Our deep dive into the latest quasi edition of Dungeons & Dragons continues, this time with the new mechanics. At least, what we know of the new mechanics. It seems like everything we’ve been told could be reversed at any time, which is part of the problem. But hey, weapon masteries are cool!

• Guidance

Generously transcribed by Elizabeth. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.

Oren: And welcome everyone to part two of our D&D complaining podcast. I’m Oren.

Wes: And I’m Wes.

Oren: And Ari returns once again to bless us with his D&D wisdom. I think that gives us a +1d4 to knowledge D&D checks.

Ari: Yeah, I snuck back in for a second podcast.

Oren: And it’s a cantrip so we can keep casting it.

Ari: You wish Bless was a cantrip.

Oren: Is it? Which one is it? Because there’s a cantrip that gives +d4.

Wes: Guidance.

Ari: You’re thinking guidance, my friends. You’re gonna get roasted in the comments. They’ll be like, no, Bless is a first level spell. [laughter] You can’t just cast that forever.

Oren: See here, the +1d4 is already paying off. All right, so today we’re going to talk about the new mechanics of One D&D, or 5.5, or D&D 2024.

Ari: I’m calling it 5.5. They can’t stop me.

Oren: Yeah, they literally cannot pick a name. We know in their design documents from some interviews that they’re calling it 5E 2024. And the original one is 5E 2014. And it’s like, all right, guys, the fact that you had to make a different name for it in your design documents suggests we should have something else to call it. But anyway, we’ll talk about the new mechanics. And I know we have a lot of things that we didn’t love, but I thought it might be nice to talk about some of the things that are not bad, that are perhaps even good that we’ve seen so far.

Ari: Impossible.

Oren: Before we go into the complaints. For one, I’m glad that we’re finally and officially decoupling the specific stat bonuses from Ancestries.

Ari: Yep, I totally agree. I was doing that for years, and I’m glad that it’s official now.

Oren: Yeah, and I think also we’re decoupling alignments and all of that. That’s all good. There are still some unforced errors, like the Gladiator just happened to be an orc in their example document. And it’s like, all right, OK, come on. Trying to break stereotypes here, guys. But that’s good. I like that each Ancestry now gets a single ability that makes them feel unique without pigeonholing them into a specific role. Mostly. Gnomes are OP.

Ari: Yeah, they’re pretty good. Their save bonuses are quite strong.

Oren: We don’t know what all the feats are yet, so humans could still be the most powerful because humans still get just a bonus feat. But if the feats aren’t as strong, then Gnome will have its day.

Ari: Yeah, this is the thing that I like. And actually, what was initially I was excited about 5.5 was I think that a lot of this addition seems to be rules cleanup, which is really important in a game like D&D. And we’ve had 10 years to figure out a bunch of rules that don’t make a whole lot of sense and are hard to track and use as a GM. A lot of these rules are often just ignored at a lot of tables. So I’m a big fan of that, especially for inexperienced GMs. A lot of these fixes were things I was already doing at my table, but I’ve been playing this game for a long time and I have no problem making modifications to the rules on the fly as I need to make sure that the game runs smooth. But a lot of GMs don’t do that. And so you should make your rules clean as you possibly can for those people.

Oren: I’m also a fan of the weapon masteries, at least in theory. I admit I haven’t done all the math to know which ones are good, but I watched a couple videos and people seem to like them.

Ari: And any cool thing that martials get, I’m a fan of. Martials need more love, and we’ll get to that and the things I don’t like. But yes, the weapon masteries are a cool idea and I hope they do more with it than they are currently.

Wes: I am a big fan of them because it was tough in just 2014 5e or whatever [scoffs]. In 5e, it’s like if you want to do cool things with weapons, you had to be a battle master, pretty much. I always thought it was very weird that in the character design that they had subclasses and then I guess just like warlocks with lots of customization options. It’s like battle masters have all these maneuvers and then warlocks have all these invocations, but then the rest of the classes just don’t have as many customization options. I guess the hunter had some choices. And then seeing masteries in this document, I was like, cool, thank you. Let’s spread some love. Let’s do some cool stuff with weapons.

Ari: It’s interesting you bring up the battle master because I believe early in the testing for D&D for 5e back in the day, the battle master wasn’t the subclass. That was just a thing fighters did. They had maneuvers. Oh, and lots of people, and I agree with these people, have pointed out that maneuvers being baseline for fighters or martials in general would be very cool and a cool thing to help give them something unique to them. But these weapon masters, as I said, are also cool. I think that they’re a good idea and I want to see more of it.

