Sage Advice returns as a conversation between me and @ToddKenreck, in which we talk about the ins and outs of D&D's rules. Watch below! i have a question what is sage advice to those that do not know so sage advice is a question and answer uh column basically well at least it started as a column in dragon magazine many many many decades ago where people would send in rules questions and then get an answer from the people who made dungeons and dragons so we have carried on that tradition over the years and the whoever is responsible for sage advice is called the sage and so now we’re going to do that here where you ask me a question maybe it’s your own question or a question that has bubbled up from the community and i give an answer now there is important context here sometimes when rules answers are offered by our team and then in the last you know seven or eight years that’s usually me giving the answers there can be sometimes this feeling that oh because this answer came from the team that makes dungeons and dragons this must be you know like official with a capital o and a tm after it yeah you showed up on my house a lot like look when i get real wrong and so what’s really important important context for anyone joining in and listening to our conversation is yes these are answers coming from the official makers of dungeons and dragons so from that standpoint the answers themselves are official but it’s the context for any rules discussion we have right is that in d d each group determines how it is going to deploy the rules in service to their campaign to their taste to what gives their group joy and anything we say here again even though it has that that glimmer of official dome right still it’s just a tool an additional tool in a group’s toolbox for the dm and the players to consider as they decide how are we going to make use of the various tools that dnd offers for us to go on our heroic adventures and weave a story together so nothing that we say in these videos or that we say in our sage advice compendium pdf is ever meant to override a group’s own choice guided by that group’s dungeon master in how to use the many tools that d d offers i often like to use this word tool because i think of d and d as this storytelling toolbox and each group decides you know they open up the toolbox and it’s like this week are we using a hammer or a screwdriver or how did the spatula get in here you know and the group decides again with the the dm as sort of the the chief tool user how to use each of these tools and how much uh because each group’s tastes are different each group has different levels of mastery of the game and so sometimes a group might decide we’re going to ignore some of this simply because we’re just learning the game right now other groups their joy is playing exactly the way the rules are written and in line with what the designers intended so for those groups they’re going to listen to every word said here and if hey if for that group that it gives them happiness then awesome but for another group they’ll listen to what we say and say yeah yeah that’s nice crawford and and then go on and do what they want to do and i think that’s also awesome because ultimately it’s about supplying as many tools as possible for people to create the d d experience they want at their table we’re not like the d d paladins knocking at your door riding out into neighborhoods making sure everyone’s playing d d the exact proper way no exactly and it’s actually quite the opposite uh and i’m gonna get serious for a minute i get legitimately sad anytime i see in public people waving the rules at each other and even worse waving something i or another member of the team has said about our design intent and whatnot i’m really i get super bummed because again these are meant to just be happiness tools these are not meant to be weapons to be wielded against each other because at the end of the day this is a co-op game and a group decides together how they’re going to play it to essentially optimize for their amusement and so yeah nothing we say here uh should ever be used as a weapon unless it’s like a nerf weapon and and it’s just making people giggle or it’s about a weapon uh that brings me to i have questions yes please hit me with them backgrounds uh since strix strix haven uh the curriculum of chaos it feels like backgrounds have become a little bit more powerful so yes in strix haven we introduced a background which represents your character being a starting student at that magic university and in that background inside the feature and every background gives you a special feature it’s usually more flavor than anything else we give you a free feet that’s unusual yes that that that definitely gives that background more teeth than a background typically has now that is actually in line in terms of power with our other magic the gathering books where in each of the worlds we give a character who’s built for that world the ability to gain a source of power that is outside class or race and the other things in the game that power up a character in guildmaster’s guide to ravnica we did that with your reputation with a particular guild in mythic odysseys of theros we did that with building up your piety with a particular deity in strix haven we decided to go with a much more sort of direct approach which is you get a feet now people have noticed in a recent unearthed arcana we released that there were also backgrounds in that unearthed arcana that gave feats i noticed as well and so this is definitely a design theme that we are keenly pursuing uh because what this does is it allows us in a very elegant targeted way to give a background a little extra that says something about that background not only story-wise but it gives the background a little bit a little mechanical toy that you can actually see in play later on because one of our own critiques of our background design over the years is that while they give you some proficiencies which absolutely can see play over the course of your character’s adventuring life it’s very easy for the background to just sort of vanish as a meaningful part of who the character is unless the dm really engages with it as a storytelling sort of inspiration you know a way to feed the campaign with different little you know perhaps quests or npcs related to a character’s backstory and it’s really like actively involved like if you’re the pirate and you can do something like steal someone’s drink and people will just kind of back up because they’re scared of you that kind of stuff going up often yeah but you’ll see in many games the background just sort of fades right now part of that is on purpose it’s called a background it’s behind you um but uh so we so we’re not interested in background uh sort of elevating to the same level as class you know class is the most defining element of a person’s character but we’re exploring how can we give it just just that little something extra and so we’re doing that right now in our setting design of having these special world specific backgrounds that give you a feat that gives you that something extra and people can expect to see us do more of this as we explore this design space this is a great example of how alive our game is that we are always exploring ways to bring new ways to have fun new ways to optimize the play experience uh looking for fresh ways to make the game easier to learn for us it’s sort of like the game is never done uh it it’s constantly evolving part of this comes from just we’re a game design team it’s our job to look for ways to constantly improve the game but it also arises from the fact that our team is filled with people who are dming and playing tnt uh you know constantly and just through our own play we’re discovering things that you know hey this is working for us in our home game what if we brought this to the official game right and sometimes we’ll also do experiments like we did in strix haven and then if they catch on if we notice people are liking this or we