D&D 5E What's one thing that pleasantly surprised you, and one thing that disappointed you about the PHB?

[gyor]

Inspiration is a bit weak, unless you go college of Lore and gain cutting words, but the 4 things that make the Bard is Song of Rest, Expertise/jack of Trades Skill Monkey hood, Magical Secrets (this is the biggest one to me), and the Bardic Colleges.

Magical Secrets alone allows you to jack your favourite spells that you don't already have from any class. Want to summon Celestials, you can do that, want metor storm, you can have it as well, want bless you can have it, want some smites you can have it, want Hex and Hunters Mark you can have it, you can just cherry pick spells.

And of your a skill money to revival the Rogue and Knowledge Cleric.

The Bard is insanely versitile, its the closest class to building your own class in the game.

Personally I think a Half Elf Bard with Pirate background would be really cool, college of Lore for additional magical secrets cutting words, and extra skill prof, and Peerless Skill, from the College of Lore.

I'd have prof in 3 Musical Instruments, Athletics, Perception, Naviators Tools, Water Vechiles, Elvish, Common, one other Language, and no less then 8, yes 8 other skills.

For Magical Secrets Find Steed, Wrathful Smite, Animate Object, Conjure Woodland Beings, Mordenkainen's Mansion, Summon Celestial, Wish.

Welcome to the magical verison of the Dread Pirate Roberts ;p

For 8 skills I'm thinking of Bluff, Persauasion, Perform, Stealth, Arcana, Acrobatics, Survival, Religion, plus gaining Athletics and Perception from Pirate.


I was surprised by how cool the Bard is.

I was disppointed that find steed got nerfed.

 

[wedgeski]

I was pleasantly surprised by the campaign setting inclusiveness, not just in the Appendix but throughout the book.

I was slightly disappointed by the sheer proportion of the book that's taken up with spells, but it's unsafe to assume if they hadn't been there, something else would have taken their place. So I won't.

 

[Mort]

*cough*

Spell Sorter spreadsheet.

Downloaded.

Plan to take full advantage of it!

 

[Darth Palpy]

Pleasant Surprises: Diviners and Bards. Now I want to play each one ^^

Unpleasant Surprises: Nebulous "mounted combat" rules (partialy handled with Dexterity), and the equivalent of "Equitation" under Animal Handling (with Wisdom !!??)
Adios to my dinosaur mounted halfling barbarian...
The Talenta Plains will look very empty, it seems.

 

[Tzarevitch]

Surprised - Some of the wizard specializations are actually interesting. Diviner and Abjurer are probably the most interesting, necromancer is actually functional and looks survivable as long are you are playing in a setting where the authorities wont kill an necromancer on sight.

Disappointed - spell formatting in the book is BAD. This is easily the worst I've seen in any edition. 1.) The only indexing provided is a general list for bard, cleric, druid paladin, ranger, sorcerer and warlock. Eldritch Knight, Arcane Trickster, and all specialist wizards have abilities (or the entire class) which depend on the school of arcane spell, which is indexed nowhere in the book. In order to figure out what your abilities do or even what you can cast you have to read through 78 pages of spells, single spaced. That's lazy publishing. An intern spending half a day with a word processor could have broken down the arcane spells by school for the classes that need it especially since they are the ones that made the school matter in the first place. 2.) Keywords buried in the body of the spell text should have been in boldface at the top. Why is the spell's component in bold at the top of the spell when that is optional gameplay information, but necessary gameplay information for the DM to quickly adjudicate it such as its area of effect, saving throw, damage type or any other special condition it has, is buried in up to two, single-spaced columns of text?

3rd and 4th edition put the important information at the top or bolded it somewhere. Who thought burying it in the text like this was a good idea? I can tell you from many years of DMing that nothing wastes more time at the table than waiting for a player to read though his spell and tell me the pertinent information so I can actually adjudicate its effect. The first steps in adjudicating most spells in 5e are: can it affect the creature, and does it give a save? That information should be at the top. None of the spells in the book place it there. As an example Suggestion starts off telling you what the spell does before even addressing whether it worked. You have to get to the second paragraph to even figure out what the save is. If the thing saved or is immune, no one at the table cares what it was supposed to do. It's even worse if the DM is running the creature because you have to stop the game and read through the text yourself to find the saving throw. I don't know why they ignored past precedent on this and I really hope they fix this in later printings.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Ha, lots of owls, noticed that last night.

For me, the pleasant surprise was the sheer number of options that look fun to play. The number of permutations available through choices of class and sub-class alone is great, more than any other PHB. I was concerned that many options would be weak or otherwise undesirable, but for the most part it seems like they created a large number of viable choices that should please lots of players. Almost all the subclasses looked appealing to me, or at least I know they will be to some of my players. They may or may not have missed the mark with the ranger and sorcerer (those were my least favorite), but IMO at worst they are average or maybe just not how I would have done them, and not outright bad, so that's pretty good for 12 classes and so many subclasses.

I dont have PHB yet and already I think my favourite thing is how nearly all the classes look awesome. This will be the first DnD where I'm happy to play anything from a monk to a fighter to a druid to a wizard to a bard. Ok Ok, not a ranger or sorceror prolly. But still that's huge.

Biggest disappointment: The way passive perception has crept into the game, apparently first emerging from take 10 in 3e. Its not needed (let DM make secret checks, they still have to make other secret checks even with passive perception anyway), its boring (eg: same PC finds everything all the time, super hidey PC never fails his stealth check), and creates new problems of its own (eg: static DC trap vs static perception score = auto success or failure, ummm yeahh: lame). Luckily passive perception is easily ignored, but including such a dodgy mechanic still rubs me the wrong way.

 

[Mouseferatu]

spell formatting in the book is BAD. This is easily the worst I've seen in any edition. 1.) The only indexing provided is a general list for bard, cleric, druid paladin, ranger, sorcerer and warlock. Eldritch Knight, Arcane Trickster, and all specialist wizards have abilities (or the entire class) which depend on the school of arcane spell, which is indexed nowhere in the book. In order to figure out what your abilities do or even what you can cast you have to read through 78 pages of spells, single spaced.

A time-saver for you. It's a spell sorter spreadsheet.

http://mouseferatu.com/index.php/news/august-8-2014-a-special-gift-for-my-fellow-dd-fans/

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

I was pleasantly surprised by all the fun options available. I hadn't expected to be quite as impressed.

I was disappointed in the mechanical treatment of halflings and gnomes. When you have a 3-foot-tall, 40-pound character with the same Strength score as the 6'5" human warrior, wielding exactly the same weapon...

It just bugs me.

 

[Jester David]

Pleasantly surprised by the art, especially after the Starter Set. There's just so much.

Disappointed by how many classes only have two subclasses.


Pleasantly surprised by variant backgrounds that make an already fun option even better and more flexible.

Disappointed by none of the promised modularity. This isn't "Advanced D&D" but "Expanded Basic D&D".


Pleasantly surprised by how solid the vast majority of the classes look, including the ones we didn't playtest like the warlock and sorcerer.

Disappointed by the bard that lost a lot of unique bardic flair for generic spellcasting. And bardic inspiration is such an overtly mechanical option.


Pleasantly surprised by the index. I mean, god damn that is how you do an index.

Super disappointed by the absence of summoning spells.

 

[Kobold Stew]

I was disappointed in the mechanical treatment of halflings and gnomes. When you have a 3-foot-tall, 40-pound character with the same Strength score as the 6'5" human warrior, wielding exactly the same weapon...

It just bugs me.

Where were you last summer when I was asking for a hard cap of strength for all small races?