Summon Monster – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

July 26, 2018Zoltar Leave a comment

hello hey twitch welcome back to the mic Merle’s happy fun hour I am your host Mike morals I am the franchise creative director on Dungeons & Dragons and this week we have something kind of fun to talk about so they call me Tim you took dad to off took time off work early for this why hope it lives up to it because I think this is gonna be really fun so the last week we did some monsters before that we did some monsters and week before that we did psionics and as part of psionics we talked about doing class the shaper that could create like creatures kind of like something so the I was thinking a lot about summoning and if you remember right I was looking at the summoning spells like like the casting time is often like a minute and it seems kind of random what you get and so I decided hey would it be interesting to try to tackle somebody named there’s sort of a different route the we all said a bunch of announcements yesterday rabbinic and Oberon so that’s all I get me excited and I’ve got this so in chat if you guys have questions about ever on it in rabbika I don’t wanna try to hit them here because I want to focus on what I’m doing game design wise here feel free to get me on Twitter I’m at Mike Merle’s or if you have questions they go ahead and chat just talk amongst ourselves I’m gonna try not to dwell on those though because I don’t want I know some people they call me tomu took time walk off work early for this hopefully this being the design of summoning and pet stuff so I don’t want to like it too distracted and if you’ve watched the stream you know I’m easily distracted I am actually chaotic neutral that is my actual alignment so I don’t want to go wandering off too far but um yeah so if you’ve got questions feel free to hit me up on Twitter and obviously in Chad just just chat if you guys our questions answered back and forth I don’t want to go too uh we should we should probably do something on settings and stuff at some point but the I don’t want to go too far off so game Phantom DM we are back on the Sion somewhat indirectly because I think we’re going to spend the entire hour talking about summoning and then indirectly talking about pets and how those can work because I wanted the I wanted to make sure the soundex worked really well with this idea of summoning and creating you know creatures with sonic energy and it’s obviously sending them out your enemies having them do stuff you know a summoning approach it’s a bit more flexible than what’s in the players in book right now kind of tank with the idea of actually building a druid subclass the shaman to show this off but I don’t think we need to do that because I think we just need to walk through how I want to approach something lying faith question here will there be more key in warlock spell casting classes respects maybe um the probably those will just end up within those classes the monk using key the warlock using ink you know a short rest recharge on spell slots we definitely have a real compelling reason to build an entire new class when that chassis is already there often we can get that effect by using with subclasses even within other classes so and this is something here where this is gonna work within our spell slot system so I’m gonna address it purely with in terms of just a generic summoning spell and what that might mean so the game phantom this is more like a new spell that would just slot straight into the game it exists so it’s gonna be we’ll see it’s not really it’s not meant to replace what’s in there in the players handbook it’s make to complement because it’s gonna take a little bit of a different approach so you can see looming behind my head and coming into view is this spreadsheet I poked away at this last night because I had this really useful potentially we’ll see chat you might hate this then well no it’s not useful but this revelation about summoning and there’s a table the Dungeon Master’s guide that it’s this table right here coincidentally enough I happen to have a copy on my desktop the that tells you what I spell slot of a given level is worth in terms of damage and what is interesting here is that this doesn’t apply just damage it applies to healing and so I was stuck in traffic yesterday I’m thinking about this and it’s really hot up here in Seattle and I’m stuck in traffic cuz I completely screwed up and went the wrong way there’s a street shutdown and for some reason I’m driving toward that Street rather than away from it because I’m just being stupid and I realized wait a second these dimmers also apply to healing healing does just hit points coming back into the system and the characters who can think of it as a system of hit points they take damage hit points get knocked out we throw a healing spell we put it spit points back in your maximum hit points are sort of your ceiling you can’t get too many hit points pop a blob well these could just be the hit dice or hit points for a summoned creature and then some of those dice could just be the damage that that summoned creature does and since remember when we were talking about monsters we said look really we kind of expect a fight to last for three rounds three rounds is long enough that it can feature multiple abilities off work off a character or monster it’s short enough that it feels kind of predictable we can just take your top three most powerful things once a fight goes to four more rounds there’s enough randomness and you’re probably dealing with a big in a fight and big enough area that’s it starts to if you try to model that out too precisely you just end up with very very scripted feeling system so we just really look at your top three things and go from there well that’s actually kind of a nice thing because I only have to worry about those first three rounds of damage if you get more rounds that’s just bonus you know well played so what we’re looking at and rad like asks the question how do we use multiple summons love bogging down the action economy I try to think of that too and I think I have an answer but we’ll see we’ll see we’ll see so okay the what this revelation meant was you could take a first level spell slot and say hey this could summon a creature that has one D ten hit points that’s it’s hid died and over the course of three rounds does a total of one D ten damage no that’s a that’s like whoa hey that could totally work no that’s kind of a lame creature though right one D ten damage it’s like five point five on the average over three rounds that’s less than two points of damage great I summon something with like sixty points that if it hits those two points of damage hurray summoning right like that that’s not exciting then I thought of sanics we’ve talked about Sonic’s being able to label ladle on more slots on two one effect to change it make it more powerful so what if we instead said hey I want some of the creatures so I spend a first little spell slot to create that creature summon it it’s kind of weak it’s whatever it is it’s got one D 10 hit died and it’s doing two dansk around then I threw another switch first of all spell slot on it to augment it now maybe it’s doing four damage per round it has 11 hit points instead of five five or six and then it started to make sense to me okay so I have a creature I’m summoning and I can just put more spell slots into it to make it more powerful just like we talked about doing with psyonix right I have a if you’ve missed the sonic streams we talked about doing was having this set of can trips that required concentration and while you’re concentrating on that can trip you can expend spell slots to generate new effects either completely new effects or in this case I might have a canned trip level summon is my imaginary friend so I kind of thought of it shows up and then I spend my spell slots to get my imaginary friend more hit points and better attack give him special effects or benefits things like that so there we go yeah and Mad Hatter up yet and this is probably some sort of bonus action