are discovering you know it’s a it was a mine where at first we thought well there’s just a little bit of ore in there for us to mine but we started digging and discovered oh no there’s way more potential here we think there might be gemstones in here then we will do what people are now seeing as of the most recent anarch arcana where we take this design theme and we start iterating we’re like okay how far can we go with this uh and so again people can expect to see more of this exploration in the future there’s also something i’ve seen is what many would call feet stacking two feats are related to each other i actually rather miss this so can you tell me a little bit about that yeah we also in strix haven uh in addition to having this background that you could take that gave you a feat we then introduced a second feat that you could take but you had to have the previous fee to take it right this is something that we also wanted to start exploring because we felt that first off feats are a very useful place for us to explore what are essentially class features not tied to a class we as designers that’s basically what we think of a feat as it’s a a classless class feature and we wanted to be able to provide this feature option to stricthaven characters that was going to have a bit more a bit more power than a typical feat and so for us the natural way to do that was well put a level prerequisite on it and because we wanted to tie together sort of a narrative connection between them also require you to have the previous feet this is really useful because it creates a a way for us to give you options that have different levels of power you know we can give you lower level power higher level power and give you also the sense of build of going up a little sort of narrative ladder yeah um it’s optional uh you know if you get the if you get the background and you get the free feed you don’t have to take the second one but if you decide to invest in it that’s a fun little character development path that we’re inviting you to go down because one of the pieces of feedback that we have gotten about the game since its release in 2014 is that especially our heavily invested players and people who’ve played a lot of different characters who are always looking for something new would like a few more ways to sort of turn the dials on their characters and these feats that build on each other that’s one way to do it this is also a space that we’re continuing to explore because again we also introduced some feats like this in our most recent unearthed arcana because we also view this as very fertile design ground now in third and fourth edition we did this as well where you had feats that would go in a chain yeah now we also got very clear feedback back then that people grew weary if the chains grew too long or or to use the stacking metaphor if the stack got too high so we’re keeping that in mind as we explore this space that it’s unlikely that any of these chains will ever get you know you’re not going to have like 10 feets in a chain but there is a space for us to explore just like you have class features where you know you get a lower level one and then a higher level one exploring having these essentially class agnostic features that also can have levels uh and that again opens the opportunity for us to create ones that would be more powerful than we would ever want a generic feed to be yeah this this isn’t getting back to uh mapping out your entire career ahead of time before you’re like you’re at first level i have to take all these feats in this order kind of thing right back back in that day yeah i mean because right now what we’ve shown is it’s basically you get you get the starter one yeah and then there’s another one you can pick or there are three you can pick from uh and we’re going to keep exploring this is what things like unearthed arcana are for you know we we are uh just about to release the survey for the most recent under tarkana so we’re going to get more feedback on this uh we know people really enjoyed that that little feet chain it was two whole feats in strict haven right uh and so we’re gonna keep exploring and keep getting feedback and seeing how these play out in people’s campaigns i’ve noticed that existing elements within the game you’ve started to utilize in different ways so like proficiency bonus in natashas was very common as a way to be like you can use this ability equal to the amount of your proficiency bonus which is a very elegant solution of telling people how often they get to do something i notice recently hit dice are kind of being more involved in in the mechanics of d d with some of these experiments yes uh something that we especially starting a couple of years ago when we began work on tasha’s cauldron of everything in earnest one of the design goals that i gave the team working on that book was for us to look for ways to use things that are already in the game in new and interesting ways not just for the sake of the novel you know for you know oh it’s a new thing which can be fun i mean all of us where gamers enjoy you know the new shiny yeah i mean i’m obsessed with it but but there’s a more important goal there and that is for us to discover ways to use things that are already on people’s character sheets that they’ve already learned how to use for other purposes because the more that we can lean into design that already exists the easier the game is to teach to learn it also makes it easier to balance things because there are these you know certain things that are known quantities like the proficiency bonus like we we know regardless of class that if a character is x level its proficiency bonus is equal to y and then we can balance for that uh so now we’re doing a similar thing like like you pointed out that we we started in tasha’s with the proficiency bonus which is now starting to appear all over the place we’re doing the same thing with hit dice because we have felt that the hit dice option of spending it when you take a short rest to get some of your hit points back is interesting but if we’re going to teach you about that my my feeling as a designer is there’s more we can do with that one of one of the tests i pose to all of our rules is is there enough fun being generated by the complexity we’re presenting that the ratio to me like the more complex something gets the more we’re asking of our players and dms to learn the more i feel like there needs to be more fun coming out the other side uh because otherwise like why are we asking people to learn this and so that’s another reason often why i’m looking for how can we make the thing that’s already there do more and bring more fun and cause you to look at the game in new ways i i think there was kind of an aha moment for us when we figured out this new way of using proficiency bonus and then i i really enjoyed watching the d d community have then once it was out in the book this ah-ha of oh this makes total sense they could have been doing this all along uh and uh i think we’re gonna see a similar thing in the months ahead as we start exploring more and more ways to use hit dice and other elements of the game because again this is this is a perspective we’re bringing to basically anything on your character sheet we are like looking at it and it’s like all right is this piece doing enough is there something else we’re doing in the game that we can actually hand to this and then the whole game gets tighter easier to teach easier to learn more fun to play easier to balance new customization options etc all of those are our factors that we’re looking for when we start doing these tweaks and these explorations thank you very much jeremy crawford for being our sage that is our our episode of sage advice uh we’ve got a survey coming up if you want to check into that and yeah as always leave comments on the on the channel and let us know what you think have a great day https://t.co/VZaJGPbLGw
— Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford) March 30, 2022