D&D 5E The New D&D Book: Tasha's Cauldron of Everything!

dave2008 · Aug 26, 2020

Rygar said:
That is a fair question, and under any other circumstances, I'd agree, but from what I've seen the leadership team on the D&D RPG side is fantastically incompetent.

First there's 4th edition itself, any business that makes that big of a mistake, doubles down on the mistake, then encourages and supports vigilante groups of fans to attack the fans of their previous products on their own forums isn't a business cursed with an abundance of skill.

Then they hinged their product line's entire future on digital product lines, and couldn't recover from losing two engineers. I can't think of any other business with WOTC/Hasbro's market value that isn't able to execute on a business plan because they lost two employees.

Then they tripled down on 4th edition after another company took their customer base, and released essentials, which anyone could've told them wasn't going to bring back all of the customers.

Then they launched 5th edition and still can't figure out they could be making huge amounts of money by releasing frequent periodic content like they did with Dungeon magazine. Instead relying on random people to sell things on a website that the average customer has probably never heard of.

Then they tied themselves to phones/tablets as a poorly supported content delivery platform...failing to notice that "Ebooks" plateaued years earlier at a 20% market penetration. So basically, they decided they weren't going to bother with 4 out of 5 customers.

Then they rejected a sequel to one of their most popular video games by the guy who lead the original (Planescape) when they weren't doing anything with Planescape, had no intention of doing anything with it, and could've just basically received free money.

Then they made a huge amount of noise about player demographics...except they have no way of knowing player demographics since you're not required to self identify when you purchase a D&D book or identify all of the friends you share it with. So how they expected anyone would believe those numbers is mind boggling, anyone with any business sense would say "Guys, wait, no one's going to believe this. It's obvious it's impossible for us to have this data".

I'll also throw in - They still keep repeating the old bit about "TSR failed because campaigns fragmented the market" without any evidence of that. The premise hinges upon every D&D player being required to buy product even if they don't like it, and by removing product lines those players would've bought others. To put it another way, it's saying that every person who bought Birthright would've bought Forgotten Realms if Birthright didn't exist, and no person who bought Birthright also bought Forgotten Realms. It's another example of how they don't have anyone who understands metrics.

Even the Magic the Gathering side demonstrates the same flawed business sense. They decided they needed an intro product for MTG, so they made portal...and it didn't sell. So they made portal 2...and it didn't sell. So they turned the core set into a beginner set...and it stopped selling. So they turned it into an even more beginner set...and it sold even less. Then they cancelled it.

So yes, superficially it might sound like a conspiracy theory, but all available evidence indicates that they really are that clueless and as such, it becomes very plausible that they really don't have any idea why the 4th edition books didn't sell.

This is not evidence, this is speculation and conjecture. Making claims it is evidence is partially what makes it sound like a conspiracy theory. I don't feel like I could have a rational discussion with you, so I will leave it there.

dave2008 · Aug 26, 2020

Parmandur said:
Your question isn't funny in and of itself, but there was a knockdown, drag out fight over this in the pre-reveal thread.

TL;DR this was established in the final print issue of Dragon (with her on the cover, I think) and Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk, both at the end of 3.5 and Eric Mona's involvement with Greyhawk.

It was also mentioned in a 4e Dragon article

Krachek · Aug 26, 2020

I’m glad for a new product.
i hope we will see some part of the UA class variant.
but honestly I have prefer more options on actual classes and subclasses than brand new sub classes.

humble minion · Aug 26, 2020

eyeheartawk said:
And FR is those things?

Nah, I didn't explain myself very well there. FR (and GH, and some of the other early campaign worlds like Mystara) is a bit of a step away from the One Story Per Setting model that LotR embodied and that Dragonlance struggled to escape from. But FR still has a lot of the binary good vs evil stuff baked in, because it was baked into D&D at the time, you know, the age of 'always chaotic evil' in the MM, and the various problematic issues that all the raised way back to the paladin and orphaned baby goblin dilemma back in 2e.

The movement towards more grounded antagonists has mostly been driven by fiction. Eberron is possibly the D&D-iest incarnation of that attitude that occurs to me off the top of my head. There's not really much emphasis in Eberron on cacklingly evil for the sake of evil organisations or overlords trying to rule the world. No Zhentarim, no Cult of the Dragon, or Szass Tam, etc etc. Hell, in 3e Eberron it was generally assumed that a 6th level character was a genuine force to be reckoned with. It was hard to take seriously the looming fear of a dark overlord when his big party trick was (maybe being able to cast Cone Of Cold once a day). Your PCs enemies were expected to be smaller, more local, more personality driven, with comprehensible goals (and then there's they daelkyr, just to make a liar out of my over the whole 'comprehensible' thing).

None of this is to say that a modern Dragonlance wouldn't work or find a fanbase or even be popular, but it seems to run counter to most modern trends in fantasy that I'm aware of. So I expect that it'll be lower down WotCs priority list than a number of other settings or properties.

