#one d&d

[brewerssupplies]

Go forth kingmage and wield magic in a way that truly exhibits your mastery and command over the arcane. I've been making it a goal to make subclassess for classes I don't often make them for, so here's my offering for wizard. I hope you enjoy!

[Drive]

[Homebrewery]

[rpgtoons]

A simple guide to using the new and old Player's Handbook for D&D 5e. Let me know if I missed anything, I'll update the reference with any good tips!

[dailyadventureprompts]

We've known for a long while that people find different things about d&d to be fun and what archetypes they fall into, but I'd posit that within the framework of everything that is "Dungeons and Dragons" there exists several wildly different games/forms of fun that all from a part of the d&d ecosystem.

This was brought up during a discussion with my partner when we were talking about the build for her bard. She LOVES playing d&d, it's one of the highlights of her week, but her brain just doesn't give her the happy chemicals when it comes time to do anything related to character building: levelling up, managing her inventory and spell list, charting out what her abilities do, all these things are a chore she puts up with so she can play at the table with our friends. Compare that to me, who loves building characters so much that I have an ever growing stable of concepts I'm never going to get to play, some of which are so developed I not only have them planned out from low to high level but have gone so far as to make playlists about them.

My brain clearly does give me the happy chemicals when dealing with character stuff, to the point where one of my favourite things as a Dm is trawling through my vast archive of 3rd party content to help a player realize a mechanical/flavor concept that might otherwise be hard to nail. Further contrast that with the older generation of tabletop characters who invest almost nothing into characters and throw that into meat-grinder dungeons, or the folks who spend years debating build optimization on forums but seldom ever rolling dice at the table. We're all playing very different FORMS of d&d.

This variance applies to nearly every aspect of the game: dungeons, combat, roleplay, story, but because we don't have strong terms for as many of these variables as we should we end up with mismatches, especially when narrowmidned folks start talking about how the way they play d&d is the RIGHT or ONLY way to play it.

There's a lot of communities that are guilty of this ( anyone who's ever complained about the Critical role effect for instance) but strangely enough one of the biggest ones is WotC, who's trying to make OneDnD for a VERY specific group of people

They play online

They play official modules almost exclusively

They don't use much 3rd party material, if any

They are willing to accept limited character customization for sake of ease.

Not only does no one I play with fit inside that group of people, it's a profile that more accurately fits MMO players, a group of people that broke off from d&d's target audience somewhere around the 90s. You have to wonder how much of the shitshow OD&D has amounted to is all just a reaction to world of warcraft biting into Wotc's bottomline

[racefortheironthrone]

Question about One D&D discussion post-Reddit

Hey, does anyone know where the One D&D community went post the Reddit crash? Pretty much all the D&D subreddits went dark and I don’t see an increase of activity on EN World or rpg.net. 

[lostinludens]

BOYCOTT WOTC AND D&D BEYOND, CANCEL YOUR SUBS

https://twitter.com/DnD_Shorts/status/1613576298114449409?t=DLX6kL3IZeFTWFq3CxKJhg&s=19

[theoutcastrogue]

[D&D PLAYTEST] Pleasant surprise: 5.5 is actually getting good! And in combat I can FINALLY do something more exciting than "hit it again"

So this was my biggest issue with 5e: when I play a character who's good at hitting things, as opposed to flinging spells at things, I want to do cool shit! I love tactical combat, and I can't stand it when "I hit it again" is the only option of a martial character. Everyone should have options, but especially the Rogue. (I'm biased, yes, but the Rogue is conceptually the one class that fights dirty.) And disappointingly, not even the Swashbuckler got manoeuvres in 5e. For everyone other than Battle Masters and monks with Stunning Strike, our only options in 2014 were a measly Shove / Grapple / Disarm IN PLACE of an attack (for many of us, our only attack), and that was WITH optional DMG features. And Tasha's additions were only a marginal improvement.

