D&D (2024) combing through the new glossary changes.

[tetrasodium]

Did anyone mention that prone no longer causes a flying creature to fall?

expert & cleric packet both read

Spoiler: expert fly speed

FLY SPEED
A Fly Speed can be used to move through the air.
While you have a Fly Speed, you can stay aloft
until you land, fall, or die.
While flying, you fall if you are Incapacitated or
Restrained. If you have the Hover trait, you can
stay aloft even while Incapacitated or
Restrained.

Spoiler: cleric fly speed

FLY SPEED
A Fly Speed can be used to move through the air.
While you have a Fly Speed, you can stay aloft
until you land, fall, or die.
While flying, you fall if you are Incapacitated or
Restrained. If you have the Hover trait, you can
stay aloft even while Incapacitated or
Restrained.

They look the same.

 

[OB1]

Were the changes to Special Speeds and Jump in the last packet? I may have just missed it the first time around (that packet was huge). Seems waaaayyyy to fiddly. Is there really a big issue with jump being part of your move when appropriate or being able to walk 15 feet and then climb a wall 15 feet? Maybe some players can find ways to exploit it, but this seems to make things needlessly complex for little/no benefit. Is there an exploit around this that I just haven't seen in 8 years of 5e?

I like the fact that they got rid of the suggested DCs in the Influence action, and I'm coming around to the idea (much more explicit in this playtest packet) that Influence, Study and Search provide a way for players to ask for a specific skill check, while still allowing the DM to call for one anytime without an action. I wish they would get rid of the set DC for Hide though. Seems like that can be a range based on what you are trying to hide behind and what the circumstances are at the moment, from easy to nearly impossible.

 

[tetrasodium]

Were the changes to Special Speeds and Jump in the last packet? I may have just missed it the first time around (that packet was huge). Seems waaaayyyy to fiddly. Is there really a big issue with jump being part of your move when appropriate or being able to walk 15 feet and then climb a wall 15 feet? Maybe some players can find ways to exploit it, but this seems to make things needlessly complex for little/no benefit. Is there an exploit around this that I just haven't seen in 8 years of 5e?

I like the fact that they got rid of the suggested DCs in the Influence action, and I'm coming around to the idea (much more explicit in this playtest packet) that Influence, Study and Search provide a way for players to ask for a specific skill check, while still allowing the DM to call for one anytime without an action. I wish they would get rid of the set DC for Hide though. Seems like that can be a range based on what you are trying to hide behind and what the circumstances are at the moment, from easy to nearly impossible.

Spoiler: jump[action] looks identical to expert

JUMP [ACTION]
With the Jump Action, you attempt to leap more
than 5 feet (a jump of 5 feet or less is treated as
Difficult Terrain). When you take this Action,
your Speed must be greater than 0, and you must
make a DC 10 Strength Check (Acrobatics or
Athletics). If you don’t Move at least 10 feet
immediately before this Action, you have
Disadvantage on the check.
On a failed check, you leap 5 feet horizontally
or vertically.
On a successful check, the check’s total
determines the distance in feet that you can clear
horizontally, or half that total if you’re jumping
vertically (round down). This jump doesn’t
expend your movement, but the distance you
clear can’t exceed your Speed.

Spoiler: special speeds seem identical to expert

SPECIAL SPEEDS
Some creatures have special speeds, such as a
Climb Speed, a Fly Speed, or a Swim Speed. If you
have more than one speed, you must choose
which one to use each time you take your Move.
For example, if you have a Speed and a Climb
Speed, you can use one of those speeds when
you Move, not both during the same Move.
If you take more than one Move on a turn and
have more than one speed, each Move can use
the same speed or a different one. For example, if
you have both a Speed and a Fly Speed and you
take the Dash Action on your turn, you could use
your Speed for the Move and your Fly Speed for
the Dash or vice versa.

I think both are good changes over 2014

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Cleric deserves its own dive .

