The latest Unearthed Arcana class variant features for Rangers & Fighters gets a breakdown! – Now with the replacements
THIS IS A AN AUTOMATIC CAPTION TEXT from YouTube, so it’s not “perfect”.
My advice is to use it just to help people like me that are not english speaking, to understand the Video/Podcast
in this UA, here is where,particularly, when you look
at a class like the Ranger,
we’ve been able to give alternatives
that people have been hungry for.
We have gotten feedback for a while
that people would like an
alternative to Favored Enemy
in the form it had in
the Player’s Handbook,
an alternative to Natural Explorer
and some of the other
features, and so, here,
we’ve offered up some alternatives.
They’re really saucy.
– They are very good, I will have to say,
especially if you’re playing
a Horizon Walker, where,
sometimes, the Favored Enemy
still made perfect sense,
but if you’re a Horizon Walker,
you go through a lot of terrain. (laughs)
– [Jeremy] Yes, yeah.
– Maybe some terrain isn’t listed, right?
– [Jeremy] Yeah, yeah.
– But ooh, Hunter’s Mark,
without concentration,
and without, so, (chuckles)
and it’s not even a bonus action, right?
– [Jeremy] Well, we don’t mess
with how you cast the spell.
– Yeah, yeah, that’s right, so, yeah,
so Hunter’s Mark, you can just do it.
You get spell components,
doesn’t take a spell slot,
and this is remarkable because
this kind of frees you up
to do smites now, which
Rangers have as well,
which I thought was very clever.
– So, yes, one of the
enhancements we do in this article
is adding spells to certain
classes, spell-less.
We’ll see what people
think of these additions,
and we’ll see if they make
it into a publication.
Again, this is a thing on
the buffet that a group
has to decide if they’re
gonna turn on or not.
This is not, these are not sort of errata
to the Player’s Handbook.
This would be–
– [Todd] This is UA.
– This is UA.
– This is a test session.
– And, no, but even if it, again,
makes it into a publication,
this is not an add-on
to the PH, this is, here’s an option
that your group may or may not turn on.
Now, I am really fond of what
we’ve done for the Ranger.
Like all UA material,
when we do class design,
we have not optimized
it for multi-classing.
So I do, I should say that
there is a good chance
that Deft Explorer and Favored Foe,
if they make it to our
next level of development,
there will be some tweaking to make it
so that they are not too juicy
of an option for everyone
to just dip into Ranger for one level.
– Oh, yeah, yeah, because a hunter,
immediately when I saw Hunter’s Mark,
what didn’t require
concentration, I’m like,
can I just do Variant Human, then get Hex,
and now layer Hex on top of Hunter’s Mark?
I’m like, no, because,
just because it doesn’t
require concentration
doesn’t make it not a concentration spell,
and that’s how I was just
fighting in my brain.
I don’t know–
– [Jeremy] But, no, actually, the–
– Oh, really?
– The game doesn’t have a concept
of a concentration
spell as an abstraction.
– [Todd] Okay, okay, so it doesn’t.
– No, the game is like,
you’re either concentrating
on a spell or you’re not.
– Okay, okay, that’s
interesting ’cause Hex
on top of Hunter’s Mark is mean. (laughs)
– [Jeremy] But again, I–
– But not optimized for multi, yeah.
– Yeah, it’s not optimized
for multi-classing,
and so the not having to
concentrate, that is an example
of something that is likely to change
in the next phase of development.
We often, and this is not only true
for this Unearthed Arcana,
but also for our subclasses,
we will often put things
out that are more potent
than we would end up publishing.
I’ve mentioned before, it is
actually far easier for us
to produce something that is
more powerful than we want,
and then, but see, do
people like the concept,
and simply rein in the power,
rather than producing something
that’s super underpowered
and because often to address that,
you don’t just fiddle with the numbers,
you often have to come up with new design,
which then has to go back
into playtesting, so in a way,
it’s actually more efficient
for us to present something
that’s overpowered and
then just have to turn some
of the numbers down.
Now, I also want to talk
about the primal beasts
for the Beastmaster.
– Oh, I love how you’ve done this,
because this is something
you and I have talked before.
You have now started to
include the stats for creatures
within the classes themselves,
and this is a great example of that.
Not only that, but you also provided
kind of the best ones, right?
Everyone chooses an owl, right?
Because you can do a flyby
and stuff like this, but yeah,
so you provided these awesome choices
for the Beastmaster, so.
– So part of the philosophy
behind what we did
with the Beastmaster companions
is I did not want us,
with this Unearthed Arcana,
to go too deeply into subclasses.
Part of that is because
that would have been a road
that would have no end, because the game
has many, many subclasses,
and it really would’ve
gone far beyond the point
of this UA, which was, its main goal
is provide some cool
options for base classes.
That said, I did want us
to give the Beastmaster Ranger something
because we know, in survey after survey,
this is the subclass where
people are most hungry
for some new options.
And so I had this aha moment,
’cause I was racking my brain,
how can I give people what they want
without actually changing
what’s in the Player’s Handbook?
And I realized, well, we actually do it
through the creature, because it’s funny,
technically speaking, what’s
in this UA is not a change
to the Beastmaster at all.
These are simply two
additional monster stat blocks
that the Ranger is free to partner with
as a part of their companion feature.
And they are designed
to work with everything
in the Beastmaster subclass as written.
