Once or twice a decade, like clockwork, there’s a new version of D&D. This time it’s not 6e, either! I’m a bit behind on looking at it, and I certainly haven’t had the chance to playtest any of the material yet, but I’ve got some initial reactions to the Character Origins stuff. Check out the playtest rules here or through your D&D Beyond account (if you have one).
Going forward with these we’re also going to be doing some public playing of this, so if you want to play some simple games with some totally untested rules join our Discord server!
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- Feats aren’t optional anymore, and they seem to work more like they did in 3e. Granted, for most people in 5e feats were about as optional as non-weapon proficiencies in 2e, but for me its still sad to see the game trending towards more complexity. I think our writer, Graves, will be stoked, though.
- The Lucky feat is still pretty good, though I think it might not be quite as good as it was before. Spending points to make monsters roll at disadvantage might not be very good if your DM habitually fudges rolls.
- Build your own race. This is cool. I hope in the actual books — if they do actual books — they still include the classic Tolkien knock-offs as the default, but a slim system to make your own is great. Having a checklist for what every race has is a bit less cool, but 5e already more-or-less worked like that in the Player’s Handbook and especially so after Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (both still 50% off on Amazon, by the way). They aren’t writing out the word “race,” though, which is somewhat surprising. That sacred cow might be too much to touch, even now.
- Backgrounds are here to stay, and you get feats from them. This sounds pretty cool, but I’m withholding judgement until I use it. They’ve also moved ability score buffs to backgrounds, which seems fine. Much better than the floating bonuses in Tasha’s. Backgrounds still don’t do as much to help you ground your character as much as they do in other games, but I don’t think they need to.
- Aasimar are ardlings. I think the new name is bad, but the old name is worse. And, it excises some relics of the Satanic panic, which is cool. Hopefully I never have to hear someone say “Assmar” again. Don’t know how I feel about planetouched races being standard, but that’s an old battle I lost a long time ago. These guys get limited flight at level one, which doesn’t gel with the kind of fantasy I run, but it’s whatever.
- They didn’t bring back low-light vision for the elves, so they still have darkvision. Kind of lame, but it is what it is.
- They finally replaced half-orcs with orcs. Took them long enough. They look like every orc homebrew race I’ve ever seen, though, personally, I don’t know if this is the same as how they were presented in the most recent Monster Manual splat.
- I’m curious to see how classes survive the new backgrounds — a lot of them are handing out previous minor class traits as background traits. Looking at you, Criminal.
- Crits are still around, but crit successes give Inspiration. Inspiration works the same as 5e, but is no longer tied to optional rules designed to reward roleplaying.
- Short rests look like they’re on their way out.
- There is now an arcana/divine magic distinction, back from 3e, plus a new spell list for elemental magic, called “Primal.”
