D&D 5E (2024) In Interview with GamesRadar, Chris Perkins Discusses New Books

[bedir than]

I wonder if they will be crazy and bump the Monk HP to a D10 for the Tank comment.

I don't think WotC is going to change their design principals due to what a journalist writes as a poor summation.

 

[Oofta]

This is weirdly petty, frankly, and it's weird and out of character for you, so I'm not even going to argue with it. I hope your day improves significantly.

So being called "petty" doesn't sit well with you? Huh. Almost like calling the developers cowards and mediocre at design doesn't sit well with other people who actually like the game and appreciate all the work they've done.

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

People, OK. But if a game designer refers to a Melee DPR class as a a Tank, then I'm concerned about the game. Did they just give the monk a new role, or is he simply clueless?

Classes are not reduced to only one role anymore. They can be built any number of ways. But the monk will be able to tank or DPR. Just like the barbarian can. Just differently.

 

[Mirrorrorrim]

Gonna be perfectly honest, Perkins concluding that people don't want to move away from existing 5e based on the stuff they tested and didn't think people would accept is....not encouraging. Like at all. That's blatantly bad statistical inference. It would be like presuming that, because you put out a collection cup for rainwater on days where there was no expected precipitation three times, that means that it rains if and only if the forecast says it will.

Instead, the correct statistical inference here is that those specific changes were not popular. And it's really not hard to see why--a number of them futzed about with deep and fundamental mechanics like critical hits or the like, rather than addressing any of the far more relevant areas of 5e's rules that could have been updated.

Perkins seems to understand my preferences. I want a refined 5e that lets me use all my 5e (plus 3rd party) content. I don't want a completely new D&D from Wizards. If I want something different, I'll buy from someone different.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Gonna be perfectly honest, Perkins concluding that people don't want to move away from existing 5e based on the stuff they tested and didn't think people would accept is....not encouraging. Like at all. That's blatantly bad statistical inference. It would be like presuming that, because you put out a collection cup for rainwater on days where there was no expected precipitation three times, that means that it rains if and only if the forecast says it will.

Instead, the correct statistical inference here is that those specific changes were not popular. And it's really not hard to see why--a number of them futzed about with deep and fundamental mechanics like critical hits or the like, rather than addressing any of the far more relevant areas of 5e's rules that could have been updated.

Yeah this is partly what I'm discussing when I say they could have tried a lot harder - what was absolutely striking about most of the proposed changes to 5E, especially the early ones, was that they were ones "nobody had asked for".

And I think it's pretty fair to say that - I'm looking at a fairly broad selection of people who have suggested things could be improved or change with 5E - here, a couple of subreddits, several Discords, YouTubers, etc.

There are a lot of complaints that come up frequently - but stuff like critical hits, how grappling works exactly, stuff like that, absolutely just not stuff that came up. I think the only thing in terms of general rules, that 2024 addressed as an issue was lack of transparency/easy to understand rules/DCs re: social activities - they are present in 5E, but they're hidden away in the DMG, and 2024 seems to moving them player-side.

With classes it's been a wildly mixed bag, but again I'd say the general theme we saw was that about 50% of the proposed changes fit under the heading "nobody said that was a problem", where stuff that people do - rightly or wrongly - complain about, was largely ignored. We've saw bizarre, perverse changes like the Rogue's Sneak Attack being nerfed to hell, and it's like, who the hell thought that was needed? Rogue was already one of the lower-DPR classes and harder to "max out" DPR-wise than most classes, and WotC thought it needed to be worse?! Or the more recent "Oh we need to nerf 2024 Paladins but also not give people any reason to not play fully-compatible 2014 Paladins" - just wild weird stuff. Or the truly demented "Wizards aren't flexible enough, let's let them change out any spell they want by taking 10 minutes, as many times as they like per day!" - any other class that'd be like 1/Short rest, or INT mod/Long Rest, but not, it's Wizards so it has to be free and on-demand!

To be clear, I'm not saying that overall 2024 isn't going to be an improvement, because my guess is (and sadly it has to be a guess as we have absolutely no idea how much of the playtest they took onboard, and how much random stuff they'll have added, or just ignored, in the intervening period) it will be, overall, a somewhat slight improvement mechanically, and probably with much prettier and better-organised books (and an overall much better DMG). Ironically I expect by far the biggest improvement in rules to be the non-playtested MM. It'll be interesting to see which PHB rules actually "made it", and how many of them genuinely improve the game, rather than just shuffling things around.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Classes are not reduced to only one role anymore. They can be built any number of ways. But the monk will be able to tank or DPR. Just like the barbarian can. Just differently.

Will it though? The playtest Monk didn't seem like it could be build as a tank any more than the current 5E Monk can be. Likewise the playtest Barbarian. In fact, the latter seemed to be less capable of as a tank than a 2014 Bear Barb. On what basis do you make these assumptions?

 

[bedir than]

People, OK. But if a game designer refers to a Melee DPR class as a a Tank, then I'm concerned about the game. Did they just give the monk a new role, or is he simply clueless?

As the word tank wasn't part of a quote from Perkins the insistence that he's clueless because of a thing he never said is a problem.

 

[Parmandur]

WotC had message boards back then. There were a lot of play testers on them. The designers never came out and said that the sorcerer was rejected. They said, if I remember correctly, that we were unhappy with the class being OP. Then we didn't see the sorcerer for a while, then we got a 3e version. 5e was rushed at the end, so I think the designers ran out of time.

There were a lot of people, sure, but that's not a representative sample: and we know from the recent surveys thst the 3E-style Sorcerer is, st least, well regarded by the player base at large. I don't think it is much of a mystery why the 3E Sorcerer is in the game, but they changed the Bard.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

and we know from the recent surveys thst the 3E-style Sorcerer is, st least, well regarded by the player base at large.

Do we? Could you provide a source? I'm going on memory, but didn't it have by the far the lowest approval rating of any 5E class or something, in the recent surveys?

 

[Parmandur]

Do we? Could you provide a source? I'm going on memory, but didn't it have by the far the lowest approval rating of any 5E class or something, in the recent surveys?

Trying to find the thread with the relevant UA feedback right now didn't fit in my Lunch break, but the numbers were solid: they didn't do much back and forth for Sorcerer.