effect right like I just do it ladle it on top but also I’m doing my critter runs and does things and I’m still using spells because this takes concentration I’m not I don’t have the full access to everything I could do and there we go it starts to keep things a little bit simpler and then since I’m expending my spell slots there’s a clear cost for this if I just want to summon a monster in our creature whatever and say hey I just want you to block this door if remember we talked about this last week this is one of the over couple weeks ago the the real tricky thing about pets and monsters is battlefield control it’s not necessarily the damage output it’s not necessarily you know the effects they bring with them though it can be if there’s that does happen but the real thing that happens is you can summon a creature and then just block off part of an encounter area you can you know you can summon a creature to have a ghost scout ahead you can have it summon a creature have a ghost set off a trap and it’s a it’s a 10 D 10 damage trap well my three hit points summon creature goes triggers it gets killed whatever is just a personal spell side I don’t care I move on the and that’s kind of what okay so this is actually now there is more of a cost to it rather than what is maybe happen if something in the past so going back the trap example what you might do is I’m gonna summon eight little creatures now I’ve got eight little trap trigger guys I can deploy the next eight traps we are we have a get-out-of-jail-free cards for them so this is a way in which hopefully we can make summoning really fun and compelling but happy appropriately costed and then what I actually like about is I thought about it you know that emotional level of the design and playtesting will tell will tell us if this actually works but I like this idea that I summon a thing and then it’s like I have a relationship with it I can give it abilities its Politan really hurts well I’m gonna spend a spell slot to give it some more hit dice that’ll increase its maximum and current hit points that’s why I imagine so my summon creatures guarding the doorway and the orcs trying to batter through and he gets really beaten up okay great my turn bonus action either a third level slot on it give him five D ten more hit points and then I fire bolt the orc in the face is trying to get through you know things like that and then my summon creature takes his turn and smacks the orc you know things like that so that is kind of the idea here that could also apply to a pet creature though I’m not gonna worry about the pet right now I really want to focus on the summoning somebody and how that might work so what I think this is to start with I’m gonna make a spell so but I haven’t made a spell on stream before and I don’t like making us what I don’t like that only it’s not expensive I’ll be honest with you had only designing spells so that spells the game’s like hundreds of them why do I need more right the the incremental benefit of one spell when you’ve like 5,000 in the game is just tiny right compared to like adding a new class we only have like twelve so but we’ll do this and I’m gonna kind of write this out I have my word document here what I want to do is call up DNA beyond because when you’re designing something we never we never assume we remember we always assume we’re gonna forget so we always go back and we look at what exists and make sure we’re getting it right so what I want to do here is just look at all my spells I’m just gonna grab a summoning spell at random right well nice things on Deenie beyond is that I can go to my advanced filters go to tags and I’m pretty sure I’ve got a summoning tag handily and quite usefully added and then I’ll just come down here and go both my spells let’s see what we got all right and so I’m gonna grab now want this be a bonus action no there’s no bonus action summoning spells in the game right now so I’m just going to grab the closest element I’m gonna stay away from the the grave the demon spells just cuz I know those come with a cost the so I’m gonna throw up here and go hey look we got Condor animals is one action great boom so I’m gonna use this as my guide now make this at the actually wearing two columns so we should be fine okay I’m gonna try to keep an eye on where my head is so actually know what I’ll just reverse these because the spell is not as important as the so what I want I’m just gonna call this monster summoning or I guess we do like verb than thing that’s coming out of it so I’m now gonna murder our format because I forget what the actual format looks like the I’ll clean it up so summon monster this is when you spell that scales up just like a lot of our spells do we imagine miss a lot of that connect spells come in at low levels and scale up this would be the same thing the you know actually it’s really fun to consider like this format is not the permit we use in our book so I’m just gonna make something up the information is going up on screen will see it it’s it’s cool I’m a professional don’t worry the is I find it weird sorry the comic tome and see this is funny once i like call it someone like i keep seeing the thing yeah psychokinesis Terkel apathy those are act we did touch on those the question is why haven’t i touched those yet those when we did do the wizard one i touched on that a bit it’s interesting cuz it’s not really something that is like massively new but it gets into the what i want to talk in with sign axes like this solve summoning solve the things that are like we can’t do right now then everything else will fall into place so the only take a quick looks you have any questions so far so then make sure I’m not lying the fake up a question show the very to really be we work and said you should the Beastmaster me work that’s an interesting you know it might be the depend on this expiration we might find there’s a better way to approach the Beastmaster style design and just do a new subclass which would actually solve a lot of our the issues that we see monka for ailments rework I don’t you know I think it’s more likely and the chamber warlock – something falling under here what I would want to do let’s say I do this stuff and it’s amazing I never was like this is how everything should be done from beginning this is the most likely just to end up in new options you can add to the game we’re trying to avoid going back and rewriting the players handbook we’ve sold a lot of players handbooks and we don’t want to create a disconnect in the audience whenever possible we can solve a problem by offering you a new feature that can rest aside the existing features but that’s hitting the target of what people want that I feel is a good good path forward and as I mentioned went back we’re looking at the Ranger if we had something which we felt really was just a pure replacement we would try to get that out there for free right we wouldn’t expect you like hey you really like playing like you know the Beast Master Ranger you really like it but you’re really frustrated we’ll make it available to through DMS Guild and through DDD Beyond without charge because we that’s kind of a make good you know we kind of promised you you could play this and if you’re trying to play it and you’re frustrated by it we don’t you feel like oh now you have to go buy this book to make the game work you know that that’s never feeling we want people to have so the it is funny – they can we think of things that are broken one thing I will say I was making up some pre gen characters over the weekend and you know I know the champion is a design that I’m not necessarily crazy about and I know people have some issues with but I made like a half work champion and you know a half work on a crit gets an extra extra die of damage and that half work champion with a great axe like that’s funny up that’s a go okay this is where this could work you know it’s hard for us to just say like something just doesn’t flat-out work because might be someone out there playing that you know a character who’s built to do crits who’s playing a champion who feels