Oren: And for anyone who hasn’t been following along super closely, the weapon masters are specific abilities that you get with different kinds of weapons, but you need specific class features or a feat, I think, to unlock them. And it makes the weapons behave a little differently, which is a neat idea. It would be cool if we had a D&D where you actually switched weapons based on the task at hand. I don’t think we’ve gotten quite there.

Ari: It won’t be. Anyone who says that is a dirty liar.

Oren: But it’s a neat idea, right? And some weapons have a slowing effect when you hit your opponent. Others do a little bit of extra damage even if you miss. Some let you cleave into the next opponent, etc. I don’t know why getting shot with a crossbow is supposed to slow someone down, but there you go.

Ari: It would slow me down to be fair. [Wes laughs] If you shot me with a crossbow, I’d be like, yeah, I think I’m gonna move 10 feet slower this time.

Oren: Yeah, maybe use that extra time to consider how I got here. Also, they boosted the damage of my favorite weapon, the trident.

Wes: Yes.

Ari: Good things. We all us trident users unite.

Oren: Kindness to the trident fan base. And muskets are officially in the game now. All hail the musket.

Ari: The gunk, the gun monk writhe as official content.

Oren: Yeah, I used to think guns in D&D were a bad idea because they break theme and whatever, and they still do, but I don’t care anymore. [Wes laughs] 

Ari: Guns are just cool, and they’re so easy to take out if you don’t want them. I just like seeing them. It was weird that they were in the book, but as this weird optional thing that just made it more complex than- and they weren’t broken. Obviously the future ones were, but the ones that would be allowed in a fantasy setting weren’t broken. 

Wes: Not the frag grenades.

Ari: Not the anti-material rifle that did 5d10 necrotic damage or something like that. Yeah, that one’s probably shouldn’t let your characters use that, but yes, big fan.

Oren: All right, so that’s some good stuff, and maybe we’ll find more good stuff along the way, but then the next thing that just makes this whole play test very difficult and awkward, and has resulted in at least one beef between D&D YouTubers that I follow, is the way in which material is being released to people to test, supposedly.

Ari: This is actually one of the reasons I stopped. I was initially going to cover all these test packets that came out, and I just stopped because of this partially. They have been releasing the test content for 5.5 in this piecemeal fashion, generally focusing on like a group of classes or sometimes like feats and backgrounds, and then they ask for our feedback. And D&D isn’t the type of game where you can give good feedback like that, because let’s say they release the wizard, and the wizard is very powerful. However, they didn’t release the wizard’s spell list. I can’t tell you how good the new wizard is, because if you make all the good spells from 5e bad, then the wizard will be bad. It doesn’t matter how good their class features are.

As they have told us, if it’s not in the play test packet, assume it hasn’t changed. Okay, cool, so the wizard is still busted because its spell list has the- I don’t see enough changes to the spell list here to justify any other reaction, but is that correct? Like, some people are like, obviously they’re gonna nerf a spell like Hypnotic Pattern or Fear or Slow or Wall of Force or Force Cage, but we haven’t seen that. I mean, it would make sense to nerf those spells. I probably would if I was designing a new edition of the game, but I can’t assume.

The general vibe I get from people who talk like that are, trust the designers and they will have a plan, and I just don’t. I don’t trust them. Their current output just does not garner trust from me. I don’t feel like they have a plan. I have questions about some competency or thought process that we can get into later that make me wary of that strategy of, don’t worry, they’ll figure it out in the end.

Oren: It’s also just weird to say that because the whole point of them releasing this stuff is that they want our feedback, but how are we supposed to give it when we don’t know what the actual context is? I also noticed this line from when I looked at the most recent Player’s Handbook quote-unquote “playtest release” that they gave. There was a note on power level. “The character options you read here might be more or less powerful than options in the 2014 Player’s Handbook. If a design survives playtesting, we adjust its power to the desirable level before publication. This means an option could be more or less powerful in its final form.” So what am I judging exactly?

Ari: It could be anything. Don’t worry about it.

Oren: What is my feedback? What am I supposed to tell you? Am I just supposed to tell you that I kind of like the idea of this? Because if that’s what you want, okay, but you didn’t say that anywhere. You just said you wanted feedback.

Ari: Also, the way they’ve done this, their timeline is so short, the way they’re requesting feedback. Like, sure, they have till, what, 2024 when this thing comes out? Because I don’t think they’re bumping that date back because it’s for the anniversary. But the turnaround time on their feedback is so long, I can’t imagine they have enough time to really incorporate much more feedback. I work in a field that does lots of user testing, and you gotta use what user testing you have very frugally, and it feels like they have wasted their window with this piecemeal approach. It would have been, I know it would have been a lot to read through, but also, they should have released everything and said, what do you think of this? Because that is the only way to give you a good review of an RPG system as complex and intertwined as D&D.

