D&D 5E (2024) August 18th Tarrasque-sized D&D News (Poll)

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

That sounds exactly right for the problems they're experiencing, and they did lose a bunch of people at least twice. Earlier this year they were so low on staff they had to cut first doing UA stuff at all, then cut even doing a lot of announcements and so on.

 

[Parmandur]

I am willing to bet some kind of Internet Points that it isn't the 50AE Public Playtest, by the way, because there absolutely no chance that they would be doing a public playtest with out some kind of internal/friends-and-family playtest first, and if there was an internal/friends-and-family playtest, it WOULD have leaked, period. I might not have leaked beyond "there is a playtest!!" or a poorly photographed copy of a rules-sheet with some new rules on it or something, but it WOULD have leaked. D&D is too big, and D&D fans far, far too online for it not to have, in 2022.

We've been playtesting it since 2019, though I expect a final UA big push within the next year similar to Xanathar's and Tasha's.

I agree, but because I don't think we're going to get a public playtest the way we did 10 years ago. Because the changes aren't going to be as big as when 4e ended.

I expect a series of Unearthed Arcana to be the public playtest for this next iteration. In fact I personally think that all of us commenting on the UA rules and using the books they've published in the last few years have all been participating in the 50th anniversary playtest already.

This exactly.

@Ruin Explorer I think this partially depends on what 50AE is. If it's the same 5E ruleset with a different set of character generation options (racial features, class ability swaps, etc) I think they could go straight to playtest with the specific goal of, 'see if the 50AE fighter can play in the same campaign as the 5eOG fighter' it could be sent out in the same way they do UA material, without anyone leaking it beforehand.

I think this is precious is happening. No fundamental changes, UA for what they want to change with Rave and Class.

Well, it would have been if they'd followed up with any more details about Dragonlance. It's still very sketchy, and I'm not keen on this "Your army combat will blow chunks unless you buy our wargame competitively priced at $69.99 as well!" approach they seem to be advocating, but I will retain final judgement on that until we get more details.

I mean...they are definitely talking about Dragonlance Thursday next.

 

[Parmandur]

How may online platforms are they on as far as news goes, their website, twitter, facebook, Dragon+, DDB, & YouTube; did I miss any? I'm not on any of these except their site which is terrible nowadays and I haven't gone there in ages. I wouldn't even know where to follow them to keep current on news and announcements.

Pretty much all of those yup, and the Magic team does Tumbler, too. It wasn't clear till the past few days that this would be as much a D&D event as a Magic event, though.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

You can fix that - I absolutely hate it and find Twitter unusable without the "thinks I might be interested in" stuff on. So I have it set to only show people I follow, and show in strict timeline order, rather than a post from 7 hours ago being further down than one from a day ago like normal Twitter does.

Unfortunately I can't remember what buttons I have to press to do that lol. And it still has "might be interested" stuff on mobile, even though it's off on PC.

Oh boy yup.

I dunno what exactly the problem at DNDBeyond is, but they went from rapidly upgrading and improving their platform, make fairly big changes at a decent rate from launch until late 2019, to gradually getting slower, and slower, and slower, and less capable, and slower from late 2019 until now. Whether it's just bad management, brain drain, underinvestment, sheer incompetence (I feel like, sadly there is some of that), bad prioritization, or some/all of those, I dunno (my guess would be all), but it's bad, it's real bad. There's stuff they literally expected to be done by early 2020 (so pre-pandemic even) that still isn't done, and that they're still cracking down on as if they were not owned by WotC, even though they're owned by WotC (their entire detailed excuse before was that their contract with WotC didn't allow this).

So I expect fixing DNDBeyond, if WotC even make a serious attempt and it doesn't suffer the "WotC curse" which has destroyed virtually every D&D-related IT project/game WotC has been close to (BG3 and Beyond being the only real exceptions, and no surprise those were the ones most distant from WotC until now), it'll be a long time before Beyond is improved to the standard I think they'd want to be encouraging mass sign-ups.

I don’t get this. Mainly cause I can’t see how D&D Beyond is broken?

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Well, it would have been if they'd followed up with any more details about Dragonlance. It's still very sketchy, and I'm not keen on this "Your army combat will blow chunks unless you buy our wargame competitively priced at $69.99 as well!" approach they seem to be advocating, but I will retain final judgement on that until we get more details.

If it's a setting announcement, it'll be nearly meaningless because we can virtually guarantee they'll be silent about anything beyond the announcement and a couple of bits of art until after Dragonlance is out in order not to spoil DL hype/sales.

Oh actually here's what I think it probably is:

The First World campaign setting - I.e. loads of giants and elemental junk, two of my absolute least favourite elements of D&D (I don't hate Hill and Stone giants as they feel like actual archetypal "giants" to me, but the rest feel like '80s glam rock guys who got hit with enlarge and not in a good way). Four-classical-elements stuff though is THE WORST (in all RPGs). Well, para-elements are even worse but let's not go there.

Fire and Frost Giants are from Norse Mythology. Cloud Giants are based on the one from Jack and the Beanstalk from memory.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Fire and Frost Giants are from Norse Mythology. Cloud Giants are based on the one from Jack and the Beanstalk from memory.

I'm aware, but their presentation in D&D has been consistently cheesy hair-metal nonsense, where they're just "big viking dudes who are on fire lolz". Compare and contrast the terrifying, primordial and bizarre fire giant from Elden Rings to "LOL IMA VIKING WOO" Fire Giants from D&D. There's absolutely ZERO sense of actual Norse mythology, just cheap Norse names and obvious aesthetics.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don’t get this. Mainly cause I can’t see how D&D Beyond is broken?

Really?

Beyond still hasn't implemented stuff that was in Theros in 2020, and still blocks players from sharing manual implementations of the same. If you think that's okay, well, I do not. I mean, to be clear, not just Theros, I believe every single setting book since has stuff that's not properly implemented (correct me if I'm wrong). A lot of their other implementations post-2019 have been extremely poor/half-arsed too.

They gave up on doing UAs, and stopped even being able to do announcements (for a while - this seems to be somewhat fixed at least), because they're critically understaffed, so...

If you've followed their development timeline and announcements, you'll have see how, into late 2018, they were doing solidly, progressing solidly, updating regularly, making real progress. Then it all went to hell (before the pandemic, to be clear, I'm sure that didn't help later). Progress basically stopped. Promises kept being made and broken. Then updates stopped. Then announcements about the timeline and development stopped - and I believe they may still be stopped or severely reduced.

 

[Demetrios1453]

As I said on the other thread, my theory is that they've genetically engineered an actual tarrasque, and will unveil "Tarrasquic Park"' which will be totally safe with no chance of escape at all....

 

[Mind of tempest]

As I said on the other thread, my theory is that they've genetically engineered an actual tarrasque, and will unveil "Tarrasquic Park"' which will be totally safe with no chance of escape at all....

I have hit the point in my life where death by a tarrasque is a net positive.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

I'm aware, but their presentation in D&D has been consistently cheesy hair-metal nonsense, where they're just "big viking dudes who are on fire lolz". Compare and contrast the terrifying, primordial and bizarre fire giant from Elden Rings to "LOL IMA VIKING WOO" Fire Giants from D&D. There's absolutely ZERO sense of actual Norse mythology, just cheap Norse names and obvious aesthetics.

Fire Giants have never really been like Vikings, Frost Giants are like that. But Fire Giants are more like Dwarves in culture and appearance, they outright value smithing skill over brawn. Like I am getting the impression you have never read about them.