Dragonlance DRAGONLANCE LIVES! Unearthed Arcana Explores Heroes of Krynn!

The latest Unearthed Arcana has arrived and the 6-page document contains rules for kender, lunar magic, Knights of Solamnia, and Mages of High Sorcery.

In today’s Unearthed Arcana, we explore character options from the Dragonlance setting. This playtest document presents the kender race, the Lunar Magic sorcerer subclass, the Knight of Solamnia and Mage of High Sorcery backgrounds, and a collection of new feats, all for use in Dungeons & Dragons.

Kender have a (surprisingly magical) ability to pull things out of a bag, and a supernatural taunt feature. This magical ability appears to replace the older 'kleptomania' description -- "Unknown to most mortals, a magical phenomenon surrounds a kender. Spurred by their curiosity and love for trinkets, curios, and keepsakes, a kender’s pouches or pockets will be magically filled with these objects. No one knows where these objects come from, not even the kender. This has led many kender to be mislabeled as thieves when they fish these items out of their pockets."

Lunar Magic is a sorcerer subclass which draws power from the moon(s); there are notes for using it in Eberron.

Also included are feats such as Adepts of the Black, White, and Red Robes, and Knights of the Sword, Rose, and Crown.

News Archive | Dungeons and Dragons

Read the full archives of Dungeons & Dragons news, Sage Advice, Unearthed Arcana, and D&D Studio Blogs.

dnd.wizards.com

 

[Parmandur]

Out of curiosity, can anyone elaborate on why the UA Strixhaven floating subclass model didn't work? Went back and looked at it, and it seemed sound to me - they only worked with certain classes, and you become eligible for the subclass features after certain minimum levels are reached (allowing the features to fill in the right slots at different levels).

Does anyone think this might work better for Solamnic Knights and High Sorcery Mages than it did for Strixhaven schools?

People didn't like them in the UA survey, but WotC didn't really explain why.

 

[James Gasik]

My guess is that it waters down class identity. Which is odd. Way back in the 2e era, TSR realized that Character Class =/= Character Identity. Some Kits pointed this out- anyone can be a Barbarian. Or an Amazon. Being a Pirate or a Swashbuckler didn't require a separate class, but the mechanics had to reflect individual classes (so a Swashbuckler Fighter was mechanically distinct from a Swashbuckler Thief).

Olive Ruskettle could be a Bard without having the Bard class.
Arilyn Moonblade could be an Assassin as a Fighter.
Pikel Bouldershoulder can call himself a Druid, despite probably being a Nature Cleric.
Gandalf can call himself a Wizard, despite being a Demigod/Angel (Angel Summoner?)

 

[humble minion]

Too many character concepts need the subclass at level 1 for character creation.

Definitely this.

Especially for subclasses that change the base ability the class is based on. Warlock gets their subclass at level 1, so Hexblade can be a cha-based melee combatant from the start. Whereas if you wanted a Str-based rogue or monk subclass, or a dex-based Barbarian subclass, a PC who allocated their ability scores with that in mind would be spending their first level or two being very ineffective until they got the subclass feature that allowed them to use their preferred ability score.

It just really cuts down on the design space for subclasses.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I don't reject the idea of "floating subclasses" but to do it possible the game should have been designed like this since the first time, like in Starfinder.

 

[James Gasik]

Most likely, yes, but they were trying to show that character concepts people wanted were achievable without optional content. So they quickly were like, ok, what are things people are asking for? Berserkers, Totem Barbarians, Eldritch Knights, Arcane Tricksters, different Warlock Pacts, all the Wizard specialists, Cleric Domains, Sorcerer bloodlines, etc..

Now they need to open up design space for concepts that suit more than one class and running into problems. So what to do? You don't want to make 10 different subclasses to represent the same thing, that takes up too much space- they don't want to make specialty classes with requirements to join that have less than 20 levels because they already dropped that ball once, and hard (Prestige Classes as invented were designed to represent specialized training from a unique organization in the game world- then they became patches for bad multiclassing rules).

They didn't leave themselves much design space for character options outside of class, subclass, Feats, and Backgrounds. Backgrounds don't have enough "meat" for this sort of thing, so all that's left is Feats or creating something new, like 4e's Themes.

