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Pretty much. Grouping those races by power source is deceptive. What they're really based on are is genies (genasi), celestials (aasimar), and fiends (tieflings). In other words, derivatives of well established monster types. In that way they're no different than dragonborn. If you want a...

You can make a dragonborn who's big and strong, certainly. But they don't come with Powerful Build or any other traits that denote innate physical might. Instead it's all about "being draconic" with elemental resistance and a breath weapon.

When they were discussing the addition of goliaths, they said they aim for two species covering a niche. So orcs and goliaths are the two "big and strong" species with the Powerful Build trait. That way players have a choice when going for a particular theme. The unstated corollary, then, is...

With the 2014 core books on the way out, they're apparently now outside the "don't talk badly about your own product" statute of limitations. In one of these interview videos, Crawford talked pretty bluntly about how they were working with limited time and money on those books and the DMG...

Probably not any time soon. Even if you put aside the copy protection issue, they do not want to be selling two different versions of the 5e PHB and confusing new players. They've told stories of how bad it was when 4e had the PHB2 confusing people.

That just encourages psionics to be relegated to a specialized sub-set of the rules. If there's going to be psionics, make it psionics for everyone. Don't encourage the idea that only the specific psionic races deal in psionic classes.

If we're balancing things by cutting down the Wizard and not raising up the martials, one of the first things to target is the free spell picks on level up. Martials don't receive free magic items when they level up. So why do Wizards get what's effectively two spell scrolls of their choice...

All spells are magical, but not all magic is spells. In a magical world, it only makes sense that many creatures would develop a way to use magic passively and innately for their own benefit. It's just like how lifeforms on Earth will evolve to exploit any energy source available, be it solar or...

I'll say it again. Early D&D filled a very different niche, one mostly taken over by video games these days. While I don't play MOBA games much, I move in adjacent enough circles to have picked up some of the terminology. And one of the major character niches in a MOBA is the "Carry". A Carry...

Let's not overlook how this debate gets clouded in D&D spaces by how much "magic" is identified with Vancian derived spellcasting. And if you'll excuse me poking a can of dire worms with a stick and then trying to back away, but 4e showed that many players don't want their martial characters to...

This is an important point, though it's not one everyone is happy about and accepts. In prior editions, psionics was usually separate from and opposed to magic. Not only was it practiced by different people, it had entirely different game mechanics, which really drove home to the players that it...

I've been thinking it over the last day. If it were me, and I were doing the settling flavor from scratch and had a fair bit of license to rework mechanics too, here's what I think I'd lay out. Everyone uses magic. Magic is omnipresent and foundational in a fantasy world, just like everyone on...

And really, it's not that hard to slant the flavor away from "mystical mind powers" if you happen to like the mechanics, just like you can lean into them if you do like psionics. The Soulknife manifests soul knives made of soul energy that disrupt the mind and spirit when struck. Alternatively...

It's true that characters don't see the DCs. But subject matter experts know their subject, and experienced professionals have a well honed sense for the tasks that come up regularly in their line of work. So if an adventurer looks at a door they can probably estimate how hard it would be to...

It brings us to a question of game design. Are the PHB and DMG a matched pair, where the PHB has all the rules the players use and the DMG has all the rules the DM uses? Or is the PHB supposed to be a mostly self-sufficient set of basic rules for playing the game, and the DMG is advice and tools...

My memory is a bit fuzzy, but as best I can reconstruct the Tasha's Cauldron UA process first proposed the Aberrant Mind, then trialed the less aberration flavored Psionic Soul as a revision, and when that proved less popular reverted to the Aberrant Mind for the official release.

I've never understood why some people equate "martial" with "mundane". D&D isn't an Urban Fantasy series where everyone who doesn't have magic powers is a mundane who can't exceed the abilities of the real world Earth. It's a high powered heroic fantasy world where your swordmaster can sword so...

Crawford said as much explicitly in one of the dev interviews. Some are sets of thematic pairs, some are "four quadrants" meant to cover all the bases.

Just to emphasize this for people who (for whatever reason) aren't taking the time to actually watch the video: What we saw from UA was not the final draft. It was a targeted information gathering phase. Internal playtesting of the classes and subclasses continued after the UA phase, and further...

If you watch the video instead of relying on a blindly transcribed and misspelled AI summery, they talk about how all the Tasha's Cauldron subclasses are getting updates and alternations. Even the ones that weren't reproduced in the UA phase. So no, nothing is a direct reprint. Which for the...