like oh this is great it’s exactly I want I like creating a lot this is really working the but yeah so it’s that we don’t want to just erase things and put new things like putting things alongside then essentially letting the market place you players everyone watching includes me – I play the game and let them just kind of decide what they want so okay so looking down here would be possible some of the creature and just have a really high AC but no attacks like ten eight points it’s High Noon that is a great question because what we want to make sure in this system is we don’t let you change a weakness into a strength by that I mean often in games and we have this concept of hey you give up this to get that which can work as long as the this year giving up is something you value in competitive games what players will always attempt to do is say I want to give up something I don’t care about and get something I really care about so I’m always wary of that approach because it is easy to put yourself in a position of let’s go back my earlier example my summon creatures blocking a doorway I just want to max out it’s it’s AC and it’s hit points and pour resources into that I would want that to be something where you just are expending resources to get that not well normally this is the number of points I’d get for a third level slot but I’m I’m getting that with a first or second level slot because I’ve decided to not give it an offensive upgrade I prefer especially needy to just say this is what this costs and it just you know let’s not attach the drawback to it so try to avoid that because again then you just end up in situations where let’s erase the drawback now I’m ahead of the curve it makes all the sense in competitive games because that’s part of the puzzle but not necessarily doesn’t necessary fit into D&D so I prefer that to be more restrict acting like when you’re playing the game you realize hey we can normally this would be a weakness but because of the situation we’ve engineered through clever play we’ve been able to overcome this drawback so yeah things like you know turning the narrow hallway only one you know the only one monster can approaches at a time things like that it’s more tactical rather than it’s just baked into my character that I just I just have this button I press and this thing happens so okay so let’s talk about the spell so I wanted to be a first level conjuration spell get my formatting everything’s me off because I’m just taking notes here I’ll pretty it up and maybe posted to Twitter probably later on this week the casting time it’s going to be an action to summon and then bonus action Dogman and we want our range you know we don’t want the creature to be like just stuck next to you then it spends its first turn just running up things I think like 60 feets pretty reasonable that’s the range on Kandra animals components verbal and somatic that seems fine duration when the thing pops in I think I want this to be something the basic last 24 hours and it’s gonna be concentration schools give me conjuration get us just notes here attack save there’s nothing damage a factory it’s a summoning so I’m not gonna worry about that and so okay so here’s what we go what I want need to do is the you cast the spell you get a creature you’re going to get a basic creature based on the spell slot then when you add spell slots you get to decide what augmentation you want to give the creature the ICO is the question hell okay that’s I thought this question here the all about the eastwards thing Brian O’Brien gold the CEO of Hazzard was on I did an interview state time to eat sports waste eSports and D&D means more streaming so that’s not it’s just more when you’re on TV live TV give me an interview you’re not gonna take like hey let’s explain everything across the board though an east they will be kind of interesting we were talking about that this morning what would like a battle royale game look like for D&D what we settled on was you get to play as a bunch of monsters so the maybe you start out as a kobold and you level up to like him at should become a beholder or maybe just start as a beholder cuz that’d be fun and then you play all the crazy wacky monsters the anyways the yeah so it’s not like DNA like we don’t see competitive D&D you know it’s not something we see as we wouldn’t do they would just depend on the platform and where we’re trying to go for though uh yeah if people really want to do something along that line and there’s been events you know that people have brought that but yeah it’s not if we did something that it wouldn’t it wouldn’t change the role-playing game the role-playing game is what it is that wouldn’t you know I guess it was less we saw a demand for it people we really want to try this then we try to find a way to make it work so okay so this is basically my skeleton here and so I’m gonna bullet point out so there’s gonna be things you spell slot determines the few effects I’m not gonna start adding layers of bullet points buts gonna be size hit points protects the rest of the stuff will kind of get to will see but this is this is enough for the chassis to build the creature we want the when are the Matt question is this gonna be a concentration loss means monster goes poor a monster goes berserk good goal that’s and should me think okay I think it’d be this concentration I don’t want you just to lose the spell so oh maybe this shouldn’t be a concentration spell you know exercise I think about it I think making this not a concentration spell actually might make more sense because it’s got hit points and someone could just smack it and kill it so I’m gonna take concentration off you know what call me crazy chat go ahead type in I’m crazy but I’m gonna take that off cuz I think it’s unfair if I summon the creature I want to throw a Sheila faith on it why not why can’t I do that I’m not gonna say you can’t I’ll have to play dice to tell me we can the and so the what we got here so then basically what we need to do is take this table that I have in PDF format here and just again I’m just gonna rough out what these things might look like so let’s go over to here it’s your my head my heads clipping the level five and lower off so I’ll just so as a rough estimate I’m just gonna create create really I’m actually you know we’re in hack ville or just hacking around if we actually build a table using the MS or a table tool because those do not transfer over to our layout at all so I’m gonna go full screen so I’m trying to run with the table tool is here we go so obviously I want a table that’s gonna be for cross and let’s just do this number down so spell level sighs uh-huh cancel pit points and then tax and slash damage so what I want to do with this table is just really here I’ll do this oops very quickly translate over this now my head’s in the way so we’ll go over here my giant block yeah there we go so let me walk you through what this spreadsheets doing the I don’t take a quick look any questions in chat let’s see how many summons can I have a good question Beauty do be the UM I think I’m gonna limit you don’t want to start with we’ll start with one and then we’ll see can you do multiple summons the main thing is handling time and then just that area control I’d rather have you scale up a monster size and say now I control more of the battlefield of the counter area rather than say you get like eight summons because it also really can really slow the game down very quickly the be persnickety and I just want to bold this just my things so then we’ll just go hey one two three four five six let’s see it looks like okay cut off a little bit I’ll do the rest we get to it so I think what we want to start with is I just do here it’s gonna start it’s assumed size medium until I have a reason to do otherwise and so then this is our basic entry-level summoned creature so I summon a creature what do I get the augments will use a different table again this is just what kind of Hagin this thing together see what we end up with so looking at the spreadsheet this one I worked on last night I just took