Unearthed Arcana D&D Beyond: Jeremy Explaining Unearthed Arcana: Class Feature Variants

[Parmandur]

Not how it's been used before, at all - if a game uses exception based design, and is written in a clear & consistent enough way, everything will work the same way, because there won't be six ways to parse each thing.
But, hey, he gets paid to do this stuff, so if he wants to use it differently, whatever, it's his business, quite literally.

What it means for 5E us that specific Trump's general. The general rules are extremely compact, they fit in a very small booklets printed with the Essentials Kit or Starter Set. Any particular Monster or PC might have abilities that defyor extend the basic rules as an exception.

 

[Krachek]

This is different... how?

It's been 28 years since I first starting playing. In that entire stretch of time I don't think I've even once played a game the was straight RAW D&D. Even when the DM wasn't adding new house rules they were subtracting rules like encumbrance or morale they didn't feel were important to their game. Even now the DMG is just full of optional or specialized rules pieces that the DM will use or ignore at their own whim, making every table or every campaign slightly different.

The only difference with this pack is that they're more directly player facing in their impact. That might motivate players to actively ask the DM if they'll be allowed, but that's about it.

I know house ruling has always been a part of DnD.
but these days some post let think that the posters hope for a perfect game that they don’t have to adjust. It also remind me some post about SS and GWM and one of the active poster admit that he didn’t yet have change these feats that bug him so much.
Maybe because dm may be more constested and compare today than 30 years ago? At this time the dm was the absolute ruler, today people go search for faq, errata, sage advice and thus some dm may hesitate more to apply their house rules?

 

[Tony Vargas]

What it means for 5E us that specific Trump's general.

Yeah, I caught that. Familiar enough from 3e.

 

[pemerton]

The design ethos of 4E was "Everything is Core,"

But 4e is also (as far as I know) the only version of D&D to have featured a published supplement (Nerverwinter) that holds the mechanics constant while changing some key features of the accompanying fiction - in the Neverwinter book, the fictional range of heroic through paragon is compressed, on the GM side, into the mechanics of the heroic range. So we see (eg) an 8th level mindflayer, whereas in the core MM the lowest level mindflayer is 14th.

Dark Sun is a bit less explicit about it but I think is best viewed as doing the same thing in reverse - the fictional range of heroic through paragon is expanded, so that the mechaincally epic-tier villains of the setting (eg sorcerer-kings) are (in ficitonal terms) paragon tier.

4e on the player side is built around consistent core mechanics, but as these examples show can be very flexible on the GM side when it comes to correlating those mechanics to the broader feeling of the fiction.

I get the impression that 5e is heading in broadly the opposite direction - maintaining a more-or-less constant fiction but using different mechanical options. I thikn @Tony Vargas is right to say that this fits with a very strong expectation about the role of the GM in curating the game experience.