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

 

[Hussar]

Look, let's be honest here. I doubt there is anything in the game that has caused more fights at the table than alignment. Would anyone disagree with that? The idea that you can define good and evil, in a couple of paragraphs, in a game book and everyone would be groovy with that is a bit optimistic. There's been a lot of minds a whole lot smarter than any of us who've spent ridiculous amounts of time trying to answer this question and haven't been able to do it.

So, right off the bat, alignment was always something of a problem. It was defining something that was guaranteed to piss off a lot of people no matter how you defined it. And, we have decades of alignment wanks both in person and online to prove it.

5e went the route of making alignment pretty much a simple descriptor. It doesn't have any mechanical heft anymore. Dropping it out of the game wouldn't really matter to the game very much, but, as a shorthand it does do the job. This NPC is bad because it says CE under alignment. Probably not 100% necessary all the time - since simply reading the description of the NPC would do the trick, but, like people say, it's a shorthand.

So long as it remains that way - a simple short hand for describing a particular NPC, then no problem. What becomes a larger issue though is when you want to apply that to groups. It becomes really sticky because, unlike an NPC which is likely only going to be on screen for a very short period of time (barring NPC's that join the group anyway - the vast majority won't get too much screen time) an organization may very well appear multiple times, in multiple contexts and in multiple ways.

So, when you have things like color coded wizards who play for team Alignment, it gets problematic. The shorthand gets in the way and becomes less useful.

Like any tool, alignment can work fine. But, I think, and this is just my 2cp, that applying alignment beyond individuals is a mistake. It causes more problems than it solves. Can cultists of some evil demonlord do anything good? Or must they always do the evil thing, even when it's counter to their own self-interests? And, if they can act good sometimes, how useful is it to say that this organization is evil? The short hand becomes less useful.

 

[Faolyn]

I mean, probably not though, unless there's literally no other way - like the dread demon is literally impossible to defeat through any other means - and in that case you're into a "Crapsack World" kind of grimdark-y setting which is not compatible with D&D alignments.

Well, impossible for the villagers, at least. But that's where the adventurers come in.

I think that's something people don't always think about, too - D&D's alignment system, whilst fun to misapply to the real world (I remember sitting in front of the TV going "Hey I think Gorbachev is LN!" and so on as a kid lol), and to all sorts of settings, is just not one that works with most settings and genres. It's a very D&D-specific thing.

Not only this, but it applies to a particular type of Good-vs-Neutral-vs-Evil style of play that I don't think many players truly adhere to in the way that one is "supposed" to.

 

[Faolyn]

As we have discussed many times, because it should be there.

"Because I said so" isn't really an answer, you know.

 

[Faolyn]

When you're used to the game, alignment is reductive and unnecessary. It also has a tendency to paint entire groups of culture-having species with a MASSIVE brush.

When you're new to the game, DM or player, alignment is a lifesaver, giving you an easy-to-grok guide on how something should generally act.

Cypher System has a motive for each creature, which is usually very a short thing like "hungers for flesh, "destruction," or "curiosity."

Fate gives each creature and PC a High Concept, which is at most a very short sentence.

There are plenty of ways to provide an easy go-to for how a thing should generally act.

 

[Aldarc]

Yeah, it's an acting prompt shorthand.

Since certain D&D players swear by it, professional acting schools tried using D&D Alignment as an "acting prompt shorthand" until fights broke out on stage as the actors, directors, and stagehands got into prolonged heated arguments about the "actual alignment" of the plays' characters. Those involved insisted that everyone else didn't understand either the fictional characters or alignment as well as they did, and that if everyone else did then there would be no need for fighting. The fights continued anyway.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Really? Here it is again. 5e: "(LG) creatures can be counted on to do the right thing as expected by society." What does that even mean? Does it mean that if the right thing for a particular society is child sacrifice that engaging in child sacrifice is LG? Or does it mean something completely different. It's far too vague to even begin to be useful. Unlike 3e and earlier editions.

So a definition that can't stand up to every outlier circumstance you dream up can't "even begin to be useful"? I guess your game focuses a lot more on weird philosophy hypotheticals than mine.

But yeah, if for some reason I introduced such a society into my game, I'd probably have their lawful good npc members be at least reluctantly pro-child sacrifice, since exploring weird social dynamics seems like the only narrative purpose of emphasizing the wide social acceptance of the practice, rather than having it be a rogue band of villains doing the child sacrificing.

Personally I'd be happy if they skipped the definitions entirely. I (like most players) am just going to decide what lawful, chaotic, good, evil, and neutral mean for myself anyway. Having an official definition just gives ammunition to pedants.

 

[DarkCrisis]

So do the Elves still brand any one a “dark elf” and exile them if they get caught practicing “Ambitious Magic”?

(FYI Dragonlance has no Drow or Orcs. Dark elves are just any elf branded evil and has nothing to do with skin color or where they live.)

Are the exiled and called “Ambitious Elves”?

Is that what happened to Dalamar now?

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Are we relitigating alignment again? The very fact of the argument and the lack of clarity or agreement on basic definitions is proof (as far as I am concerned) of the basic problem with alignment.
As for the Mages of High Sorcery, they are all evil, even the White Robes. They partake in an educational system that, as part of its examination process, murders its students. That is pretty evil, in my book.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

As for the Mages of High Sorcery, they are all evil, even the White Robes. They partake in an educational system that, as part of its examination process, murders its students. That is pretty evil, in my book.

Don't forget they also murder anyone who:

A) Doesn't take the test.

or

B) Uses too many spells from the "wrong Moon".

Except when they don't, because they make exceptions for people they like. So yeah they are definitely small-e evil, and probably capital-E Evil in modern D&D terms.

I suspect all this will be retcon'd out of existence for the DL adventure.

 

[Raunalyn]

You know what I don't get is people saying that this version of the Kender is a "huge change" from how they are presented in previous editions. It's not. They are mechanically almost identical to their previous edition incarnation. The only thing that WotC did was remove problematic language, which is what many people were asking for.

What I find remarkably hilarious is the implication that removing an ability that completely threw out the lore of the world they were originally from somehow makes the race boring. Now, they are just as interesting as humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings. They mockingly point out how people were getting bent out of shape by the fey ability (something that was never in the lore, and something that one of the world's creators even spoke out against) because it was a huge change. Then, in the very same breath, they remark that this version is a "HUGE" change...but the mechanical benefits are almost the same as previous versions of D&D, and they just removed problematic language.

Pretty hypocritical if you ask me...