D&D 5E D&D Lore Changes: Multiversal Focus & Fey Goblins of Prehistory

WotC's Jeremy Crawford revealed a couple of the lore changes in Monsters of the Multiverse.

• The big shift is toward the multiverse as the game's main perspective rather than a specific setting. The game is shifting towards a multiversal focus, with a variety of worlds and settings.
• Universe-spanning mythical story beats, such as deep lore on goblinoids going back to 1st Edition, and the gods they had before Maglubiyet. Prior to Magulbiyet unifying them, goblinoids were folk of the feywild in keeping with 'real-world' folklore.
• Changelings aren't just Eberron, but they've been everywhere -- you just don't necessarily know it. Their origin is also in the realm of the fey.

D&D 5E - A Compilation of all the Race Changes in Monsters of the Multiverse

Over on Reddit, user KingJackel went through the video leak which came out a few days ago and manually compiled a list of all the changes to races in the book. The changes are quite extensive, with only the fairy and harengon remaining unchanged. The book contains 33 races in total, compiled and...

www.enworld.org

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Everything has detractors. Bounded Accuracy has blog posts and forum posts complaining about it.

But they are wrong.
Edit: the smiley should convey that this is not meant seriously. Because it is preference, there is no right or wrong.
Below I just write about my experience.

Having played 4e, with scaling accuracy and defense, we have seen that it makes "sandbox" adventures problematic, because even little deviations from character level makes monsters way too easy or hard.

What you can discuss is the grade of bounded accuracy, where I would favour +2 to 8 or maybe +3 to 9 instead of +2 to 6.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But they are wrong.

Having played 4e, with scaling accuracy and defense, we have seen that it makes "sandbox" adventures problematic, because even little deviations from character level makes monsters way too easy or hard.

What you can discuss is the grade of bounded accuracy, where I would favour +2 to 8 or maybe +3 to 9 instead of +2 to 6.

I can discuss whatever I want, actually, but speaking to your point, that is all just preference, not some objective truth.

In fact, I found it much easier to run sandbox, and improvise encounters, in 4e compared to any edition of D&D or d20 based game I’ve run, including 5e. Scaling a monster’s numbers by level was trivially easy, reflavoring an enemy into one of a similar type, eg a hobgoblin into a human bandit captain, was basically no effort at all, and a few levels difference was generally fine until you got into high levels, where the general balance was less robust.

Would all that have been even easier if 4e had had a numerical scale similar to 5e? Maybe, maybe not, since it would have certainly come with other changes in design philosophy as well.

And of course, there is the issue that bounded accuracy means that only things you’re proficient in get better, ever. As well, BA means that the scaling of numbers mens that a large enough army could kill an ancient dragon. I like that, but not everyone does.

The point being, there are legitimate criticisms of bounded accuracy. It is not objectively better.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Snip

Maybe my smiley did not convey well enough, that I did not actually meant that you are objectively wrong. So I am sorry that you felt offended and I try to make myself more clear.

To your point. I hated reskinning (the way many people) a lot, as I hated the need for tweaking numbers senselessly.
I also hated that actual equipment for monsters did not effect AC etc, but was just cosmetics. That also did not telegraph well to players how difficult enemies actually were. If you just scale up and down to level, of course it does not matter, because players just expected even level foes all the time. But it was really not my preference that the world scaled directly around players and that players in that way felt they were expected to have a good friendly battle were they usually win.
If that is your preference or you were able to make 4e not feel like this to you and your fellow players, I envy you, but we failed miserably to make it work for us, although we tried.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

To your point. I hated reskinning (the way many people) a lot, as I hated the need for tweaking numbers senselessly.
I also hated that actual equipment for monsters did not effect AC etc, but was just cosmetics. That also did not telegraph well to players how difficult enemies actually were. If you just scale up and down to level, of course it does not matter, because players just expected even level foes all the time. But it was really not my preference that the world scaled directly around players and that players in that way felt they were expected to have a good friendly battle were they usually win.
If that is your preference or you were able to make 4e not feel like this to you and your fellow players, I envy you, but we failed miserably to make it work for us, although we tried.

What you describe is not what I'm talking about. No one I know ran 4e in a way where players could expect a "good friendly battle where they usually win" against "even level foes".

But you could take a monster stat block that was mostly appropriate to what you wanted, change the attack/ac math and HP with trivial ease, and have what you have described within the fiction represented in the mechanics. Whether that was an easy, moderate, hard, or deadly (or even impossible) fight depended on the fiction, not on what stat blocks were premade at a given level.

If you wanted Tiamat to be the end of campaign BBEG at level 30, great, use the premade stats. If you don't want the campaign to go into those levels and instead want to treat level 20 as the end of what mortals can even be, the math to treat Tiamat as if she had been built for that campaign assumption from the beginning was very easy.

Nowhere in any of that, my last post or this one, am I talking about scaling Tiamat from a level 30 encounter to a level 25 encounter so the PCs have an at-level encounter.

