D&D 5E D&D Studio Blog - Sage Advice - Creature Evolutions

There's a new D&D Studio Blog - Jeremy's posted about "Creature Evolutions": Creature Evolutions | Dungeons & Dragons

Some quick takeaways:

• Some creatures that were formerly humanoids will, going forward, be monstrosities, fey, or something else. ("Humanoid" is reserved for creatures with similar "moral and cultural range" to humans.)
• Alignment got put in a "time out".
• They've started using class tags so that DMs know that a particular NPC can attune to magic items limited to a particular class.
• Bonus actions get their own section in the stat block now.
• They've merged the Innate Spellcasting and Spellcasting traits and have gotten rid of spell slots.

Also some stuff we've already guessed based on the stat blocks and playable races in Wild Beyond the Witchlight.

There's also some Sage Advice on "rabbit hops" for harengon PCs.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Being born knowing a language is pretty rare. Languages are learned. So who does the teaching matters more than who your parents are.
This change is related to the changes on weapon proficiencies and skills. Having every adventurer from a certain race have all of the same learned skills (tools, languages, etc) makes absolutely zero sense.

Except for Deep Speech/Daelkyr (Edit: And maybe Abyssal/Infernal, Celestial, and similar planar languages). I absolutely see those languages as something you're born with, because Alien physiology is, well, alien.

 

[John R Davis]

Counterspell is a very heavily used spell ( it is very strong) so I'm ok it being weakened so monsters can get their cool thing into play.

More concerned at non-humanoid PCs. Need some spell rewrites otherwise it will be a very strong heritage to have.

 

[Stormonu]

"This deal is getting worse all the time"

Ever since Tasha's, I feel like I am slowly being pushed away by the changes and direction the D&D team are going. I don't like the changes they made to the monster statblocks - nor the reasoning behind them and unless they begin swinging back towards the way things were around about Xanather's release, I see myself buying less and less product. Certainly planning to skip the new Mord's book, at least.

 

[Ibrandul]

To be perfectly honest, it's one of those spells I've almost never seen used. [. . .]

But, as I said earlier, since the monster manual is already chock a block with abilities that are spells but not really spells, this doesn't seem like a major change. It's a bit sad when the bad guy Lich gets totally shut down for three rounds because the PC's just keep counter spelling. Much better that that Lich has all sorts of weird magical powers that normal wizards don't have.

Take a look at the revised War Priest that WotC revealed as an example of the new approach. That’s not a Yuan-ti or even a lich. It’s basically an NPC version of a common (vanilla, even) PC—right down to the newly added "Cleric" type.

It’s one thing to redesign this NPC’s spellcasting to be different from its PC version by replacing spell slots with 4e-style “per day” powers. That’s not likely to be visible to players anyway; the new version will behave the same as the old version in most encounters, so far as players can see. Even the more player-visible action-economy effects of this change (bypassing the two-spells-in-a-turn limitation) are NPC/DM-facing.

But it’s quite another thing to redefine spells—thematically spells, no two ways about it, spells such as fireball, not innate abilities or inexplicable wacky ancient magic—such that PC abilities/options that target spells can’t target these spells anymore. That's not a matter of "Under the hood, monster abilities don't work like my PC abilities do"; it's a matter of "Why can't my PC abilities that are supposed to interact with this monster's spells actually do what they say they're supposed to do?" (Note that this isn't just limited to counterspell—the Mage Slayer feat just got downgraded from "usually very good, though campaign-dependent" to "DO NOT BUY" and no longer makes any sense thematically.)

And sure, there are players and play groups that don’t choose to take counterspell even if it’s available to them. But there are also other PC options, including a whole subclass, that are designed to rely heavily on that spell, and anyway the spell is a powerful enough option that I’ve never encountered any “best build” advice that doesn’t strongly recommend selecting counterspell if you have access to it, unless other party members have counterspell covered.

