D&D (2024) New One D&D Playtest Document: 77 Pages, 7 Classes, & More!

There's a brand new playtest document for the new (version/edition/update) of Dungeons of Dragons available for download! This one is an enormous 77 pages and includes classes, spells, feats, and weapons.

Unearthed Arcana Playtest

Unearthed Arcana Playtest Materials Get Unearthed Arcana playtest content, try it out in your game, and provide feedback! Check back regularly for ...

www.dndbeyond.com

In this new Unearthed Arcana document for the 2024 Core Rulebooks, we explore material designed for the next version of the Player’s Handbook. This playtest document presents updated rules on seven classes: Bard, Cleric, Druid, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, and Rogue. This document also presents multiple subclasses for each of those classes, new Spells, revisions to existing Spells and Spell Lists, and several revised Feats. You will also find an updated rules glossary that supercedes the glossary of any previous playtest document.

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[I'm A Banana]

I think what I generally see asked for makes the most sense: Short rests that are shorter than an hour, but longer than "per encounter". The best solution, IMO is 10-20 minutes. I'd say 15, but I think 10-minute increments are a thing in 5e (Rituals, etc) and therefore the choice is: 1 or 2 "old-school Turns"?

20 minutes is probably the best possible middle-ground. Long enough that you could get caught doing it, and short enough that if the party really needs the rest, the DM can probably justify giving it to them without interruption, but also without feeling like the monsters are just standing around waiting for them.

This is functionally reducing it to "it's a handwave unless the DM is feeling spicy." Ignorable, so most tables are going to ignore it. Like a rule about ammo that says "you run out of arrows if you don't visit a town for 10 days." It gives me 4e feat vibes - weak enough to forget about most of the time.

So why are we afraid of yeeting it entirely? 10-20 minutes is not much of an interesting choice in most circumstances. We don't need to make someone spend the mental effort on deciding and declaring it. Going long-rest-only is a valid and useful choice.

And if the reason we're afraid of yeeting it entirely is because we don't want to get rid of the interesting choice about taking a short rest or not, let's make that choice more interesting. Reducing its length makes it less interesting. And maybe that's OK! But if it's OK, let's own that!

 

[Vael]

Short Rests are pretty baked into the base game ... if this was 6e, discussing the need for them is a more fruitful discussion. Yeeting them out means new rules for spending hitdice and short rest abilities ... how does a Wizard use their Arcane Recovery feature now? And yes, it's doable, but I still like having the Short Rest as a thing to do in the game, I just find that the hour doesn't feel right.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Short Rests are pretty baked into the base game ... if this was 6e, discussing the need for them is a more fruitful discussion. Yeeting them out means new rules for spending hitdice and short rest abilities ... how does a Wizard use their Arcane Recovery feature now? And yes, it's doable, but I still like having the Short Rest as a thing to do in the game, I just find that the hour doesn't feel right.

I mean, the concern is that they tried.

All that crap about proficiency per day, breaking the warlock on the Wheel... they were trying their level best to get rid of Good Recovery Methods in favor for the Bad Traditional Recovery Methods.

 

[tetrasodium]

.

In fact, that's probably the decision that they came to rather than changing the rule: Make it a clearly defined optional rule and see what people do with it.

It would need to be much more fleshed out than the current dmg rest variants. As is they terribly incomplete and exist for little reason other than providing an excuse to hang a bunch of 5e's design problems on an oberoni fallacy.

Don't like the fact that a trio of classes are built to nova >short rest>nova>repeat? Blame the gm for not changing short rest duration and running every session with an extreme doom clock.

Don't like all the problems caused by changing the rest cycle durations in a game where literally every ability has durations in rounds minutes hours and maybe days? Blame the gm for not extending things well enough.

Don't like how rests are designed to be impossible to fail at successfully completing unless the gm invokes fiat or rocks fall levels of "interruptions" to prevent players from simply taking another now that the gm so rudely wasted everyone's time with an interruption? Blame the gm for not finding "better" players.

Don't like that the gm actually stops players from completing a rest? Blame the gm for adversarial heavy handed fiat or running some kind of ultra grim dark murder fest meat grinder.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

This is functionally reducing it to "it's a handwave unless the DM is feeling spicy." Ignorable, so most tables are going to ignore it. Like a rule about ammo that says "you run out of arrows if you don't visit a town for 10 days." It gives me 4e feat vibes - weak enough to forget about most of the time.

So why are we afraid of yeeting it entirely? 10-20 minutes is not much of an interesting choice in most circumstances. We don't need to make someone spend the mental effort on deciding and declaring it. Going long-rest-only is a valid and useful choice.

And if the reason we're afraid of yeeting it entirely is because we don't want to get rid of the interesting choice about taking a short rest or not, let's make that choice more interesting. Reducing its length makes it less interesting. And maybe that's OK! But if it's OK, let's own that!

I agree that things could be done to make Short Rests more interesting. However, I don't agree that making them shorter makes them less interesting. I think it just makes them more useful.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yes, it needs a bit of a rewrite. For a while it looked like 2024 might tackle it, but then they dropped the ball

I strongly disagree, but it’s almost certainly too late to worry about it either way.

 

[Vael]

I agree that things could be done to make Short Rests more interesting. However, I don't agree that making them shorter makes them less interesting. I think it just makes them more useful.

I'm not sure about making Short Rests interesting, it's a recovery/pacing mechanic. I found Pathfinder's attempts to gamify short rest healing maddening, what I want is a time interval that is not insignificant, but also not so burdensome as to not want to bother.

If we think of a Short Rest as a break, then 5 minutes is like a smoke break, an hour is like a full meal break, and I tend to think the time needed to bind a wound or two, recenter and meditate falls somewhere between those two extremes.

 

[mamba]

The only "need" a game has is to facilitate people having fun. If the rules succeed at doing so, and are liked as is, changing for the sake of change is not necessarily going to achieve that end.

‘change for the sake of change’ is not what I am asking for here, whether you like ‘my’ change or not.
I can use that ‘reasoning’ against any individual change.

Heck, D&D does not ‘need’ a 2024 version at all.

 

[Parmandur]

‘change for the sake of change’ is not what I am asking for here, whether you like ‘my’ change or not.
I can use that ‘reasoning’ against any individual change.

Heck, D&D does not ‘need’ a 2024 version at all.

No, not really. It's a sales thing based around the 50th Anniversary. It presents an opportunity to tweak the game in some keybways, like moving away from some problematic ideas in 2014 (about, say, Orcs) and do a bunch of errata stuff that they were not willing to do as just errata documents. But the game doesn't "need" any fixes, per se. So they are working to find what changes are popular or desired.

 

[mamba]

I strongly disagree, but it’s almost certainly too late to worry about it either way.

agreed, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be discussed. If we applied that rule for everything, there would be a lot fewer posts