D&D 5E (2024) New Jeremy Crawford Interviews

[Clint_L]

Intentionally or not (and to give the designers credit, almost certainly not), "Pick-a-Parent" is a tool that feels like it encourages a "wide, but shallow" approach to mixed ancestry characters - you can play any mix you can imagine, so long as they don't have the generational "depth" that might warrant "speciation" (i.e. being treated as a distinct species option and given their own distinct mechanics). Lots of first-gen mixed individuals, no cohesive societies with a shared mixed heritage.

Why not? What stops you from creating cohesive societies if you want? IRL, cohesive societies are formed because of shared history and culture, not +2 to charisma.

 

[Charlaquin]

Neither Orc nor Human have subspecies.

Indeed, doing away with subspecies appears to have been a goal of the 2024 species redesigns. They seem to be shifting towards the dragonborn ancestry model, where you pick an option from a table that determines the selection of a number of options for a common feature for the species. E.G., damage type for the breath weapon and damage resistance with dragonborn, always-prepared spells with elves and tieflings, etc.

One thing that is nice about this approach is that it’s very easy to homebrew new options. Want a custom quicksilver dragonborn ancestry for your home game? Pick a damage type and it’s good to go. Have a player in your Curse of Strahd game who’s character just died and wants to know if they can play a dusk elf? Just choose a cantrip, a first level spell, and a second level spell that feel on-theme, and Bob’s your uncle. The furry at your table is desperate to play a Tiefling descended from Arcanaloths? Just ask them what cantrip, damage resistance, and two spells they think a fox demon would have, and bada-bing, bada-boom!

 

[Yaarel]

Also this shorter video from Diana of the Rose

Of note, the DMs Guide will aim to make DMing easier.

Players Handbook further develops rules for tool proficiencies, along with their use for a crafting system.

Plus, the DMs Guide expands the crafting system of players to create their own magic items.

 

[Minigiant]

Neither Orc nor Human have subspecies.

But Elves, Humans, and Orcs have legacies.

D&D is big on a character's ancestors and parentage affecting them mechanically and narattievly. Even in 2024.

I an be red with a tail because my grandpa was a fiend and cast spells because my great great great grandma is a dragon.

WOTC just was tripped up on words.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The guy in the first video just kind of casually drops that Exhaustion has been significantly changed (which Jeremy Crawford takes in stride, but I’m guessing he wasn’t actually supposed to say). That’s interesting because in the most recent UAs it had disappeared from the rules glossary, which according to what we were told about how to playtest the UA content meant we should continue using the 2014 version. But apparently it is some sort of cumulative penalty, the effects of which increase predictably with each additional level of Exhaustion to make it easier to remember, rather than each level having a unique effect. But, there are still 6 levels in total and you still die if you accumulate 6 levels. Interesting.

Ah, so still essentially useless. Good to know...le sign.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The Hyrid thing is addressed, just use the 2014 version of the Half Elf and Half Orc and the reason they give for their absence was they wanted a broader cross section of the Multiverse, so added Aasimar and Goliaths instead.

Honestly Half Elf and Half Orc are SRD and free anyways, along with Aacrokra and OG Goliaths and Deep Gnomes and Genasi.

No rules/use old rules is literally better than the ultra-creepy "you may look like X + Y but you're actually just X" rule from UA so that, hilariously, is an improvement.

Feels to me like there’s a bit of spin going on there, but it does at least make clear that half-elves and half-orcs still exist and can be played.

That's more spin than you're acknowledging I think because that "too similar" literally wasn't the reasoning before.

However, I am inclined to be somewhat forgiving on this because this is a move away from a frankly fringe and arguably extreme position, which in attempting to please some people, kind of erased the identities of others. And anything that causes them to drop the utterly ghastly (on every level) UA rules approach on this is good.

For me, the two half-races were a way to explore the struggles of mixed heritages; as well, they both represented different reflections of humanity and the variety of things that someone with mixed heritage faces when navigating life.

Being a mix of both while situationally neither is a unique experience.

Indeed. And this doesn't fit well with mainstream US perspectives on personal identity (which is very coloured by US specific laws/history including the "one drop rule"), despite, in many other countries (including in the Americas), being quite important, identity-wise.

But again this is still better than the UA approach!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I mean, it sounds like they are exploring different ways of using their abilities...?

All three of those Classes are Spellcasters, so casting Spells is already in their balliwick.

No. That's not what he means, and they're doing the opposite of that - what we're seeing is blandification, for better or worse (it's not always bad in TT RPGs), rules-wise. By pushing these classes demonstrably further into being casters and significantly more actually spell-reliant, they're inarguably changing them, but essentially to be more similar to each other and other classes, rather than to more unique or to have stronger mechanical identities.

Instead of nerfing Paladins in this rather hopeless way, they could have leaned in to how Paladins operated, and made them less about casting spells, and more about smiting. And achieved the same DPR result without making the big mechanical mess they've made simply by limiting this special ability Smite (rather than spell) to 1/turn.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I wonder if that means the "Pick-a-Parent" system didn't make it in at all, or if it's just been allocated to a book further down the line (perhaps the DMG). In spite of my general grouching on this subject, I don't actually have anything against "Pick-a-Parent" in and of itself, I just feel that it's a partial solution at best and needs to be bolstered by something more robust.

Well, they've clearly realized that "We removed the half-races because some people didn't like them" was actually its own kind of dodgy erasure given he's now spinning it as "they were too similar to Orcs/Elves", so I imagine they've also realized that "Pick-a-Parent" is basically unintentionally but strongly aligned with a whole giant pile of horrifically racist sentiments (like, think of a certain kind of American cookie and how that's applied to certain people, and particularly biracial ones, or the one-drop rule and how it has impacted perceptions of race in the US), so I presume they've had the good sense to move away from that permanently. It's just more trouble than its worth.

"Pick-a-Parent" may well work fine for "half-elves" in FR or Dragonlance, but it's a torpedo when pointed at Eberron's Khoravar.

Yeah which is another reason I don't think it's coming back. Also I don't think it even works fine for Dragonlance. It certainly wouldn't for Taladas (not that anyone cares!).

My guess is that individual settings where half-races are important will get rules for them (probably not called half-X, but something more setting-specific) in that setting, if it's redone for 2024-era.

And that we'll see something akin to Tasha's approach to custom species come back in a future Tasha's replacement/update as the general way to create an entirely custom species. Also I presume there's some guidance for DMs on building species in the DMG.

 

[Aldarc]

Video 2 directly confirms that half-elves and half-orcs are still playable options (since they aren’t reproduced in the new PHB, the old version is still usable with the new rules). Jeremy says they were left out because they wanted to use the 10 species options in the new PHB to express a very wide range of character archetypes, and felt half-orc and half-elf were too close conceptually to orc and elf respectively, and they decided to use that space for other species that were more distinct from the others in the book. Feels to me like there’s a bit of spin going on there, but it does at least make clear that half-elves and half-orcs still exist and can be played.

Gnomes were available in 4e PHB 2, but there was a fair amount of anti-4e sentiment simply because gnomes weren't in PHB 1 and the anti-gnome sentiment in some of 4e's marketing. Considering WotC's negative public statements about half-races and their absence in the 2024 PHB, I could see similar problems arising. As you say, it feels like spin-doctoring to say that half-elves and half-orcs are still playable. The reason given for their exclusion for purposes of the multiverse does not exactly square with their earlier statements about their unease with the existence of half-species.

 

[pemerton]

So why would we think other species would be?

Because they're fairly simple story-telling devices?