spell level I took that table earlier we said we saw how many D tens of damages spell is worth put that here these are our D tens I did not write 15 D 10 because I want to be able to write Excel equations without having to like wear what strip out the D 10 notation so I just threw in the number of D tens here we go we’ll do this this would be clear and then this was an estimate now these numbers are actually a kind of bogus because this is just the assuming all those get get got turned into hit points so it was a deed to D 10 creature it had 98 points I don’t want that I wanted to be 5050 so guess what you get to watch me very carefully right there very complicated Excel equation I know if you can see this what I’m writing is I’m going to multiply the D tens row the number of dice by 4.5 which is a d8 reserved size medium hit die and then I’m just going to divide it by two because basically what I’m doing is I’m splitting in half the value of the spell slot between attack and defense this is a bit bogus because I don’t think my damage I want my damage to scale up that way but it’s a good starting point and then I actually have to do the same thing over here I can’t just whatever we’ll just do this goals gonna take B to multiply it by 4.5 I’ll just use D eights cuz that’s no this is D tens loops look like that and then divide by 2 so this is a sort of total damage output you’d expect the spell to have now because we expect this thing to last three rounds the tip of a fight the we would have divided by three so this is just going to be equals this now that’s a really low number we’re not surprised that’s only a first of all swimming so this gives us our baseline the okay so what we’re looking at here is we’ve got given a spell of level X 1 to 9 if I was just to take the die expression from the dmg the number of D tens that this is worth and then say how many hit points for this thing have and how much damage should it do total and then per round for three rounds and in fact to be fair I should probably actually make this 5 it should just be equal so essentially use some of the creature and it’s going to have hit points and then it’s going to do damage equal to its hit points but we’re breaking that up for three rounds the nice thing about this though is you can see if I have a level one summon it’s gonna have about five or six eight points it’s doing two damage around so it’s like doing a one D for damage with no modifiers we’re got to kind of hack things up it’s not gonna be like a monster in full like minister I’m adding modifiers and whatnot to its damage just again I just want to get this thing a functional I’m not gonna try to get it perfect but that is not necessarily super exciting but it’s a starting point often just getting the first sort of pylons down your foundations there and I can start building on top of it that’s what you need what starts getting interesting to me though is again what I can do to augment these because what I imagine is getting a creature and having it hanging around 24 hours is really good it’s very useful so the and so I imagine is you probably don’t want to invest a couple spell slots into attacks to make this shine now one thing that the members with the keep an idea in context oh and I’m gonna just make it up myself leaning baseline AC speed etc so some point we have to decide what’s our starting point to give you a sort of preview we’d assume that AC should be something reasonable it’s not like oh it’s a c10 that does this expend a spell to make it not terrible it’d probably come in like what I would do is take a look at like what’s a C 15 or 16 to be good starting point that’s what an AC that a lot of characters can hit pretty easily at first level you figure a rogue with leather armor at a deck 16 is gonna have an AC 14 anyone heavy armor is gonna have AC 16 or out of the box 18 with the shield even a wizard or any caster with me armor can hit that so it’s not it’s not that super super crazy the and so with that in mind let’s take a look at the spell progression for let’s say a wizard or let’s say druid right cuz druids and something were a kind of a thing that feels kind of like that somatically feels like you know appropriate that doesn’t matter they all at the same spell progression I just we haven’t talked about the druid in the stream before so why not show the druid off can see this cool art the my head’s not in the way okay so let’s take a quick look at the spell progression so let me see if I can explode this up there we go yeah it looks pretty real so we see a first of all Germans gonna have to first level spell slots by the time you get a third level you for first level on to second level so if we assume that you’re gonna have to invest to spell slots at a minimum you know first of all spell slots just to kind of get something that’s not it can be a bit more active the that seems kind of reasonable around third and fourth levels when you first start actually doing this a lot I’m okay for not doing this at first and second level all that much because when we think of summoning it’s adding complexities of the game it’s giving the party more stuff to do we said it said we have more actions we have more battlefield control which having more people and just gives me more options right you can just get this thing can just it’s it’s another character you get the boss around the other nice thing is we do need have designed the game set first and second that will sugar by go by pretty quickly so I’m not too worried if a lot of casters are waiting now if you are really dedicated to seminole what I probably want to do is create a subclass that in augment your ability to summon and maybe you are the player at first souls just like no I’m spending both my first of all spell slots to summon something and then I might have a class feature depending on the class I’m playing that improves that but but I’m okay with you not being so great at it out of the gate it probably means something like a you know a healing class with summoning like there’s gonna be a natural tension there but that exists anyways you know we don’t assume people are healing we assumed they’re their cannon because they want to we don’t sort of make other things cheaper to encourage you to heal we just make everything cost whaa costs and you decide what you want to do so okay let me do a quick look of questions here the okay so there we go so I feel like that’s a half tease in place so I go back to here and my my table here oops my spreadsheet here and I put this over here if I was just to translate this over I could prop a cat at first level again just going straight by this have a creature with 11 hit points and that’s doing like 1b 4 damage per strike it’s not super good but it could be useful as soon as I get a second level spell slot I’ve got a creature with 90 points now the damage here this is probably a little too well it’s only 2.8 I think back the envelope but I’d want to do is that you’re getting about it know if this a second level spell slots probably get you a d6 we’d probably just round up I’m not too worried about over the course of three rounds or doing an additional 2.1 damage that’s not it’s not the end of the world we don’t we don’t get that finicky it isn’t until level fourth double slot this always throws me off by the way that the that’s a row five little four is getting a d-10 so what that tells me is I’m probably gonna make this you know what I think this is probably maybe even approach you the base summoning spell is gonna give you this things form its hit points and its size and then what I probably want to do then is have an augment to give it an attack because then even at low levels okay this thing’s kind of durable I can still use it to like defend I can still use it to like a lock down an area I can still have it scout ahead things like that the yeah magda but you can stick and drop will someone I just grab them and help out the rest the party grappling in fifth all it does is it reduces your speed to zero it doesn’t give it’s not until you get to the not entangled I was restrained that you’re