Oren: And I get that if they had released the whole thing, fewer people would have looked at it. I tried to read all of the player’s handbook PDF before this podcast, and I admit I could not do it. I skimmed many sections, and that would have been significantly shorter than a full rules release. But at the same time, the people who actually did it would have given you some actual useful feedback, as opposed to this weird piecemeal approach where no one can tell if their reactions are legitimate or not. 

Ari: It also doesn’t help that some of these quote-unquote “playtest materials” are either so bad or so overpowered, I cannot imagine the designers did not know what response they would receive, right? We’ll get into some specifics in a little bit later, but if you’re doing user testing, don’t ask questions you know the answer to already. That’s valuable time and valuable responses that you are burning on something you have an answer to. Why are you showing me something in this stage of the design? This is something that should never have gotten out of internal testing.

Wes: All of this kind of just makes me think that it’s all just a PR stunt. They’re not actually incorporating feedback, but they can say, [commercial voiceover voice] we asked and you answered and we listened. 

Ari: It’s the hype train.

Wes: It’s the hype train. That’s exactly what it is. I do not believe they’re actually considering this feedback.

Ari: There was that leak that, according to D&D Shorts, who his leaks were pretty good so far regarding the OGL, that some employees were saying that they don’t look at this feedback. Now, a lot of the D&D design team have come out pretty strongly against that, saying, no, we read it, we look at your scores, and Jeremy Crawford in his interviews obviously has read something or has been told something about it, but the amount of responses they get is too many for me to believe they are looking at a large number of custom responses, because you gave your scores and you can aggregate those, so you can look at however many you want, you just look at them and average out the scores, but all the type in your response things, there’s just too many.

You can’t do it.You do not have the time to look at all of those and actually process, and so you’ll cherry pick ones and you’ll talk about them because that’s easy and it makes it look like you’re listening. And that’s just from my experience with user testing.As often as you can, you want to avoid open-ended answers like that because they’re so hard to review as a team. Like, 10 people with open-ended answers is a lot. 10,000? I don’t care if that’s your 40-hour work week. That is still too much.

Oren: Yeah, when I send out like a story for beta reading, I send it to six people, not sixty.

Ari: It’s just too much. I worked in a field that does this. I’ve seen it time and time again. It looks good when you let people type their feelings out, and then you ignore a lot of it because you just don’t have the resources.

Oren: We do know that they are paying at least some attention because they withdrew the druid and were like, we’re sorry guys, we messed this one up. We’ll do a better druid next time.

Ari: What I’m guessing is happening… So they get all this feedback and they look at the aggregate scores and they probably look at really high-performing questions and then really low-performing ones. And then they hunt through those. They probably use keyword searches to try and find specific things to test against what they’re thinking, would be my guess. This is what we think the problem might be, and we want to look for words that would talk about that to see what people’s thoughts are in that area. Because that’s what I would do. And this team just doesn’t have the resources to look at all of them. This is not a thing.

Oren: Or maybe they train a large language learning model on all of the answers-

Wes: [quietly] No.

Oren: -and create a chat bot that can talk to them in the voice of their playtesters.

Ari: ChatGPT, did the playtesters like the druid? [laughter] We’ll get there one day, I’m sure. But I do think it’s just somewhere in the middle. I don’t think they’re ignoring everything, but they can’t be reading all of it. They just don’t have the time for it. It doesn’t matter if they want to or not. That’s not the equation here.

Oren: All right, all right. So you’re the one with the expertise here. What aspect do you think is the most important to talk about next? We got game balance, we got scope of the changes. How are you feeling?

Ari: I think the most important thing that underpins almost all of my complaints about this newest edition of the game is the philosophy behind how they approach this new edition of D&D and how much I disagree with the things they have done.

Wes: Yeah, please.

Ari: So I already mentioned what I think the first thing they did. I think the first thing was, here are all these weird interactions that confuse the hell out of people. We’re gonna try and clean that up and make the rules make more sense. And that’s great. 100%. If this was a digital game, I would have expected this in some of the first patches, but it’s not. So they obviously can’t do like a weekly or monthly patch cycle. So that part is good. 100%, you should always do this. Now the other part of this that I don’t like, and I think has completely drained my excitement for this new edition, is here are some things we think are problems from 5e or exploits from 5e. We need to fix those because those players shouldn’t have been doing those things, and we don’t like that. And that, I think, is the root of a lot of the problems with this edition.

