Basically: Change nothing, refine everything. Honestly, that's the dream for the most successful version of the most successful rpg ever, and I'm excited.
Soo the system will be left as bare as it is, martials will be as bad as they are since they need a grounds up rework... boy am I excited to have options
@@reachcole514 Say sike now, say sike please. Martials are 'good' at lvls 1-3, maybe 4. At lvl 5 they just become filler for the party. Ranger and paladin being kinda exceptions cause their spells (+ smites in case of paladin) carry them a bit further. But, I'm kinda done arguing over martials being useless filler in 5e with ppl, it's just a sisiphian task to convince most ppl.
While I have no problem with making creature and race descriptions setting agnostic, IN THEORY... I think there needs to be a massively updated "Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide" (or even better, a more general Faerun campeign book), that describes how the creatures and races fit in that world, especially if they want to keep the it as the default setting (like in the Basic Set), or keep making it the main setting for most of their published adventures.
If they actually refilled the lore they’re draining constantly from their own game then maybe it’d be fine. But as it stands this setting agnosticism is just taking away from the game as a whole.
@@trexdrew I am fully with you. How do you want to write a (for example) vampire statblock setting agnostic? In different setting, vampires have different characteristics and/or abilities. Can a vampire turn into a bat? Depends on the setting. Can a vampire mesmerize others? Depends on the setting. You can play this for nearly every monster.
The only thing I really want is a martial weapon overhaul. Basically: make martial classes have as many choices and interesting things to do as other classes. Would love to see whips that can grapple or restrain, or bludgeoning weapons able to shove or crush bones and inflict different conditions from there... As of right now you basically look for what has the highest damage number and works with the best feats and go from there. Anything out of that scope is "sub-optimal" however fun it may be. I would LOVE to be able to do throwing weapons fully and as effectively as a sharpshooter, if I could for example.
I think there was once an edition where martial classes had these spell like attacks that could do various utilitarian actions even outside of the combat. If I remember correctly they were called At-Will powers.
I have Aphantasia, it basically means I don't have a "Mind's Eye", and I cannot imagine things in my head, it goes on a scale, where some people might be able to imagine objects if they force it, but for many, it is just complete emptiness Edit: This means that without a battlemap, the game is basically unplayable for me
I have aphantasia as well, and I still play with Theater of the Mind. It's just about remembering the list of facts about what is where at any given time, but obviously it's not for everyone. Battle maps would probably be preferable, but no one in my group wants to spend the time and money for maps and minis haha
@@danieldurham5891 We have a very stupid combination of High Standards + Laziness. We break out simple maps every so often but generally prefer theater of the mind over super simple maps haha
One of my players has this as well, we don't usually use a map, but I really want to switch to a virtual table top, I feel like it would help their situation a lot.
I think they should add unique weapon affects to different weapons to give martials more flavor and bring them more in line with casters. Rapier -parry/riposte, great sword -great cleave, maul - sunder armor or crushing blow, etc. Make them limited uses (PB) or tied to certain events. For instance a rapier can be used without a shield or offhand and gains the ability to use a reaction to add PB to AC and if an attack that would hit misses then a follow up riposte can be made (pb times a short rest?) Make it do PB damage. Probably too far out there,but just a thought I had while listening to this list
The Essentials line from 4e was the 4.5. It featured a rules book with some updated classic classes and monsters. The old stuff was still entirely compatible, one was just more refined than the other. That's what I expect they'll do: revisions and such for an "advanced" 5e.
The thing I most want to see is more cinematic combat. I've been showing my son how to play and he instinctively wants to describe combat in terms of "I want to try to knock the shield out of his hand", or "I want to hit him in the foot so he can't move fast.". These sorts of called shots can be done with DC (and I did it) but I realize I'm probably completely invalidating some class feature somewhere by allowing it.
Either the PHB or the DMG has rules for a disarm action. Less sure about crippling the foot like that. You could rule it as a shove prone action? The Battle Master definitely has better versions of things like that though, but it doesn't mean you can't still do them without superiority dice
I fully agree that I would like this to be more of a feature. Even if there was guidance in the DMs guide on how to modify damage or attack rolls when players want to do maneuvers like this would be good, and then classes should be built around that design. That is honestly why I don't like the battle Master as it is designed because it takes a bunch of cool, relatively universal fighting maneuvers and says "this is my space, nobody is allowed to do this better than me, also I have a unique dice mechanic tied to its so up yours."
@@skiks3562 I totally agree with your comments about Battle Master. Same thing with Mage Hand cantrip, how you can't do some cool stuff with that cantrip simply because that's Arcane Trickster's purview. It's really silly.
Encounter balance is such a difficult thing in 5e. You can routinely throw encounters that are deadly x2 at a party and they smoke it. I don't think the system was optimized for people playing well. I love my party but they aren't war gamers. I am. I have to be careful with how things go one way or another, because if they have good tactics they can easily overcome regular encounters. When I have monsters starting to use tactics, things get deadly real quick. Even small things like a dragon keeping itself out of reach of the melee paladin can really change an encounter.
I feel like it should be a combination of forgotten realms info on races and a more generic option so new dms don't have to design an entire culture for every race they include in thier games, a quick reference would be helpful.
i mean, by sheer virtue of making it "setting agnostic" you're getting less information and thus requiring yourself more work to create a whole culture. If you even bother to do so, cuz let's be honest since when do the players actually talk to the goblins and bother asking about their culture instead of just killing them?
I feel like if they give out examples for multiple settings it would be more useful. One paragraph dedicated to FR, another to Eberron, then so on. It helps to visualize the common points in the settings while showing the DM some twists they can use.
All we really need is a disclaimer in one of the books stating that the DM makes the final call on stuff like lore, so you don't have to follow the given lore. Oh wait.
I think when they designed 5e, they used data suggesting that few parties actually got past level 10 and those that did had experienced DMs and players who could adapt accordingly ... however, with it being so hard to die in 5e and levelling being much easier (some seem to level up every session it seems), there might actually be a need to put more work into higher level campaigning as less experienced players find themselves there quicker.
I'd like to see Artificers added to the new PHB. I also think looking at how much they've been referenced (including in Spelljammer without a book/page referral) firearms are going to be added as base game weapons.
I don't know about leaving everything else be. Why create a new version if you aren't going to fix much more than what he has listed. Frankly, there's some things that I just don't think work like they should. Short rests and surprise are so inconsistent between tables that it makes some classes and subclasses good at some tables but not at others. So many magical items require Attunement that I basically don't want cool magical weapons or armor. I just want regular old +3 weapons, armor, and shields to leave room for other cool magical stuff. I like the idea of Concentration as a limiting factor, but it seems like that has been added to too many spells, especially for certain classes. I also think almost every spell should be upcastable, especially ones on the Warlock spell list. I think it needs to mostly stay the same, but I feel like Mike just wants 5.0.1, and if they're going to update it, make it a 5.5.
The quality of 5e books is decreasing slowly. I'm pretty sure 5.5e is going to be a borderline errata book for the base game, with some power creep put in there to get people to buy to buy the new books.
I completely disagree with the idea of making it all setting agnostic. All that does it make it less interesting and less fleshed out as a whole. Players love and enjoy the specific lore of the creatures in the various bestiaries that Monsters of the Multiverse cut out dramatically. You know how much lore the Gith got in MPMotM? About a paragraph each. How much did they get in TOF? Multiple full pages detailing their lore and background as well as their wars and the exile of the Githzerai. It feels way less interesting than what we used to have. People can say all they want that you can just go look at that lore BUT that’s not really true. WotC is doing everything in their power to wash clean and strip down everything they don’t like into a more condensed and dull form. They’ve discontinued the printing of Volo’s and TOF from what I know as well as the digital versions too. You can find them secondhand sure or at places that still have them in stock but it’s not a good thing to me. They want new players to only see the current “setting agnostic” lore and people won’t know about the old lore. When the redo comes in 2024 I guarantee we won’t get the level of detail about the Blood War like we did for TOF. Will we even get feral Tiefling? That one is a SCAG specific race that isn’t setting agnostic so will they even keep it? TLDR the cleansing of all in depth and interesting lore is an inherently bad thing for DM’s and players alike. It condenses everything down too much and doesn’t provide a good enough refill of the lore you’re losing. It’s also helpful to both categories of people to draw inspiration from that’s suddenly missing in 5E. So please WotC stop doing it.
I totally agree. Even though I run my games in my own world, I like to see an example of complex and interesting lore for monsters in the Forgotten Realms, so I can adopt what I want and change what I want. If they want to make them more system agnostic and make new DMs more comfortable with creating their own lore, they shouldn't strip the old one. In my opinion, they should add to it. Things like: "Here is how Gith are in the Forgotten Realms. In Greyhawk they might be more like this. And in your own world they might be totally different" would be great.
@@echsengenosse1351 it’s clearly not even about agnosticism though. If you look at what they’ve scrubbed clean from the lore it’s all the darker more “problematic” parts. Blood feud style hates with other races, slavery, and war. You know the things that actually make for complex storytelling? It’s very obvious they’re appeasing a group that’s too loud about their dislike of these ideas being in the game but to scrub them completely out is insane IMO. If you read the paragraph on orcs in Monsters of the Multiverse it seems to make Gruumsh out to be a good guy.
I have to disagree. I love some of the 5e conversions. Star wats 5e is amazing and super fun to play, Adventures in Middles Earth is a wonderful system that made really fun and unique classes without magic. I also love some of these other systems made specifically for these games, partially because I have a passion and mind for learning new systems. For some people it's just easier to make a slight change to a system they already know then learn something as complex as say Edge of The Empire.
About "Fix certain Spells and abilities": There are also some spells and abilities that are underpowered. For example, monk needs a buff for levels 5+, Assassin Rogue needs a complete revamp, ranger deserves to be redone from the ground up to be more consistent. The sorcerer subclasses need to be brought to one power level, I would say a bit weaker than Clockwork Soul and Aberrant mind, but a little bit stronger than Divine Soul. Druids Wildshape should be made a statblock and not dependant on what creatures are published in some DnD books. Certain Capstones should be buffed. Bards Countercharm is completely broken and useless. Life Cleric needs a bit of a nerf on spells that heal multiple times, like Goodberry.
My only addition would be clearer wealth guidelines for higher level and a return to some sort of magic item economy that can measure those items, and a greater emphasis on feats. Having them only be available at the cost of ASI makes them hard to justify so something like what they teased in the Krynn Unearthed Arcana where feats are tied to a background and having bonus feats unlock at certain milestone levels (5, 10, 15th for example) would go a long ways to upping their value.
My thoughts for Warlock in a "no short rest" world: a warlock can restore their spell slots outside of combat a number of times equal to their proficiency bonus. It takes 5 minutes (or whatever) of in-game time to do this.
I'd prefer if they drop the whole special Pact Magic system, and just make Warlocks a half-caster similar to an Artificer. While it's cool to have such a special ability, it just makes it complexity for complexity's sake, and this will remove the short rest mechanic.
@@egonhomes That would completely kill off Warlock as a class. Why would you play a class that used to be a full caster as a half-caster? I would rather have then just remove Warlock from the game than to have them make that change. (Just as an FYI: Warlock is currently my favorite class to play in the game. And I have never played a Hexblade, so it is for the casting, not because of Hexblade mechanics.)
@@johncox7169 The one thing I DO like about the Warlock is that they essentially get 2 subclasses at once. You have a Patron and a Pact Boon. I wish more classes had that sort of a mechanic. That being said, I don't really see a functional difference between a Cleric and a Warlock lore-wise. They both get their power from a higher being, usually by doing something in return.
@@johncox7169 Because Warlocks have never been casters with slots before 5e. Their eldritch invocations took the place of spells. Anyway, you can't say it would kill the Warlock. It might not be to your liking, but it would add a lot of versatility to the class, with more spells per day (even if not upcast).
I have only one problem with not changing classes whatsoever. If they are going to phase out short rests like people are thinking, then about half of the classes are going to need to be refined or become utterly useless.