actually giving out advantage so that’s actually something that could um that could work pretty well okay so here’s what we’re gonna do here we’re gonna blow this is we’re gonna add another column here who fancy when insert a column and then what I want to be able to do is just say total value so what I’m doing is I’m gonna make a column that just shows my total sort of hit point and damage value combined just for use a reference here keep that point duplicate that and rather than just have a raw calculation I want to that want I want a g4 of damage and I’m okay with that being 5.5 coming out of this and want the rest going into head points so I’m just gonna say this is five point five because I what I want to do then say is this equals c2 minus e2 there we go and now I’m getting numbers that look a bit more useful in terms of hit points so scaling up much quicker especially at low levels because I’m keeping my damaged static so this is my damage my total damage takes a big chunk out but then as I just everything else gets pushed over to hit points I see a nice quick bump here so my first of all spot my first of all summons stays the same but my second level summons has 11 hit points for that spell slot and a D for day and it so this is yeah so this feels pretty good if I’m coming with a base summoned creature this is the number of hit points I’m getting on that creature and it’s got a D for attack without a modifier it gets one attack if I want to make it offensive I had to put a spell slot into it if I wanna make a defensive about to put another spell slot into it and defensive imagine would be it has more hit points and maybe has an ability to protect people around it so yeah I kind of like that how do you guys feel about that the they call me tell me why is this someone looking so much phenomenally better than say fine grater steed this isn’t flying on if I remember right from fine grater steed that is flying is very expensive in 5th ed paranthas oom dunder so I can see everything here flying you you get charged a lot to fly that’s why there’s like some DMS really don’t like the Eric okra the they find out yeah it’s just too good at first so a creature that just at first of all can just fly that TRO a lotta DMS really just feels like it’s just – it’s two fleets it’s far too flexible for the party to have access to so when you’re going yes you get a pair eaten I mean you can get a Rhino like so here’s how this spell works you can choose a Griffon a Pegasus or Parrington or you can choose something else really because the flying creatures on the list here it pushes it up the now we look at the saber-tooth tiger this thing has 52 hit points and let’s see let’s actually look at its full step like this is our fourth level spell 52 hit points and it’s dealing 10 damage on a hit okay so 52 and 10 for level 4 let’s look at our spreadsheet level for spell so actually we’re getting this thing is actually coming up behind it so now the other thing to keep in mind here is that this is also a 1-minute spell casting time sorry casting time 10 minutes so you’ve got to be ready like you need a lot of time to bring this thing in the yeah now that is something that we have to keep in mind this is all sort of theory crafting then we have to actually look at the spells that are here the cossack 1:59 you can I summon a level 2 creature but with two levels added to it so here’s how I would want this to work going back to our spreadsheet I cast an initial summoning spell that’s summoning spell based on its level here and is that big enough yet it looks like it’s big enough to OPI chiming in shadow this is big enough cast a spell I pick the the spell slot I want to cast that gives me some initial values I can then expand further spell slots to augment its hit points it’s a it’s attack or them potentially give it other special abilities and I pictures being dynamic that I can probably expend spell slots to essentially yeah peel it there should be a healing effect I can basically replenish its hit points probably to discount because you’ve already committed to the creature to keep it standing so and these would be one action to summon and they act as soon as they show up so the so yeah and it might be beauty by approach it might be the idea ten minutes summon and then you keep it around and then Ahmad wenting is in action will see part of it’s going to come down to how these stack up to everything that’s out there because of the existing you know let’s just do that right now why am I sort of beating on bush let’s reset all our filters then let’s vote you are summoned tagged and let’s just see where we ended up all right I’m gonna choose I’m gonna go with well we have one actually ever Kandra animals its duration is an hour let’s just go challenge two so and challenge two giant boar let’s go the giant boar so an ax murder I forgot what’s fellas level to spell right little three spill some this is what Mike my level three summon currently gets me and hear what I’m saying is 28 hit points and one D for damage so here I’m pretty far by on hit points I’m at 28 verses 42 so this is this armor class is 12 which is lower than what I was looking at as the standard this thing can charge and it’s doing 10 damage on a hit so we’re not super far off we are a little bit behind but we’re not so far off and I’m like oh this is just a bad approach this just needs some more refinement what I suspect is happening here that I’m undervaluing the dislike I’m sorry overvaluing damage right now sticking you in a d4 in a in a vacuum makes sense because I’m just saying hey what’s the mathematical value of this but we have to keep in mind there’s a number of things going on in here this this could be killed so I’ve made an investment for three rounds worth of attacks and I got one we don’t worry about missing because we just kind of assume like we don’t try we don’t normally really like super penalize your offense like your accuracy to give you much bigger damage we do that sometimes it’s not standard typically we just assume a about essentially assuming a plus 3 or plus 4 ability modifier and then the appropriate proficiency bonus based on the character level of the effect so for instance a third level spell we’d assume like okay a fifth level character so proficiency bonus two plus three probably a plus four modifier from a stat so it’s acting its attack when it should be about plus seven so this is probably one thing that’s that I’m off a bit here with this dim it should probably be higher and I’m gonna arbitrarily because there’s nothing nothing more fun than just making arbitrary decisions you know this d4 is probably good here but it’s well but it’s it points are lower there’s a funny thing here it has lower hit points it’s more likely to get splattered but in theory it’s fighting weaker creatures so less likely to kill it one blow but that probably tells me these are probably like it might have to start higher and not scale up as quickly because even like me with 44 hit points for the fifth able spell there aren’t too many things unless you’re really focusing fire typically your tax get broken out rather than just being one big attack that deals 44 you’re dealing like four attacks that do 11 each at like you know see our nine creatures and that in that neighborhood so it’s gonna hit you with everything or two hits in a crit thereabouts so it’s a very long way of saying I think that this damage has to start higher and can scale up slowly because the threat of the creature getting struck down in one round does go down a little bit as I go up in level so I’m gonna get more reassured payback on my my investment for three rounds of damage so I’m gonna arbitrarily do this this is always this is a fun thing that’s when you’re like doing some real deep game design I do this I’m just gonna peg the damage at d6 to start with I mean sometimes you just sort of like you take an estimate and it you see where it goes let’s do one d6 let’s do one D 8 D 1 D 10 and let’s keep it at 1 d 10 for a few levels let’s go up to 2 d6 again this is just back the envelope right here it’s the