You couldn't impose conditions with an attack, which, from a simulation aspect, is just silly. Any two-bit caster could do the craziest shit with spells, but an epic level martial couldn't even say "I hit 'em so hard or so deftly that they got a headache". For the most part, they could only say "I hit it again" and deal damage. And I hate that. It's boring. I even had an unfinished homebrew project of Called Shots, where you could spend a resource to do interesting shit with your attacks (give 'em disadvantage, make 'em dazed, reduce speed, that sort of thing). For Rogues, that resource was Sneak Attack dice. And guess what! In the latest version of the 5.5 playtest, WE GET THAT!

Can I get a fuck yeah, and also a fucking finally.

It's not an automatic win button, and that's good! I don't want win buttons (that's also boring), I want options. Cunning Strike is situationally useful, and that's ideal: if it's always good, you'd do it every time (so why isn't it a standard rule?), and if it's always bad, you'd never do it (so why does it exist at all?). If it's potentially good, depending on the situation, it means I get to THINK what I'm gonna do on my turn, and that's such a joy.

For years now, the only combat decisions my Rogues made in 5e were about movement/positioning, and how to get advantage. And co-ordinating with the others, which always happens, I mean it's a group game. But I had very little to contribute in that department other than flanking, I usually just waited for THEM to help ME to get advantage or something.

With this feature (which I'll be stealing as is, regardless of what happens to the playtest, or if I'm gonna adopt 5.5 as a whole or not), I can set up moves for others, I can impose conditions, so many things. Plus, it's customisable. Now that this basic framework is in place, anyone can fiddle with it and come up with new effects that fit their game and style. (I am NOT in favour of perfect rulesets that cover all bases, needs, and preferences, since that's an impossible and silly thing to ask. I am in favour of solid frameworks, that can be easily tweaked and built upon.) So I am ecstatic. I don't have to hit it again every time! Holy shit!

This is not a blanket endorsement of "One D&D" (I'll keep calling it 5.5, thankyouverymuch). It's still a work in progress, I haven't even read all of it in yet, and I do have issues with it, big and small. (And if my favourite class was the Monk, I'd be thumbs down right now: this one needs a lot of work, oof.) But with Weapon Mastery rules (another interesting development for martial characters), and better feats, and with this enormous improvement, I feel that some of the fundamental problems I had with 5e get... kinda solved. The new Rogue simply KICKS ASS. The whole class, not just Cunning Strike, it's a huge improvement. [Go read it, here's the PDF link.]

It's not overpowered, mind you. In terms of damage output it still lags behind Fighters and Barbarians and whathaveyou (which I'm perfectly okay with: Rogues are experts and skillmonkeys, they got stuff to do out of combat, meanwhile Barbarians have ONE JOB so they better be scary good at it), and full casters still slay. It just does cool shit, and I ask you: why do we even bother with the fuckton of combat rules in D&D if not to do cool shit?

See treantmonk's video below for a nice breakdown of the new Rogue. It's a few months old, and a couple of things have been revised since then: there's no "Arcane" spell list any more, so the Arcane Trickster presumably reverts to the Wizard spell list, and the Weapon Mastery rules are slightly different now. But they're very minor changes, and all the conclusions, with which I wholeheartedly agree, stand: this is simply FANTASTIC.

[oldschoolfrp]

(Someone asked for my thoughts about the current OGL debacle, and compared it to how TSR handled its properties in its final years as a company; Tumblr twice ate my reply and deleted the original question)

From the earliest days of D&D a big part of its appeal has been the way it encourages players to create and share their own worlds. The initial appearance of the game sparked the rise of a host of amateur fanzines and third-party small press publishers whose efforts helped increase the popularity of TSR's core product. As TSR grew, it extended various licenses for official supplements, with an uneasy tolerance of ‘generic’ material that didn’t claim to be official.

As competition increased, Gygax seemed more irritated with others engaging with his game on their own terms.  Instead of writing as much about imagination and creativity he often focused on promoting the right way to play. He wasted pages of space in Dragon magazine railing against the small presses and accusing them of making inferior unauthorized products that deceived unsuspecting gamers in the marketplace.

After forcing Gygax out in the mid-80s, Lorraine Williams saved TSR through aggressive expansion, but an attempt at total market dominance helped cause its final financial crisis in the 90s.  The company produced too many of its own new games and official supplements split between too many different genres and campaign worlds, dividing its own customer base among an unsustainable number of products that competed with each other.