Oren: Are we talking about things like making it so the rogue can’t get an extra sneak attack in by triggering an attack on someone else’s turn?

Ari: Yeah, I think that’s probably my best example. Wizards did not intend for that, and it was a thing that rogues were often doing, especially optimized rogues were doing this, and they don’t like that, and so they fixed it. But the problem with that is that the reason rogues were doing that is if you wanted to be competitive as a rogue with other well-built characters- that’s important here because you can build any character badly- but assuming your party has made good characters, your rogue is going to feel very sad until they can sneak attack twice. And then they are competitive. They aren’t ahead, they aren’t like hugely overpowered, they are competitive with the other martials in your party. But what they did in fixing this loophole is they reduced the rogue’s damage output by 50%, and that’s bad. And there’s no amount of weapon masteries that are going to fix that.

Oren: Yeah, it really felt like they were thinking, okay, this rule where you can get an extra sneak attack if you can provoke an attack on someone else’s turn, that is weird and wonky and players find it frustrating, which they absolutely do. But instead of the obvious solution of let’s just let rogues do this and make it easier and simpler, they’re like, nope, we’re taking that out. But rogues needed that, and now it’s gone. 

Ari: Yeah, their general strategy seems to be nerf-oriented rather than buff-oriented, which I just think is the weirdest thing to do when you are making a new addition and you’re trying to get people excited. Like, calls of power creep are rampant in D&D, lots of other games too, but the reason power creep exists is because we’ve seen in card games if you release new content and it sucks and it’s weak, no one uses it and people don’t have fun. Because, generally, weak content isn’t fun. Sometimes it is, but generally not. The weaker something is, the more likely it will be unfun to play. And so they went with this nerf strategy instead of increasing the power, and this is a dual problem because that type of approach can work if you’re creating a game different enough from the old one that you cannot compare it apples to apples. Like, fourth edition to fifth edition. If you could have reduced the damage by 50% from fourth to fifth, and I don’t think people would complain or really notice it because the games are so different.

Oren: That is literally what they did from 3.5 to fifth edition. One of the big changes that made the game better was they hunted down and cancelled a lot of the miscellaneous 3.5 bonuses that everything was adding to everything. They even came up with a fancy name for it, they called it bounded accuracy, which at the time I thought was pretty pretentious, but it was a good choice.

Ari: When you make a game different enough that you can do that, that’s a great time to reset power because players aren’t going to complain, they can’t compare it. But when you do this 5e to 5.5, you can compare this because they keep touting this is not a new edition, this is just a change and evolution of 5th edition. And if your new edition, if I get to start playing 5.5 and I’m playing the same character I was playing in 5e but I do 20% less damage, I’m gonna notice that and I’ll just be like, why? This is less fun, I like doing powerful things. Powerful things are fun, fun should trump balance every time in D&D. It’s a cooperative game. And the extra funny part about 5.5 is even assuming balance is your number one goal, it’s still horrendously imbalanced. So they did not even accomplish that I presume to be their goal, like I can’t imagine what else it would be with a lot of these changes.

Oren: But it still feels bad if party member Bobbo, your friend, is doing twice as much damage as you, unless you’re not a damage dealing build. 

Ari: There is of course a limit to that, right? There is a point where someone else’s fun is taking away fun from other people at the table and you probably should look into that. But that point is pretty high. It is way more likely that if you just take away the fun stuff from a class because it was good, people are just gonna have less fun in general. And especially some of the things they took away were support builds as well. I feel like a lot of builds might be weaker now that never even took the spotlight no matter how strong they were.

Oren: One of the things was that they nerfed Twin Spell basically out of existence. And the main use of Twin Spell was to buff your party; to make your party cooler. Why would you nerf that? That is the thing you want everyone to be doing. Everyone has a good time when the sorcerer runs out and dual casts holy weapon.

Ari: 100%. So I don’t think nerfing is the way to do this. Things should have been buffed to go up to par. Martials are weaker than casters, let’s say. Like barbarians are bad past level five. Let’s buff barbarians. Let’s not nerf everyone else to try to bring them down to barbarian’s level. And so they went with this seemingly nerf oriented strategy and it didn’t balance the game. At least not – maybe they’ll fix it all before the game releases. Maybe this is just completely making a mountain out of a molehill here. Maybe they’ll trust the plan and it’ll all work out. But nothing I’ve seen from these design documents so far makes me think 5.5 will be any more balanced. If anything, it looks less balanced, assuming some of the things we’ve seen coming out of caster-land stick in the book in any form resembling what they are now.

