D&D General Take A Look At The Class Boards From The New D&D Starter Set

Check out the cleric's 'dashboard'.
Heroes of the Borderlands, which is Dungeons & Dragons' upcoming new starter set, is one of the largest starter sets the game has ever produced--not least in part to the card-based character creation pops. One essential part of that card-based process is the class board--as D&D Beyond puts it, "a dashboard that clearly lays out everything you need to play, from your Armor Class to your spells and features, with card slots and token trackers that keep the game moving fast".

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There's a board for each class in the boxed set (the example above is the cleric). In the bottom left you can see a 'What You Need To Play' section which lists the additional cards you need to play a cleric--in this case, two equipment cards, 7 spell cards, and a bunch of gold pieces.

The card itself includes your basic stats--ability scores, saving throws, skills, hit points, speed, and so on. There are also clearly marked spots where you can place cards for your armor, your spells, and other things. There's also a space over on the far right for species and origin cards.

Once you reach level 2, you flip the card cover. That automatically increases your hit points and other features.

cleric-level-2.jpg

Finally, at level 3, you choose your subclass and you swap your class board for a more specialised one. The included cleric includes boards for the Life and Light domains. The new board not only updates your stats (like when you leveleled up to level 2) it also adds in the subclass features.

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Heroes of the Borderlands comes out September 16th for $49.99.
 

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While this looks great, I gotta imagine the disappointment a new player would go through going from this to paper sheets.

Modular, component-heavy, and intuitive character boards to clunky, boring, and number-dense character sheets. Plus, after level 1 tons of character stuff that won't even fit on that sheet!

Some will be disappointed. Some will just see it as finally getting to take the training wheels off.
 

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This looks really interesting and has a distinctive design that I think a lot of people will like. It doesn't look anything like 4E. I say that as someone who played 4E and likes it. This looks like a way to help get new players into D&D with bits and bobbles.
Yeap, the game place mat has become very popular with board and card games. Folks will naturally gravitate over to D&D with stuff like this.
 


It's a neat teaching aid but I think it would be a pain in the butt to maintain for a long term game, as a physical product anyway.

It would be neat to have something like this as a 'beginners mode' version of the Character sheet on D&D Beyond.
 

The concept is a neat idea, but I worry that it introduces too much extra clutter to the game table.

I think you could get rid of the board completely and cut things down to cards similar to the various hero decks for Sentinels of the Multiverse (the cooperative board/card game, not the rpg).
 

Fantasy Flight Games did it with their version of WFRP. And Daggerheart (I hear) is quite card-based.
Yeah, it does look like an evolution on Daggerheart's character sheets.

I'd forgotten about the WFRP boxed set with the cards (and how much I initially enjoyed it). That thing is dense!

I can very much see this being expanded with additional card sets, like the 4E power decks for the various classes. As long as they don't suffer the same issue back then, with the powers being tweaked so often they weren't really usable. 5E has, luckily enough, been stable expanded decks should last awhile.

Get a folder with a pocket for the "sheet", a ziplock for the tokens and pages to hold the cards and we might see this thing last beyond the basic set.
 



I think you could get rid of the board completely and cut things down to cards similar to the various hero decks for Sentinels of the Multiverse (the cooperative board/card game, not the rpg).
Heh. More than a decade ago I cut out everything but the cards. Books, sheets, boards, adventures, etc. All gone. Just an RPG using a couple dice and cards only.

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