D&D 5E New Unearthed Arcana Today: Giant Themed Class Options and Feats

A new Unearthed Arcana dropped today, focusing on giant-themed player options. "In today’s Unearthed Arcana, we explore character options related to the magic and majesty of giants. This playtest document presents the Path of the Giant barbarian subclass, the Circle of the Primeval druid subclass, the Runecrafter wizard subclass, and a collection of new feats, all for use in Dungeons &...

A new Unearthed Arcana dropped today, focusing on giant-themed player options. "In today’s Unearthed Arcana, we explore character options related to the magic and majesty of giants. This playtest document presents the Path of the Giant barbarian subclass, the Circle of the Primeval druid subclass, the Runecrafter wizard subclass, and a collection of new feats, all for use in Dungeons & Dragons."


New Class options:
  • Barbarian: Path of the Giant
  • Druid: Circle of the Primeval
  • Wizard: Runecrafter Tradition
New Feats:
  • Elemental Touched
  • Ember of the Fire Giant
  • Fury of the Frost Giant
  • Guile of the Cloud Giant
  • Keeness of the Stone Giant
  • Outsized Might
  • Rune Carver Apprentice
  • Rune Carvwr Adept
  • Soul of the Storm Giant
  • Vigor of the Hill Giant
WotC's Jeremy Crawford talks Barbarian Path of the Giant here:

 

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Parmandur

Book-Friend
I agree that it would. I'm genuinely interested to see what they do there. My expectation is that they present Fixed Array and Rolling equally, even Point Buy almost always wins polls on the web, because those two are the most immediate/accessible methods, whereas Point Buy requires the dreaded MATH. I suspect the largest number of groups use it, because most D&D players are, still, nerds, but it's not what I'd present as the default method.


It could be as high as 33% actually. WotC quote the current user-base of Beyond at 10m, and the current player-base of 5E at 30m, most recent figures from them that I saw (I know they said 50m previously, I doubt this is a drop, it's probably a different estimation method).

But even at 20% or even 10%, it's a gigantic sample, probably a literal hundred times larger than the surveys you love so much, it's very unlikely it's unrepresentative. It's fanciful on your part as I said, to continue believing that it's "unrepresentative". You're like one of those partisan political pundits, who, no matter how many polls show their party is 15 points behind, insist they're going to win, because "polls can be wrong", and it's like, yeah, they can, but not usually by very much (in politics it tends to matter because so many races are close anyway, so if a poll is even 5% off it makes a huge difference).

I mean, 10% of 30m is 3m! That's a wild number. How many surveys you think they get filled in properly? 10k? 20k? 50k? I'd be interested to hear if you know, Google is unhelpful on this. I'm going with less than 50k responses typically. Quite possibly less than 10k. And yet that's been enough for WotC to make decisions on - a much more biased and self-selecting group, nerds on the internet only, D&D fans only, people with too much time on their hands only. These dweebs (of which I am one) were enough for WotC to make big decisions based on whether 70% of internet dweebs liked a thing. And 3m isn't enough for you? Kind of seems wildly self-contradictory.
The UA surveys were getting 7 figure response rates, last they slipped any numbers. Only WotC knows how many they are getting now, and the current squad isn't as likely to let that sort of industry secret slip as the old boss was.

Beyond is the only example that has any meaning...and it suggests that rolling as the largest single method, probably about as much as the two variants combined among that set.
 

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Beyond is the only example that has any meaning...and it suggests that rolling as the largest single method, probably about as much as the two variants combined among that set.
LOL! It does not suggest the bolded bit. That's simply a false claim, that is mathematically impossible to be true, and you know it, because we've already discussed it.

I agree Beyond is the best sample we have though.

