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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Uta-napishti" data-source="post: 8176845" data-attributes="member: 7026422">My take on Tashas:Character Options:  Solid mechanics, necessary & modern flexibility in backstories and builds, but there is for my taste too heavy a focus on building the eldritch/psi/cosmic spirit powered version of everything.  Just try and find me a subclass that doesn't have some "magic floating spectral [whatever] appears" around it as "flavor"--you'll have to flip past most of this book. I heard on a podcast a year or two ago that WoTC always want to imagine what a class feature might "Look like" when they think about flavor.  Well, two years later, and Tasha's and Theros come out, and every damn subclass has to fluoresce somehow. I'm personally not a fan of the more cartoon / class as superpower feel, but perhaps this makes room for the next book to swing back the other way a bit.  B+Group Patrons: This is the real stuff! Applicable to any setting, campaign to add depth.  Just makes everything better. A+Spells: Basically just reprints, and a couple of fixes (summoning) and a bare couple of Tashas' specials.  Xanathars' was WAY stronger here. Biggest missed opportunity in a book focused on Wizardy stuff. You know what wizards care about? Spells!  CMagic Items:  Special spellbooks & Tatoos & Campaign driving Artifacts are the theme.  It's focused, but not abundant. BArt/Style: The quality is quite good, but a touch esoteric to match the Tasha (read Lady Gaga) theme.  The art featuring Tasha herself is all great actually, giving a far superior portrait of her as compared to other "Named" books.  Tasha is FAR more present here than Volo or Mordenkainen were in their eponymous volumes and it's a good change.  (rant warning) HOWEVER, A majority of all people pictured in the art have either glowing runes/tatoos or arcane/eldritch energy swirling out of their hands. I know this is a book about magic and such, so I forgive more than I would elsewhere, but I can only imagine the art director hosting regular conference calls to assign artists colors of arcane energies to avoid too many overlaps: "OK, so the bladesingers gonna have pink magic-swirl for the female elf and blue magi-crackle for the male elf, but the tiefling two pages later is an awesome Warlock, so he gets orange and blue magic-floof arching over him -- everybody ok with that?".  There are palate cleansing rustic character portrayals of low level rangers and such, but they are badly outnumbered, and not the focus in the book. Diversity doesn't require cheesiness. "People of Color" refers to an honest and representative range of cultures and skin tones, not that every other portrait needs a prismatic rainbow aura. Hey WotC, let's put MORE distance, not less between D&D inspirational art, and the free-to-play-fantasy-elf browser game look, huh?  B+DM Tools (aside from Puzzles): Strong, and helpful.  I think this and the group patrons are the best part of the book. APuzzles: Boy they put a TON of work into this section, and all I can say is, I wish the effort had been invested elsewhere. A valiant and unsuccessful effort to breath life into a previous pillar of the game.  As roleplay has taken it's proper place in roleplaying, puzzles have faded.  Back when puzzles were cool, was it because the players weren't very?  At least there is a structured framework provided (Hints, Customization, Difficulty adjustment) that someone else might take to make fresh puzzles with, but for the love of god, don't bore your party with anything like these bland examples of letter/number/color substitution.  Get a book of old riddles instead, or literally any collection of logic puzzles, or replace it all with a roleplaying encounter with a secret you must extract. Can anyone make puzzles interesting? Not WotC. C-</blockquote>

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