Wild West but I had that to me starts to be more of a reasonable thing we might even want to add your caching ability mod to this because we might find it’s just not quite having the impact we want again we had while this is the strict map mathematical reflection of the value it’s not capturing the context again you could just kill the creature then you’ve lost your investment the and the important thing there is that’s an opportunity cost the monster has attacked the creature rather than attack a party member which is nice but that could also be an AoE that’s capturing the creature regardless so there’s really is no opportunity cost there and you have spent a spell slot on it so you should get some more reliable return on your investment unless the enemy is also using for instance a counter spell or a disability they’re burning a limited resource to deal with it so it’s not an exact thing you know this is gonna be kind of one of the things we get to kind of look at it and get a sense of the feel of how this is gonna play out what typically happens my experience is you kinda have this phase to start the math you go to this phase where chuckling dealing what feel then you’re gonna loop back to the map once you start actually playing and you just yeah this is kind of thing it’s gonna feel too good or too weak and then you’ll take a look at the math and you’ll see okay here’s where it’s happening we need to bump this up by a kadai or bump it down by a couple points so the okay so we have here a model we have here a creature that I can get with a third level spell I’m looking at my third level spell here and seeing one d-10 damaged it’s not too far off it’s like half the damage here again this guy might be a little inaccurate compared to where this guy is gonna end up but we are we are not home yet but we’re in the right neighborhood so I feel like that’s a pretty good starting point so then what I want to do is what I imagine how the spell will work is let us be a table you have a stop lock and then you have a table that’ll tell you here the pieces to drop in so any questions so far let’s see where we got here the well pokeballs comes an arcane focus our train Derek I guess they could write the over super you skip what you also can’t buff a conjurer element with other spells that’s right because you’ve got if I remember right these summons are concentration so that is also a benefit you’re getting with this spell so and again that’s one of those things that you can’t really put a hard cost on it too easily you’re you can’t put a hard cost on it that is it cost the system math tells you you have to kind of estimate it based on your field all right so the tennis Toto summoners con mod to hit point and in modded image yeah I think will do something like that I like the feeling of like that your ability scores matter and so I think it might just be casting stat all the way around because I just might be a little easier that is a bigger number it might distort the hit points here but we have ways which we can kind of if we’re using hit dies can kind of decrement those a little bit to account for a mod coming in that’s also why we wouldn’t well we wouldn’t a Sarah want to use two mods like say hey it’s your casting mod for this and your con mod for that because that’s less predictable and if this is something it’s me very signature for people we want the nature the effect to be fairly predictable in the sense of I just seem a summoning druid I just max on my wisdom I know my summons are gonna be as tough and is damaging as they need to be I don’t then have to because of a spell and start thinking of another ability score that’s why in fifth edition if you’re a wizard and you make an attack with a spell user intelligence modifier rather than your dexterity and three five used your dexterity but what it meant was kind of hidden within the game you had to figure out that if I was going to take scorching Ray that I needed a good dexterity to actually make that work the so we wanted to move away from that but just keeping things more straightforward so okay they call me Tommen would disavow magic and this yeah it actually it would the as written right now and you know I’d have to think about what we’d want to do the one where II there would be I stack multiple slots into it to some of the creature and then one spell counters act that might not be what we want so don’t think about it it is a little bit so alright so the what might be to speak you know I could this is something I could imagine easily is that what it might do is might dispel one of the effects on it and you have to like you take out each spell at a time the but that’s something which we do more in the refine in phase so this is a half-decent starting point I’m comfortable here using this I am just gonna throw in these numbers here for now my notes my spreadsheet to refer to needless to say this is something we require a lot of testing the it’s a great example of something where math well mathematical analysis of system is very good if you’re dealing with two existing practices because that’s a like versus like we’re dealing with something that’s doing something essentially completely new or the comparisons like the existing summoning spells are so different that you can’t be confident that that is a one-to-one relationship it gets a little bit harder to just sorta to theory craft that’s a theory crafting is very useful it gives you a very good starting point especially for what your issues might be but it doesn’t it’s more theory crafting is very good to determine what you’re now going to argue about then rather necessarily tell you what the answer is the but like I said it’s still it’s very it’s a useful tool to have I’m gonna keep this damaged these hit points where I’m just sort of charging you 5.5 total damage even though this is going up again that’s kind of reflecting my I think that this initial approach was under was attaching too much value was overvalued undone driving over valuing the damage output from the summon creature so I’m gonna let that slide I’m not going to try to try to tank with eight points so I’ve got my raw numbers up here still well I think I’m not too worried about this because I look at like the second double spell slot 11 hit points with one d8 damage that’s essentially a first little character get swatted down in one hit pull out of the time but I think I’m okay with this because I think I’m okay if the typical operating procedure is you want to put two spell slots into this to get something that’s gonna be really durable for your your group the so I think I’m okay with that so now I want to add another column here know what ten minutes okay good oh let’s see let’s insert a column to the right and I’m gonna call this points this is pretty simple what we want to say is how many if I expend a spell slot to buff my summon creatures hit points how many points are to get and that’s really easy cuz it’s this column right here right it’s just the numbers right there so I’m just gonna try this a little voodoo and I try to copy a page between programs and see what happens there girls just did it so that’s just how many points you should get we talked with buffing damage this is probably where we need to be a little more precise so I am once again I don’t need this what I’m going to do is I’m gonna change this so instead of dividing my my leftover damage by three I’m just gonna divide the total value of the spell by three and see what like that number okay and I’m seeing some numbers here that already make me pretty happy so the because they are and they are sort of human readable numbers I got a three point seven is great that’s a d6 so the sort of column to the right that’s really tiny because of my thing watching me resize do it this is why it tune in right to watch me move there we go let me buff damage and so if if it’s first level spell saw it gives me three points seven days per round that’s easy that’s plus twenty six it’s my tax in additional d6 damage five point five that’s easy that’s plus one need ten now we start getting these bigger numbers