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Message: <blockquote data-quote="martynq" data-source="post: 8019906" data-attributes="member: 9852">I'm quite familiar with 1e/2e/3e/v3.5, but wandered away when 4e came along.  Consequently, I'm late to the party with 5e and am now trying to get my head around what has changed.  It seems that people like 5e lots - I can see that it looks slightly more rules-light than 3e, but has some aspects of earlier editions' general structures.Some of the design choices look unexpected to me.  I wondered if anybody could enlighten me as to why certain things were done, as my Google skills have not managed to find an explanation.  I've got two specific questions to start:1. Why were the many Bigby's Hand spells from earlier editions combined into a single spell in 5e?2. Why does a Drow Mage (Monster Manual 5e) get d8 hit dice?  It seems strange to someone more familiar with 3e that NPCs get to play with different rules to PCs, so I would have expected a drow mage to use the same hit dice as a wizard (or whatever class it was supposed to be).Apologies in advance for my ignorance... I look forward to being enlightened by those more informed than me.</blockquote>