Honestly I’m not sure why this is needed. Multiclassing works perfectly fine for building your own characters, and provides plenty of flexibility to create unique builds with fair restrictions. At worst all you need to do is talk to your DM about how your character is mechanically is this, but you’re flavouring it as that… So as an example, in a current game I am in my character is mechanically a Wildfire Druid/Divine Soul Sorcerer multiclass, but when it comes to flavour he is a unique class. A Phoenix reborn in a humanoid body, who is slowly relearning how to harness the powers from his previous form.
I have a problem of making things setting agnostic. You basically remove the idea of having any real setting let alone having multiple ones. The settings would only give locations and maybe NPC but even then you might have some who would argue the NPC is written in a bias way which it has to be for order for it to fit the setting. Monsters should be the same way with the understanding that one setting of a Goblin is not always true somewhere else. Having generic monsters makes them boring and no real challenge. It would be more interesting for a ranger who believes they are following a goblin trail to find out it is an orc or elf trail. AS much as 4th got things wrong\bashed, the way they attempted to handle character advancement into the three tiers including 21-30\epic is probably one of the best things it came from 4th.
Also, this basically makes it so they have to delete all of the flavor text portions of the monster manual and it's going to end up being a book of literally only stat blocks with zero information about the creatures because it has to be "setting agnostic." The information on the monsters is now going to consist of simply their physical description, if they even do that since surely whiny losers will complain that it isn't broad enough for them.
What's the point of 5.5 if everything from 5e is compatible? That just means essentially nothing is changed. What the fuck is the point... You can't have a 5e veteran be exactly like a 5.5 veteran otherwise there's literally no changes being made... I get the idea, but no, it needs to make changes and those changes are going to make it not backwards compatible.
Great video and good summary of Mikes message. I ageee with most of what you said. I do hope they find a way to remove Short rest and Bonus actions. Maybe do something like Pathfinder and go for an action point system and bonus actions are just actions available.
I really just want a comprehensive list of the deities, their divine domains, the location of their dominions, and their divine ranks. It would really help me in building a pantheon for my homebrew world.
For theatre of the mind combat, I use a simple Far, Near, Close system. It takes an action to move from one zone to another. You can hit something with melee only when it's in the same zone as you. Attacks of opportunity are only valid when something moves from Close to Near. Ranged attacks are required to hit something in the Far zone. It works a lot better than trying to track distances in your head.
I hope they adjust feats, particularly for martials, so that trying to build a classic fantasy character using a longbow or a long sword doesn't put you at a disadvantage compared to a crossbow or a pole arm.
For grided combat in 3.5, it was needed. Feats, attacks of opportunity, and movement, in general, changed things. When I first started playing 3rd I did not have a grid or minis. Later when I got those things I realized how feats that I thought were a waste to take became very important. 5e doesn't rely on the grid as much. So, I can see why people would want "theater of the mind's eye." I don't want it but I know others do and I think it would be good to introduce it.
Personally, short rests, hit die, and bonus actions are the hardest things for people i introduce to DND to get down. I think removing them would be a great idea, and just give the classes that rely on short rests regenerating abilities. Abilities reset on initiative roll, or could be an ability check to refresh slots. I personally think it thematically works great for say a monk or warlock. In combat, a monk takes a second to center themselves and build up power within their body: BOOM ki point. Your warlock stops and looks to be in a trance as their eyes roll back into their head, and they commune with their dark god, BOOM spell slot. I think new players would be able to comprehend that much faster than hit dice, short rests, and bonus actions.
One thing I'd add is to fix magic items. A Heward's Handy Haversack is rarer than a Bag of Holding?!? I'd have a few changes to make to magic items: > Put the magic items at the back of the DMG, like they were in previous editions. Why they're in the middle of the book I'll never know. > Fix the rarity system. See example above. > Give magic items prices. If you need, use the Sane Magical Prices PDF for inspiration. > Give ingredients and procedures for making magic items. We have a process for making magic items in XGE, but having spells and example components would help out immensely. If necessary, put this behind a feat.
I know I'd prefer a 5e advanced, 5e is simple but simple creates all sorts of issues when you get into it. I would love for them to redesign how armour and movement is calculated. How weapons work, not change it all just refinement. There's a huge gap between simple and complex, I hope 5.5 is somewhere in the middle.
I would love a game with a complexity between 3.5 and 5e, but I don't think we are going to get it. You get called a "gatekeeper" for wanting a bit more crunch in 5e.
Something that I really look forward to seeing In the new players handbook is to see them put a lot of the new spells that they've been making into that book. The reason why I say this, is because each new subclass can only use player handbook spells in their subclass spell lists. So expanding that spell list would open up a lot of design possibilities.
For 5.5e or even 6e, somethings that I would love to see are: Give us a dog and a wolf race like the Tabaxi and the Leonin (I don't mean Shifter, I mean actual half dog/wolf, half humanoid). Get rid of the custom lineage ruling from Tasha's and replace it and the entire Chapter 2 of the PHB with the rules for character creation from An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby and An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby 2 (Actually achieving what Tasha's set out to do). Give us more elemental Special casting spells like Plant Growth, as awesome as it is it seems to be one of the only spells in 5e (that I know of) where it has two different effects depending on how you cast it. Use a spell slot and cast it in one turn to create difficult terrain or use a spell slot and cast it over an 8 hour period to enrich the land. Give us more weapon variety but don't go as crazy as Pathfinder to give both players and DMs a bit more flexibility and to encourage all parties to be a bit more descriptive with the weaponry and this have the flow on effect to get players and DMs descibing in better detail what armour and clothes look like. Give us other settings for campaigns that take more inspiration from international settings (Pacific Islands, Asia and Africa). Team up with Dragonix from DM's Guild and the folks over at Kobold Press to rebalance all the monsters as well as including more monsters and give us a Monstrous Manual of Monsters including a guide on how to make a chimera from different monsters and group/swarm stat blocks for smaller enemies. Lastly include in the new PHB a comprehensive list of feats, blessings and curses with the latter two expanding on what was introduced in Van Richten's by having positive and negative aspects for the blessings and curses. The whole point being because you were blessed by a magical/divine being doesn't mean you might not experience some negative side effects and vice versa for being cursed.
I will add that they really need to re balance feat. Add more (mianly weapons style because why the fuck one weapon fighting (not great like a sword in one hand and a free hand) doasnt have a feat. Or just remove weapons feat and make them a part of the class(like ate level 5 you ungraded your fighting style to have the feat also) because a must choos feat shouldn't be a feat. Its should be a fitter.+give marthiels more options like moves of something .they really beed options
I never use the MM for 5th edition ( most of the monsters in the book are sheer weak sauce against players 5th level and over), i used the 4th Ed MMs, which in my opinion is the deadliest MM in all of D&D.
Great advice. I have recently started using 3rd party products and older edition sourcebooks for encounters and noticed that they are often a lot more challenging. Part of me wishes that WotC would reduce PC power just a tad. I'm not talking about making things ridiculously hard but, as a relatively new DM (2-3 years DMing 5e), it can be hard to just see every encounter easily overcome and face rolled.
At this point I don't even want 5.5 anymore. Their version of "backwards compatible" seems to just be changing 5e to work with whatever's coming in the future. It still boggles my mind why they decided to make Monsters of the Multiverse before whatever is coming in 2024. The races were the only significant changes in that book. They should have just made an errata for the handful of monsters they actually made any changes for and then left the race updates for 2024 so we aren't in this weird limbo where all the races that the majority of people use are out of date in comparison to these new versions of races that get to choose their spellcasting ability and cast racial spells with spell slots. They should've just made a 6e if that's what they wanted to do.
legit, they did like BARELY any changes in MMM to the monsters. Just the ones that had spellcasting got nerfed and they changed stuff like "makes 3 greatsword attacks" to "makes 3 melee attacks". Waste of trees and money.
I talked to a guy at Gen Con who had insight into the new edition. He wouldn't say much due to NDA, but he said that if you don't care for how streamlined 5e is, you won't like the new edition because it's even more streamlined. By the context of the conversation, I took "more streamlined" to mean "less complexity". I think I made the right call for me and my group to move to Pathfinder 2nd edition.
I disagree with making monsters and races description more independent from settings, it's just more work for the DM. If I want to add a race to my setting I can read the description of Volo's and call it a day and if I want to change it is as easy as just not using the parts I don't like. With less info I have to make up a lot more like with MPMotM that says almost nothing of the races way of live and if not for Volo's I would have to make up a lot every time my players want to try a new race.
I fully agree with you 110% and said as much myself in my own comment. There’s no reason for agnosticism when you can just ignore what you don’t like. It as you said makes it harder for new DM’s when multiverse is the only book they sell now and afaik both print and digital versions of the books are discontinued or at least that’s what I heard. But this isn’t about agnosticism anyway it’s about the “troublesome” lore that people who are a fraction of the people who play the game threw a fit about darker aspects of the lore and now it’s gone. It’s the reason they changed orcs and removed most of the mentions of slavery from probably all races. Multiverse makes it out like Gruumsh is this powerful and good guy. They’ve scrubbed all mention of blood feud level hatred of gnomes from the Kobold section and actually make them out like they don’t blindly venerate all dragons anymore. These are MASSIVE changes to lore that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored by the community. Tbh I wish the book had never been made.
@@trexdrew "troublesome" topics like slavery and blind faith aren't bad, they are interesting and a fountain of inspiration. When I knew that in old lore of the Dragonborn they where a race created by Dragons to serve as slaves and they for themselves succeed in an uprising it was super cool and interesting and having races with hateful views of other races is realistic and a topic that can be really easily ignore but if not is a way to add character development to a PC.
@@alexllenas4607 I agree but it doesn’t seem like a small fraction of people do and that’s apparently who WotC listens to because they scream the loudest
I'd love to see some of the base classes updated and tweaked. Improving the original PHB classes and subclasses. (Becuase they are heavily outshone by XGtE and TGtE). Also. Buff the capstone abilities. Nothing crazy... but something.
The big thing I think I would want because it's the issue I've had the most trouble in my D&D group is make it easier to Homebrew brand new playable races. Usually what I end up doing but it isn't a complete seamless conversion is I take non-playable races and I use the scores they have as much as possible to tweak it so that you can play such as I created a Homebrew campaign that was sci-fi based I found online stats for a Roswell Gray but it still wasn't a very easy conversion from non-playable to playable race.
I don't agree completly with Mike but I can understand where he is coming from. Will see how it goes hopes whatever the end result is that it ends up been an improvement.
D&D fits its purpose for what it is and sets out to achieve IMO 5E is certainly the best of the versions I've seen, and I've played all versions. If you want a different setting but can accept (or even embrace) the D&D 5E system warts and all, well, that can work. But there are far better systems for achieving specific goals and atmospheres, so adapt and adopt. I basically agree with Sly Flourish here on almost every count. Hope that a game I love evolves in such a measured and careful fashion.
I only ever use 'theater of the mind' when combat is either; completely unexpected, or takes place in a small location, like an office or small house. It's so easy to share screens these days, or use roll20 or whatever. And I've got millions of battlemaps in the chamber.
Personally me I think some spells should be treated as Magic Items / quest rewards and not just automatically learned on level up (A lot of spells in the 7th-9th ranges). It always felt weird to me that Wish isn't a Legendary quest spell and the only way to learn it is by going on a quest to learn it from some high powerful magic source. and instead once you hit level 17th wizard you just know it. I do think there is a place for having certain spells be separated into this kinda categories, even some lower level spells like revivify feel kinda odd to just learn on a level up.
You can do that with any spell you want. Just tell the players at the beginning of the game these are rare spells you will have to find someone or some hidden knowledge/ancient power to teach you. Maybe for revivify you have to meet with an elder healer or be granted permission by a powerful member of the clergy to study the ancient scrolls of healing to learn it. The clergy member makes you go on a quest to prove you are worthy. Just tell your players up front and ideally have a list of the spells you are gating this way in session zero don't suprise them at level up.
I will say with the brief mention of SW5e, it is 5e taken apart and built back up and honestly works better for than the official system with the weird die that should've just been d10s like WoD. it almost feels like a new system at times and its crunchier than normal 5e, but not too much that it feels overwhelming. But to be on topic with the video. It sounds like we will get just refinements and I'm good with that!