I'm talking about scaling the hobgoblin captain they didn't manage to kill 10 levels ago, having advanced in power just like the PCs have, or using that low heroic tier statblock with advanced math to represent a similar kind of character in the fiction without having to dig around and find a level 17 martial leader enemy with similar abilities to the level 6 martial leader enemy I am already familiar with.

You can dislike that whole dynamic all you want, but it is just as valid a preference to prefer it over 5e's monster dynamics.

And going back to the whole reason this came up, none of this has any impact whatsoever on the question of how well recieved the cosmology of 4e was, especially amongst people who hadn't decided to dislike 4e before taking the cosmology into account. When a thing is as divisive as 4e was, trying to tease out which things worked and which things didn't, without the kind of consumer data that wotc has access to, is a foolish endeavor. The simple fact is, none of us has anything meaningful to go on when discussing how well received the 4e cosmology was. We have our own perception of discussions about it, and that is genuinely it.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Snip.

You are right. Wrong thread for such a discussion.
I knew what you meant, but that did not work for us. If it worked for you, that is absolutely great.
I never devalued your preference except in a bad joke, that went wrong, which I regret.

Edit: I edited my previous post to make it clear.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not going to try and touch the traditional reasons, but what do you mean by business reasons?

I don't see anything in setting up the multiverse so that multiple different things are true at the same time is somehow bad for business. This is pretty much how 90% of all other multiverses work. DnD is one of the few exceptions where they try and have this set up where there is this established "truth" that supersedes the multiverse.

This is a shared universe, not really a multiverse (despite them using the name). What they want to create is more of an MCU pre-Loki and What If..., where characters and events can cross over, but they're aren't multiple versions of the Forgotten Realms. It's easier to understand, and a proven money maker if you put in the work. That's what I mean by business reasons.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

You are right. Wrong thread for such a discussion.
I knew what you meant, but that did not work for us. If it worked for you, that is absolutely great.
I never devalued your preference except in a bad joke, that went wrong, which I regret.

Edit: I edited my previous post to make it clear.

Okay, I don’t see any commonality between what I described and what you claimed about the 4e encounter design paradigm, but you’re right that it’s a discussion for another thread.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This is a shared universe, not really a multiverse (despite them using the name). What they want to create is more of an MCU pre-Loki and What If..., where characters and events can cross over, but they're aren't multiple versions of the Forgotten Realms. It's easier to understand, and a proven money maker if you put in the work. That's what I mean by business reasons.

But... they don't want to do that. In fact in many ways they cannot possibly do that.

Let me ask you this question, who defeats Auril in Rime of the Frost Maiden?

You can say "the player characters" but that's a non-answer really. Those player characters could have included Throm the Dwarven Paladin of Berronar Truesilver, or Sh'lak the Twisted Reborn Warlock. Were they the same player characters that are the Heroes of Phandalin or are they the same player characters who run a brutal tyranny over Phandalin? Did they ever meet Strahd?

Just by releasing an adventure that can have multiple endings, which by their very nature RPG adventures MUST have many possible endings, they have abandoned a model that is a shared universe. Heck, I think there was a Forgotten Realms story called "Brimstone Angels". I've never read it. Events happen in that story, in the Forgotten Realms... but they don't affect the Forgotten Realms that is being published in Adventures in any meaningful way.

Now, they can only publish one version of the Forgotten Realms, and they could make a lot of money by focusing on that version, but that is a version that fits best in novels and movies and TV shows, not in how people will run the game at their tables.

 

[Faolyn]

But... they don't want to do that. In fact in many ways they cannot possibly do that.

Let me ask you this question, who defeats Auril in Rime of the Frost Maiden?

You can say "the player characters" but that's a non-answer really. Those player characters could have included Throm the Dwarven Paladin of Berronar Truesilver, or Sh'lak the Twisted Reborn Warlock. Were they the same player characters that are the Heroes of Phandalin or are they the same player characters who run a brutal tyranny over Phandalin? Did they ever meet Strahd?

Just by releasing an adventure that can have multiple endings, which by their very nature RPG adventures MUST have many possible endings, they have abandoned a model that is a shared universe. Heck, I think there was a Forgotten Realms story called "Brimstone Angels". I've never read it. Events happen in that story, in the Forgotten Realms... but they don't affect the Forgotten Realms that is being published in Adventures in any meaningful way.

Now, they can only publish one version of the Forgotten Realms, and they could make a lot of money by focusing on that version, but that is a version that fits best in novels and movies and TV shows, not in how people will run the game at their tables.

But they've kind of been doing that for years. I can't tell you how many times I've read a gaming book and seen a reference to "some adventurers" having done something, when that something had been the focus of a previously-published adventure.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But they've kind of been doing that for years. I can't tell you how many times I've read a gaming book and seen a reference to "some adventurers" having done something, when that something had been the focus of a previously-published adventure.

Exactly. The only time I read one of those where the party lost was the explanation for House of Strahd (2e's version of the original Ravenloft adventure) in Domains of Dread, "Powerful heroes assault Castle Ravenloft and perish".

Every DM's campaign is it's own shared universe, but beyond PC actions, it's one universe. There's only one Forgotten Realms, and that's the one from the books modified by the DM and the PCs.