That was back then. As for now, I think:

As a consumer of some recent third-party content for 5e and B/X D&D I've been pretty happy with the thriving community of creators making free and commercial supplements, and I hope no one tries to place roadblocks in their way.

That’s about it.  I think I'm not the best person to comment on the details of the allegedly more restrictive leaked OGL 1.1 because:

I have no inside information or contacts with the legal representation of Hasbro, Inc, and

I myself am not a publisher of OGL-based material who would be directly threatened with financial loss by any of the changes that might occur.

It's understandable that independent authors and publishers would be worried about a possible threat to their businesses. It is especially concerning that the company at the center of all this has mostly remained silent for several weeks while anger and fear has been amplified. The last official statement was back on December 21, in which they insisted that independent creators would still be able to keep doing what they have been doing, and mentioned new threats like NFTs as an example of why they felt the old legal language needed an update:

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1410-ogls-srds-one-d-d

Unfortunately when I see this topic being promoted on Twitter and YouTube, many of the top suggestions are clearly bad-faith click-bait performance art by people selling anger as entertainment, which isn’t going to help anyone understand the actual issues.  I won’t engage with the worst of those.

There are some good takes on the topic here -- @mostlysignssomeportents explained some reasons why publishers probably never needed the OGL and could be better off without it, and @prokopetz has some observations on why the OGL made people more comfortable about quoting the official rules and where things might be headed.

[assistant-honcho]

Does anyone else think that D&D has a power creep problem? The new 2024 Player's Handbook is intended to make the classes more balanced and interesting to play, which I believe it does, but it's also a buff to players across the board. Some of the strongest classes, like the wizard and bard, got buffed despite already outshining other characters in 5e!

This might be a ploy to get more tables to buy the new books. If new content is technically compatible with old, but there's a major power mismatch, lots of people will just want the new books.

Or it could be an attempt simply to attract players. For whatever reason, most players love all new content that makes PCs stronger and hate nerfs no matter the context. This might be down to how most of the D&D community plays and doesn't DM.

Anyway, I wish the new PHB kept power levels similar to 5e by cutting character features that are powerful but not fun or interesting to use. Also by nerfing powerful casters overall.

[thesunderedrealms]

Edward Harrison Compton (German, 1881-1960), Motiv aus Rothenburg ob der Tauber

The Great City of Redrock

Gulls clatter upon the rooftops - I watch as they squark & squabble over a long rotted fish, their hunger persistent, ever much like my own. I was hoping to be settled into some warm fresh bread & honeyed butter down at Haddocks Hope, alas plans do change. Shame they had to change on my day off though, especially when the sun decided to finally play so fair.

Some highborn dip seems to have gotten themselves roughed up in the alley below. What they thought they were doing 'ere is its own matter, yet the Viscounts Men… Well, seems they be naturally more insistent to pass the blame to one of us. Sounds like they're busy roughing up some poor sod below. Well, good luck to ‘em and Wives be willing their arms tire by the time they reach me.

For now suppose I'll try finish me pipe and savour Redrock’s pungent Summer smells. It ain't such a bad life. Could always be worse.

-H.H

[hypothetical-karma]

My genuine reaction now days after barely playing d&d in a full year whenever someone tells me whatever the most recent WotC/Hasbro controversy is just say, "So? Go play literally anything else."

Seriously, if you don't like the company, don't buy their shit.

[keplercryptids]

"WOTC backed off on the OGL nonsense with 5e but we need to stay vigilant so they don't try this with 6e--"

nah. nope. i mean, if you want to put your energy towards that, fine. but tbh, if WOTC wants to create a walled garden for their new game, that's their prerogative. if 6e and its eventual VTT are good enough to warrant the exclusivity, the micro transactions, the price of entry to the garden, then cool. people will play. and if not, other systems including 5e will remain open and accessible. i believe they're shooting themselves in the foot if they make 6e less open and accessible, but! they can technically do that and it's fine.

the issue was never "WOTC shouldn't be allowed to put restrictions on their game/IP." the issue was that WOTC was trying to delegitimize a 20-year-old agreement with the ttrpg community and retroactively lay claim to shit they had no right to claim.

if they create a new version of the OGL for 6e, fine. the consumers will decide if it's worth it and thus will decide 6e's fate. the point is that now nothing will stop you from continuing to play 5e (or any other system!).

