D&D 5E (2024) Is 5E better because of Crawford and Perkins leaving?

[bedir than]

You can’t stealth errata a physical book. Unless they’re hiring ninjas to sneak into my house and swap the book for one with different text while I’m asleep.

The printings have changes that they haven't announced.

 

[Charlaquin]

The printings have changes that they haven't announced.

Seems like a poor policy, since people with older printings will have incorrect text and not know it.

 

[eclair~]

And revised it so that it no longer uses your reaction, for some reason.

You know, in all the discussion of whether or not the unpredictable movement feature actually functioned as intended, I kinda forgot to consider if it would even be any good when used as it was intended. Move up to half your speed as a Reaction when you roll initiative…? Maybe this is just me, but my experience has always been that, if you’re using a battle map, the DM generally gives the players the opportunity to position themselves on the map at the beginning of combat anyway. What good does being able to move before anyone has had the opportunity to act even do in that scenario?

A really good point as well. You'd have to have your characters pre-placed on a map for this feature to have any effect.

There's also something to be said about how hollow the Lorwyn Changeling's Shape Self is as a feature—there's no utility or benefit whatsoever, only downsides, to shifting to a beast form. Honestly, it feels rather glaring when the only other species added are just edits of existing 2014 races. (To the point that Rimekin get Flame Blade, but it just deals cold damage instead.)

Or the fact that if you pick a Shadowmoor Faerie/Kithkin, you get 120 feet of darkvision—significantly more than more species, and an apparent selling point to the 2024 Orc—on top of the regular fairy/halfling features, and if you pick a Kithkin or Faerie from Lorwyn, you get...nothing at all.

Seems like a poor policy, since people with older printings will have incorrect text and not know it.

After all, let's not forget that they printed off Heroes of Faerun with a feature that used a different ability score than was intended, even though no draft of the feature ever used said incorrect ability score.

 

[AlViking]

Dashing as a bonus action is significantly different than dashing as a reaction. Because what dashing does is gives you more of a resource, called movement, which you spend on your turn to change your character’s location. If you Dash as a bonus action, you gain movement equal to your speed, which you can spend because it’s still your turn. If you Dash as a reaction, you gain movement equal to your speed, but can’t do anything with that movement because it isn’t your turn. This is why the Ready Action specifies that you can Ready to move up to your speed. Because the designers knew that moving as a reaction was a desirable option, but Readying to Dash would be useless under the rules they wrote. For some reason they seem to have forgotten that fact here.

Holy pedantically correct Batman!

It's a game. They wanted to give a character an option to move at the start of combat and other than call it by the acronym dnadwycmbyt (definitely-not-a-dash-where-you-can-move-before-your-turn), they just told you that you can take an action not otherwise allowed by they rules. Specific overrides general, D&D is not written like computer code or with the rigor or a doctoral thesis.

 

[AlViking]

Because"natural language" is still being treated as an improvement rather than acknowledged as a bridge or six too far. For whatever reason there is this , (erroneous) idea of that technical writing required and immediate catapult into the realm of knockoff ikea engrish assembly instructions. The proofreading for something like d&d should (at minimum) be filtered through something like technical writing for dummies if not a full on technical writing set of courses rather than perpetuating a bucket of bad pixie dust.

Overreliance on technical verbiage was a pretty major barrier to entry with 3e. I just don't see natural language causing issues all that often, the group discusses it and the DM makes a final ruling. It's not like all the geek-speak in 3e ever prevented rules disagreements.

 

[tetrasodium]

Overreliance on technical verbiage was a pretty major barrier to entry with 3e. I just don't see natural language causing issues all that often, the group discusses it and the DM makes a final ruling. It's not like all the geek-speak in 3e ever prevented rules disagreements.

Not addressing what I said there

 

[mamba]

Having the Fighter and Wizard make sense thematically and being fun to play without tacking on cheesy mechanics to make them "balanced" and letting the chips fall with one of them being objectively better than the other is a good design

no it isn’t, especially since balance is kinda independent from mechanics and a thematically well designed class

 

[Eric V]

And revised it so that it no longer uses your reaction, for some reason.

A really good point as well. You'd have to have your characters pre-placed on a map for this feature to have any effect.

On a VTT, this might still be a good feature...

 

[Charlaquin]

Holy pedantically correct Batman!

And people believe the line that 5e is written in natural language

It's a game. They wanted to give a character an option to move at the start of combat and other than call it by the acronym dnadwycmbyt (definitely-not-a-dash-where-you-can-move-before-your-turn),

The thing is, the game already has a standardized (and functional!) way to express that. It’s used by the Ready action, and in the corrected text of the feature in question. Someone apparently just forgot that when they initially wrote the feature, and it somehow didn’t get caught and corrected prior to release.

they just told you that you can take an action not otherwise allowed by they rules.

Well, no, they told you you can take an action that is allowed by the rules, but doesn’t do anything. That’s the problem.

Specific overrides general, D&D is not written like computer code or with the rigor or a doctoral thesis.

It is actually written pretty technically. It’s just also written to sound natural. One of the very noticeable distinctions between 1st and 3rd party content is that 3rd party publishers often lack the technical precision of 1st party content. Which is why this mistake concerned me. It indicated that 5e’s writers may be slipping in what used to be one of their key selling points.

 

[Charlaquin]

On a VTT, this might still be a good feature...

Oh, true. Good point!