The closer we get to release, the more I worry that their decision to make this a backwards-compatible revision that also has its own entire set of rules changes, subclasses, magic items, monsters, and adventures is going to leave everyone unhappy.
They know players will be unhappy if they have to throw away their books.
So instead they'll change everything so that you just won't want to open them. And if you do open them, you also need to open the revised rules in the new books, too.
It's going to be clunky.
I'm with you here. Compatability with adventures (monsters, loot) I find good. Classes and player facing rules not so. I mean what if you take a 5e character that uses a 5e rule for something to a One table where the rule that the 5e build depends is altered. Or just a class feature? Imagine the confusion if a feature that does the same thematic thing have the same name in both? What about mixing features from both editions?
CHAOS! (and not in a good way)
I have been pretty tuned out of this process ever seen the OGL issue. I am still back and forth about getting the new books but I will likely end up getting them. The updates look interesting and want to see what it looks like in play. I will likely just do what my group wants to do. Especially since we are 2+ years into a campaign
As someone who hasn't been tracking these UA updates at all, how are the new classes? Are they way more balanced and more fun than the base classes? What makes them better?
Some classes are substantially better, others have been cleaned up. For example, the fighter has an entirely new set of tools, from Second Wind now being +1d10 to any skill check, to indomitable being a pseudo legendary resistance; Barbarians gain new bonuses from their rage, including advantage on stealth; rogues get to flavour their sneak attack with extra effects at the cost of their damage output; Warlocks have bigger expanded spell lists which are automatically added to your known spells, and a few extra invocations; and so on. Additionally, most of the optional features, invocations and maneuvers from Tasha have been included, too.
There have been a few nerfs as well: +10/-5 feats being removed/reworked will drastically shake up the meta for martial classes. Unfortunately, we have no word on the main problem the game has faced since its inception - spells, which apparently are not going to be playtested. I wonder what the designers have in mind; the same designers who tried to give infinite Wish to three different spellcasting classes as a capstone, and an ungodly broken metamatic to Wizards. Yeah, not holding my breath for that.
They also decided to leave the rest system unchanged, while also putting some band-aids on certain short rest-reliant classes (Warlock and Monk) instead of fixing the rest system as a whole. So if you play a Warlock, you can recover half your spell points in 10 minutes, but if you're a fighter stuck with a DM that doesn't use short rests on a regular basis, you are still going to suck.
It's basically just a Tasha's cauldron of more things, but the options presented are no longer "optional" and are baked into the base rules, which is good because having your class/subclass fixed in an optional ruleset that your table may not accept was not great.
Appreciate the summary!
+10/-5 feats being removed/reworked will drastically shake up the meta for martial classes
Thank goodness. Those feats made certain martial classes crazy good at the early levels with variant human.
Baking in the Tasha's changes should help rangers hopefully.
And ya, calling a lot of the optional features in Tasha's optional when they were supposed to be straight up fixes for existing issues isn't great. It'll be annoying having to get used to a bunch of new rules but the changes do sound exciting now lol.
But too bad about the spells. The fact that wizards can replace a bunch of other classes at later levels has always been kind of an issue, or easily solve an encounter unless as a DM you were aware of the effect the most powerful spells have (like Forcecage or Wall of Force), has probably ruined many a campaign story.
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