what I’d like to do is since I’ve got I know I’m doing I might start giving you extra attacks so I know that the let’s see 9.2 that’s still it’s gonna say plus 2 D 10 well now I can’t because it the next it’ll cost you 10 I don’t want to give you a tax a lot of extra tax until a higher level that’s to d8 so anyways that’s math we can go through the interesting thing will be once we get up to here when I’m doing 28 extra damage per round I probably want to start making this extra attacks and extra damage and that’s to avoid just the wif factor the one thing that would then say is I can’t throw in a buff that gives me a bunch of extra tax then thrown another buff that further increases my damage so we probably need a rule that says if you apply a buff you use the biggest buff rather than just you can stack all these up we wouldn’t want to do is say like I just pour a ton of low-level slots into a monster my summoned creature now it’s just doing ungodly damage you know it might overshadow the rest of the party so I think what I think we could do is also put it a spell level cap on it you could say for instance if the number gets too big over here we’ll just start saying look you can only go up to a fifth level it’s a little too good to give you this damage all the time because it’s gonna last I mean I’m projecting for three hours per fight but I know ideally if you’re playing smart you want to keep this around for a long time you’re good it’s an interesting thing we’re sort of plays skill we’ll get a better value return here I don’t want to let that return get out of hand so and once I’m seeing plus 2d ten damage on top place so it’s 3d ten damage per hit here that doesn’t feel noxious that feels like okay I feels pretty good I’ve invested a fourth levels two fourth of all spell slots to get this that feels okay but I don’t want these to start turning into this thing is just a you know the damn it starts to feel out of control so okay so let’s take a look at fifth that’s a fourteen point seven damage that’s plus 46 I wanna try to keep it to one attack to so I can avoid that stacking yeah okay I’ve just talked myself into an out of giving this thing multiple attacks especially for handling time I’m okay if you get a little unlucky and you get stuck with okay this thing just whiffed and did no damage I’m okay with that because you know this is something it’s gonna stick around for a while and you’ll have an opportunity next round to have it punch someone else so MD sir ah gee maybe limit limit the duration of the augmentation perhaps I do kind of like the idea that I just alter the stop block then I don’t worry about it again but yeah but that’s something that is actually good lever to have if we find it’s getting out of control we can we can flip that over so I had a fan question can other spells affect this yes enlarge reduce haste slow I’d expect this should be a creature that I can throw their spells on tower mirror thoughts on actual creature type summoned thinkin it might be you know I could see four druids at their beasts I could see four Wizards their elementals I really would want the flavor to drive that so let’s see this is oh yeah this was supposed to be for the shaper so that would yeah the sonic version a probably construct the yes and barracks silver bird this is the shaper Sion this is essentially the spell we’re building out that the shaper is gonna use and that we could potentially adapt to a summoning spell for other casters too let’s see um let’s see what that could think about here anybody questions um does this end on a long rest or can I sleep with it guarding and regain the slots probably I would do is specify that it ends with a long rest the Jessie you’re not carrying it over probably with the began the nice thing is you could have it just keep guard yeah so I’d probably if you if you take a long rest you regain your spell slots that that breaks the duration the yeah so this is okay cool oh it’s in my head to the way the bottom table you let’s swap these over so yeah okay you can see the full table here so yeah kind of think and stop here and it’s one thing which probably do is I thought I would let you buff hitpoints and probably I’m okay with you pouring lots of spell slots to increase its hit points because the what I often find for players in DMS things that feel broken to them are things with more extreme burst potential doing 100 points of damage in a single attack as opposed to the fighter model which is just consistency and giving you more hit points lends itself more consistency you know I can hold down this area I could block the story for a long while well the party hides behind the creature of things like that the saw I think I’ve earned the side of making it more durable rather than letting it just throw out tons of damage the oh and the I hit 24 yes okay probably iterations probably 24 hours or a long rest so whichever comes first the will it be able to go get talk about the Vienna document I think well that’s kind of funny things I think you’d want it to be like pretty independence you can have a go around and do stuff because in I feel like oh I’ve got my pot of summoned paddock and go do stuff for me you can clean my room right the so yeah the will the be any way to add special features monster with just basic attacks nothing else is pretty boring honestly yeah that is exactly what I’d want to do and that’s where I would see the shaper effects coming in we talked about things like I’m not giving people motion sickness by going up and down this file um like the vision I had the kind of the iconic thing was the shaper looks across the room into the eye of the you know the ogre chieftain and plucks out his greatest fear and then shapes a creature summon creature that looks like that thing and the ogre chicken screams in terror right so definitely and that’s where I see a lot of the additional spells on the spell list for the shaper being these augments what I wanted to build today was just the basic chassis to get a snap lock in your hands for summon creature so this is a pretty good starting point we’ve got our weight and I think that this spell comes with buffing damage and buffing hit points and I imagine when you throw a buff hit point on the creature you’re increasing its current in maximum it’s probably another column here that’s a healing column where you might get this at a bit of a discount it might shift up one column that might be too good the but you’re probably if you’re not increasing your maximum you’re just filling back up to it I think it’s me worth of it more than this the yum this might be something where you also you only take the highest one you’ve given like the damage I can’t do 46 then pop two for several slots ditional to d6 so that would make the healing a bit more useful the human owe to someone who’s is yeah I think this was kind of a fun thing is now as I’m thinking about it is there might be ways to like essentially put templates on these things and it might be you could learn them by class you can learn them at a spell you learn like there could be someone who’s there could be summon beast and then you get some basic flavorful elements like the use might be its basic attack is acid the beasts would be like your choice of bludgeoning piercing or slashing so I think it’s probably like this chassis would then get adapted yeah that might make a lot of sense where the shapers might be like some an astral construct and it gives you a construct with some basic thing maybe it’s doing a psychic damage with its attacks and then we can make one for Druids you can make for druids could have summon beast and like maybe summon totem wizards could get like summon elemental source wizards and sorcerers warlocks could get like summon fiend and then you get some other cool effects I really want this in my game now I really want this in my game that’s the fun thing about it is you could really gate access to the spell through subclasses or through choices so how do you feel about this everyone feel like this is making sense does this feel like a good place to start I mean obviously