11:03 - Disagree on your bottom end, level 3 to 10. Take a look at the various published modules. DiA, RotFM, HotDQ - all have the level 1 and 2 content setup to easily cause a TPK (don't get me started about throwing a level 5 mage at the party at level 2 with said mage having fireball and being in a relatively small room - so no way for the party to really spread out to minimize the fireball damage).
Well for one, WotC didn't design HotDQ and it was actually designed to be more lethal/challenging, but no one talks about that. It was originally intended to be the harfwr option while LMoP was supposed to be the easy way
@@NerdImmersion LMoP can also easily cause a TPK at level 1 as well. That's why I say the real range should be level 3 to 10. WotC has been pretty bad at scaling things for level 1 and level 2 parties in their published modules with really only W:DH being a fairly well balanced module.
People with aphantasia can’t see images within their mind. I have it, I see almost nothing but darkness if I close my eyes and try to imagine something as simple as an apple. I’ve never enjoyed fiction books because of this. In dnd I’m a heavy rules/lore guy and I love virtual tabletops.
I would argue that these conversion systems like adventures in middle-earth and Star wars 5e are actually very useful to the community because it's not a huge step into learning a new system. If you already understand 5e, you're going to understand the majority of the conversion system. If someone asks for perception check you know exactly what to do. Sure there are system agnostic things for each of these conversion systems that are going to only apply to that conversion ie Force powers, heritage is in middle-earth etc but these are smaller leaps to learn versus learning an entirely new system. I have played both and they handle 5e as well as their own conversions very very well. Well I don't completely disagree with you that other systems do it better, if done Right conversion systems can work just fine.
One thing I'd like to see changed is not having unlimited cantrips, essentially at lower levels. I like the idea of a wizard having to use their quarterstaff to fight a goblin because they may feel the need to save their Firebolts for the hobgoblin captain. Also, I hope when the "fix" the ranger for 5.5/6E they don't make them too powerful. Just use the ranger from Tasha's and call it a day.
that would make low level spellcasters even more useless. i mean until you are at least lvl 5 you are kinda dead weight, plus this would kill the warlock class
Artificers need 18th Level Infusions. Barbarians need Rage back on a Short Rest. Bards need to fix Countercharm and their Capstone Feature. Clerics are fine as is. Druids are fine as is. Fighters need Battle Maneuvers for every Subclass, plus Arcane Archers and Eldritch Knights need a whole rework for their Subclass. Monks should be able to use abilities at-will without having to use Ki Points. Paladins are fine as is. Rangers got updated perfectly. Rogues are fine as is. Sorcerers need to be using Spell Points instead of Spell Slots, they need to be Constitution based Spellcasters, they need more Metamagic (maybe equal to Proficiency Bonus), and they need to fix the Capstone Feature. It would also be nice to move the 14th Level and 18th Level Subclass Features to 10th and 14th Level, but doing so would need to give them a powerful 18th Level Class Feature. Warlocks need to be given all Pact Invocations for free, increase the number of Spell Slots (possibly equal to Proficiency Bonus), plus make Mystic Arcanum into Spell Slots that only recover on a Long Rest. Wizards are fine as is, but maybe give them a minor Class Feature that using Bonus Action to use.
I think hear me out. EB should be a basic worlock feather that the subclass can change. Just saying if its must pick its should be just a part of the packeg
Ted, not sure if you’ve seen already but I just got an email from dndbeyond about a Wizards Presents event tomorrow about “big things coming to dnd”. Thought I’d let you know since you’re THE GUY when it comes to news. Love the channel.
There are some changes they need to and should consider changing so here is a list to supplement the changes that would work: Fix short Rest- You can choose to Short rest, eat a meal and Short Rest, have nothing happen for 2 hours and you short rest. Class skills - Automatically given skills to make sure that you don’t have a Cleric with out Religion or a thief without Stealth. Rangers need two and that helps them. Sure up weak skills with better descriptions and reasons to use them.how often have you used Animal Handling or Medicine. In a “medieval” world these should be automatically used. Improving opportunities to use them is easy with better definitions (and reasons) Sure up the monk as a skirmish fighter and make it so you less focus on stunning strike and allow more options make sure they are not so ASI Starved single career focused. Rangers keep Tasha, give options for familars/pet taming and most importantly let them choose spells daily (i mean they don’t have a great set of spells and need more better ones but to hit them with known too is just rude). Add Blood Hunter and Artificer to the base and the SRD. Give MM credit, even though I don’t love the Blood Hunter there is a lot of love out there for it. Put the Aasimar in the book because dang it if you have teachers and libraries doing D&D and the kids can be devil kin but can’t be Angel kin you are just being rude - also you need a minor tweak in them since you hit them hard on power. Fix the mounted stuff. Add a companion class to mounted so this class can work with the characters in terms of they get one more move action during the controlling rider’s turn. That does an amazing job ti fixing the timing issue. Also, fix the poisoning issue by just making it official that rider declares at the begin JH of turn. Add secondary rider rules as well (basically they have no control and can only use one hand to do anything but hold on) Add a basic code of the game contract in DMG or PHB. I know two pages but I want that because so many issues could be resolved with that conversation. This hint is the single best thing for new players (and some old ones) to do and it more then anything else can get you a good first game. I know they won’t but they should.
conjure animals doesn't actually say the DM picks, it says "you choose one of the following options for what appears", and then lists a number of a certain CR. RAW if the spell says that you choose one of the following for what appears and "a beast of cr 1/4" is the only option, you can then pick a creature of your choosing that fufills the CR requirements. Expanding it to four didferent numers and CR's doesn't change this. It never actually says the DM chooses, only that the dm has the statistics. The intent is that the DM chooses, but it isn't actually written anywhere in the spell.
Don’t stop at orcs and goblins either. My heart breaks for every Minotaur-American who has to deal with daily micro aggressions from people assuming they’re good at mazes. This is not okay!
In re: DM chooses what’s summoned. WotC: Don’t put more work on the DM. There are loads of spells where the DM is supposed to provide a list or chart of monsters. Or be in charge of additional creatures. If it’s part of a player class or feat or spell everything should be there for the player to handle. The DM has already chosen what they can handle in the combat and they don’t need a bunch of creatures they didn’t anticipate.
I think a lot of base classes need a touch up. I think this new feats in background thing should be an optional rule that is included in all of the PHB backgrounds, with the stipulation that other settings that do it means if you use that rule for setting backgrounds players can also use it for PHB backgrounds. I think mythic monsters should be a part of the base game for when you intend to run a solo boss fight. I also think a lot of PHB feats could use a touch up, specifically feats like Dual Wielder that are just awful or feats like GWM/Sharpshooter that are possibly too good. Stuff that modifies core races like Dragonborn should be part of this new PHB. Also core subclasses like Four Elements, Hunter, Wild Magic, Champion, and Assassin could all use some tweaking.
I complain about official content a bit myself and reading this just reminds me that DMs should take more initiative in swinging the banhammer on stuff they don't like from official sources or changing it. Like, why do they have to make the monsters "setting agnostic"? You already make your own damn world! You can do that yourself! The only stuff they should honestly think about changing is how every monstrous humanoid is a "primal savage". It's stuff like this that ruined the goblinkin in MMM 😔
Honestly, I think there's several things that need a complete revamp. I agree with all this, but I think the base classes and PHB subclasses need an overhaul. Ranger still doesn't really seem to know what it wants to do, all the Tasha's stuff for it completely replaces the base class which isn't that great honestly. If they get rid of Short Rests, Warlock is screwed plain and simple. Fighter also takes a hit there but not as bad really. But the base classes need an overhaul I think, especially the Ranger, Warlock, Wizard, and Sorcerer
I think they should do more standalone adventures rather than full campaigns. I know that setting books are unlikely, but even just one book for each historical campaign setting, just to update them to the current edition and bring them back into vogue. More and more DM's are moving to homebrew settings as Forgotten realms has essentially been forgotten.
I just hope wotc doesn't get wishy-washy where "oh goblins can be any alignment they can be any weight any height" makes the game feel less alive I'm sorry they're different creatures. I was making an auto gnome and I wanted to know how close they're are to a gnome. Or maybe idk how much the metal construct would weigh but no they don't tell you that. They don't give details because it's "problematic". Orcs Drow and goblins are unique don't screw with that
Ted, you and Mike Shea (and the Dungeon Dudes, Treantmonk, Colby from d4 Deep Dive, Luke from DMs Lair - i could go on and on...) are giving us inspiration and hope for the future of D&D. there are very creative people at Wotc, but they seem to be suffering from confusion and lack of editing (Hadozee gliding anyone?). Wotc need greater openness to 3rd party content that is actually improving D&D!
As a player and a DM I don't agree with a lot of the spells mentioned that need fixing, just giving those higher CR monster better abilities should be good. Except for removing the conjure spells. Those need to be done away with and replaced with the Tasha's summons.
I’ve seen a couple people sound off in the comments that they have aphantasia. I do, as well. I’ve heard people mention that they can imagine vivid images in their head. I can get vague outlines at best. As such, I heavily prefer battlemaps when possible. I also get tired of hearing people repeatedly ask “are there any enemies near me” because they weren’t listening during other turns. If you do have players with aphantasia, what helps me enjoy the game more is visuals. Pictures of locales, npcs, and monsters. Pinterest is a great resource for that, but even the official books have good art. Don’t be afraid to give something away when you can just crack the book open and show off that troll. If you don’t have maps, sketches help. Or even just using placeholder tokens. I’ve known many dms that use candies, and whomever kills the monster gets the candy.
my list would be a refined and better explanation/system of how a DM can build level appropriate magic items (said could be said for other things like Feats, etc.).
While I get some of the points I feel there is an immediate contradiction at the end of the post with "Leave the rest be", it feels a bit cheeky that author decided to choose things that he doesn't like and suggest to change them while saying leave everything else as it is, when some of the suggestions almost affect the core of DnD...if you get what I mean. Now for the more specific things: Making encounter building easier and balanced - While I 100% agree with this, I think this is an impossible task, and it is ok. The reason why some things can be imbalanced comes a lot to: what is party composed of, where are they fighting, how is combat initiated. Some enemies will be better when ambushing, some can just go directly in combat, some can suddenly raise the whole encounter difficulty if they are surrounded by allies even if you put them instead of other same CR level monster. For the most part each monster is different and has different roles and has different counters. If you want encounters to be easy to make and balanced quickly the only way to do it is to strip every monster to very basics, have very similar AC/Attack/abilities where all they become is just a small reflavors of one another. This is not something I would like to see. Provide Less problematic Race Descriptions - Again I get it, but this can be at the cost of flavor and uniqueness of the races, what we saw recently in DnD is how a lot of monster races were changed to say - "hey, they are not the 100% bad guys, goblins can be good, orcs can be good, drow can be good". It is fine, but again I hope this wont go into too much neutral area where we wiil end up - We have red race, we have short race we have green race, we have pointy ear race - it's up to you now to decide how they work in your world. People always have the power to decide for their settings how some races can differ from the core books, but this may bring issue that article raised itself - you change too much and it's not DnD anymore. Fix Certain Spells and Abilities - This topic can lead down the rabit hole once you start talking more about it, there can be much more spells that "will change how DM runs a game" - party needs to reach something high on the cliff? remove fly and levitate so they cant do it via magic. Party is camping outside - remove tiny hut. Party needs to find a way to survive in the desert? remove create food and water and goodberies. There are many in and out of combat spells that will change how game is played out, but that is again on DM to adapt (saying this as a DM myself). I do agree that some spells end up being more problematic where if you want to try and challenge the party you need to step up the game which, if it swings one way too much it may result in TPK
I never understood why they wanted conjure animals to be randomized. If I were a druid and I wanted to summon some animal companions, why wouldn't you pick SPECIFIC animals to aid you.
Heh, yeah, just ran the level 11 adventure from Journey's Through the Radiant Citadel, and when the CR 15 purple worm showed up, well, turn 1 it was shaking off hold monster, turn 2 it could only take one action, so it moved, turn 3 it was polymorphed into a regular worm, put in a little bag, and carried around by the wizards owl familiar to use as a threat for an hour, at which time it was flown out into the desert and dropped off harmlessly as the spell ended....
