Marandahir
Crown-Forester (he/him)
Truth. The thing is, the UA opens the floodgates. If there’s massive rejection of this it won’t happen, but they’re openly testing it. I’m reminded of when they tried out adding Prestige Classes with the Rune Scribe. If I recall correctly, people felt strongly that they didn’t want to give up their class features to access the concept, so it would be better incorporated into a subclass or multiple subclasses (hence we now have various Artificers, Rune Knight Fighters, and Order of Scribe Wizards).I love how a single UA, not even official material, makes people think that this is the new normal. There's no guarantee that the classes in the Strixhaven book will even make it into that book, let alone in the form that they are showing. And, there's no guarantee that any subsequent books will use these mechanics. They might or they might not.
Note, this is different from the lineage changes since that wasn't a mechanics change per se, but, a reaction to other issues outside of the rules of the game.
People tend to forget things like the fact that we've had, what, three different stabs at psionics without a single psionics class becoming official. The UA ranger has never made it into print. Heck, a large swath of stuff in UA doesn't make it into print.
But, yeah, "subclasses are no longer for one class" because of a setting specific book that hasn't even been released yet.
What I took away from that experiment was that people would be happier if the Rune Scribe was like a floating subclass, but that the mechanics of class feature progression was the sticking point for that. This seems to be a partial way around it, and anecdotally I’m hearing a lot of positive feedback.