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

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I think that backgrounds giving out multiple bonus feats could be a fine... if every background worked that way. Right now, I think they need to turn off the free-stuff faucet until the edition gets a refresh and all of the backgrounds get boosted in the same way. It feels super lazy and grimy to give new backgrounds way more than classic ones.

tbf they do have other bonus feats listed for people who take other backgrounds

 

[Kurotowa]

The feat trees don't seem to require the associated backgrounds. You won't get them for free, but you can still pick them up as long as you meet the pre-requisites.

Indeed. The rules offered are that everyone gets a bonus feat at 1st and 4th level, picked from a small list, to indicate their status as war heroes. Or if you take one of these backgrounds you are both able and required to take a specific pair of feats that aren't normally on the list. Those pairings being these new ones also introduced in the book.

 

[Kobold Stew]

Divinely Favored is a pretty sweet feat to be generally available.

One thing it does is it lets Rangers cast all their spells with a divine symbol on their shield in lieu of material components.

I also think it's funny that good-aligned characters taking the feat can get Inflict Wounds as their spell, but Neutral and Evil characters cannot. That, with a free casting of Augury.

 

[Mistwell]

I see it more as it helping out with dealing with the "sack of HP" issue that a number of posters have listed as being a problem (despite others saying that things die super quick regardless due to poor action economy).
Also, if you applied the Squire of Solamnia/Knightly Orders backgrounds to NPCs, you can create Martial foes that can add Superiority Die to their attacks too!

(Now to wait to get swamped by everyone saying Backgrounds can't be given to NPCs and other class level to monsters topics.) I don't know, I like the idea. That Tiamat Chromatic Draconian Battle Master Champion sounds like a nice bad guy to fight against.

You can do whatever you want to NPCs. You don't need to follow any PC rules. Just directly give them superiority dice. Nothing will break.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

You can do whatever you want to NPCs. You don't need to follow any PC rules. Just directly give them superiority dice. Nothing will break.

yup I give 1 or 2 off class features to NPCs all the time... not even just low level ones, I've given skill mastery to NPCs

 

[Cadence]

How did I miss that Kender were Gnomes in the lore before... (or also transformed Dwarves in other parts).

 

[Juomari Veren]

Still not a big fan of free feats from backgrounds, for the simple reason that most of the feats they offer here are incredibly bloated with little benefits all over. I'm also surprised that it seems they took incredibly little input from the survey, besides the Kender being fey-adjacent (but got rid of the best feature they had???????? Were people asking for that to happen or is that just WoTC flexing the ol' trigger finger?).

These new feats are too dense; Too many free spells, or extra spells on your lists, and too many superiority dice. The robe feats should give you some other minor benefit instead of spells and keep the special ability attached to it, maybe with less uses per day but I'm not gonna complain about a wholly unique benefit. If they want to give free feats out, why not those skill and tool feats they made in Xanathar's and Tasha's? I get it, it'd be another book that's wholly necessary to play a specific setting, but I also am not fond of the idea overall anyways, so I would prefer that they stepped back into the realm of backgrounds being focused on the flavorful non-numerical benefits anyways.

Thank god that awful eyesore of a subclass is gone for now, there was way too much involved in having a subclass that's basically three rolled into one going on. Maybe they can revisit that idea of classless subclasses from Strixhaven-era and plug them into these knightly orders instead, and then they can open up a design space that's more broad than having to cram all the good benefits into a feat. Plus, martials and 3-feature subclasses like Bards could probably use the love more than wizards, clerics, et al.

Overall, this UA seems to take one or two things that were critical of the previous iteration and move the entire thing too far in that direction; It's wildly all over the place in terms of what it does for the individual, but all of a sudden this UA presupposes backgrounds are king and they completely tipped the balance of the game on its head because of it. This isn't necessarily worrying for the impending rules update, but if they decide to try and push character benefits too far in this direction without making feats a bit more holistic and less "long string of bullet points and multiple buttons and knobs" then I can't imagine this going well in the near future.

 

[Faolyn]

Thats even more mind boggling. A spell is a spell is a spell, and gods can grant within domains blah blah blah.

A GOOD Black Robe?? Come on Wizards....

Gotta ride that fence and annoy everyone as you say I guess.

I have a suspicion that the books will provide enough background info that if there are any good Black Robes, they're vanishingly rare. And I'm sure that there's been more than a few players who've played good Black Robe mages (or evil White Robe mages) in order to be "different."

 

[Parmandur]

Thank god that awful eyesore of a subclass is gone for now

O, they said the Moon Sorcerer was extremely popular, and didn't need any adjustments based on feedback. The Kender feature was pretty unpopular, apparently.

 

[Scribe]

I have a suspicion that the books will provide enough background info that if there are any good Black Robes, they're vanishingly rare. And I'm sure that there's been more than a few players who've played good Black Robe mages (or evil White Robe mages) in order to be "different."

100% there will be justification, 'flavour' but its all meaningless without the mechanical limitation.

"Non-Good" was too much? Really Wizards? Come on.