The UA surveys were getting 7 figure response rates, last they slipped any numbers.
Thank you. So they're laughably tiny compared to the actual playerbase, and obviously, given that they're self-selecting audience-wise, ludicrously time-consuming (ruling out all be the dweebiest dweebs by that alone), and so on. We can't have any faith in them if we're dismissing things like Beyond (which you are not, to be clear).
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend
LOL! It does not suggest the bolded bit. That's simply a false claim, that is mathematically impossible to be true, and you know
48% are entering manually. If even 70% of that is rolling as you suppose(probably closer to 99% than 70%, since that is the assumed game rule), then rolling is the single largest method at 33.6% of Beyond users, also known as a plurality. The larger the percent that are rolling, the larger that plurality. And the question remains, are the kind of people who use Beyond more likely than the population at large to use the variant methods? We don't know, but it seems probable.

Thank you. So they're laughably tiny compared to the actual playerbase, and obviously, given that they're self-selecting audience-wise, ludicrously time-consuming (ruling out all be the dweebiest dweebs by that alone), and so on. We can't have any faith in them if we're dismissing things
I mean, millions of respondents are more meaningful than a few hundred Redditers or a few dozen ENWorlders. Bit we don't have that information.
 

48% are entering manually. If even 70% of that is rolling as you suppose(probably closer to 99% than 70%, since that is the assumed game rule), then rolling is the single largest method at 33.6% of Beyond users, also known as a plurality. The larger the percent that are rolling, the larger that plurality. And the question remains, are the kind of people who use Beyond more likely than the population at large to use the variant methods? We don't know, but it seems probable.
Dude... seriously... I know what a plurality is. I also know its meaningless. The percentages tell the story. This isn't voting in a first-past-the-post election, where it would matter!

I agree with everything except the last sentence, bolded, which has no apparent basis for the "probable". At this point Beyond's audience is too large for claims like that to be inherently plausible, probable. If this was 5 years ago, and Beyond was new and only had 500k people or 1m or whatever, I'd agree, most people using it would be more "advanced" players. In which case I'd agree with "probable".

But this is 2022. Beyond has 10m+ users (compared to a worldwide total of either 30m or 50m D&D players, depending on how WotC is measuring today), which is frankly staggeringly, insanely high market penetration. Can you imagine? Even if it's only 10m that's utterly wild, to have 20% of millions of people who do a hobby using the same specific bit of entirely optional software. So we're now far beyond (npi) the "advance users" phase. I think this is obvious from experience too - I've met extremely casual adults who've barely heard of D&D, nine-year-old kids, and many others, who manage to find and use Beyond. So I don't think they "kind of people" argument holds any water at all, at this point, and I think you should admit that.

But I do offer you an olive branch here! Because whilst we must, I suggest, dismiss the "kind of people" argument, there is a valid argument you've skipped over. The "structural" argument, which does support your contention. If people come to Beyond before being introduced to rolling, then they're not really going to have much of a reason to pick manual input. And likewise, for people who want to create characters out-of-session, which I think is an increasing number of people, rolling doesn't really make sense. So these two things together create a structural situation which is pushing the popularity of Stat Array and 27-point Point Buy (the only kind allowed on Beyond) up, artificially. And it may mean that Beyond's users use them more than people who don't use online platforms at all. The same pressures would apple to Roll 20, Foundry, etc. etc. so anyone using online tools or a VTT, or just wanting a character builder is somewhat more likely to use them than roll, due to this. Whether that is statistically significant, and what the long-term impact will be remains to be seen, but I strongly suspect rolling is on the decline. I mean, indeed, all the evidence we have suggests that. The question is how steep, really.

Also, let's be real re: the history of "variant" methods. D&D has a long history of variant methods actually being the dominant method, going back to at least 2E. I mean, who actually used Method I for a significant part of AD&D 2E's life? I literally never came across or even heard of anyone using it in the time 2E was "live". Much later, when people started doing OSR stuff, suddenly there was a lot of talk about 3d6 in order, but not at the time. Even the 1E players I knew didn't use it. There's no question that 4d6DtL, arrange to taste was the dominant method by, say, the very very early '90s. That's Method V. It's not even the first alternative! But it was dominant.
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend
Dude... seriously... I know what a plurality is. I also know its meaningless. The percentages tell the story. This isn't voting in a first-past-the-post election, where it would matter!