That's better than what happened in my campaign. The Purple Worm got surrounded by the cleric and paladin with their full plate armor and beat on mercilessly until the rogue and alchemist decided to put it out of it's misery. I literally could not deal any damage.
My biggest hopes is that warlocke gets changed to proficiency bonus spells per long rest where they can meditation for a minute and get them back charisma mod times per long rests. This would actually make the feel like spell casters and not just eldritch blasters/hexblade multiclass choices as some who has tried with warlockes its ruff to feel like a caster as I end up going teifling or shadow mark elf every time and taking fey touched every time to just feel kinda like a caster as a teifling with fey touched warlocke actually can cast a few spells for utility and not just be gimped the rest of the day. Because unless your a genie warlocke or in the short rest party people just don't wanna take short rests... And secondly I really hope they make dual weilding as viable as 2h wepon fighting as there's no feats for 1h wepons specifically like there's pole arm master and gwm master which makes a halberd fight disgusting but someone who wants to use 2 longswords/rapeirs gets very little to go for as you need to take a particular fighting style and feat just to function sub optimally in comparison. Mabey some sort of bonus action extra attacky feat where if you use your bonus action and action to make 1h wepon attack attacks you can make a second wepon attack as a bonus action. Or some features that cares about the number of hits you've done in a row to proc a ability
My thoughts are more or less the following - I like my broken spells and would be sad to see them go, and sometimes I prefer to use a stat block from the mm rather than these ‘___ spirit’ stat blocks, but I’d understand if the changed that and would agree it’s probably for the best - I’d scrap race and just make it lineage, with some details and biological features, and then have the rest of your starting abilities come from your background - wouldn’t it be cool if they just made all of 5e available for the OGL and added the new basic stuff for 5.5 to encourage people to convert 5e stuff to 5.5 so they don’t have to do it themselves. Win win in my opinion
Not a fan of what has become of Tasha's racial modifiers. When it came out I was told it would be an optional rule and us DMs that liked fixed racial modifiers would be able to still use them. Now, all the new races coming out have the Tasha rules for stat modifiers and I would bet money that they aren't even in the next PHB. Heck, I miss racial penalties from 3.5. I liked playing characters that had a bad race-class mix. I had an elf fighter in 3.5 with a 6 in CON, but he had a 20 in DEX. Almost nothing could hit him, but when he DID get hit, it was a big deal. I get the point that people want to play an Elf Paladin, but the +2 DEX, +1 INT don't fit well, so they want a +2 CHA and a +1 STR instead. At that point, you aren't playing an elf anymore. You might as well just pick and choose racial features from a list and make up whatever you want. How I would fix it is to make all stats useful for all classes. Characters with high INT get more skills. Have DEX always affect AC, assuming you are strong enough to wear the armor you picked. Now there is a benefit to playing any race for any class. On another topic, I'm going to call it. Either 5.5e will start out backwards compatible then slowly become incompatible as splat books come out, or 5.5e options are going to be noticeably better, to the point that playing with 5e material in a 5.5e game will make you weaker. WotC wants to sell books.
One big thing (that I sadly have no confidence will be changed) is magic items. Magic item rarity is incredibly disconnected from power level, and even if it were, the pricing / crafting rules are practically nonexistent. Not to mention that individual items are often far more nonsensical than even their 3.5 versions (ability score items setting your score to 19 instead of just adding +4, for example). DM's really need a magic item revamp, but I doubt we'll get one.
I'm curious if we might also get the mystic class in 5.5. Also I would like to see some more refined rules for moving squads and or armies have having war and battles I find to be clunky and normal avoid the battles and have players come late to battle field.
Thematic spells for sorcerers. Like aberrant mind or clockwork soul sorcerers, a list of thematic spells for every subclass of sorcerer would be greatly appreciated. Also for sorcerer and monk, redesign the ki/sorcery points system so that you can do some things #/day for free rather than forcing sorcerers and monks to either/or their abilities. Why have an ability if there is not enough ki/sorcery to do that ability and the key (pun intended) ability the system was designed for. Sorcery points are mostly for metamagic and the occasional slot conversion, forcing a sorcerer to choose between that and some of their subclass abilities means they will never do that subclass ability. Same for monk stuff. Just change some of those limited abilities to be #/day would free up the points for what the player really wants. Practical DM advice for designing encounters, not building worlds.
Ability modifiers need to start at 14 and not 12 and proficiency bonuses need to start at +4 so being proficient in something easy more than just having a high ability modifier
Immediate bad take, everything with 5e be forward compat with new edition?? No, I love 5e but it has some core design failures and needs some love from the base that if they keep it compatible will end up just being a waste of time and money. Every other edition will eventually throw out the old to make the new why is everyone all of a sudden so scared of that? 5e won't be unable to be played, as evidenced by all the people playing 3.5. Do you really think they will fix the core issues of sorcerer, monk, martial vs caster while making phb and what not still work? The only thing I could see is monsters but even then myself and alot of others find the current direction they are taking monsters disappointing and plain not fun. Make a NEW edition not some duct tape cost saving profit maximizing half measure. Actually make a good product first.
You can only summon 1 giant constrictor snake until level 9 where you can summon 2 it is extremely dramatic to say that you can ruin an encounter by making all the enemies immobile
Imho: If they ever they decide to change the action system in combat, itll just be an adjacent version of pathfinder if theyre even legally allowed to do that. But otherwise, yeah, i agree that if they fully remove bonus actions without some kind alternative, then backwards compatibility is going to be a no go since so many things rely on bonus actions (Also I hope they rework the monk and fighter)
I very much disagree with leaving in things like vancian casting. If you never try to improve you stagnate. If you think it isn't broken, don't assume there are not cracks you cannot see.
I think they should remove short rests and rework warlock but it would be hard for them to claim backwards compatibility if they do that. Since they have said several times that it will be backwards compatible I do not think we will get that change
I hope when they a just the classes that they make all classes a have a subclass at first level and subclass options even out to match up something like 1st 3rd 7th and 15th
5e is a weird system. It is accessible to players sure but it has some simplifications and a reduction of individual power of sorts with things such as bound accuracy etc, that it means you cannot have an epic fight of one huge monster versus a party cause simply the action economy even with legendary actions will have the monster devastated while many low cr creatures will overwhelm almost any party after a while or at least drain it from its resources dry. I heard somewhere that the design was supposed to be multiple battle encounters per day but if you are at a table like ours where we do battle once a week of in game time then it is very hard to make one huge monster that threatens everything unless players are super underleveled where suddenly its ultra unfair and not fun for the players because they have 0 fighting chance.
The classes for the most part don't need much a few only needing a little bit of work patching and clean up here and there.....except for the Sorcerer it needs a complete tear down and rebuild.
In my humble opinion there are things that do need radical changes. Weapons, Feats and Spells need more than bandaid adjustments or rebalancing, they need fundamental reworks. Things like tools, resource amount and caster balance need to change. Conditions have to be looked at to not disproportionately affect martials. Dex/Str and armour types need to be looked at. Power scaling overall needs to tone the fuck down. The power creep is out of control and as a result even tier 2 play is feeling like you're players are demigods. I am not hopeful these aspects will be addressed.
Big oof on removing powerful and creative spells. A DM with an issue with force cage and banishment is a bad dm. They are high level spells that casters can do once or twice per day at high levels. They SHOULD be much more powerful than a fighter swinging a sword, which they can do an unlimited number of times.
I think they're already fumbling "provide less problematic race descriptions" in what we saw in MotM. They're not providing new info really, they're wholesale removing descriptors from races. "Everything ages and behaves as a human" is not IMO conducive to good worldbuilding. If someone dislikes the warfaring hobgoblins and the lore/background for how they became that way that DM//player could say my hobgoblins are different. By homogenizing races we also lose focus points that assist us in playing against type or making different decisions for our characters in the stories we tell. Drizz't is interesting because he is different from the menzoberranzan drow, if we don't have knowledge of what the drow *ARE* we can't define what they aren't like, i think thats a net loss for the community and the game.
@@alexbarn3841 but that is only because we have the background for what drow culture is like. I used Drizz't as a popculture example because he is recognizable. He is not unique, because we know that there are other good-aligned drow in the enclaves of Eilistraee, the dancer. He is interesting because he is incompatible with the morals nad social norms of menzoberranzan. My point is that if these tendencies continue where race lore continues to get wiped away, then we'll lose the wicked drow of menzoberranzan, we'll lose what makes Drizz't interesting, we'll lose what makes the good-aligned drow a rare find, we'll lose the niche that Eilistraee, the Dancer, occupies. Because without the lynchpin, that the wicked Lolth worshipping Drow are, then the entire rest of the framework falls apart.
It's definitely a net loss for the game but retards will be retards so what are ya gonna do, ya know? The only option is to not give them your money, otherwise get used to it. Either buy 3rd party content instead until they go back to traditional D&D, kinda like people did with Pathfinder during 4e, or just accept this is your new D&D and continue to pay them for it.
@@alexbarn3841 i think its entirely reasonable to say that the Lolth worshipping drow are central to what makes the drow race unique. If we remove those sadistic matriarchal values from drow lore/society then the rest of my points are entirely sound. I think with the tendencies we're seeing this could be realized in '24.
Would be nice to see a nice nerf/rebalance for full casters, fix non-working subclasses, buffing melee and classes what does not works without items. As well would be noce to see at least a 60:40 item ratio between fullcasters and non/limited casters.
At the Moment CR is just a guideline , i use my guts feeling and it USUALLY is enough , sometimes i have problems using not linear monsters , their CR is VERY inaccurate and screwed one way or another
Good points man, but As a mixed race kid from the states, I'm tired of people calling the orc lore "problematic", it's just some silly ass shit, "I'm defending you by saying the orc lore is racist "... That mind set is the real racism, .I'm not a half orc, my dad's not an orc ....it's a fantasy monster creature and if someone thinks orcs are synonymous with non Caucasian humans then that person needs to reevaluate their mindset. But I like the way you said it, make them "setting nuetral, cuz volvos is from the forgotten realms setting but maybe WOtC could take the time to layout a little info on a few of the different orc cultures throughout the settings like in forgotten realms many are like "this", in grey hawk they are commonly like "this" etc., But good call man, but let's stop calling it "problematic.
Basically: Change nothing, refine everything. Honestly, that's the dream for the most successful version of the most successful rpg ever, and I'm excited.
Refining something is still changing it.
@@aaronhumphrey3514 I'm pretty sure they mean not adding/removing a bunch of mechanics and just changing what's already there
Soo the system will be left as bare as it is, martials will be as bad as they are since they need a grounds up rework... boy am I excited to have options
@@The_Yukki martials are plenty powerful in 5e.
@@reachcole514 Say sike now, say sike please. Martials are 'good' at lvls 1-3, maybe 4. At lvl 5 they just become filler for the party. Ranger and paladin being kinda exceptions cause their spells (+ smites in case of paladin) carry them a bit further.
But, I'm kinda done arguing over martials being useless filler in 5e with ppl, it's just a sisiphian task to convince most ppl.
Thank you for the kind words!
While I have no problem with making creature and race descriptions setting agnostic, IN THEORY... I think there needs to be a massively updated "Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide" (or even better, a more general Faerun campeign book), that describes how the creatures and races fit in that world, especially if they want to keep the it as the default setting (like in the Basic Set), or keep making it the main setting for most of their published adventures.
If they actually refilled the lore they’re draining constantly from their own game then maybe it’d be fine. But as it stands this setting agnosticism is just taking away from the game as a whole.
@@trexdrew I am fully with you. How do you want to write a (for example) vampire statblock setting agnostic? In different setting, vampires have different characteristics and/or abilities. Can a vampire turn into a bat? Depends on the setting. Can a vampire mesmerize others? Depends on the setting. You can play this for nearly every monster.
@@trexdrew Exactly. Having stuff that's setting agnostic is ok, but when you actually have a setting don't suck all the life out of it.
