D&D (2024) August 18th Tarrasque-sized D&D News (Poll)

Jer said:

I strongly suspect that their core software design was something that the initial devs understood quite well, those devs left or rolled off to other projects at Fandom, and the new devs who are trying to maintain/expand the system do not have the understanding of the system that the initial devs did. Also that the original system was designed to be modular and extensible in ways that the original devs thought would be important for future use cases, but in fact they guessed wrong and extending it for the directions that Wizards has actually taken D&D is harder than it should be.

Not that I have any inside info or anything - this comes from years of experience on software projects and talking with folks who have their own years of experience on software projects, because that's the story of so many projects that have rolled out in the last 20 years or so.

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Indeed. It doesn't even have to be anything specific. Once you start trying to expand, extend and adapt an existing piece of software to cover a multitude of different directions and developments, every new tacked-on or fudged piece of functionality is yet another bit of complexity that has to be taken into account when you're trying to add the next thing. It can build up to a huge amount of inertia over time that makes it exponentially harder to incorporate new features.

Ruin Explorer said:

Except that in virtually all art since the 1980s* Dwarves have been depicted with stereotypically Viking-themed stuff (since LotR there's often some extra blockiness to it too, but it's still usually Viking-y). And they Norse names.

Is Dwarf culture like that? No. But that's not my point. I'm not doing a cultural analysis on a monster that looks like a viking, is called a viking name, lives in a viking-looking castle, and so on. Quacks like a duck...

* = I do like stuff like that PF2 supplement with an African theme where they go way broader on this stuff, and get away from that boring Viking-ness.

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Just on pure appearance Fire Giants don’t look very Norse.

MarkB said:

Indeed. It doesn't even have to be anything specific. Once you start trying to expand, extend and adapt an existing piece of software to cover a multitude of different directions and developments, every new tacked-on or fudged piece of functionality is yet another bit of complexity that has to be taken into account when you're trying to add the next thing. It can build up to a huge amount of inertia over time that makes it exponentially harder to incorporate new features.

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What was particularly interesting here was that this whole thing emerged over the Supernatural Gifts in Theros. Somehow, I forget how, people knew about them well in advance, and they were discussed, and Beyond people said they wouldn't be implemented initially, but they were working on a system that would allow them to implement them, and that system would be finished within (at that time) three months. Then three months passed, but the Beyond people said, well, in order to get the stuff for Tasha's working (then a UA), we'll have to get this working, so it'll be soon! Then we kept getting "just wait for Tasha's, it'll be then". Then Tasha's came out and they still hadn't implemented Supernatural Gifts (or Piety, IIRC, which they also said would come).

Now it's late 2022, and whilst they implemented Tasha's, they still didn't do Supernatural Gifts, nor Dark Gifts from Ravenloft, and so on. And now it looks like they're not even tracking that. So they'd promised the same tech which would make Tasha's possible would work for these, but apparently not? They specifically said the tech for Tasha's would let them arbitrarily add any new traits (in the general sense) to a PC. But I guess that didn't happen.

It's pretty bad, frankly.

It was suggested to them that they just make all the Gifts into Feats (which is doable even using their own systems), but they repeatedly refused to do so on the specific grounds that they'd soon be available via a better system.

MonsterEnvy said:

Just on pure appearance Fire Giants don’t look very Norse.
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The first image looks plenty exaggerated Fire-Norse to me. It's absolutely classic. The second is atypical I admit.

MarkB said:

It can build up to a huge amount of inertia over time that makes it exponentially harder to incorporate new features.

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Yup. There's a reason the phrase "technical debt" gets used a lot in established projects....

MonsterEnvy said:

Just on pure appearance Fire Giants don’t look very Norse.
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They still originate in Norse myth, as the giants who lived in Muspelheim, led by Surtr.

Demetrios1453 said:

They still originate in Norse myth, as the giants who lived in Muspelheim, led by Surtr.

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I know that, just saying appearance wise they don’t look as Norse as the Frost Giants.

GMforPowergamers said:

I would hope for BIG change test in UA... like "here is an alternate (insert class name)" or here are a list of alternate spells....

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Those aren't big changes, they've done both of those through Unearthed Arcana before. Big is "here is a new action economy." New Class or Spells are easily doable like they were for Xanathar's (Mystic and Artificer were both tested for Xanathar's, recall).

Ruin Explorer said:

I would be pretty surprised if it's less than a 5.5E, I have to say. The changes they've made via Tasha's and MotM being implemented in the PHB (including re-writes of all existing PHB races) and MM, and the DMG presumably being re-written to not suck horribly alone would make the changes significantly bigger than 3.5E.

So you'd have to do revisionist history and make it so 3.5E was only 3.25E or whatever to justify that.

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I think you are right about the level of changes, band that they will even call it a 6E. But nothing that has been show so far calls for a Next style Playtest, when the UA regime is already working on it.

There’s a new book placeholder on Amazon Canada