Oren: Wes, have you looked at much of the new mechanics? I’m curious if you have any thoughts on it. Not a ton of the new mechanics but I was trying to pay attention to just like the changes, and I think going along with what Ari’s talking about with this nerf focus, this might just be my copy editor talking. The weird fixation on how they’re just deciding what to capitalize or what not to capitalize, and like clarifying certain types of terms and conditions and stuff, struck me as completely unnecessary. [Wes laughs] Did anybody think that was a problem? Ari, were there some instances where like an ability did not specify that it created a condition and therefore a loophole?

Ari: Most of the time, conditions weren’t the problem. The problem that 5e had was that they would mix flavor text with rules text and they’re not fixing that. So that’s the real problem from a copy perspective. Like 5e should take a page out of Magic’s book and put all the rule text in one place and italicize all the flavor text and put it under that or above it. Whatever. I don’t care where it goes. But I’m fine with them capitalizing conditions if they think that’ll help. They’re trying to make conditions a bigger part of 5e so that’ll probably be helpful. But I agree. It’s fine, but it’s not what I would be focusing on at the moment.

And this kind of moves a little bit neatly into a recent thing where they said they’re done with the big ideas phase of 5.5. And I look at them and I say, what big ideas? How is this what we ended up with?

Wes: One of my favorite big idea changes was in 5e 2014 they really made it very clear that feats were optional.

Ari: The biggest ideas I’ve seen in 5.5 is the wizard but there was another one- oh yes, the warlock. They basically completely redesigned the warlock. It’s like a different class now and that is a big idea. I don’t know if it’s a good idea but it’s big and so that’s one. And then the other one was the wizard spell creation mechanics which is the most exciting thing they put out, and it is a big idea, and it’s horrendously imbalanced. So those are the two big ideas and they said that if people don’t respond favorably to this they’re just going to revert to what 5e did and it’s been what was the point of all this?

Wes: Sell new books.

Oren: I did notice that is it really felt like a lot of this was actually we didn’t have enough time to test any of this so we’re just going to go back to what 5e was for the most part, with some nerfs here and there.

Ari: It boggles my mind that they had 10 years to work on this. I’m not saying they started working on immediately after 5e released but as someone who dabbles in design as a hobby, I’m always thinking about neat possible ideas to explore. I can’t imagine the team didn’t have some of those that came up after 10 years of the game existing. And even if you had no ideas of your own you can just look at what third party content creators are coming up with. And honestly, not to put too fine a point, on it you can just steal that stuff if you have nothing original to bring to the table. Just look at what popular third party creators are doing and say, what if we did that but our own spin. We changed the serial numbers or whatever. And I’m not saying you should do that that is not a good thing to do but I’m trying to imagine the designer who is so unoriginal as to have very few new ideas themselves but also morally upright enough to not look at other people’s ideas and try to borrow those.

Oren: Yeah. I don’t want to cast aspersions on the creativity of a bunch of designers who I don’t know and I’ve never met them. My experience in the gaming industry was that very often designers have ideas but they are not given the time or the resources to pursue them. And it’s weird. I don’t know what the design team in 5e was doing. I don’t know what the work structure of Wizards of the Coast is like.

Ari: It’s just the time to develop a good idea versus a bad idea are pretty similar in a game like D&D. It’s not like a video game where you have to spend a bunch of dev time coming up with things. And you’re right, I don’t want to bash on specific designers but I just don’t understand how this is it. Like there’s been so much cool movement coming out of third party and it’s like a self-selecting thing. You don’t even have to pour through all the bad homebrew out there because you can just look at the popular people, and heck, you could even hire the popular people to help work on your game and things like that. It’s just, it’s so weird to me. They played it so safe and I understand you don’t want to just put all this over complicated stuff that third party people came up with in your game because that might confuse new players but you could make simple versions. There’s understandable stuff out there. So it’s very confusing and very frustrating for me to watch this.

Wes: Ari, do you think that there’s this kind of lingering fear of them putting out a fourth edition, and have it flop if they stray too far with something new and it fails?

Ari: I think it’s possible, but there’s just so much room between making cool and interesting stuff in 5e and having 4e. There’s a lot of design space between those two points and I just have a hard time understanding how this came to pass in this form.

Oren: Hey everyone, Oren from the future here. This conversation actually went on for an entire hour, which is way too long for a single episode, so we’ve split it into two. The second part will be up next week. In the meantime, if this podcast was a good use of half your short rest, you can help us make more via Patreon. Just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. And before we go I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie MacLeod, next there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally we have Kathy Ferguson, professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week. 

Chris: This has been the Mythcreant podcast. Opening closing theme, The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.