ChaosOS · Aug 26, 2020

humble minion said:
Nah, I didn't explain myself very well there. FR (and GH, and some of the other early campaign worlds like Mystara) is a bit of a step away from the One Story Per Setting model that LotR embodied and that Dragonlance struggled to escape from. But FR still has a lot of the binary good vs evil stuff baked in, because it was baked into D&D at the time, you know, the age of 'always chaotic evil' in the MM, and the various problematic issues that all the raised way back to the paladin and orphaned baby goblin dilemma back in 2e.

The movement towards more grounded antagonists has mostly been driven by fiction. Eberron is possibly the D&D-iest incarnation of that attitude that occurs to me off the top of my head. There's not really much emphasis in Eberron on cacklingly evil for the sake of evil organisations or overlords trying to rule the world. No Zhentarim, no Cult of the Dragon, or Szass Tam, etc etc. Hell, in 3e Eberron it was generally assumed that a 6th level character was a genuine force to be reckoned with. It was hard to take seriously the looming fear of a dark overlord when his big party trick was (maybe being able to cast Cone Of Cold once a day). Your PCs enemies were expected to be smaller, more local, more personality driven, with comprehensible goals (and then there's they daelkyr, just to make a liar out of my over the whole 'comprehensible' thing).

None of this is to say that a modern Dragonlance wouldn't work or find a fanbase or even be popular, but it seems to run counter to most modern trends in fantasy that I'm aware of. So I expect that it'll be lower down WotCs priority list than a number of other settings or properties.

Eberron pulls from pulp, not high/epic fantasy, for its big moments. There are vile cults to fiendish and aberrant forces, but there's just less of an expectation that the hero is a paladin in shining armor rather than a morally gray tomb robber like Indiana Jones. Incidentally, this makes the setting well-suited to a genre inversion into horror, by degrading the capabilities of the hero from "Punching out Cthulhu" to "Cthulhu eats 1d4 investigators as an action"

GarrettKP · Aug 26, 2020

I think people are overthinking the Aberrant Mind/Psionic Soul thing.

A majority of the articles refer to it as the Psionic Mind, which is a combination we’ve never seen it referred to as before. So that’s likely the name, and the others are misinterpreting.

It likely kept the flavor flexible, allowing you to be slimy and tentacle filled it you choose, or stay tentacle free if you wish.

And it likely either dropped the Psionic Die completely or heavily revised it since it tested poorly.

So we likely are getting a Psionic Mind Origin that mixes the best of both previous versions of the playtest to try and please all parties involved.

Sir Brennen · Aug 26, 2020

Krachek said:
I’m glad for a new product.
i hope we will see some part of the UA class variant.
but honestly I have prefer more options on actual classes and subclasses than brand new sub classes.

Check out some of the articles linked at the bottom of the first post. It sounds like we'll have both.

dave2008 · Aug 26, 2020

Tyler Do'Urden said:
A DISTINCT LACK OF GREEN EYE SHADOW!

That's Iggy's thing. Tasha is more discrete.

Sir Brennen · Aug 26, 2020

Flamestrike said:
Strange concerns.

Player: Hey DM can I use these rules from Tashas?
Me: Yeah brother, fill your boots.

I get what Li Shenron is saying. Some of the items listed in the Class Features Variants were a bit of power creep. Maybe not enough for D&D 5.1, but definitely 5.01.

Now, I can't imagine a table where a GM let Player A use Spell Versatility but not Player B. But at a given table, there may be players who want some of these enhancements to improve their characters, but a DM who's worried about it being power creep might disallow it. Not any different than allowing any other optional material, granted, but still a potential for conflict.

And across the community, there may be some who see these enhancements as "the new normal", while others, again, have issues with them being power creep and stealth edition changes.

Reynard · Aug 26, 2020

Sir Brennen said:
I get what Li Shenron is saying. Some of the items listed in the Class Features Variants were a bit of power creep. Maybe not enough for D&D 5.1, but definitely 5.01.

Now, I can't imagine a table where a GM let Player A use Spell Versatility but not Player B. But at a given table, there may be players who want some of these enhancements to improve their characters, but a DM who's worried about it being power creep might disallow it. Not any different than allowing any other optional material, granted, but still a potential for conflict.

And across the community, there may be some who see these enhancements as "the new normal", while others, again, have issues with them being power creep and stealth edition changes.

I think it is pretty common for books like this and Xanathar's to be considered "core" by players. That's just a thing us GMs have to deal with. You could ban things, but that leads to more conflict that just figuring out how to deal with the new material. And it isn't like there aren't things that are broken -- over or under powered -- in the PHB that have to get modified or banned.

The bigger problem I see is that since 5E front loads most of its choice, books like this make some players want to switch characters because they want to try out new toys. That can be more disruptive to an ongoing game that a little power disparity or a poorly playtested ability.

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