D&D (2024) New Jeremy Crawford Interviews

[Ruin Explorer]

Knocking an enemy back and prone is good not just when the enemy is near a cliff.

It's not very good for the high cost and very low chance of working against exactly the enemies you'd most want it to work on.

Oh no, a paladin in melee, whatever will they do. Interesting you mention Cause Fear, because this is an concentrationless cause fear that also works on undead and contructs and deals necrotic damage (despite the public perception, a lot of undead are not actually resistant to necrotic damage). And even if you never upcast it, the ability to do so is now there, and well... you need 1st level smites don't you? Do you think giving disadvantage to everything an enemy attempts, without concentration isn't valuable? This is really a superior version of another 1st level spell.

No, it's not. It's mediocre/niche spell that will see very limited use in actual play and does basically no damage.

Basically Faerie Fire except... no save. You can't dex save against it, you can't legendary resistance it. You get hit with it? Everyone gets advantage to hit you. Yeah, it takes concentration, but as I pointed out, against an invisible opponent? This is a game changing move.

LOL which would be great if it say, ignored the disadvantage to hit an invisible opponent, but as it stands, you have to both know exactly where the invisible opponent is, and stand around whiffing with Disadvantage until you hit, before you can do this. Faerie Fire you only need their general location and you can hit a whole bunch of targets. Plus this is Concentration. It's mid at best.

You clearly don't understand the melee critique, which weakens your responses in general.

That is a tremendous buff to all of these, to not have to cast it ahead of time, but cast on a hit.

No. It's the dead minimum required to render a pointless trash-spell not pointless.

And the original banishment didn't require extra saves, while Banishing smite still required the 50 hp limit. They just included the nerf they were giving banishment into the Banishing Smite. I don't like it either, but it is consistent. And perhaps they reversed it by the time we get the book, because I remember a lot of people not being happy with that.

It's really dumb, yeah hopefully they changed it. It's like, pick a limitation! You can't have both! I think the save is a lot better because otherwise it's a silly guessing game as to whether they're below 50 HP.

I think that changes which "rescue spells" are pretty massive changes.

I don't consider them buffs. I consider them minimal fixes. If they were already borderline viable, and just needed to be improved, sure, I'd consider that a buff, but these were completely non-functional - most Paladins went their entire career without using any of them, or using 1-2, finding out how bad they were, and dropping them forever.

I think you are also too focused on the small bits of damage and underestimating how much battlefield control is hidden in these abilities.

I don't think I am at all. I've played an absolute ton of 5E, and the best and only consistent CC of enemies in the entire game is death. Inflicting drastically less damage to create a puny condition, especially on a spell with Concentration (which they have some potential competition for), or worse, an easy save is not good, especially as a lot of spells have strong conditions. The one real exception is when you can apply a condition without a save, and that's why Blinding Smite is good - trading 2d8 (9) damage for blinding the enemy for at least 1 turn (even a boss with Legendary Resistance, technically, though I can see a lot of DMs trying to weasel out of that) is really nice, especially as it might potentially last longer. The more I think about that Smite, the more I like it.

Of course the problem is, as you pointed out with Banishing Smite, these may not be what they get. If they are, then they don't really mitigate the Paladin nerf, but at least they give a sort of direction to the Paladin, as this like, condition-inflicter. But if, say, they moved the Blinding Smite save to the beginning of their turn, i.e. before attacks, it would go from great to "kind of a dud", pretty much immediately.

 

[dave2008]

I would recommend Ginny Di video that was juat posted, she actually holds Crawfords feet to the fire on Backwards compatibility to the point where she even gets a near-admission that it is a new edition, but they are not calling it a new edition because they want it to be clear people can use all their old stuff and it will play nice.

While a agree, she got the issue for how to use 2014 subclass with the 2024 classes wrong.

 

[JEB]

Yes they could - I can go right on there and make a Volo's goblin if I wanted to, for instance. They're just labeled as legacy.

DDAL = D&D Adventurers League, not D&D Beyond (DDB). DDAL implemented a policy after MOTM came out requiring players to update any characters with a species revised in MOTM to use the MOTM version, not the Legacy version.

Now if someone hadn't purchased Volo's before Monsters of the Multiverse came out, then they can't, as purchasing the former is no longer possible. But if you had it before, you still have access.

Yep!

 

[Charlaquin]

Just finished watching the Ginny Di video, and it was very good. Nice to see the backwards compatibility questions directly asked and clearly answered, all in one place. To summarize:

If you want to make a character under the 2024 rules, you use the most recent version of any elements (class, subclass, feats, spells, etc) you want to take for that character. So, if you want to play an Elf Necromancer Wizard, use the 2024 Elf species (and the 2024 versions of the spells you get from the 2024 elf traits), the 2024 Wizard class, and the 2014 Necromancer subclass (since there is no 2024 Necromancer subclass). Since the 2024 wizard gets its subclass at 3rd level, you will get your Necromancer subclass starting at 3rd level, and you will get all of the 3rd level and lower Necromancer features at that time. (Ginny doesn’t actually address this point in her video and seems to think it’s still an open question, but it has been answered before. I’m surprised she apparently didn’t ask, I can only assume she had limited time with him and prioritized other questions higher something). Likewise, when you choose your spells, you can choose from any existing sources, but if a spell you want appears in the 2024 books, you use that version. Same goes for feats, etc.