 

[Fifth Element]

Today even Friends, one of the first sitcom that showed a wedding of a same-gender couple, it is not enough "politically correct" now.

And lot of D&D characters do a lot of horrible things, for example some dark lords were cursed because violence against their wives.

Friends debuted almost 30 years ago. 30 years before Friends the Voting Rights Act didn't exist. Society can change a lot in 30 years.
Plus they played Chandler's dad's trans identity for laughs, which is kinda gross.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Friends debuted almost 30 years ago. 30 years before Friends the Voting Rights Act didn't exist. Society can change a lot in 30 years.
Plus they played Chandler's dad's trans identity for laughs, which is kinda gross.

Every character was played for laughs on the show, but by the standards of the time it was very prop trans, Chandler still loved his Dad and while growing up in the situation was challenging at times Chandler still very much supported his Dad. Honestly I think it was the most positive example of a trans character in the 1990s. Most of the humour was about her job as an entertainer, not being trans. You knew that if anyone came at Chandler's Dad with transphobic attacks Chandler and his friends would have his Dad's back in a heart beat.

 

[Jer]

Which is exactly what I do. Which, IMO, is still a problem. If I have to start my game at a later level to achieve that, it's a problem with how the Class system is designed.

The dirty secret of 5e is that level 3 is actually level 1 if you want your character to come with a concept to the table rather than play the "old school" way of discovering what your character is through play at the table. A couple of levels in their past tied to their Background to represent their previous training/experience. It's largely a compromise between the folks who want their characters to start out as capable with a history and the folks who want their characters to start out completely blank slates so they can do the zero to hero thing.

The classes aren't poorly designed, it's that the expectations around how to use them are poorly explained. The "tiers of play" explanation doesn't go far enough to explain what's really going on in that first tier. (They use the term "apprentice adventurers" for levels 1-4 in the PHB - I'd go further and split in half - levels 1-2 are the truly unexperienced adventurers, while levels 3-4 are where you truly get the characters who know what they're doing to a large degree).

 

[Jer]

Plus they played Chandler's dad's trans identity for laughs, which is kinda gross.

What is it with the trans jokes in the late 90s? My kid and I have been working our way through the Simpsons and we hit Season 10 and out of nowhere back to back epsiodes making fun of trans women. Nothing like it in the previous 9 years at all and them bam suddenly it's let's drop some trans slurs into our jokes (though oooof the Asian racist caricatures in the show are even worse than I remembered them being through those first 9 years).

 

[Alzrius]

I think they might go that radical with the 2024 revision: as long as you can still show up with a 2014 PHB built character and play at the table with 2024 Monsters and such or a 2024 PHB character in Princes of the Apocalypse or whatever, I think they are on poitn with being compatible.

The problem is that it's not enough to simply be compatible; they also need to make sure that the revision is perceived to be compatible, otherwise they're risking what happened with 4Essentials all over again. As Shannon Appelcline notes in the product history for Heroes of the Fallen Lands (affiliate link):

What a Difference an Edition Makes: The Compatibility. When Mearls began working on Essentials, one of his main priorities was keeping it totally compatible with previous 4e books. With the release of Heroes of the Fallen Lands, players could now see that changes were indeed pretty minimal, involving: errata; updated Feat and Magic Item systems; and updated philosophies for building characters. Of these, the difference between the character builds was the largest, and had the most possibility to be incompatible.

But the designers felt they weren't

Mearls paraphrased designer Rich Baker when he said, "the choice between a traditional build and an Essentials build would basically reflect different play styles". Baker expanded on this, saying "It’s perfectly ok if, at the same table, Joe is playing a Fighter straight out of the Players Handbook, with all of the power selections that he would ordinarily have had, and Dave, sitting next to him, is playing a Slayer, out of Essentials. Those Characters, essentially, are built the same, and are transparent to each other".

But that's not at all how the D&D roleplaying community treated the new rules. Between late 2010 and early 2011, 4e players seemed to fracture into "traditional" gamers and "Essentials" gamers. At first there were edition wars over whether Essentials had replaced the core rules, then for the next year each new D&D book was scrutinized for whether it was Essentials or traditional.

So, there's no mechanical reason not to use core and Essentials products together, but you could similarly have said that 3e books could be used with D&D 3.5e (2003) with almost no problem. In both cases, the roleplaying community disagreed.