Forgotten Realms is big on the list of Campaign Setting books wishlists already, mostly because nobody liked SCAG.
The only thing I really want is a martial weapon overhaul.
Basically: make martial classes have as many choices and interesting things to do as other classes. Would love to see whips that can grapple or restrain, or bludgeoning weapons able to shove or crush bones and inflict different conditions from there...
As of right now you basically look for what has the highest damage number and works with the best feats and go from there. Anything out of that scope is "sub-optimal" however fun it may be. I would LOVE to be able to do throwing weapons fully and as effectively as a sharpshooter, if I could for example.
I think there was once an edition where martial classes had these spell like attacks that could do various utilitarian actions even outside of the combat. If I remember correctly they were called At-Will powers.
I have Aphantasia, it basically means I don't have a "Mind's Eye", and I cannot imagine things in my head, it goes on a scale, where some people might be able to imagine objects if they force it, but for many, it is just complete emptiness
Edit: This means that without a battlemap, the game is basically unplayable for me
I have aphantasia as well, and I still play with Theater of the Mind. It's just about remembering the list of facts about what is where at any given time, but obviously it's not for everyone. Battle maps would probably be preferable, but no one in my group wants to spend the time and money for maps and minis haha
You sameeee, I feel ya there
@@danieldurham5891 We have a very stupid combination of High Standards + Laziness. We break out simple maps every so often but generally prefer theater of the mind over super simple maps haha
One of my players has this as well, we don't usually use a map, but I really want to switch to a virtual table top, I feel like it would help their situation a lot.
@@stevencooper564 Ye, I almost exclusively play virtual, and it has helped me a lot
I think they should add unique weapon affects to different weapons to give martials more flavor and bring them more in line with casters. Rapier -parry/riposte, great sword -great cleave, maul - sunder armor or crushing blow, etc. Make them limited uses (PB) or tied to certain events. For instance a rapier can be used without a shield or offhand and gains the ability to use a reaction to add PB to AC and if an attack that would hit misses then a follow up riposte can be made (pb times a short rest?) Make it do PB damage. Probably too far out there,but just a thought I had while listening to this list
The Essentials line from 4e was the 4.5. It featured a rules book with some updated classic classes and monsters. The old stuff was still entirely compatible, one was just more refined than the other. That's what I expect they'll do: revisions and such for an "advanced" 5e.
I really hope not, Essentials was a garbage fire that ultimately failed in basically every conceivable way for what it wanted to do
The thing I most want to see is more cinematic combat. I've been showing my son how to play and he instinctively wants to describe combat in terms of "I want to try to knock the shield out of his hand", or "I want to hit him in the foot so he can't move fast.". These sorts of called shots can be done with DC (and I did it) but I realize I'm probably completely invalidating some class feature somewhere by allowing it.
Either the PHB or the DMG has rules for a disarm action. Less sure about crippling the foot like that. You could rule it as a shove prone action? The Battle Master definitely has better versions of things like that though, but it doesn't mean you can't still do them without superiority dice
Check out MCDM maneuvers
I fully agree that I would like this to be more of a feature. Even if there was guidance in the DMs guide on how to modify damage or attack rolls when players want to do maneuvers like this would be good, and then classes should be built around that design.
That is honestly why I don't like the battle Master as it is designed because it takes a bunch of cool, relatively universal fighting maneuvers and says "this is my space, nobody is allowed to do this better than me, also I have a unique dice mechanic tied to its so up yours."
@@skiks3562 I totally agree with your comments about Battle Master. Same thing with Mage Hand cantrip, how you can't do some cool stuff with that cantrip simply because that's Arcane Trickster's purview. It's really silly.
Encounter balance is such a difficult thing in 5e. You can routinely throw encounters that are deadly x2 at a party and they smoke it.
I don't think the system was optimized for people playing well. I love my party but they aren't war gamers. I am.
I have to be careful with how things go one way or another, because if they have good tactics they can easily overcome regular encounters.
When I have monsters starting to use tactics, things get deadly real quick. Even small things like a dragon keeping itself out of reach of the melee paladin can really change an encounter.
I feel like it should be a combination of forgotten realms info on races and a more generic option so new dms don't have to design an entire culture for every race they include in thier games, a quick reference would be helpful.
i mean, by sheer virtue of making it "setting agnostic" you're getting less information and thus requiring yourself more work to create a whole culture. If you even bother to do so, cuz let's be honest since when do the players actually talk to the goblins and bother asking about their culture instead of just killing them?
I feel like if they give out examples for multiple settings it would be more useful. One paragraph dedicated to FR, another to Eberron, then so on. It helps to visualize the common points in the settings while showing the DM some twists they can use.
All we really need is a disclaimer in one of the books stating that the DM makes the final call on stuff like lore, so you don't have to follow the given lore.
Oh wait.
I think when they designed 5e, they used data suggesting that few parties actually got past level 10 and those that did had experienced DMs and players who could adapt accordingly ... however, with it being so hard to die in 5e and levelling being much easier (some seem to level up every session it seems), there might actually be a need to put more work into higher level campaigning as less experienced players find themselves there quicker.
I'd like to see Artificers added to the new PHB. I also think looking at how much they've been referenced (including in Spelljammer without a book/page referral) firearms are going to be added as base game weapons.
They are all ready are. Its just a veriant.
I don't know about leaving everything else be. Why create a new version if you aren't going to fix much more than what he has listed. Frankly, there's some things that I just don't think work like they should. Short rests and surprise are so inconsistent between tables that it makes some classes and subclasses good at some tables but not at others. So many magical items require Attunement that I basically don't want cool magical weapons or armor. I just want regular old +3 weapons, armor, and shields to leave room for other cool magical stuff. I like the idea of Concentration as a limiting factor, but it seems like that has been added to too many spells, especially for certain classes. I also think almost every spell should be upcastable, especially ones on the Warlock spell list. I think it needs to mostly stay the same, but I feel like Mike just wants 5.0.1, and if they're going to update it, make it a 5.5.
The quality of 5e books is decreasing slowly. I'm pretty sure 5.5e is going to be a borderline errata book for the base game, with some power creep put in there to get people to buy to buy the new books.
I completely disagree with the idea of making it all setting agnostic. All that does it make it less interesting and less fleshed out as a whole. Players love and enjoy the specific lore of the creatures in the various bestiaries that Monsters of the Multiverse cut out dramatically. You know how much lore the Gith got in MPMotM? About a paragraph each. How much did they get in TOF? Multiple full pages detailing their lore and background as well as their wars and the exile of the Githzerai. It feels way less interesting than what we used to have. People can say all they want that you can just go look at that lore BUT that’s not really true. WotC is doing everything in their power to wash clean and strip down everything they don’t like into a more condensed and dull form. They’ve discontinued the printing of Volo’s and TOF from what I know as well as the digital versions too. You can find them secondhand sure or at places that still have them in stock but it’s not a good thing to me. They want new players to only see the current “setting agnostic” lore and people won’t know about the old lore. When the redo comes in 2024 I guarantee we won’t get the level of detail about the Blood War like we did for TOF. Will we even get feral Tiefling? That one is a SCAG specific race that isn’t setting agnostic so will they even keep it?
TLDR the cleansing of all in depth and interesting lore is an inherently bad thing for DM’s and players alike. It condenses everything down too much and doesn’t provide a good enough refill of the lore you’re losing. It’s also helpful to both categories of people to draw inspiration from that’s suddenly missing in 5E. So please WotC stop doing it.
I totally agree. Even though I run my games in my own world, I like to see an example of complex and interesting lore for monsters in the Forgotten Realms, so I can adopt what I want and change what I want. If they want to make them more system agnostic and make new DMs more comfortable with creating their own lore, they shouldn't strip the old one. In my opinion, they should add to it. Things like: "Here is how Gith are in the Forgotten Realms. In Greyhawk they might be more like this. And in your own world they might be totally different" would be great.
@@echsengenosse1351 it’s clearly not even about agnosticism though. If you look at what they’ve scrubbed clean from the lore it’s all the darker more “problematic” parts. Blood feud style hates with other races, slavery, and war. You know the things that actually make for complex storytelling? It’s very obvious they’re appeasing a group that’s too loud about their dislike of these ideas being in the game but to scrub them completely out is insane IMO. If you read the paragraph on orcs in Monsters of the Multiverse it seems to make Gruumsh out to be a good guy.
I have to disagree. I love some of the 5e conversions. Star wats 5e is amazing and super fun to play, Adventures in Middles Earth is a wonderful system that made really fun and unique classes without magic. I also love some of these other systems made specifically for these games, partially because I have a passion and mind for learning new systems. For some people it's just easier to make a slight change to a system they already know then learn something as complex as say Edge of The Empire.
I completely agree and actually posted something very similar to this.
The problem i see here its most systems are simpler than 5e.there is more complex systems. But most system i seen are simpler
About "Fix certain Spells and abilities": There are also some spells and abilities that are underpowered. For example, monk needs a buff for levels 5+, Assassin Rogue needs a complete revamp, ranger deserves to be redone from the ground up to be more consistent. The sorcerer subclasses need to be brought to one power level, I would say a bit weaker than Clockwork Soul and Aberrant mind, but a little bit stronger than Divine Soul. Druids Wildshape should be made a statblock and not dependant on what creatures are published in some DnD books. Certain Capstones should be buffed. Bards Countercharm is completely broken and useless. Life Cleric needs a bit of a nerf on spells that heal multiple times, like Goodberry.
I love to remix 4e adventures into 5e. Maps and lore in 4e were great and under appreciated
My only addition would be clearer wealth guidelines for higher level and a return to some sort of magic item economy that can measure those items, and a greater emphasis on feats. Having them only be available at the cost of ASI makes them hard to justify so something like what they teased in the Krynn Unearthed Arcana where feats are tied to a background and having bonus feats unlock at certain milestone levels (5, 10, 15th for example) would go a long ways to upping their value.
My thoughts for Warlock in a "no short rest" world: a warlock can restore their spell slots outside of combat a number of times equal to their proficiency bonus. It takes 5 minutes (or whatever) of in-game time to do this.
Totally works. Why didn't I think of that!! 😜
I'd prefer if they drop the whole special Pact Magic system, and just make Warlocks a half-caster similar to an Artificer. While it's cool to have such a special ability, it just makes it complexity for complexity's sake, and this will remove the short rest mechanic.
@@egonhomes That would completely kill off Warlock as a class. Why would you play a class that used to be a full caster as a half-caster? I would rather have then just remove Warlock from the game than to have them make that change. (Just as an FYI: Warlock is currently my favorite class to play in the game. And I have never played a Hexblade, so it is for the casting, not because of Hexblade mechanics.)
@@johncox7169 The one thing I DO like about the Warlock is that they essentially get 2 subclasses at once. You have a Patron and a Pact Boon. I wish more classes had that sort of a mechanic.
That being said, I don't really see a functional difference between a Cleric and a Warlock lore-wise. They both get their power from a higher being, usually by doing something in return.
@@johncox7169 Because Warlocks have never been casters with slots before 5e. Their eldritch invocations took the place of spells.
Anyway, you can't say it would kill the Warlock. It might not be to your liking, but it would add a lot of versatility to the class, with more spells per day (even if not upcast).
I have only one problem with not changing classes whatsoever. If they are going to phase out short rests like people are thinking, then about half of the classes are going to need to be refined or become utterly useless.
Something cool that Wotc could explore is a create your own class system as an optional alternative to multiclassing
Symbaroum has an excellent version of this.
Honestly I’m not sure why this is needed. Multiclassing works perfectly fine for building your own characters, and provides plenty of flexibility to create unique builds with fair restrictions. At worst all you need to do is talk to your DM about how your character is mechanically is this, but you’re flavouring it as that…
So as an example, in a current game I am in my character is mechanically a Wildfire Druid/Divine Soul Sorcerer multiclass, but when it comes to flavour he is a unique class. A Phoenix reborn in a humanoid body, who is slowly relearning how to harness the powers from his previous form.