[topaz-mutiny]

Was looking at a video discussing the One D&D changes to Druids and I thought it was funny how much of a coincidence the changes are:

Wild Shape - basically useless worse Polymorph (no features from yourself OR the animal you change into) - no additional HP for tanking anymore - Moon Druids only slightly less useless Wild Shape - No more elemental forms for Moon Druids Spells Druids Lose Access To Blight, Confusion, Divination, Fire Shield, Hallucinatory Terrain, Cone of Cold, Contagion, Geas, Planar Binding, Flesh to Stone, Heroes Feast, Mirage Arcane, Plane Shift, Symbol, Antipathy/Sympathy, Feeblemind, Incendiary Cloud, Foresight

I say coincidence because I don’t think it was intentional, but this is basically a “fuck everything cool Keyleth ever did as a Moon Druid” change.

[raeynbowboi]

Fixing the Wizard’s Spell Creation in OneDnD

I will be the first to say that when I read the new system for Wizards to create their own spells, I was in love with the idea. It sounded like so much fun. Until I realized just how broken it could get. Forecage for free? Wall of Force? Darkness that only effects enemies? The wizard’s spell creation as it is right now is in serious jeopardy of wildly unbalancing the game, and is also stealing everything that isn’t nailed down from Metamagic. BUT, I do like the idea of Wizards creating their own spells. I think it’s a fun idea. So, how do we salvage this fun idea while also protecting the game’s balance? We pivot. Rather than breaking existing spells by removing casting components, give us tables of options to effectively sculpt new spells from these tables. So like... say I want to create a new necromancy spell. Step 1: spell school. It's a necromancy spell. Step 2: components? Let's say you need Verbal, Somatic, and Material components. What material?  You need a corpse, pile of bones, or an animated skeleton or zombie that is friendly toward you. Step 3: Range/AoE. This one targets one creature within 90 feet. What does the spell do? You use a dead body, pile of bones, or an animated skeleton or zombie that you control and break them apart to create a lance of bone and flesh. You then hurl that lance toward an enemy, dealing 4d8 Necrotic damage. Then you give it a name, level, and work with your DM to decide who can have access to such a spell. Is it just for Wizards, or can you teach this spell to Warlocks too? This is Goring Lance, a 4th Level Necromancy spell available to Wizards and Warlocks. And that's just off the top of my head. Make creating spells a way for your players to do something new instead of breaking spells that already exist. Have the tables to help without turning every single spell into the same exact thing. Have a way for players to create new non-damaging spells too. Maybe balance it with like a point system so that the more powerful a new spell is, the most costly it is to create, so your party isn't just making 400 new 9th level spells. Giving us a means of building brand new spells not only better fits the idea of the wizard inventing spells, but it also gets the wizard's hand out of the sorcerer metamagic cookie jar.

[jkcorellia]

for once I have to give it to them, the monk class as presented in playtest 8 is ACTUALLY pretty fucking good

bonus action disengage no longer costs a discipline (formerly ki) point

bonus action dash no longer costs a discipline point

(the above two together mean the Mobile feat no longer feels like a necessary component to completing your monk)

BA unarmed strike no longer has the Attack action as a prerequisite

Deflect Missiles is now Deflect Attacks more generally, and later it applies to magical damage types

Flurry of Blows scales!!! (3 attacks instead of 2 eventually)

Stunning Strike deals damage on a successful save, and monks rejoice at no longer feeling useless against bosses with either 26 Constitution or immunity to the stunned condition

[racefortheironthrone]

I would love to hear your general thoughts on the design direction of OneDnD, especially as it compares to how you feel about the design trends in 5e over the years. I apologize for this exceedingly broad prompt; I read essay series on this topic for fun

Let me start by saying that I am not an expert in game design, either from an academic perspective or an industry perspective. My only experience here is as someone who's been engaged in the playtest process for both "D&D Next" (which eventually became 5th edition) and "One D&D" (which will eventually become 5th edition 2024).

