D&D General The Resurrection of Mike Mearls Games.

[Shardstone]

A real quick summary:

• Wild shape is, IME, what makes many people want to play a druid.
• In practice, it creates a huge pool of extra hit points that makes druids weirdly durable.
• Wild shape damage also lags at high levels.
• Because the druid is a full caster, we don't have a big power budget for subclasses.
• All of that together means that circle of the moon packs a ton of core functionality that anyone who likes wild shape wants. It makes designing alternatives difficult.

I'm really looking forward to the 2024 refresh of the druid. I know the ranger and monk get a lot of attention, but my experience working on subclasses showed me that the druid is the most difficult class to work with.

The last two points were the big ones for me as a 5E designer. Moon Druid being the template to base other wild shapes off of, and creating Druids that use different monster stat blocks at higher level, or custom blocks, or blocks with alternations was a big design shift in my mind too.

Sometimes, I feel as if Martials need to be given more base power so that way Fullcasting doesn't take up so much design space. Or, if spellcasting could be turned into subclass design space somehow. I find people are much more interested in subclasses as a larger source of power, with casting being a slightly smaller version.

For example, you could only ever have once 6th-8th level spell slot, and maybe those come from Subclass and not the main class, etc.

 

[comrade raoul]

I'm planning on doing that! Working on figuring out a good streaming set up. A few projects are ahead of it in the queue right now, but once those are cleared I'd love to start doing design streams again.

After all these years, I continue to hold out hope that at least one of those projects involves FIGHT BATTLE!!!

 

[Shardstone]

Also @mearls more Psyker when?!

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

What is the militant, a new class?

 

[Shardstone]

What is the militant, a new class?

He is making an Odyssey project, which is basically D&D if levels 1-10 were mathed out to be what vanilla 1-5 are. The Militant is the 1-10 "cleric" replacement. A 10th level Militant = a 5th level Cleric.

 

[overgeeked]

I'm planning on doing that! Working on figuring out a good streaming set up. A few projects are ahead of it in the queue right now, but once those are cleared I'd love to start doing design streams again.

Odd question, maybe. But at some point you mentioned a quick combat resolution mechanic. Any chance of that seeing the light of day?

 

[mearls]

Odd question, maybe. But at some point you mentioned a quick combat resolution mechanic. Any chance of that seeing the light of day?

Yes! I'm waiting until the 2024 updated PHB, though, since the core of the system connects to each character class.

 

[overgeeked]

Yes! I'm waiting until the 2024 updated PHB, though, since the core of the system connects to each character class.

Sweet. Would I be close if I guessed it’s a kind of group check with class-specific resource spends or drains based on the results?

 

[Scribe]

Reddit.

Ah, that's only a step above Twitter to me, easily dismissed.

 

[mearls]

Sweet. Would I be close if I guessed it’s a kind of group check with class-specific resource spends or drains based on the results?

Yes! That approach makes it easier to zero in on what each character has at stake.