Everyone would pick that
Just go play GURPS, 3.X, or pathfinder if you want needless complexity
I have a problem of making things setting agnostic. You basically remove the idea of having any real setting let alone having multiple ones. The settings would only give locations and maybe NPC but even then you might have some who would argue the NPC is written in a bias way which it has to be for order for it to fit the setting. Monsters should be the same way with the understanding that one setting of a Goblin is not always true somewhere else. Having generic monsters makes them boring and no real challenge. It would be more interesting for a ranger who believes they are following a goblin trail to find out it is an orc or elf trail.
AS much as 4th got things wrong\bashed, the way they attempted to handle character advancement into the three tiers including 21-30\epic is probably one of the best things it came from 4th.
Also, this basically makes it so they have to delete all of the flavor text portions of the monster manual and it's going to end up being a book of literally only stat blocks with zero information about the creatures because it has to be "setting agnostic." The information on the monsters is now going to consist of simply their physical description, if they even do that since surely whiny losers will complain that it isn't broad enough for them.
What's the point of 5.5 if everything from 5e is compatible? That just means essentially nothing is changed. What the fuck is the point... You can't have a 5e veteran be exactly like a 5.5 veteran otherwise there's literally no changes being made... I get the idea, but no, it needs to make changes and those changes are going to make it not backwards compatible.
Great video and good summary of Mikes message. I ageee with most of what you said. I do hope they find a way to remove Short rest and Bonus actions. Maybe do something like Pathfinder and go for an action point system and bonus actions are just actions available.
I think they're going to go towards the Bland route which is unfortunate
I really just want a comprehensive list of the deities, their divine domains, the location of their dominions, and their divine ranks. It would really help me in building a pantheon for my homebrew world.
For theatre of the mind combat, I use a simple Far, Near, Close system. It takes an action to move from one zone to another. You can hit something with melee only when it's in the same zone as you. Attacks of opportunity are only valid when something moves from Close to Near. Ranged attacks are required to hit something in the Far zone. It works a lot better than trying to track distances in your head.
Disappointed that ‘give martials more options’ wasn’t included in this list. That’s one that is really necessary
I hope they adjust feats, particularly for martials, so that trying to build a classic fantasy character using a longbow or a long sword doesn't put you at a disadvantage compared to a crossbow or a pole arm.
For grided combat in 3.5, it was needed. Feats, attacks of opportunity, and movement, in general, changed things. When I first started playing 3rd I did not have a grid or minis. Later when I got those things I realized how feats that I thought were a waste to take became very important. 5e doesn't rely on the grid as much. So, I can see why people would want "theater of the mind's eye." I don't want it but I know others do and I think it would be good to introduce it.
Personally, short rests, hit die, and bonus actions are the hardest things for people i introduce to DND to get down. I think removing them would be a great idea, and just give the classes that rely on short rests regenerating abilities. Abilities reset on initiative roll, or could be an ability check to refresh slots. I personally think it thematically works great for say a monk or warlock. In combat, a monk takes a second to center themselves and build up power within their body: BOOM ki point. Your warlock stops and looks to be in a trance as their eyes roll back into their head, and they commune with their dark god, BOOM spell slot. I think new players would be able to comprehend that much faster than hit dice, short rests, and bonus actions.
One thing I'd add is to fix magic items. A Heward's Handy Haversack is rarer than a Bag of Holding?!? I'd have a few changes to make to magic items:
> Put the magic items at the back of the DMG, like they were in previous editions. Why they're in the middle of the book I'll never know.
> Fix the rarity system. See example above.
> Give magic items prices. If you need, use the Sane Magical Prices PDF for inspiration.
> Give ingredients and procedures for making magic items. We have a process for making magic items in XGE, but having spells and example components would help out immensely. If necessary, put this behind a feat.
I know I'd prefer a 5e advanced, 5e is simple but simple creates all sorts of issues when you get into it.
I would love for them to redesign how armour and movement is calculated. How weapons work, not change it all just refinement.
There's a huge gap between simple and complex, I hope 5.5 is somewhere in the middle.
I would love a game with a complexity between 3.5 and 5e, but I don't think we are going to get it.
You get called a "gatekeeper" for wanting a bit more crunch in 5e.
@@theodorehunter4765 I guess thats why we homebrew, i overhauled the armour in my games and my players love it
Something that I really look forward to seeing In the new players handbook is to see them put a lot of the new spells that they've been making into that book. The reason why I say this, is because each new subclass can only use player handbook spells in their subclass spell lists. So expanding that spell list would open up a lot of design possibilities.
For 5.5e or even 6e, somethings that I would love to see are:
Give us a dog and a wolf race like the Tabaxi and the Leonin (I don't mean Shifter, I mean actual half dog/wolf, half humanoid). Get rid of the custom lineage ruling from Tasha's and replace it and the entire Chapter 2 of the PHB with the rules for character creation from An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby and An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby 2 (Actually achieving what Tasha's set out to do).
Give us more elemental Special casting spells like Plant Growth, as awesome as it is it seems to be one of the only spells in 5e (that I know of) where it has two different effects depending on how you cast it. Use a spell slot and cast it in one turn to create difficult terrain or use a spell slot and cast it over an 8 hour period to enrich the land.
Give us more weapon variety but don't go as crazy as Pathfinder to give both players and DMs a bit more flexibility and to encourage all parties to be a bit more descriptive with the weaponry and this have the flow on effect to get players and DMs descibing in better detail what armour and clothes look like.
Give us other settings for campaigns that take more inspiration from international settings (Pacific Islands, Asia and Africa).
Team up with Dragonix from DM's Guild and the folks over at Kobold Press to rebalance all the monsters as well as including more monsters and give us a Monstrous Manual of Monsters including a guide on how to make a chimera from different monsters and group/swarm stat blocks for smaller enemies.
Lastly include in the new PHB a comprehensive list of feats, blessings and curses with the latter two expanding on what was introduced in Van Richten's by having positive and negative aspects for the blessings and curses. The whole point being because you were blessed by a magical/divine being doesn't mean you might not experience some negative side effects and vice versa for being cursed.
I will add that they really need to re balance feat. Add more (mianly weapons style because why the fuck one weapon fighting (not great like a sword in one hand and a free hand) doasnt have a feat. Or just remove weapons feat and make them a part of the class(like ate level 5 you ungraded your fighting style to have the feat also) because a must choos feat shouldn't be a feat. Its should be a fitter.+give marthiels more options like moves of something .they really beed options
Or play PF2
13:05 counterspell has to be the least problematic problematic spell
I never use the MM for 5th edition ( most of the monsters in the book are sheer weak sauce against players 5th level and over), i used the 4th Ed MMs, which in my opinion is the deadliest MM in all of D&D.
Same here. There are so many great 3rd party publishers that have done far better MM.
Great advice. I have recently started using 3rd party products and older edition sourcebooks for encounters and noticed that they are often a lot more challenging.
Part of me wishes that WotC would reduce PC power just a tad. I'm not talking about making things ridiculously hard but, as a relatively new DM (2-3 years DMing 5e), it can be hard to just see every encounter easily overcome and face rolled.
I wish they'd bring forward some stuff from 3.5 though. Like the special attack actions like sunder or coup de grace
At this point I don't even want 5.5 anymore. Their version of "backwards compatible" seems to just be changing 5e to work with whatever's coming in the future. It still boggles my mind why they decided to make Monsters of the Multiverse before whatever is coming in 2024. The races were the only significant changes in that book. They should have just made an errata for the handful of monsters they actually made any changes for and then left the race updates for 2024 so we aren't in this weird limbo where all the races that the majority of people use are out of date in comparison to these new versions of races that get to choose their spellcasting ability and cast racial spells with spell slots. They should've just made a 6e if that's what they wanted to do.
legit, they did like BARELY any changes in MMM to the monsters. Just the ones that had spellcasting got nerfed and they changed stuff like "makes 3 greatsword attacks" to "makes 3 melee attacks". Waste of trees and money.
I talked to a guy at Gen Con who had insight into the new edition. He wouldn't say much due to NDA, but he said that if you don't care for how streamlined 5e is, you won't like the new edition because it's even more streamlined. By the context of the conversation, I took "more streamlined" to mean "less complexity". I think I made the right call for me and my group to move to Pathfinder 2nd edition.
I disagree with making monsters and races description more independent from settings, it's just more work for the DM. If I want to add a race to my setting I can read the description of Volo's and call it a day and if I want to change it is as easy as just not using the parts I don't like. With less info I have to make up a lot more like with MPMotM that says almost nothing of the races way of live and if not for Volo's I would have to make up a lot every time my players want to try a new race.
I fully agree with you 110% and said as much myself in my own comment. There’s no reason for agnosticism when you can just ignore what you don’t like. It as you said makes it harder for new DM’s when multiverse is the only book they sell now and afaik both print and digital versions of the books are discontinued or at least that’s what I heard. But this isn’t about agnosticism anyway it’s about the “troublesome” lore that people who are a fraction of the people who play the game threw a fit about darker aspects of the lore and now it’s gone. It’s the reason they changed orcs and removed most of the mentions of slavery from probably all races. Multiverse makes it out like Gruumsh is this powerful and good guy. They’ve scrubbed all mention of blood feud level hatred of gnomes from the Kobold section and actually make them out like they don’t blindly venerate all dragons anymore. These are MASSIVE changes to lore that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored by the community. Tbh I wish the book had never been made.
@@trexdrew "troublesome" topics like slavery and blind faith aren't bad, they are interesting and a fountain of inspiration. When I knew that in old lore of the Dragonborn they where a race created by Dragons to serve as slaves and they for themselves succeed in an uprising it was super cool and interesting and having races with hateful views of other races is realistic and a topic that can be really easily ignore but if not is a way to add character development to a PC.
@@alexllenas4607 I agree but it doesn’t seem like a small fraction of people do and that’s apparently who WotC listens to because they scream the loudest
I'd love to see some of the base classes updated and tweaked. Improving the original PHB classes and subclasses. (Becuase they are heavily outshone by XGtE and TGtE). Also. Buff the capstone abilities. Nothing crazy... but something.
The big thing I think I would want because it's the issue I've had the most trouble in my D&D group is make it easier to Homebrew brand new playable races. Usually what I end up doing but it isn't a complete seamless conversion is I take non-playable races and I use the scores they have as much as possible to tweak it so that you can play such as I created a Homebrew campaign that was sci-fi based I found online stats for a Roswell Gray but it still wasn't a very easy conversion from non-playable to playable race.
I don't agree completly with Mike but I can understand where he is coming from. Will see how it goes hopes whatever the end result is that it ends up been an improvement.
I hope they expand DM tools for sure. It'd be nice to see more instruction on successful homebrewing.
D&D fits its purpose for what it is and sets out to achieve IMO 5E is certainly the best of the versions I've seen, and I've played all versions. If you want a different setting but can accept (or even embrace) the D&D 5E system warts and all, well, that can work. But there are far better systems for achieving specific goals and atmospheres, so adapt and adopt. I basically agree with Sly Flourish here on almost every count. Hope that a game I love evolves in such a measured and careful fashion.
I only ever use 'theater of the mind' when combat is either; completely unexpected, or takes place in a small location, like an office or small house.
It's so easy to share screens these days, or use roll20 or whatever. And I've got millions of battlemaps in the chamber.
Personally me I think some spells should be treated as Magic Items / quest rewards and not just automatically learned on level up (A lot of spells in the 7th-9th ranges). It always felt weird to me that Wish isn't a Legendary quest spell and the only way to learn it is by going on a quest to learn it from some high powerful magic source. and instead once you hit level 17th wizard you just know it. I do think there is a place for having certain spells be separated into this kinda categories, even some lower level spells like revivify feel kinda odd to just learn on a level up.
You can do that with any spell you want. Just tell the players at the beginning of the game these are rare spells you will have to find someone or some hidden knowledge/ancient power to teach you. Maybe for revivify you have to meet with an elder healer or be granted permission by a powerful member of the clergy to study the ancient scrolls of healing to learn it. The clergy member makes you go on a quest to prove you are worthy. Just tell your players up front and ideally have a list of the spells you are gating this way in session zero don't suprise them at level up.
