D&D (2024) WotC Fireside Chat: Revised 2024 Player’s Handbook

In this video about the upcoming revised Player’s Handnook, WotC’s Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins reveal a few new tidbits.

• The books are near final and almost ready to go to print
• Psionic subclasses such as the Soulknife and Psi Warrior will appear in the core books
• Named spells have art depicting their creators.
• There are new species in the PHB.

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[Maxperson]

What @FitzTheRuke said.

A character is only as good as their rolls. Don't take many rolls and you are more than capable of botching a bunch and being the loser you want your character to be.

Or of course... either go back to playing 3E or just incorporate the 3E skills and their advancement rules into 5E. Both are easily doable.

So d20+7 is the same as d20-1? The former is proficiency and a good score to be good at swimming. The latter is non-proficient and a bad score in order to be bad at climbing. With a standard DC of 15 I need an 8 or higher vs. a 16 or higher. One of those is much better than the other.

The roll is also not relevant to SKILL. The +7 indicates high skill no matter what you roll. If you fail with +7 you had bad luck. If you fail with -1 you are just bad at whatever it is that you are doing.

5e cannot model most concepts well because it merged too much when it simplified things. And again, I'm not saying 5e is bad. It's just not even remotely as good as 3e was at achieving concepts. 5e concepts usually have to shove square pegs into round holes like the swimming/climbing above. With 3e I really can be really good at one and really bad at the other.

 

[tetrasodium]

No. That's complete fail, because whether or not I use it, my PC is in fact good at it. Not to mention that at some point I'm going to have to climb something. Virtually every campaign involves climbing at some point and the instant it happens, my PC is great at it.

Agreed and I think that one of the old xmen movies has a scene that perfectly explains why "You can just not bother having your PC climb things." misses the problem to a staggering degree

Spoiler

 

[Parmandur]

So d20+7 is the same as d20-1? The former is proficiency and a good score to be good at swimming. The latter is non-proficient and a bad score in order to be bad at climbing. With a standard DC of 15 I need an 8 or higher vs. a 16 or higher. One of those is much better than the other.

The roll is also not relevant to SKILL. The +7 indicates high skill no matter what you roll. If you fail with +7 you had bad luck. If you fail with -1 you are just bad at whatever it is that you are doing.

5e cannot model most concepts well because it merged too much when it simplified things. And again, I'm not saying 5e is bad. It's just not even remotely as good as 3e was at achieving concepts. 5e concepts usually have to shove square pegs into round holes like the swimming/climbing above. With 3e I really can be really good at one and really bad at the other.

My experience of 3E and 5E is rather the opposite, that 3E gates concepts behind esoteric math homework, like having to sacrifice my Fighter being being able to Swim in order for them to be a food blacksmith, whereas 5E allows me to more easily put together an archetyp, ao my Dighter can be good at Athletics and worh Blacksmith tools.

 

[Chaosmancer]

No you can't help that. But your explanation falls flat when considering those 2 races don't stand out woth their age.

My explanation wasn't meant for races that don't have weapon proficiencies. Again, you may as well ask why an Elf can be a five hundred year old mage and only level 1. Any explanation you give falls apart if you then also introduce a one hundred year old elf mage who is level 10.

Yes. You tried and failed to convince me.

Which is different than "you are ignoring my arguments and only using strawmen" that you accused me of before.

You also, consistently, have ignored me bringing up Elves, Hobgoblins, and Githyanki. You ONLY want to argue this in terms of Mountain Dwarves, nothing else.

You can. But your defense did nothing to convince me.
And you started to use dismissive terms:
"lets not try and pretend... ".

Which still does not match your earlier accusations, and does nothing to change the fact that you are now telling me to back off and stop debating your preferences.... when you started the debate.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. You started this. I engaged, now you want me to stop. All because you decided that an explanation that works for the people the rule is for, doesn't work for the people the rule doesn't apply to.

Nope. Maybe in 4e. But there every species got +2/+2, so how did only they got +2 for legacy reasons and not others. There are other species lile goliaths who

Goliaths who get a +2/+1? I'm not following this. And, fine, Mountain Dwarf isn't legacy like I thought. So it was just poorly designed.

 

[Maxperson]

My experience of 3E and 5E is rather the opposite, that 3E gates concepts behind esoteric math homework, like having to sacrifice my Fighter being being able to Swim in order for them to be a food blacksmith, whereas 5E allows me to more easily put together an archetyp, ao my Dighter can be good at Athletics and worh Blacksmith tools.

That's only gating if you can't do basic math. 3e allowed me to customize my PC in ways that are impossible in 5e. That's just plain ole math and fact. A billion ways to represent concepts is better than a hundred thousand. You can get into the ballpark with 5e on a lot of concepts and really hit home runs on relatively few(compared to 3e). 3e allowed you to hit home runs on almost all of them.

 

[Parmandur]

That's only gating if you can't do basic math. 3e allowed me to customize my PC in ways that are impossible in 5e. That's just plain ole math and fact. A billion ways to represent concepts is better than a hundred thousand. You can get into the ballpark with 5e on a lot of concepts and really hit home runs on relatively few(compared to 3e). 3e allowed you to hit home runs on almost all of them.

I would say quite the opposite, that 3E was full of traps that would not work (and on purpose, an influence from Magic deaogn!), whereas all 5E builds will work.

But seriously, what concept can yoy not cover in 5E PHB but the 3E PHB facilitates...? I don't consider the minutiae of the Akill system as having much significance to the character concept, frankly, though 5E gets in the way far less than 3.x ever did.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

it was just poorly designed.

So we just disagree.
Bye.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The quote said version of the game, which I take to include the whole game. Even if it's just the PHB, though, 3e still comes out ahead.

45 skills in 3e PHB vs. 18 skills in 5e. In 3e I can make someone who can swim, but can't climb. In 5e I can't. In 3e I can make someone who has both skills but is better at one than the other. In 5e I can't.

109 feats in 3e PHB vs. less in the 5.5e PHB. I'm not sure there are even 109 feats in all of 5e at this point. 3e includes the magic item creation feats and 5e has very little in magic item creation rules, none of which are in the 5e PHB.

I'm not saying 5e is bad, just that it can't(as long as they hold to limited release rates for crunch) hold a candle to 3e for achieving character concepts.

Or to 2e for achieving detailed campaign material. Or to 4e for rule clarity and balance. Or to 1e for evokable prose and creativity.

5e holds the reputation of "everybody's second-favorite D&D" for a reason.

 

[Kurotowa]

I would say quite the opposite, that 3E was full of traps that would not work (and on purpose, an influence from Magic deaogn!), whereas all 5E builds will work.

I wouldn't say every 5e build will work, but it's very hard to mess up a single class character. It's only when you dabble in the dark arts of multiclassing, or making very specific combinations of non-core races with certain classes, that you run into problems.

 

[Micah Sweet]

there is such a thing as too much granularity.

Maybe, but 5e isn't anywhere close to it. I'm not convinced any official D&D reaches that point.