The D&D Next playtest saw a lot of conflict between traditionalists and non-traditionalists which the traditionalists largely won - hence the Combat Superiority system going from a core Fighter mechanic to the Battle Master subclass, for example - largely because people's memories of the edition wars kicked up by the 3.5 to 4th Edition transition were still strong, and a major part of WotC's intent behind 5th edition was to win back some of the audience share they'd lost to Paizo et al. as well as grow the overll audience with a "back to basics" edition. (There was also a fair bit of lingering conflict over the Tome of Battle, but that's not quite edition warring and is a bit harder to categorize.)

I have to admit that I haven't followed "design trends in 5e over the years," because while I've been playing D&D pretty consistently since 5e came out, I didn't buy Xanathar's and Tasha's and MoM etc. (because my DM had already done so on D&D Beyond) so I don't have a good sense of them as cohesive books that sought to change the design of 5h edition, rather than just "oh that's the book Booming Blade comes from." So I have to admit that I don't know as much to what extent One D&D's design philosophy is an extension of those efforts.

As for One D&D, I am a bit unsure about the overall direction, because I see two conflicting impulses in design at work at the same time. On the one hand, there is clearly an appetite among the devs to swing for the fences and make some big changes to character classes - Moon Druid, Warlock, etc. - within the overall shell of 5th edition. Stuff like class groups, moving subclasses to 3rd level and other anti-dipping moves, moving away from Short Rest mechanics, Weapon Mastery, and so forth starts getting more into game mechanics, but we haven't seen an entirely new game engine in the same way that d20 or AEDU or bounded accuracy were.

On the other hand, there is clearly a mandate to maintain compatibility with 5th edition and make as few changes as possible while still providing a value proposition for the new books, because 5th edition was such a massive success that transformed their playerbase in ways that a lot of older players still haven't really integrated into their thinking, because 5th edition is still selling well and they don't want to rock that boat, and because ".5s" are terrible marketing and numerical edition changes are a real crapshoot whereas "5th edition" is now a brand with some cachet.

I still think we're a bit too early to tell which impulse is going to win out in the end - we've only seen first drafts of any of the characters and we don't know yet what the second drafts will look like, we haven't seen the Monk, we haven't seen most spells, we haven't seen most monsters, etc.

[ivanovaisalwaysright]

Watch "WotC breaks their silence" on YouTube

Link to WotC statement: https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl

They've cut the royalties and the ability to claim 3rd party content as theirs. But they maintain the decision to replace the original ogl and make no mention of the being able to change it any time with a 30 day warning part.

___

Paizo (creators of Pathfinder and starfinder) and other creators are coming together to create their own Open RPG Creative licence (ORC).

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v?Paizo-Announces-SystemNeutral-Open-RPG-License&utm_campaign=893500_ORC%20PR&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Paizo%20Inc.&dm_i=4XTJ,J5FG,30BDLC,245YT,1

We believe, as we always have, that open gaming makes games better, improves profitability for all involved, and enriches the community of gamers who participate in this amazing hobby. And so we invite gamers from around the world to join us as we begin the next great chapter of open gaming with the release of a new open, perpetual, and irrevocable Open RPG Creative License (ORC).

The new Open RPG Creative License will be built system agnostic for independent game publishers under the legal guidance of Azora Law, an intellectual property law firm that represents Paizo and several other game publishers. Paizo will pay for this legal work. We invite game publishers worldwide to join us in support of this system-agnostic license that allows all games to provide their own unique open rules reference documents that open up their individual game systems to the world.

In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Legendary Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group.

The ORC will not be owned by Paizo, nor will it be owned by any company who makes money publishing RPGs. Azora Law’s ownership of the process and stewardship should provide a safe harbor against any company being bought, sold, or changing management in the future and attempting to rescind rights or nullify sections of the license. Ultimately, we plan to find a nonprofit with a history of open source values to own this license (such as the Linux Foundation).