I will say with the brief mention of SW5e, it is 5e taken apart and built back up and honestly works better for than the official system with the weird die that should've just been d10s like WoD. it almost feels like a new system at times and its crunchier than normal 5e, but not too much that it feels overwhelming. But to be on topic with the video. It sounds like we will get just refinements and I'm good with that!
11:03 - Disagree on your bottom end, level 3 to 10. Take a look at the various published modules. DiA, RotFM, HotDQ - all have the level 1 and 2 content setup to easily cause a TPK (don't get me started about throwing a level 5 mage at the party at level 2 with said mage having fireball and being in a relatively small room - so no way for the party to really spread out to minimize the fireball damage).
Well for one, WotC didn't design HotDQ and it was actually designed to be more lethal/challenging, but no one talks about that. It was originally intended to be the harfwr option while LMoP was supposed to be the easy way
@@NerdImmersion LMoP can also easily cause a TPK at level 1 as well. That's why I say the real range should be level 3 to 10. WotC has been pretty bad at scaling things for level 1 and level 2 parties in their published modules with really only W:DH being a fairly well balanced module.
@@csdn4483 looking ate distend into avernus whit the 12 bandits and the bandits captian. How the fuck my group lived through this
@@yuvalgabay1023 That too, but the mage with the fireball is the icing one a really terribly balanced cake
People with aphantasia can’t see images within their mind. I have it, I see almost nothing but darkness if I close my eyes and try to imagine something as simple as an apple. I’ve never enjoyed fiction books because of this. In dnd I’m a heavy rules/lore guy and I love virtual tabletops.
I would argue that these conversion systems like adventures in middle-earth and Star wars 5e are actually very useful to the community because it's not a huge step into learning a new system. If you already understand 5e, you're going to understand the majority of the conversion system. If someone asks for perception check you know exactly what to do. Sure there are system agnostic things for each of these conversion systems that are going to only apply to that conversion ie Force powers, heritage is in middle-earth etc but these are smaller leaps to learn versus learning an entirely new system. I have played both and they handle 5e as well as their own conversions very very well. Well I don't completely disagree with you that other systems do it better, if done Right conversion systems can work just fine.
My gaming group and myself just catapulted into 5e only a couple months ago. We are excited to see what’s on the horizon.
good points about the standard reference document in the open game license . . . at least for now, DMs Guild has been opening to accept more settings
One thing I'd like to see changed is not having unlimited cantrips, essentially at lower levels. I like the idea of a wizard having to use their quarterstaff to fight a goblin because they may feel the need to save their Firebolts for the hobgoblin captain.
Also, I hope when the "fix" the ranger for 5.5/6E they don't make them too powerful. Just use the ranger from Tasha's and call it a day.
that would make low level spellcasters even more useless. i mean until you are at least lvl 5 you are kinda dead weight, plus this would kill the warlock class
Artificers need 18th Level Infusions.
Barbarians need Rage back on a Short Rest.
Bards need to fix Countercharm and their Capstone Feature.
Clerics are fine as is.
Druids are fine as is.
Fighters need Battle Maneuvers for every Subclass, plus Arcane Archers and Eldritch Knights need a whole rework for their Subclass.
Monks should be able to use abilities at-will without having to use Ki Points.
Paladins are fine as is.
Rangers got updated perfectly.
Rogues are fine as is.
Sorcerers need to be using Spell Points instead of Spell Slots, they need to be Constitution based Spellcasters, they need more Metamagic (maybe equal to Proficiency Bonus), and they need to fix the Capstone Feature. It would also be nice to move the 14th Level and 18th Level Subclass Features to 10th and 14th Level, but doing so would need to give them a powerful 18th Level Class Feature.
Warlocks need to be given all Pact Invocations for free, increase the number of Spell Slots (possibly equal to Proficiency Bonus), plus make Mystic Arcanum into Spell Slots that only recover on a Long Rest.
Wizards are fine as is, but maybe give them a minor Class Feature that using Bonus Action to use.
I think hear me out. EB should be a basic worlock feather that the subclass can change. Just saying if its must pick its should be just a part of the packeg
@@yuvalgabay1023 I agree, but I was just mentioning only a fraction of all the changes that need to be made.
Ted, not sure if you’ve seen already but I just got an email from dndbeyond about a Wizards Presents event tomorrow about “big things coming to dnd”. Thought I’d let you know since you’re THE GUY when it comes to news. Love the channel.
There are some changes they need to and should consider changing so here is a list to supplement the changes that would work:
Fix short Rest- You can choose to Short rest, eat a meal and Short Rest, have nothing happen for 2 hours and you short rest.
Class skills - Automatically given skills to make sure that you don’t have a Cleric with out Religion or a thief without Stealth. Rangers need two and that helps them.
Sure up weak skills with better descriptions and reasons to use them.how often have you used Animal Handling or Medicine. In a “medieval” world these should be automatically used. Improving opportunities to use them is easy with better definitions (and reasons)
Sure up the monk as a skirmish fighter and make it so you less focus on stunning strike and allow more options make sure they are not so ASI Starved single career focused.
Rangers keep Tasha, give options for familars/pet taming and most importantly let them choose spells daily (i mean they don’t have a great set of spells and need more better ones but to hit them with known too is just rude).
Add Blood Hunter and Artificer to the base and the SRD. Give MM credit, even though I don’t love the Blood Hunter there is a lot of love out there for it.
Put the Aasimar in the book because dang it if you have teachers and libraries doing D&D and the kids can be devil kin but can’t be Angel kin you are just being rude - also you need a minor tweak in them since you hit them hard on power.
Fix the mounted stuff. Add a companion class to mounted so this class can work
with the characters in terms of they get one more move action during the controlling rider’s turn. That does an amazing job ti fixing the timing issue. Also, fix the poisoning issue by just making it official that rider declares at the begin JH of turn. Add secondary rider rules as well (basically they have no control and can only use one hand to do anything but hold on)
Add a basic code of the game contract in DMG or PHB. I know two pages but I want that because so many issues could be resolved with that conversation. This hint is the single best thing for new players (and some old ones) to do and it more then anything else can get you a good first game. I know they won’t but they should.
conjure animals doesn't actually say the DM picks, it says "you choose one of the following options for what appears", and then lists a number of a certain CR. RAW if the spell says that you choose one of the following for what appears and "a beast of cr 1/4" is the only option, you can then pick a creature of your choosing that fufills the CR requirements. Expanding it to four didferent numers and CR's doesn't change this. It never actually says the DM chooses, only that the dm has the statistics. The intent is that the DM chooses, but it isn't actually written anywhere in the spell.
Don’t stop at orcs and goblins either. My heart breaks for every Minotaur-American who has to deal with daily micro aggressions from people assuming they’re good at mazes. This is not okay!
In re: DM chooses what’s summoned.
WotC: Don’t put more work on the DM. There are loads of spells where the DM is supposed to provide a list or chart of monsters. Or be in charge of additional creatures. If it’s part of a player class or feat or spell everything should be there for the player to handle. The DM has already chosen what they can handle in the combat and they don’t need a bunch of creatures they didn’t anticipate.
I think a lot of base classes need a touch up. I think this new feats in background thing should be an optional rule that is included in all of the PHB backgrounds, with the stipulation that other settings that do it means if you use that rule for setting backgrounds players can also use it for PHB backgrounds. I think mythic monsters should be a part of the base game for when you intend to run a solo boss fight. I also think a lot of PHB feats could use a touch up, specifically feats like Dual Wielder that are just awful or feats like GWM/Sharpshooter that are possibly too good.
Stuff that modifies core races like Dragonborn should be part of this new PHB.
Also core subclasses like Four Elements, Hunter, Wild Magic, Champion, and Assassin could all use some tweaking.
Just hope they give ranger the love the class deserves and tweak /fix the base class as well as fix some capstone abilities
I complain about official content a bit myself and reading this just reminds me that DMs should take more initiative in swinging the banhammer on stuff they don't like from official sources or changing it. Like, why do they have to make the monsters "setting agnostic"? You already make your own damn world! You can do that yourself! The only stuff they should honestly think about changing is how every monstrous humanoid is a "primal savage".
It's stuff like this that ruined the goblinkin in MMM 😔
You seem to contradict yourself. How can MMM “ruin” goblins if you can make them whatever you want like you say?
@@waltascher nothing gets past you does it? Especially not that first sentence. :p
Honestly, I think there's several things that need a complete revamp. I agree with all this, but I think the base classes and PHB subclasses need an overhaul. Ranger still doesn't really seem to know what it wants to do, all the Tasha's stuff for it completely replaces the base class which isn't that great honestly. If they get rid of Short Rests, Warlock is screwed plain and simple. Fighter also takes a hit there but not as bad really. But the base classes need an overhaul I think, especially the Ranger, Warlock, Wizard, and Sorcerer
I think they should do more standalone adventures rather than full campaigns. I know that setting books are unlikely, but even just one book for each historical campaign setting, just to update them to the current edition and bring them back into vogue. More and more DM's are moving to homebrew settings as Forgotten realms has essentially been forgotten.
I just hope wotc doesn't get wishy-washy where "oh goblins can be any alignment they can be any weight any height" makes the game feel less alive I'm sorry they're different creatures. I was making an auto gnome and I wanted to know how close they're are to a gnome. Or maybe idk how much the metal construct would weigh but no they don't tell you that. They don't give details because it's "problematic". Orcs Drow and goblins are unique don't screw with that
Ted, you and Mike Shea (and the Dungeon Dudes, Treantmonk, Colby from d4 Deep Dive, Luke from DMs Lair - i could go on and on...) are giving us inspiration and hope for the future of D&D. there are very creative people at Wotc, but they seem to be suffering from confusion and lack of editing (Hadozee gliding anyone?). Wotc need greater openness to 3rd party content that is actually improving D&D!
As a player and a DM I don't agree with a lot of the spells mentioned that need fixing, just giving those higher CR monster better abilities should be good. Except for removing the conjure spells. Those need to be done away with and replaced with the Tasha's summons.
I’ve seen a couple people sound off in the comments that they have aphantasia. I do, as well. I’ve heard people mention that they can imagine vivid images in their head. I can get vague outlines at best. As such, I heavily prefer battlemaps when possible. I also get tired of hearing people repeatedly ask “are there any enemies near me” because they weren’t listening during other turns.
If you do have players with aphantasia, what helps me enjoy the game more is visuals. Pictures of locales, npcs, and monsters. Pinterest is a great resource for that, but even the official books have good art. Don’t be afraid to give something away when you can just crack the book open and show off that troll. If you don’t have maps, sketches help. Or even just using placeholder tokens. I’ve known many dms that use candies, and whomever kills the monster gets the candy.
Feels like it has been a long time since I heard that outro
Right, “problematic goblins”, JFC. Thank “god” we’re considering the monsters feelings.
Love Sly Flourish content!
my list would be a refined and better explanation/system of how a DM can build level appropriate magic items (said could be said for other things like Feats, etc.).
While I get some of the points I feel there is an immediate contradiction at the end of the post with "Leave the rest be", it feels a bit cheeky that author decided to choose things that he doesn't like and suggest to change them while saying leave everything else as it is, when some of the suggestions almost affect the core of DnD...if you get what I mean.
Now for the more specific things:
Making encounter building easier and balanced - While I 100% agree with this, I think this is an impossible task, and it is ok. The reason why some things can be imbalanced comes a lot to: what is party composed of, where are they fighting, how is combat initiated. Some enemies will be better when ambushing, some can just go directly in combat, some can suddenly raise the whole encounter difficulty if they are surrounded by allies even if you put them instead of other same CR level monster. For the most part each monster is different and has different roles and has different counters. If you want encounters to be easy to make and balanced quickly the only way to do it is to strip every monster to very basics, have very similar AC/Attack/abilities where all they become is just a small reflavors of one another. This is not something I would like to see.
Provide Less problematic Race Descriptions - Again I get it, but this can be at the cost of flavor and uniqueness of the races, what we saw recently in DnD is how a lot of monster races were changed to say - "hey, they are not the 100% bad guys, goblins can be good, orcs can be good, drow can be good". It is fine, but again I hope this wont go into too much neutral area where we wiil end up - We have red race, we have short race we have green race, we have pointy ear race - it's up to you now to decide how they work in your world. People always have the power to decide for their settings how some races can differ from the core books, but this may bring issue that article raised itself - you change too much and it's not DnD anymore.
