I've seen a lot of various cool "extended equipment lists" available for people to pick up and think it's great if it gets folks what they are looking for.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, I've seen a lot of various cool "extended equipment lists" available for people to pick up and think it's great if it gets folks what they are looking for.

Yeah, I spent a good deal of time putting mine together, mostly as a consolidation of various lists from multiple sources, with homebrew to fill in the gaps. Covers every time period I could think of.

 

[TwoSix]

That's a silly way to formulate the complaint. The disappointed user there was expecting that kind of diegetic grounding/simulation and ability design, and didn't get it. You had player who didn't even have the language to ask for anything else, because that was normative at the time, and a completely implicit, assumed design goal. If the game wanted to sell them something else, it had a lot more groundwork to do.

Very fair. I learned an awful lot about game design in the first few years of the Edition Wars, but it was definitely not commonplace in 2008, even on ENWorld. Understanding that a lot of martial powers were metagame plot coupons (as opposed to arcane/divine powers which were obviously more diegetic) was a bridge too far even for those who were mostly simulationist by acclimation. (That is to say, they were simulationist because that's how popular TTRPGs had always been presented at that point. Most people on here who argue for simulationist goals are making that choice based on positive preference.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

And that's fine, if you want a game where mechanical choices are driven by narrative and story beats. But a lot of people don't.

Violating causality between player decision making and character action is about the worst immersion-sin in my personal experience, but it's variable tastes all the way down.

They were.

But that ironically didn't fit the narrative that was formulated that they were trying and failing at 3e's simulationism and was therefore bad and wrong.

Yeah, I get why some people want more tightly tethered player choice to character choice. Nothing wrong with that preference.

I don't think you are doing this, but what I don't like is when people refuse to evaluate 4e under the paradigm that makes things make sense. If you look at it under X (abstract player button martial powers, etc.) everything makes pretty good sense. If you look at it under Y paradigm (HP are only meat points and you are shouting wounds closed, etc.) then the game would be not as good.

People can certainly say they don't like X and therefore didn't like the game. But don't insist on Y and make these silly arguments that it isn't good because Y leads to bad things. We know that now, so use X or don't go past that.

Yeah, 4e did a terrible job IMO telling you what they were trying to do, let alone why we should want it.

I think this is true. 4e could have been much more explicit about abstract powers, effects based and re fluffing prone and the like, HP as not only meat points, the assumption that the rules are PC oriented and not meant to be used for anything other than resolving challenges for PCs, DC level tables and the assumption that the challenges would be narratively different as the level went up to reflect the DC, etc.

4e was a radical change but at the same time tied down by D&Dism as well. HP could have been renamed to Heroic stamina Points or whatever to reflect their original intention and 4e use, etc.

I'm not even sure the designers really fully grasped the paradigm shift needed to really make the game hum when it came out. But we know now and think if you are ok with that mindset, it's a decent game and very consistent and "sensical".

 

[Shardstone]

snip At some point... isn't that enough? Does the game itself have to to make that call for you or can you just make that call on your own?

This has been on my mind for a while.

I'm young, 29, have only been DMing frfr this edition. It seems to me that the game has always told us to use it as a guideline to create our own content for our own table. But it seems somewhere along the way, people just screw that, we all have to play the SAME game the SAME way and if you want to homebrew or create anything you have to spend YEARS proving to the entire world that its not busted trash or else why even make it?

It's so backwards to me. This is a game where most tables create homebrew worlds, but somehow, adding in new weapons, modifying spells, tailoring the rest and encounter paradigms to your table, etc all kind of got put in the "Only amateurs do this" bucket. Like, if I'm not playing the game RAW and making the most minute of modifications then I'm a bad DM and don't know what I'm doing.

What happened to the free and experimental spirit that used to define D&D? Are people still so traumatized by the 3E era that they just refuse to make the game their own? It's even right in the PHB. Rulings over rules is meant to let you take what they give you and fine-tune it or remodel it to your taste.

Oh well. I guess we have to accept at some point that the contemporary DM is NOT a game designer, just a consumer, and because critical thinking and creativity are penalized in western culture due to an overfocus on capitalistic growth, we just have to complain endlessly about small "problems" that we were explicitly told are left for us to solve ourselves.

One man's creative challenge is another's gamebreaker.

 

[Shardstone]

Yeah, I spent a good deal of time putting mine together, mostly as a consolidation of various lists from multiple sources, with homebrew to fill in the gaps. Covers every time period I could think of.

I'll never understand why someone with your experience and desire to create so relentlessly crusades against mainstream 5E. I get not being the target audience anymore, but my man, have they not endowed you with the skills necessary to create the D&D you've always wanted to play?

 

[Incenjucar]

Very briefly, being able to take the additional time to change the game and find people willing to deal with your personal homebrew is a luxury that tends to get harder and harder to access over time. The older you get, the more precious your hours become, especially now that the internet gives us so many additional things to be doing with our time.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, I get why some people want more tightly tethered player choice to character choice. Nothing wrong with that preference.

I don't think you are doing this, but what I don't like is when people refuse to evaluate 4e under the paradigm that makes things make sense. If you look at it under X (abstract player button martial powers, etc.) everything makes pretty good sense. If you look at it under Y paradigm (HP are only meat points and you are shouting wounds closed, etc.) then the game would be not as good.

People can certainly say they don't like X and therefore didn't like the game. But don't insist on Y and make these silly arguments that it isn't good because Y leads to bad things. We know that now, so use X or don't go past that.




I think this is true. 4e could have been much more explicit about abstract powers, effects based and re fluffing prone and the like, HP as not only meat points, the assumption that the rules are PC oriented and not meant to be used for anything other than resolving challenges for PCs, DC level tables and the assumption that the challenges would be narratively different as the level went up to reflect the DC, etc.

4e was a radical change but at the same time tied down by D&Dism as well. HP could have been renamed to Heroic stamina Points or whatever to reflect their original intention and 4e use, etc.

I'm not even sure the designers really fully grasped the paradigm shift needed to really make the game hum when it came out. But we know now and think if you are ok with that mindset, it's a decent game and very consistent and "sensical".

Absolutely. The issues as I see them are 1) making the game about X and not explaining it is a problem, and 2) replacing the #1 RPG with X without being reasonably sure that your customer base evens wants X is a bigger problem. You are telling the people that you want buying your product that they should go elsewhere if they don't want X, without actually telling them.