If your group is playing using the 2024 rules, but you still want to play a 2014 Wizard, you can do that, and the 2024 rules can handle it. If you choose to do so, they recommend you stick to the 2014 versions of your character options, rather than mixing and matching, but operate using the 2024 rules glossary, as it could be written to account for instances where friction occurs between the old rules and the new rules, whereas obviously the 2014 rules could not have been written to anticipate what friction might occur with rules that had not yet been written. They also noted that you might feel like your character is at a disadvantage compared to the 2024 characters in your party if you choose to do this, but the option is still there if you want it.

I also think we’ve gotten here the clearest and most honest statement about the 2024 rules status as a new edition or not: specifically, what Jeremy Crawford said was that the new core rulebooks have been re-written to the same extent that the 2014 core rulebooks were re-written coming from 5e, and that the 4e core rulebooks were re-written coming from 3.5. The difference is that this time around they were re-written with the intent of being compatible with the material that came before it, as opposed to being re-written with the intent of superseding that material as they had done in the past. So, there you have it. It is, by the lead designer’s own word, as much of a new edition as 5e was, but it’s a new edition that they specifically designed to work with the previous edition’s adventures, player options, and presumably third party material (though he didn’t call that last bit out specifically). And that seems like a reasonable description to me. Sounds very much like what I understand the 1e to 2e change to have been.

 

[Parmandur]

While a agree, she got the issue for how to use 2014 subclass with the 2024 classes wrong.

She did, yes, but Crawford was clear and she kept pushing so he said more than the others.

 

[Parmandur]

Just finished watching the Ginny Di video, and it was very good. Nice to see the backwards compatibility questions directly asked and clearly answered, all in one place. To summarize:

If you want to make a character under the 2024 rules, you use the most recent version of any elements (class, subclass, feats, spells, etc) you want to take for that character. So, if you want to play an Elf Necromancer Wizard, use the 2024 Elf species (and the 2024 versions of the spells you get from the 2024 elf traits), the 2024 Wizard class, and the 2014 Necromancer subclass (since there is no 2024 Necromancer subclass). Since the 2024 wizard gets its subclass at 3rd level, you will get your Necromancer subclass starting at 3rd level, and you will get all of the 3rd level and lower Necromancer features at that time. (Ginny doesn’t actually address this point in her video and seems to think it’s still an open question, but it has been answered before. I’m surprised she apparently didn’t ask, I can only assume she had limited time with him and prioritized other questions higher something). Likewise, when you choose your spells, you can choose from any existing sources, but if a spell you want appears in the 2024 books, you use that version. Same goes for feats, etc.

If your group is playing using the 2024 rules, but you still want to play a 2014 Wizard, you can do that, and the 2024 rules can handle it. If you choose to do so, they recommend you stick to the 2014 versions of your character options, rather than mixing and matching, but operate using the 2024 rules glossary, as it could be written to account for instances where friction occurs between the old rules and the new rules, whereas obviously the 2014 rules could not have been written to anticipate what friction might occur with rules that had not yet been written. They also noted that you might feel like your character is at a disadvantage compared to the 2024 characters in your party if you choose to do this, but the option is still there if you want it.

I also think we’ve gotten here the clearest and most honest statement about the 2024 rules status as a new edition or not: specifically, what Jeremy Crawford said was that the new core rulebooks have been re-written to the same extent that the 2014 core rulebooks were re-written coming from 5e, and that the 4e core rulebooks were re-written coming from 3.5. The difference is that this time around they were re-written with the intent of being compatible with the material that came before it, as opposed to being re-written with the intent of superseding that material as they had done in the past. So, there you have it. It is, by the lead designer’s own word, as much of a new edition as 5e was, but it’s a new edition that they specifically designed to work with the previous edition’s adventures, player options, and presumably third party material (though he didn’t call that last bit out specifically). And that seems like a reasonable description to me. Sounds very much like what I understand the 1e to 2e change to have been.

Yeah, I can see a case for this being the 9th edition of the core rulebooks, or the 17th edition of D&D...but their choice to just move away from enumerated editions makes sense since they screwed up the usage so much over the past 5 decades.

It is a new edition, but it is not a "New Edition, Throw Away All Books Now".

 

[Charlaquin]

Yeah, I can see a case for this being the 9th edition of the core rulesvooks, or the 1utj edition of D&D...

I’m normally very forgiving of typos, but this one made me laugh. I can’t figure out what “1utj edition” was supposed to say; though I agree with the general point regardless.

 

[Parmandur]

I’m normally very forgiving of typos, but this one made me laugh. I can’t figure out what “1utj edition” was supposed to say; though I agree with the general point regardless.

17th, actually makes a little sense looking at my phone keyboard how that could happen: u is right below 7, j right next to h...

That is including OD&D, plus 9 iterations of AD&D from '78 to '24 (later "D&D", and all new ISBNs count for an edition), plus all the Basic D&D...maybe 16th?

At any rate...the word edition is pretty broken for D&D.

 

[Charlaquin]

At any rate... thenword edition is pretty broken for D&D.

I should hope so!

 

[Argyle King]

That is a fair position, but I have two comments.

1) This doesn't speak to a unique playstyle at all. Not only does it not address typical points that are covered by playstyles, but you are consistently comparing it to other existing playstyles, making it inherently not a unique route.

2) This sort of system would have completely worked. However, it always feels like being told your car needs an oil change and deciding to completely rebuild the engine instead. Sure, you fixed the oil issue, but you spent FAR more effort and time than was actually necessary to address the problem.

I don't see it as any more effort than the rebuild that occured. I'd argue that it's less effort because there's zero requirement to deal with spell slots at all.

It's more like changing the oil and realizing that you might want to use a funnel.

Even if it did turn out to be an engine rebuild, wasn't that the point to having a revised version of 5e?