Fix Certain Spells and Abilities - This topic can lead down the rabit hole once you start talking more about it, there can be much more spells that "will change how DM runs a game" - party needs to reach something high on the cliff? remove fly and levitate so they cant do it via magic. Party is camping outside - remove tiny hut. Party needs to find a way to survive in the desert? remove create food and water and goodberies. There are many in and out of combat spells that will change how game is played out, but that is again on DM to adapt (saying this as a DM myself).
I do agree that some spells end up being more problematic where if you want to try and challenge the party you need to step up the game which, if it swings one way too much it may result in TPK
I never understood why they wanted conjure animals to be randomized. If I were a druid and I wanted to summon some animal companions, why wouldn't you pick SPECIFIC animals to aid you.
Devs: tweets anything
Ted: WRITE THAT DOWN
Heh, yeah, just ran the level 11 adventure from Journey's Through the Radiant Citadel, and when the CR 15 purple worm showed up, well, turn 1 it was shaking off hold monster, turn 2 it could only take one action, so it moved, turn 3 it was polymorphed into a regular worm, put in a little bag, and carried around by the wizards owl familiar to use as a threat for an hour, at which time it was flown out into the desert and dropped off harmlessly as the spell ended....
That's better than what happened in my campaign. The Purple Worm got surrounded by the cleric and paladin with their full plate armor and beat on mercilessly until the rogue and alchemist decided to put it out of it's misery. I literally could not deal any damage.
My biggest hopes is that warlocke gets changed to proficiency bonus spells per long rest where they can meditation for a minute and get them back charisma mod times per long rests. This would actually make the feel like spell casters and not just eldritch blasters/hexblade multiclass choices as some who has tried with warlockes its ruff to feel like a caster as I end up going teifling or shadow mark elf every time and taking fey touched every time to just feel kinda like a caster as a teifling with fey touched warlocke actually can cast a few spells for utility and not just be gimped the rest of the day. Because unless your a genie warlocke or in the short rest party people just don't wanna take short rests...
And secondly I really hope they make dual weilding as viable as 2h wepon fighting as there's no feats for 1h wepons specifically like there's pole arm master and gwm master which makes a halberd fight disgusting but someone who wants to use 2 longswords/rapeirs gets very little to go for as you need to take a particular fighting style and feat just to function sub optimally in comparison. Mabey some sort of bonus action extra attacky feat where if you use your bonus action and action to make 1h wepon attack attacks you can make a second wepon attack as a bonus action. Or some features that cares about the number of hits you've done in a row to proc a ability
My thoughts are more or less the following
- I like my broken spells and would be sad to see them go, and sometimes I prefer to use a stat block from the mm rather than these ‘___ spirit’ stat blocks, but I’d understand if the changed that and would agree it’s probably for the best
- I’d scrap race and just make it lineage, with some details and biological features, and then have the rest of your starting abilities come from your background
- wouldn’t it be cool if they just made all of 5e available for the OGL and added the new basic stuff for 5.5 to encourage people to convert 5e stuff to 5.5 so they don’t have to do it themselves. Win win in my opinion
Not a fan of what has become of Tasha's racial modifiers.
When it came out I was told it would be an optional rule and us DMs that liked fixed racial modifiers would be able to still use them.
Now, all the new races coming out have the Tasha rules for stat modifiers and I would bet money that they aren't even in the next PHB.
Heck, I miss racial penalties from 3.5. I liked playing characters that had a bad race-class mix. I had an elf fighter in 3.5 with a 6 in CON, but he had a 20 in DEX. Almost nothing could hit him, but when he DID get hit, it was a big deal.
I get the point that people want to play an Elf Paladin, but the +2 DEX, +1 INT don't fit well, so they want a +2 CHA and a +1 STR instead. At that point, you aren't playing an elf anymore. You might as well just pick and choose racial features from a list and make up whatever you want.
How I would fix it is to make all stats useful for all classes. Characters with high INT get more skills. Have DEX always affect AC, assuming you are strong enough to wear the armor you picked. Now there is a benefit to playing any race for any class.
On another topic, I'm going to call it. Either 5.5e will start out backwards compatible then slowly become incompatible as splat books come out, or 5.5e options are going to be noticeably better, to the point that playing with 5e material in a 5.5e game will make you weaker. WotC wants to sell books.
One big thing (that I sadly have no confidence will be changed) is magic items. Magic item rarity is incredibly disconnected from power level, and even if it were, the pricing / crafting rules are practically nonexistent. Not to mention that individual items are often far more nonsensical than even their 3.5 versions (ability score items setting your score to 19 instead of just adding +4, for example).
DM's really need a magic item revamp, but I doubt we'll get one.
id be happy if they would normalize battlemap play in d&d, considering that there are so many numbers involved
I'm curious if we might also get the mystic class in 5.5. Also I would like to see some more refined rules for moving squads and or armies have having war and battles I find to be clunky and normal avoid the battles and have players come late to battle field.
Thematic spells for sorcerers.
Like aberrant mind or clockwork soul sorcerers, a list of thematic spells for every subclass of sorcerer would be greatly appreciated.
Also for sorcerer and monk, redesign the ki/sorcery points system so that you can do some things #/day for free rather than forcing sorcerers and monks to either/or their abilities. Why have an ability if there is not enough ki/sorcery to do that ability and the key (pun intended) ability the system was designed for. Sorcery points are mostly for metamagic and the occasional slot conversion, forcing a sorcerer to choose between that and some of their subclass abilities means they will never do that subclass ability. Same for monk stuff. Just change some of those limited abilities to be #/day would free up the points for what the player really wants.
Practical DM advice for designing encounters, not building worlds.
Ability modifiers need to start at 14 and not 12 and proficiency bonuses need to start at +4 so being proficient in something easy more than just having a high ability modifier
Immediate bad take, everything with 5e be forward compat with new edition?? No, I love 5e but it has some core design failures and needs some love from the base that if they keep it compatible will end up just being a waste of time and money.
Every other edition will eventually throw out the old to make the new why is everyone all of a sudden so scared of that? 5e won't be unable to be played, as evidenced by all the people playing 3.5.
Do you really think they will fix the core issues of sorcerer, monk, martial vs caster while making phb and what not still work? The only thing I could see is monsters but even then myself and alot of others find the current direction they are taking monsters disappointing and plain not fun.
Make a NEW edition not some duct tape cost saving profit maximizing half measure. Actually make a good product first.
Well bad news is that WotC has said multiple times that it will be backwards compatible. That's basically the only thing they've told us about it
You can only summon 1 giant constrictor snake until level 9 where you can summon 2 it is extremely dramatic to say that you can ruin an encounter by making all the enemies immobile
Imho: If they ever they decide to change the action system in combat, itll just be an adjacent version of pathfinder if theyre even legally allowed to do that. But otherwise, yeah, i agree that if they fully remove bonus actions without some kind alternative, then backwards compatibility is going to be a no go since so many things rely on bonus actions
(Also I hope they rework the monk and fighter)
I very much disagree with leaving in things like vancian casting. If you never try to improve you stagnate. If you think it isn't broken, don't assume there are not cracks you cannot see.
I think they should remove short rests and rework warlock but it would be hard for them to claim backwards compatibility if they do that. Since they have said several times that it will be backwards compatible I do not think we will get that change
I hope when they a just the classes that they make all classes a have a subclass at first level and subclass options even out to match up something like 1st 3rd 7th and 15th
5e is a weird system. It is accessible to players sure but it has some simplifications and a reduction of individual power of sorts with things such as bound accuracy etc, that it means you cannot have an epic fight of one huge monster versus a party cause simply the action economy even with legendary actions will have the monster devastated while many low cr creatures will overwhelm almost any party after a while or at least drain it from its resources dry. I heard somewhere that the design was supposed to be multiple battle encounters per day but if you are at a table like ours where we do battle once a week of in game time then it is very hard to make one huge monster that threatens everything unless players are super underleveled where suddenly its ultra unfair and not fun for the players because they have 0 fighting chance.
The classes for the most part don't need much a few only needing a little bit of work patching and clean up here and there.....except for the Sorcerer it needs a complete tear down and rebuild.
In my humble opinion there are things that do need radical changes.
Weapons, Feats and Spells need more than bandaid adjustments or rebalancing, they need fundamental reworks.
Things like tools, resource amount and caster balance need to change.
Conditions have to be looked at to not disproportionately affect martials.
Dex/Str and armour types need to be looked at.
Power scaling overall needs to tone the fuck down. The power creep is out of control and as a result even tier 2 play is feeling like you're players are demigods.
I am not hopeful these aspects will be addressed.
Big oof on removing powerful and creative spells. A DM with an issue with force cage and banishment is a bad dm. They are high level spells that casters can do once or twice per day at high levels. They SHOULD be much more powerful than a fighter swinging a sword, which they can do an unlimited number of times.
I think they're already fumbling "provide less problematic race descriptions" in what we saw in MotM.
They're not providing new info really, they're wholesale removing descriptors from races. "Everything ages and behaves as a human" is not IMO conducive to good worldbuilding.
If someone dislikes the warfaring hobgoblins and the lore/background for how they became that way that DM//player could say my hobgoblins are different.
By homogenizing races we also lose focus points that assist us in playing against type or making different decisions for our characters in the stories we tell.
Drizz't is interesting because he is different from the menzoberranzan drow, if we don't have knowledge of what the drow *ARE* we can't define what they aren't like, i think thats a net loss for the community and the game.
Drizzt is still different from Menzoberranzan Drow, he is unique for someone in his situation.
@@alexbarn3841 but that is only because we have the background for what drow culture is like.
I used Drizz't as a popculture example because he is recognizable.
He is not unique, because we know that there are other good-aligned drow in the enclaves of Eilistraee, the dancer. He is interesting because he is incompatible with the morals nad social norms of menzoberranzan.
My point is that if these tendencies continue where race lore continues to get wiped away, then we'll lose the wicked drow of menzoberranzan, we'll lose what makes Drizz't interesting, we'll lose what makes the good-aligned drow a rare find, we'll lose the niche that Eilistraee, the Dancer, occupies.
Because without the lynchpin, that the wicked Lolth worshipping Drow are, then the entire rest of the framework falls apart.
@@SweetThreat you’re using the slippery slope fallacy… there’s a reason it’s called a fallacy.
It's definitely a net loss for the game but retards will be retards so what are ya gonna do, ya know? The only option is to not give them your money, otherwise get used to it. Either buy 3rd party content instead until they go back to traditional D&D, kinda like people did with Pathfinder during 4e, or just accept this is your new D&D and continue to pay them for it.
@@alexbarn3841 i think its entirely reasonable to say that the Lolth worshipping drow are central to what makes the drow race unique.
If we remove those sadistic matriarchal values from drow lore/society then the rest of my points are entirely sound.
I think with the tendencies we're seeing this could be realized in '24.
Would be nice to see a nice nerf/rebalance for full casters, fix non-working subclasses, buffing melee and classes what does not works without items. As well would be noce to see at least a 60:40 item ratio between fullcasters and non/limited casters.
At the Moment CR is just a guideline , i use my guts feeling and it USUALLY is enough , sometimes i have problems using not linear monsters , their CR is VERY inaccurate and screwed one way or another
Good points man, but As a mixed race kid from the states, I'm tired of people calling the orc lore "problematic", it's just some silly ass shit, "I'm defending you by saying the orc lore is racist "... That mind set is the real racism, .I'm not a half orc, my dad's not an orc ....it's a fantasy monster creature and if someone thinks orcs are synonymous with non Caucasian humans then that person needs to reevaluate their mindset. But I like the way you said it, make them "setting nuetral, cuz volvos is from the forgotten realms setting but maybe WOtC could take the time to layout a little info on a few of the different orc cultures throughout the settings like in forgotten realms many are like "this", in grey hawk they are commonly like "this" etc., But good call man, but let's stop calling it "problematic.