NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9411843" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I've started skimming these posts about WOTC 2024 IS MAKING EVERYTHING SPELLS FOR ALL SPECIES!!!But I want to take a moment and just take a look at what has actually, factually happened. Humans: No spells. In fact, they gained a unique ability that ties into their core theme. It is actually an even more impressive jump in design, if you consider that this is the new base human, and the old base human was +1 to six stats. Dwarves: No spells. Gained a unique ability that ties into their core theme. Halflings: No spells. Didn't gain any new abilities, but became a more consistent package. Dragonborn: No spells. Compared to the 2014 PHB version (which is the version they were redesigning) it gained a lot of unique abilities that tie into their core themes. Orcs: No spells. Technically didn't gain anything new compared to their most recent version, just the ability to use their new iconic ability more often. Goliaths: Complete redesign.... and no spells. None of the options in the playtest had spells at all. Aasimar: Very interesting ability to swap revelations, giving Aasimar a thematic counter to tieflings by being more mercurial and changing in their abilities instead of static. Not redesigned to have spells in 2024, except for the light cantrip that they had previously. Tieflings: Have spells! Just like they did in 2014. But compared to the 2014 PHB, they now have a lot more options, going from one version to three. Elves: This one is a little complicated. Drow already had spells, so this isn't a redesign. High elves ALSO had spells already, and just gained more to match Drow. So, technically you could argue that the Wood Elf gained spells into of MAsk of the Wild, but they also gained spells in the EXACT same way that the Drow and the High Elf got. Was this because they wanted to shove every possible ability into spells... or because they wanted to make sure the three elven ancestry options matched in design? Well, for me, I think it was the second. Because once they removed the Drow's sunlight sensitivity (a good move) they suddenly had an option much, much stronger than the other two. And, again, the team was redesigning the PHB options. Gnomes: The only place where I can say for certain that abilities that were not spells were turned into spells. And... in the case of the Forest Gnome getting speak with animals, I've already argued why that is BETTER for players and DMs, by answering a lot of vague questions from the original ability. Like whether or not you could understand the animal. And then Rock gnomes got their crafting tied to prestidigitation, which I agree is annoying... but is also undeniably more powerful than what they used to get. Because it now has more abilities, and all the abilities it had before. So, looking through every single species option presented, there is a case for a SINGLE option getting spells instead of abilities when it could have otherwise gotten abilities. And it was GNOMES, who are a magical race who HAD innate magic as part of their story.</blockquote>

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