Spoiler: cleric dive

• L1Channel Divinity[fluff]: eleven of ten.. I love the shift from "ability to channel divine energy directly from your deity" to "ability to channel divine energy directly from the Outer Planes". It can be exceedingly difficult to realign a playerdecicated towards the disruptive baselines of a setting with obvious interventionist deities when the setting at the table is one like eberron darksun or even some ravenloft domains where the gods are more hands off & distant. Going the other way is easy because the gods can just be petty & withhold power or cause hardship but FR dedicated to eberron/darksun is very different because there's no active power to pressure correction.
  • L1Divine Spark: Pretty much a prof bonus*d8 heal orcon save for half radiant nuke. or the same heal. The choice of a con save is worth noting because in some past editions undead had no constitution score & used charisma for concentration checks(3.5MM pg317, I'm not looking for more editions). You can still see the likely echoes of that historical bit in the huge numbers of undead with a bare 10+0 con. That may or not be a bad thing, but "does con need fixing?" a thing that should a thousand percent be on a sticky note reminder any time someone is working on undead 5.5/6e monsters & this is a good example of why. Doing a quick skim very few undead monsters have any save proficiencies & those need to be fixed alongside evaluating con.
  • L1Turn Undead: eleven off ten... Shifts from save or lose to save or suck with the payload going from fear to Dazed. I think it's a good shift because the save or lose just never fit with the size of 5e PC gas tanks/high survivability like it did in old editions where adventuring days were shorter & lethality was higher.
• L1Spellcasting: Solid 8/10 to 10/10... Same Flex vancian we saw with ranger/bard but the full divine list as it should be for a primary caster like cleric. I genuinely liked the way it shifted spellprep on those during tests & the pressures it creates should make for much more interesting spell prep.
• 2nd/9th Holy Order: Shifting some of these from preset first level dip candy to a second level choice is a good change both for single & multiclass builds. Now just to bring back some kind of dual classing. option for GMs to deploy in their game.
  • Protector & Scholar: 8-10/10 These are pretty good & nice for different build goals.
  • Thaumaturge: 7-11/10: My first impulse was thinking this is a trap to just give an extra L0 spell, but it also gives an extra channel divinity charge and allows recovery of CD on short rest instead of long rest only. I suspect this will be better for casterish builds than martial inclined battle clerics, but it seems pretty solid
  • 3rd Disciple of life[subclass feature]:9/10 This is a much needed improvement in the wording of the old 2014 DoL that made things liketen 5hp goodberries from a single first level slot & combined with other oddball things. Now it's limited to the turn you cast the spell & gives 2+spell level.
    • There might need to be some clarity on if that is the spell slot level the spell is cast at or if it's the spell level itself A level 1 cure wounds spell that gets upcast to a level 1+N spell slot gains "ask your gm" from this. If we are going back to the old cure light/moderate/serious/critical style cure spells this wording makes a lot of sense but if not it's problematic
  • 4th/8th/12th/16th level feat: This still has the same bizarre wording of ASI or another feat we saw in experts when the ASI itself is a feat I don't know why it needs that recursive allowance baked in but there's not much to say otherwise
• 5th Smite undead[subclass feature]:/10... Um... I'm honestly confused... Divine spark allows CD to do con save for half Prof Bonus[D8s] radiant damage. damage. to one creature. This does the same but to undead with an unspecified save an unspecified number of targets an unspecified range & an unspecified targeting condition. It's not clear if this is in addition to the damage from divine spark or instead of either,
• 6th Preserve life[subclass feature]: [confused]8/10... great big 30ftaoe heal cleric level*5 divided as you please among anyone you can see.
  • I don't know how I feel about the recover to no more than half target's hp max & honestly don't have much making me lean either way because I just can't grasp even the vague outline of a reason for it or what it's trying to accomplish. I guess it could be trying to avoid a cleric dumping all of their CDs in a one encounter day boss fight? is 3 max CD that big of a concern?
• 7th Blessed Strikes: 10/10.. Making this into a choice helps me as a GM to not but heads with a player's desires by giving them the wrong cool toys for the job just because it seems like they should want it. Both mechanics are fitting & having it pack the punch into one weapon attack rather than giving an extra attack mitigates distortions while making it easier to introduce multiattack/iterative attack penalties without crippling a cleric who chooses melee.
• 10th Blessed Healer[subclass feature]: [confused]8/10...This seems identical to the 3rd level disciple of life... do they stack? How is upcasting handled?
• 11th Divine intervention: zero/10.. I just hate this ability & I'm not alone. It's almost certain to fail but payoffs are so high if it works that we need to sit through it more sessions then not. On the off chance it does work everyone at the table needs to sit there & say "ok... what now" while weighing the desire to make it matter after so many failures against the desire to not just packup & end the session because a god solves the problem a party of adventurers were going to do some adventuring with.
• 14th Supreme healing[subclass feature]: Solid 8/10 Basically your healing spells are maximized. Give or take about half of my 5e games get this high or higher & this is a pretty welcome addition assuming we also go from or get an alternative to death save absorb shields like death at 0/neg10.
• 18th Greater Divine Intervention: 10/10-11/10.. Divine Intervention always works but only works once every 2d4 days. Now we no longer need to sit through bob crossing his fingers almost every session with the old one & there's no more pressure to balance reward against the need to still have a session. Unfortunately 18th is high even for me & I'm not sure any of my 5e games went that high so my feeling is that it mostly matters for one shots where it will really matter due to unfamiliar spell prep needs. Great ability
• 20th Epic Boon: The variety these allow is still a good thing but weighing the boons themselves is probably a thing best left elsewhere & maybe not till after we have more.