I mean that was one of the
other design goals I gave
to myself and to Dan
Dillon and Ben Petrisor,
is whatever we design, again,
unless we make an explicit
exception, has to work
with the Player’s Handbook,
and the person needs to be able
to open the PH, look at
one of these options,
and have the two seamlessly lock together.
So people might wonder,
when they look at, say,
these new Beastmaster
companions, and then compare them
to, say, the Battle Smith’s Steel Defender
or the recent Wildfire Spirit,
they’ll notice that some of the scaling
that is in those other creatures
is not in these new Beastmaster
companion creatures.
The reason for that is the
scaling is in the Beastmaster,
and these creatures are designed, again,
to work seamlessly with
the Beastmaster feature.
You still use every word in it,
pair it to these stat blocks,
and you’re good to go.
I wouldn’t be surprised
if people give a thumb up
to these creatures, and I hope they do
because I think they’re a lot of fun.
I wouldn’t be surprised
if we ended up designing
another creature or two
to give Rangers a few more options.
I would also love to explore
doing this kind of thing
for other places in the
game, where you summon things
or befriend things, because it allows us
to design exactly the thing
that the person needs.
Anytime we throw the door wide open,
and I think you and I have
talked about this before,
to just, hey, go loot the Monster Manual.
First off, almost all of that’s designed
just for the Dungeon Master.
– [Todd] Exactly.
– So it is always risky when
we do that, and it also means
we end up having to be
way more conservative
in our design than we tend to be.
The Beastmaster is very conservative
because we’re so generous on just,
as long as you meet the CR specification,
go loot all of our monster books.
If we bring that, basically,
if those doors get closed,
we can then actually be way more generous
because we know exactly
what we’re giving you.
What I don’t know is if
we’ve talked about the fact
that this approach was actually
in the D&D Next playtest.
This was actually how we
originally wanted pet classes
and also the Druid’s Wild Shape to work.
– [Todd] Well, no, I didn’t know that.
– Yes, there was at least
one draft of the Druid
where the B stat blocks were in the class
and they were customized for the Druid.
At the time, it was too alien to people
who were used to being able
to go to the monster book
and get it, and between that point
and the book’s publication,
there wasn’t time for us
to get it right, so we
reverted to the classic way
of doing it ’cause it’s like,
well, it has been the way
D&D has done it for decades.
We will, and that, often, in playtesting,
if there’s not time to
make the new thing work,
you then have to revert to
the old thing you know works.
So what’s funny is this has
actually been an approach
I have wanted to be in the game
since before fifth edition even came out,
and now we’ve just, we’ve
had time to get people
used to it and to also do a better job
of showing the advantages of it,
because anytime you just
change something in a game,
the audience needs time to warm up to it,
to see, oh, I get it, that
I’m getting something cool
by going down this new path,
and really, this entire UA
is about providing some new
paths that I hope people,
when they start exploring, will see,
oh, this is really neat, I’m
seeing my character in a way
I’ve never seen them before.
– Yes, I’ve actually
experienced this multiple times,
especially with the Ranger.
Originally, my own character
started as a Ranger,
and this feels like very
much back to where he started
all those years ago, but
things I really liked,
incorporating a little
bit of the Bowmaster,
those abilities with fighters,
so now that you have,
you can actually get a bonus
to Deception, I believe,
and so, you can be a
very clever fighter now,
and now I can play this fighter
that isn’t just muscle and
swords and everything else.
I feel like there’s like more lead way
to customize the fighter a little bit.
– That is an example of us leaning more
into what’s actually in the
writeup of the Battle Master,
in the Player’s Handbook,
where we actually talk
about the Battle Master as
not just a person of brawn,
but also a person who has gone
through rigorous training,
and so the flavor text
is all there for it,
but when you get to the maneuvers
in the Player’s Handbook,
it’s all about combat,
and we wanted to show
that no Battle Masters, and
anyone else who has access
to maneuvers, can, as a part
of their training as a warrior,
have refined other aspects of themselves.
I mean, and people who
have been in militaries
in our own world know this to be true.
I mean, many people,
especially who have gone
through officer’s training,
are extremely well-spoken and
have all sorts of training
that has nothing to do with just combat.
And they’re also great
soldiers, but there’s more.
And so we wanted, in these options,
to show, and there’s more.
Maneuvers are also so fun and so versatile
that we wanted to give
all fighters the option
of dipping into them,
which is why we offer up
this new fighting style,
Superior Technique,
that allows any fighter,
if this option is turned on
in their campaign, to snag a maneuver.
Anyone can already do that
in the Player’s Handbook
using the Martial Adept feat.
– [Todd] Yeah, we can do the
feat, but now this is like–
– But, and not every
group use feat uses feats.
– [Todd] That is also true.
– So, also some of the
options in this document
are about giving people
some of the versatility
that feats provide without
having to use feats.
Because we know that a sort
of narrow majority of groups
don’t actually use
feats, and so, basically,
communicating to people, well, hey,
all the versatility
you want is right there
in the feat system.
That isn’t actually a
satisfying path for some groups
because some groups don’t want to interact
with the feat system.
This is another way for a group
to get some of that versatility
without having to dip into feats,
and also without having to multi-class,
because there are also many people
who love just playing a
single-class character.
@ToddKenreck chats with @JeremyECrawford about the replacements, enhancements & new spells for Fighters, Rangers & their animal companions! https://t.co/zXfUt5O4eB pic.twitter.com/H93j8g4kL4
— D&D Beyond (@DnDBeyond) November 7, 2019