I agree with everything except the last sentence, bolded, which has no apparent basis for the "probable". At this point Beyond's audience is too large for claims like that to be inherently plausible, probable. If this was 5 years ago, and Beyond was new and only had 500k people or 1m or whatever, I'd agree, most people using it would be more "advanced" players. In which case I'd agree with "probable".

But this is 2022. Beyond has 10m+ users (compared to a worldwide total of either 30m or 50m D&D players, depending on how WotC is measuring today), which is frankly staggeringly, insanely high market penetration. Can you imagine? Even if it's only 10m that's utterly wild, to have 20% of millions of people who do a hobby using the same specific bit of entirely optional software. So we're now far beyond (npi) the "advance users" phase. I think this is obvious from experience too - I've met extremely casual adults who've barely heard of D&D, nine-year-old kids, and many others, who manage to find and use Beyond. So I don't think they "kind of people" argument holds any water at all, at this point, and I think you should admit that.

But I do offer you an olive branch here! Because whilst we must, I suggest, dismiss the "kind of people" argument, there is a valid argument you've skipped over. The "structural" argument, which does support your contention. If people come to Beyond before being introduced to rolling, then they're not really going to have much of a reason to pick manual input. And likewise, for people who want to create characters out-of-session, which I think is an increasing number of people, rolling doesn't really make sense. So these two things together create a structural situation which is pushing the popularity of Stat Array and 27-point Point Buy (the only kind allowed on Beyond) up, artificially. And it may mean that Beyond's users use them more than people who don't use online platforms at all. The same pressures would apple to Roll 20, Foundry, etc. etc. so anyone using online tools or a VTT, or just wanting a character builder is somewhat more likely to use them than roll, due to this. Whether that is statistically significant, and what the long-term impact will be remains to be seen, but I strongly suspect rolling is on the decline. I mean, indeed, all the evidence we have suggests that. The question is how steep, really.

Also, let's be real re: the history of "variant" methods. D&D has a long history of variant methods actually being the dominant method, going back to at least 2E. I mean, who actually used Method I for a significant part of AD&D 2E's life? I literally never came across or even heard of anyone using it in the time 2E was "live". Much later, when people started doing OSR stuff, suddenly there was a lot of talk about 3d6 in order, but not at the time. Even the 1E players I knew didn't use it. There's no question that 4d6DtL, arrange to taste was the dominant method by, say, the very very early '90s. That's Method V. It's not even the first alternative! But it was dominant.
I feel like there is a miscommunication or failure to connect here, because your olive branch feels like what I was trying to day. Yes, a lot of people use D&D Beyond, but even more don't use any tools beyond the books and pen & paper. And those books call out rolling as how characters get made, it's right in the Essentials Kit.

Everyone I know personally who uses Beyond (my wife and her group, my brother-in-law and his group) are rolling at home without supervision and manually entering stats. I've never been in a group where rolling st home wasn't OK, actually, and I haven't seen anything untoward.
 

Everyone I know personally who uses Beyond (my wife and her group, my brother-in-law and his group) are rolling at home without supervision and manually entering stats. I've never been in a group where rolling st home wasn't OK, actually, and I haven't seen anything untoward.
Yeah, because you're in a tiny little bubble with only two groups, both of literally related to each other lol.
 

Parmandur

Book-Friend
Yeah, because you're in a tiny little bubble with only two groups, both of literally related to each other lol.
Yes, but that seems to me to be the norm. Most players aren't involved in large groups of strangers. While I do not assume thst everyone is doing everything exactly like my close friends and family, I see no reason to suspect that we must assume thst everyone is doing things exactly the opposite of my entire experience, either.

Also note, I said the people I know personally using Beyond. I don't use digital tools myself, I have books and paper.
 

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