Overall there are a lot of much needed & great changes to cleric in here that I'm super happy about. As a GM I can't wait to see how 6e continues to shape up

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Ardling: 15/10 I rather like the shift and the relief of being able to say "Ardlings are a race, you should try to fit that mold" instead of hearing about someone's neotrad OC alterego & why I really need to let them make an existing race be an animal person with a totally different culture. I gave it exra points just so I never need to have that conversation again.

Spoiler: animal types

• Animal Ancestry Having these a choice nstead of feeling pressure to add 47 different animal people is a good thing & most of these seem to call back to shifter subtypes. I don't know if that's good or bad but hope that shifters have enough design space leftover to differentiate themselves.
• Climber: 10/10 I've found players tend to put climb speeds to good use & the 1/turn +prof bonus damage to unarmed strike damage is interesting in ways that make me wonder of other natural weapon having races will have a similar mechanic
• Flyer: 6-8/10 Having feather fall rather than short lasting flight makes sense given the value of a choice between guidance & resistance cantrips. To be honest though I', not sure how often it would ever come up, adding a bonus to jump checks too might be justified?
• Racer: 8-10/10.. Get +prof bonus*10feet of movement added to the dash action. This makes for a nice change over the tabaxi speedforce. Having once had a tabaxi rogue literally named Barry Allen at an AL table of mine I'm hopeful & waiting to see how it interacts with other changes in the tactical grid combat realm that I suspect we might see
• Swimmer:Swim speed equal to speed, cold resistance, & you can hold your breath for an hour
  • The wording on hold your breath for an hour feels like if has some rough edges. An hour is just long enough to realize that the character with underwater capabilities needs scuba gear too, linking it to hit dice like spend a hit die for an hour per HD would avoid that if just breath water is too much. There is a big problem with "hold your breath [underwater]" with the underwater not specified though. There are lots of effects that require breathing & this wording encourages players to hold their breath at all times till they gasp for air & hold it again in a weirdly artificial feeling manner.

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Dragonborn: 8/10. There's not much to say really. Breath weapon energy resist& at 5t they can fly for up to 10 min once per long rest.

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Goliath 7/10: They get a neat ability prof bonus times per long rest based on their type.

Spoiler: types

• Cloud giant: 10/10 bonus action teleport 30ft. It's magical. Pretty buce ability for many types of build.
• Fire giant: 8/10 deal an extra 1d10 fire damage when you successfully make an attack roll & deal damage.
  • I wonder why this shifts from the +prof bonus damage 1/round of climber ardling
• Frost giant:6/10 similar to fore giant but 1d6 & -10ft speed for one round,
  • I know it's pulling from ray of frost but the 1 round 1/long rest feels like it should be something more substantial like dazed... especially if a lot of these are likely to be on melees
• Hill Giant: 10/10 knock target prone on an attack roll that deals damage. This is a very solid ability.
• Stone Giant:8/10 Reduce damage by 1d12 when you take damage. There are abilities like this already & they are fairly noteworthy when used.

Then at 5th they can be size large 1/long rest for 10 min, Especially nifty if that eventually comes with increased reach like size large once did.
Powerful build which is why I downgraded goliath to 7/10, the grapple portion is fine but count as one size larger for carry capacity may as well just say "You choose to unilaterally veto any GM efforts to make carry capacity matter on a mechanical level" unless carry capapacity changes dramatically

 

[Yaarel]

With regard to spelling out "Influence" more clearly,

I took this as all of the social skills info is relocating from the DMs Guide to the Players Handbook.

Hence the Players Handbook will have all of the rules necessary to play a complete game of D&D.