One D&D: Reading Between the Lines
Most of us watched the announcement of the new edition — sorry, generation! — of Dungeons & Dragons with tremendous excitement. One of the most exciting parts was that while the new core rulebooks — the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual — aren't set to release until 2024, we're already getting a preview of the proposed changes now. More on that can be found here.
This article isn't so much about the content of the first article itself, or what all of this means for our wallets. Instead, it focuses more on what these changes tell us about the core goals of Wizards of the Coast (WotC).
Wizards Spares No Effort
The willingness to run playtests followed by surveys already shows that WotC remains deeply interested in shaping the game around how it's actually played. The change that demonstrates this most clearly is the automatic success or failure on a natural 20 or 1, not just on attack rolls, but on ability checks and saving throws as well.
Let's update the rules so that the game plays the way people expect it to play.
Jeremy Crawford in Unearthed Arcana: Character Origins | One D&D
Changes like this are likely to please most players, since they're ultimately based on what the majority of the playerbase wants. This motivation also means that systems which, for whatever reason, haven't worked so far are being adjusted or perhaps even removed entirely. We shouldn't expect many brand-new systems to be added.
The Inspiration system, for example, was either ignored or house-ruled by most player groups. In this case, WotC decided to overhaul the system and reshape it into a kind of social currency that can be exchanged between characters.
Whether well executed or not, changes like this show that WotC's promise — that One D&D wouldn't be a new edition, but rather an effort to adapt the existing rules as much as possible — isn't just empty words. There's no denying that WotC chose the harder path with this approach. It's not for nothing that people like to say "never change a running system." New interactions between existing rule systems are difficult to predict. Creating an entirely new rule system wouldn't carry that risk, and would have been the cheaper route. Surprisingly, WotC chose otherwise.
Newcomers Will Have It Harder
Instead of making life easier for themselves with a new edition or a new rule system, WotC is heading in the exact opposite direction — tightening the web and, with it, the dependencies between existing systems.
Let's stick with the changes around Inspiration for the next example. At first somewhat detached, Inspiration now plays a role in combat, resting, and choice of species. A deeper connection with individual classes is also likely to be expected.
Another example is the reworking of backgrounds and feats, which have now been merged and form a mutual connection. Feats are now less of a bag of tricks that players and DMs can dip into, and more of an essential part of character creation — and beyond.
Feats now also have prerequisites that must be met in order to take them. This makes feats dependent on other feats, ability scores, and possibly later even classes.
We can assume this trend will continue in the subsequent Unearthed Arcana articles. This tighter interconnection of rule systems inevitably brings increased complexity. As mentioned before, the game is being shaped more and more around how it's actually played. That means One D&D is oriented toward existing players and their needs, not newcomers. After all, it isn't future players filling out the feedback surveys for these rule drafts.
So it remains to be seen whether, along with this complexity, one of D&D's most defining traits — the beginner-friendliness of its rules — ends up getting diluted as well.
Tinkerers Can Hope
A personal experience here. Before reading the proposed changes to backgrounds, I had never noticed how cumbersome background creation is in the current edition of the Player's Handbook.
First, you're given a series of options that are assumed to cover the majority of what players want. But if that's not the case, a short section explains how to adapt those options to your own needs.
That's set to change fundamentally. Going forward, players will be given a toolkit to build their own background. To make things easier to understand and to allow for faster character creation, examples will be provided — all of which were built using that same toolkit.
The first thing that people are going to see is that the default option now for your background is to build your own.
Jeremy Crawford in Unearthed Arcana: Character Origins | One D&D
Instead of instructions for adapting something that already exists, a toolkit for creating something new. This inversion of control — admittedly a very technical term — raises real hopes for the new Dungeon Master's Guide, which has often been criticized for offering good inspiration but hardly any capable tools for building your own adventures.
Separating Nature and Culture
A good toolkit needs the widest possible range of options. Since WotC has decided to introduce as little new material as possible, they're loosening the restrictions on traits and spells, opening up many options for using certain traits across species. This increases the number of options available for building a background. But that doesn't happen without a second motive.
The traits that used to be exclusive to particular species are being trimmed down to a small selection that explicitly distinguishes that one species from all others. Whenever there's doubt, the trait is instead made available to everyone, or at least to a wider selection, as a feat.
This decision-making process — what belongs to a species and what doesn't — is driven by the fact that, from now on, a species is defined purely by its biological traits; culture no longer plays a role. Biological traits are easier to pin down and more clearly delineated than cultural aspects used to be. A dwarf is now born with a sensitivity to tremors, not because of their culture, but because of their biological lineage.
Really leaning into the mythic stories of each of the race options in the game and looking for ways to make them sort of the version truest to themselves.
Jeremy Crawford in Unearthed Arcana: Character Origins | One D&D
WotC addresses the thinning out of species-specific traits by having certain traits automatically become part of a species, without players having to add them to their character as a feat via a background.
Right now, the separation of nature and culture is most clearly visible in the spell lists. These are no longer organized by the classes that can access them, but instead by the source of their power. In other words, not by what role magic plays in the culture of the game world, but by its natural origin.
More Control Over Dramatic Pacing
Another change gives hope that, in reworking the rules, WotC has set itself the goal of giving DMs more control over shaping the dramatic arc of the play experience. The decision — initially widely criticized — that only player characters can land critical hits is backed by a well-thought-out motivation.
The goal is to make the table more fun, not by reducing the risk of defeat, but by giving the DM more control over deciding at which moment it would be especially exciting to raise the difficulty for the players.
A monster's critical hit, unlike a character's critical hit, doesn't create an exciting surprise for either the DM or the players. A monster's critical hit is hard to sell as a motivated action and instead feels more like a product of pure chance. Especially at low levels, a critical hit can be the difference between a character's life and death, and can completely wreck the DM's plan for how the fight was supposed to play out.
WotC tackles both problems by shifting the possibility of exceptionally strong attacks onto recharge abilities. Another example of an existing system being reinterpreted to achieve a desired effect. That's because recharge abilities have the same effect as critical hits. But they also offer a visual, descriptive framing, and are deliberately triggered by the DM.
We use recharge abilities to deliver those scary massive strikes [...]. The DM decides when to use it.
Jeremy Crawford in Unearthed Arcana: Character Origins | One D&D
The DM decides when to raise the difficulty — when the monster, so to speak, "gets serious." This also removes the risk of unpredictable character deaths at low levels, since abilities of this kind only become relevant from a certain challenge rating onward.
To still let an element of chance influence the game, a roll determines how long it takes before the DM is allowed to use that ability again.
Changes like this show just how much thought has gone into adjusting the rules, and how surprisingly far-reaching the consequences of such simple changes can be for how the game plays out.
Initial Verdict
In my opinion, Wizards of the Coast has shown with this first draft of the rules that they care about the continuity of the established rule system. The rule adjustments are well thought out and well argued. This isn't really about individual value tweaks so much as a realignment and reinterpretation of entire systems and how they interconnect. It's an effort that really shouldn't be underestimated, and in my opinion it deserves some optimism regarding WotC's motives. Because let's be honest — if WotC had announced a completely new edition, the outrage would surely have been huge at first, but in the end everyone would have bought it anyway — myself included.
That's not what happened. Instead, we're getting smart, well-considered adjustments that we can actually help shape. Either way, I'm very excited for what's coming.