D&D 5E New Unearthed Arcana: Heroes of Krynn Revisited

WotC's Jeremy Crawford has announced a new Unearthed Arcana article today with redesigns from the prior Heroes of Krynn UA based on feedback, and in the following video he discusses that feedback and what's in the article:

• New iteration of Kender based on feedback survey, due to mixed response. This time is a back to basics, aiming to capture 1E AD&D fearlessness, curiosity and taunting skills. Delve into their origins from Gnomes in deep history.
• Kender are no longer fey creatures who grab objects from the Feywild
• Tweaked Feats from prior article
• Tweaked Backgrounds from prior article
• Brand new rule giving a list of free Feats for ANY Background
• Free Feat rule for Level 4 for all characters that doesn't take the ASI away, based on a curated list
• Reveals that in the Adventure, healing magic is already back.

Heroes of Krynn Revisited | Unearthed Arcana | Dungeons & Dragons

Explore updated character options from the Dragonlance setting! This playtest document presents revised races, subclasses, backgrounds, and feats.

dnd.wizards.com

 

[Vaalingrade]

badwrongfun is really just a means of cutting off discussion anyway, so it can easily be ignored.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Alignment, for me, serves as a useful shorthand for specific NPCs in published adventures.

I think this is the most valid modern-day use of alignment - I can't think of any other ways it is generally useful, but if you have a very short NPC description because that's all you've got room for, you can get some general attitudes out of that.

I think a system of basic personality descriptors would work about as well, but alignment is what we've got.

 

[Faolyn]

Isnt that just a facet of what Evil would be? Selfish ambition to the exclusion of others? It certainly is at my table, same with selfishness.

Or does literally everyone else think that Evil can only be ax-crazy lunatics stabbing people at random?

"God of evil" doesn't imply anything other than evil, possibly to cartoonish levels, because evil is such a generic term with no real direction or meaning to it. It could be evil as selfish ambition, or it could be evil as ax-crazy lunatics, or any other sort of evil.

"God of evil and selfish ambition" provides a direction for that evil.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't think that's quite right.

I think it's reasonable, if you have both extensive experience of a facet of the game, and all that experience is negative, or at best, neutral, to say that facet of the game could stand to be removed or reduced. That's not "badwrongfun". That's a valid experience-based opinion on game design.

By your logic, no-one could object to 4E's design ideas because it worked for "multitudes". Obviously that's not good logic.

That's not accurate. By my logic people shouldn't say that 4e had to be ended and a new edition made. It's fine to complain if you don't like something. Trying to get it taken away from those who like it is bupkis and badwrongfunning. It's in effectively saying, "You shouldn't have alignment because it's bad. I know better than you, so what I want is what should happen."

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Alignment is one of the few things that I'm genuinely happy is dying. It deserves it. The fact that it makes a bunch of older gamers that regularly call for things that I enjoy to be excluded from D&D angry is just the icing on the cake.

Alignment is just as bad as zodiac symbols and buzzfeed personality tests. If either of those ever died, I would be ecstatic. I'll have the same reaction when this stupid sacred cow is finally slaughtered.

So, yeah. You should be happy that WotC is even choosing to compromise on this. Because if they weren't, it would be gone already.

Mod Note:

Ageist? Check. Insulting other’s preferences to aggrandize your own? Check.

Your post is exactly as toxic as you perceIve the people whose potential exclusion seems to elicit your schadenfreude. So now, your wish for others is your punishment-you’re threadbanned.

 

[Parmandur]

You could kind of make the same case for 3E, though, it had about the same amount of text on each alignment (slightly more), and just has a vague and contradictory "Good vs Evil" and "Law vs Chaos" preamble before it, and some of the alignment descriptions confuse personalities and alignments (which is pretty crap). I'd argue the 3E version of Chaotic Good was actively confusing and showed a misapprehension on the part of whoever wrote it, for example.

Description :: d20srd.org

In the end, the people who care about alignment as anything more than meme-worthy shenanigans tend to derive their understandings of alignment from 1E and 2E. 4E made a bold attempt to redefine alignment, but it was somewhat misguided and didn't stick.

4E was better metaphysics (thanks to Reverend Janes Wyatt), but less useful as an acting prompt.

 

[Mistwell]

I think this is the most valid modern-day use of alignment - I can't think of any other ways it is generally useful, but if you have a very short NPC description because that's all you've got room for, you can get some general attitudes out of that.

I think a system of basic personality descriptors would work about as well, but alignment is what we've got.

I'd be fine with an alternative system as long as it can be brief. For now, I at least have a rough idea of what alignment is trying to communicate in at least a broad sense.

 

[Parmandur]

I think this is the most valid modern-day use of alignment - I can't think of any other ways it is generally useful, but if you have a very short NPC description because that's all you've got room for, you can get some general attitudes out of that.

I think a system of basic personality descriptors would work about as well, but alignment is what we've got.

Yeah, it's an acting prompt shorthand.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The 3e SRD is missing a lot. I'll show LG for both 3e and 5e.

5e: "(LG) creatures can be counted on to do the right thing as expected by society."

3e: "A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. She combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. She tells the truth, keeps her word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished."

It's not fantastic, but it has 4x the sentences and is less vague. At least it gives some sense of what LG means.

That's exactly what is in my link, I don't think the SRD is missing anything there.

You can see immediately though that alignment and personality are being confused, and needless and irrational boundaries defined. Stuff like "A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished." is a personality trait, not something inherent to having an LG alignment. An LG person might well feel "Better a dozen guilty men go free than one innocent man be executed" or the like - that's absolutely within the bounds of LG - indeed not feeling that way, accepting the state murder of innocents - that's pretty classic LN, isn't it? Equally "She combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly.", again, confusing personality traits with alignment. You can have a solid LG morality without that level of "discipline" or "relentlessness".

3E really is a good example of how they messed up defining alignments, and instead of making a real effort to create some sort of consistent and rational approach to alignments, they just slapped down a bunch of adventurer-specific personality stereotypes.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'd be fine with an alternative system as long as it can be brief. For now, I at least have a rough idea of what alignment is trying to communicate in at least a broad sense.

Yeah I think any alternative would want to not be more than 1 or 2 words of descriptor or you lose the point.