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It is  possible that a brief blog post written in a flippant style by someone who isn't part of the development team for the product is not, in fact, WOTC's final word on the rather controversial moral framework of the original Dragonlance setting.

If they really feel like they have to for continuity purposes, they should just have them be a cultural group composed of exiles and outcasts from the other dwarven nations (or the descendants thereof) like Tolkien's petty dwarves, with no impact on stats or anything else. It would simply be a...

All characters in fiction are actually NPCs and have statblocks like monsters that don't have to follow the rules for PCs. Aragorn has the Ranger tag, Gandalf has the Wizard tag (but in Middle-earth this is also a race tag and his creature type is Celestial). Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

It isn't. That's kind of a blend of the 5th Edition stuff and some of the older background from 2nd and 3.5th edition. If they appeared together, it would be incredibly egregious, but that isn't the case.

Yeah, now you mention that, I seem to remember one of the preview videos featured Perkins saying there was a deliberate reference to Planet of the Apes hidden somewhere. I suspect it honestly didn't cross their minds that there was any kind of unfortunate implication in what they wrote. I'm...

It's on the Forgotten Realms wiki, and the source is Stormwrack, a 3.5-era book from 2005. There's nothing at all like that in the recent Spelljammer release.

Let's reformulate the question: "What's the DC of a cleric with no spell slots remaining to heal their ally with a prayer?"

I mean, they can pray, certainly - but they're unlikely to have that prayer answered unless they fulfill some condition or other that gives them access to cure wounds or similar magic. That's literally what having that spell means (for a divine caster of whatever stripe): when you speak the holy...

There is a way a PC in my games could have the devotion, the self-belief, the absolute burning faith in themself and the power of their deity that their spoken prayers could channel the power of that deity and heal their dying comrade. That method is called "being a cleric or paladin and casting...

Ghosts of Saltmarsh has more involved ship rules which I think should combine fine with the basic Spelljammer framework. It would be a bit of work though. Much of those rules were also previewed in a UA called "Of Ships and the Sea" from November '18 if you want to take a look without forking...

Each class will still have its own spell list. The arcane/divine/primal thing is just a tag that will be appended to spells for the purposes of certain feats and probably other things in the future. I mean, I can imagine the Wizard will just get access to all the arcane spells, but classes...

My prediction is that opposed checks won't be in the basic rules (they might be an option in the DMG perhaps) - look at the redone grapple rules, which was basically the only time anyone used them. Stealth, surprise, etc. is also probably going to be heavily redone/clarified, since it's been one...

Yes, I imagined there'd be tables for those as well, though maybe not the ASIs, which perhaps require a bit less narrative justification.

I kind of want to do all of them now, but it would be wasted effort! For the sake of demonstrating what I think WOTC was going for though, here's the noble: Noble - Language (d6) 1. Your stuffy tutors insisted your learn the histories of the ancient dragonborn empires that once ruled your home...

It's basically how the 2014 backgrounds work, with Ideals keyed to alignments, etc. I would imagine this is what they're planning to do already, but it was too much content for the playtest document.

I think the one thing we can all agree on is that, whatever the final form of these Backgrounds in 2024 is, there needs to be proper guidance on how to create your own - as in, how to create the backstory elements - alongside the samples. This UA is just the rules, presented to experienced...

Idk, I understood what they were getting at.

In the Nentir Vale setting, Draconic is the language of Arkhosia, one of the two ancient empires that dominate the history of the known world. So there's at least one D&D world where it makes perfect sense for histories to be written in Draconic.

No, but this one did. And it's plausible that others might too, because in some D&D worlds, Draconic is a language used by ancient empires or humanoid scholars. So a noble in one of those worlds who has been the recipient an expensive education might well have had to learn it during their studies.

The idea that Draconic is used as a language outside of communication between dragons or dragonborn is in the PHB. It's often used for writing about arcana, so makes perfect sense as something the scion of a noble family would have to be versed in.