My point here is just that counterspell is a very common player selection, even if that’s not the case in your group. My broader take is that while I think nerfing counterspell is a fine idea in the abstract, this particular change doesn’t just reduce the spell’s potency, it also makes the spell even more of a hassle at the table by foisting untenable “No, this isn’t actually a spell, it just looks and behaves exactly like one—and used to actually be one until Jeremy Crawford had an idea” conversations upon tables that do use the spell and the new statblocks.

 

[clearstream]

Yeah.

As to the blog, its exactly what I expected and predicted when another thread asked how races would look going forward in the next book to consolidate them all.

Type: Humanoid (and an associated 'human like' moral system and cultural range).
ASI: Whatever.
Alignment: Whatever.
Age: Typically around 100 years. AKA: Human.
Size: Small or Medium and "Player characters, regardless of race, typically fall into the same ranges of height and weight that humans have in our world.". Human
Language: Whatever

2-4 Special Rules: Your actual race.

Your race is now a few special rules, or 'mostly human like'.

Otherwise you are an Outsider/Fiend/Construct of some type.

Plus proficiency bonus is spelled out explicitly. It's about time.

 

[clearstream]

Looking forward to the opportunity to provide feedback on these changes.

Thoughts on creatures:

• Creature Type: I'm largely OK with this, though I suspect in practice this means only creatures intended as PCs will get the Humanoid label. (Though we'll see more PCs outside the Humanoid label, on a case-by-case basis.)
• Alignment: Despite the claims that the removal of alignment was always intended as a temporary "time-out", I'd bet that if they hadn't gotten enough negative responses, it would have stayed gone. (Side question: Will we see alignments for Candlekeep and Ravenloft monsters and NPCs in errata for those books?) I applaud their attempt to thread the needle in the current approach, though I imagine a fair number of folks will still be unsatisfied one way or the other.
• Tags: Tags to identify a creature's intended character class could be pretty useful for reverse-engineering. But I hope they don't go too crazy with new ones.
• Bonus Actions: Good call.
• Spellcasting: The intent is good, and I very much like having (former?) spells described in the stat block for convenience. But I'm not happy about something that obscures the effective level of a NPC's spellcasting, or the complete removal of spell slots, both of which make modifying NPCs tougher.

Thoughts on races:

• Creature Type: No issues here.
• Ability Score Increases: I'm disappointed they're still sticking with "optimize for your class" as the quick build option, since I think that will discourage ability score diversity as much as floating ASI would otherwise encourage it. Keeping the old-school default ASIs as a quick-build option would be a nice olive branch to fans who liked that, as well. Certainly makes character race design easier, though!
• Age: Don't like this. Maybe they were uncomfortable with character races that became mature at a younger age than humans, but tossing out suggested age ranges entirely is massively overcompensating. Of course, this also means even less work...
• Alignment: As long as they still describe default cultures (ideally more than one), the loss of alignment here is fine.
• Size: Having multiple size options is interesting, though I hope we don't see it on every single race. Dropping suggested heights and weights isn't as bad as dropping age ranges (though again, not lost on me that this means less design work); but having different tables for small and medium characters would have been nice, just to avoid the bizarre potential scenario of a Small seven-foot character. (Dare I hope we might finally see Tiny or Large races?)
• Languages: Was this a common complaint, that dwarves usually know Dwarvish or elves usually know Elvish? I don't understand why a default here is a no-go, as long as you make it clear you can pick whatever.

Is it only me who cares about the proficiency bonus being spelled out?

 

[John R Davis]

Is it only me who cares about the proficiency bonus being spelled out?

No. It is about time.

 

[aco175]

Can I counterspell cultural language back to racial languages?
-You know, since tongues is a spell.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Or, as an alternative idea, not bother and make Counterspell a lot less effective so that your party of five casters basically cake walks any enemy caster because of the action economy.

I, for one, have zero problems with removing the ability of players to completely shut down the most effective baddies in the encounter with a single reaction.

But you should elimate the root of the problem, not the symptoms.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

EDIT: of course you could have languages that can't be physically spoken by some creatures. A read a book a long time ago (West of Eden) that had a race of dinosaur people that partially communicated by changing color. The human slaves could not fully replicate their language because of this.

Totally wrong... Saurials speak by changing their scent.