the math I just can’t I just want to get in the neighborhood it’s not necessarily coming home yet the zones fact meeting right who’s that ever again it’s not concentration barbarians okay now I want to make that we did that remember the disaster barbarian we had this idea that he could like summon creatures like I loved it the Barbarian radio is like a fire lentil appears around him it’s just someone oh and I actually want to I want to design that okay okay so I think we’re pretty good okay so this is something where we’re gonna play around with it yeah alder brain warlock could summon a gaze to see is a child our King Butterfree thanks always appreciate the compliments okay cool I think yeah I was to me this is something I get excited this at the stage in design when it’s like I want to make a bunch of things using this the danger is you don’t want to fall so in love with this that you just then start charging forward even as cracks start to appear so this is something where playtesting is really going to start giving us some proof points here and while I let’s say this is this is something I was working on like a product at this stage I’d want to just like stop make the simplest implementation of this table and the spell you see and do some testing with it just build out what are these stat blocks look like look at them compared to think this is when you have to don’t rush ahead don’t start getting the specific concepts of cause I’m in fiend 7 news someone this and that some and everything right we want to take a moment go duh is this a strong foundation let’s bang on this a bit do these numbers hold up does this feel good in play then put the energy indeed those flourishes don’t don’t start decorating the cake before it’s baked right you don’t want to like you’ve got your batter and it’s cooking you’re throwing the frosting and the decorate now it’s gonna be a mess so let give it time let it bake it’s you know if if you watch baking shows or you know it’s like baking it’s been more art than science or is it the reverse either way give it time give it time in the oven put the hard work into it test it out don’t what often I find was and designers have problems is they fall in love with an idea they throw a ton of work into it too early they haven’t proved out the basic foundation so they throw in all this flourish work and then they start throwing good good effort after bad it’s a path that really like no it’s time to fall back and take a new route beef like I put so much work into a nod I’m throwing all this stuff out you want to be cautious at the initial stages of this design it’s good that I’m feeling excited but it’s also a warning sign that I need to make sure I pump the brakes don’t get too far ahead of myself and make sure I’m doing the frankly it would be kind of boring work of verifying that this is functional it probably needs some more tweaks but before I start going hog-wild with it I’ve got to make sure that I’ve got a strong foundation of building on all right yeah shell off the magnanimous sunk cost fallacy but in design exactly so so that’s it for this week next week we’ll pick this up this coming actually I think I’m on the next segment for the stream we’re gonna talk about the founders of legends day this coming weekend on Saturday I’m going on to LA to stream another D&D game not quite following up with the same basic concept as the stream of many is we’re gonna be celebrating the legacy and memory of Gary Gygax and other folks who helped create Dungeons and Dragons so I’m super excited I’m gonna probably have to go next door to start streaming over there I try to get a lot of water first though I am partial as they say so um I will see you all next week and on Twitter if I have any more breakthroughs with this stuff I’ll tweet I’ll tweet them out I made a Mike mortal soul one word all right so until next week take care and I will see probably a few even just a couple six around I’ll just see you in a couple more minutes so take care

UA Destruction and Darkness domains for clerics!

July 20, 2018Zoltar 1 Comment

Requests for Darkness and Destruction. Working on Moon, conceptually trickier, want to hit the right tone with that one. Maybe tomorrow. Destruction Domain
Custom built for clerics of Grummsh, and perhaps Tiamat
Destruction Domain Spells aeric Level spells 1st inflict wounds, wrathful smite 3rd enlarge/reduce, shatter 5th fireball, lightning bolt 7th ice storm, staggering smite 9th doud kill, destruct. wave Armed for Destruction When you choose this domain at 1st level, you gain proficiency with martial weapons.
Destructive Fury Starting at 1st level, you can channel divine energy to enter a destructive frenzy. As a bonus action, you gain 5 temporary hit points and a +1 bonus to weapon damage rolls. This benefit lasts for one minute. Once you use this ability, you cannot use it again until you complete a short or long rest. When you use this ability, you can expend a spell slot to augment its effects. You gain additional temporary hit points equal to three times the sloes level and a bonus to weapon damage rolls equal to half the sloes level (minimum 1). This benefit lasts for one minute.
Channel Divinity: Sundering Invocation Starting at 2nd level, you can use your Channel Divinity. to channel destructive energy. As an action, you touch a creature or a an unattended object within reach. A creature must make a Constitution saving throw, taking 5 times your cleric level thunder damage on a failed saving throw and half as much on a successful one. An unattended object takes 5 times your cleric level thunder damage.
Appetite for Destruction Starting at 6th level, your destructive acts fuel further expressions of devastation. If you kill a creature or destroy an object with a weapon attack, you can use your reaction to immediately make one additional weapon attack.
You can use this ability a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum 1). You regain all expended uses when you complete a long rest.
Divine Strike Starting at 8th level, you gain the ability to infuse your weapon strikes with divine energy. Once on each of your turns when you hit a creature with a weapon attack, you can cause the attack to deal an extra 1d8 thunder damage to the target When you reach 14th level, the extra damage increases to 2d8.
Hand of Devastation Starting at 17th level, your spells deliver exceptional power. When you roll damage for a spell, roll twice the listed number of dice. You then choose from among the rolled dice the results you wish to use to determine the spell’s damage. You must select dice that match the quantity and type normally rolled to determine the spell’s damage.

Darkness Domain
u A.
Confidential information of Wizards of the Coast LLC. Do not distribute.
Custom built for clerics of 4clis, and perhaps Lolth.
Darkness Domain Spells Cleric Level Spells ist arms of Mg”, hex 3rd blindness/deafness, darkness Sth fear, vampiric touch 7th blight, Cvard’q black tentades 9th contagion, enervation Child of Night When you choose this domain at 1st level, you gain the chill touch cantrip. If you do not have darkvision, you gain it with orange of 30 feet Shield of Ineffable Darkness Starting at 1st level, you can invoke the power of darkness to punish anyone fool enough to harm you. As a reaction when a creature you can see damages you, you cause that creature to become blinded until the end of your next turn. Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you complete a short or long rest.
Channel Divinity: Shadow Spawn Starting at 2nd level, you can use your Channel Divinity to fade into the darkness. As a bonus action, you become a creature of darkness that can blend into the shadows. You gain advantage on all Dexterity (Stealth) checks. If a creature cannot see you, your spells and attacks deal maximum damage to them. The shadows seem to draw around, as if they seek to protect you. This benefit lasts for one minute.
Hungry Darkness Starting at 6th level, your Shield of Ineffable Darkness becomes more powerful. When you use it, you can select up to three additional, hostile creatures you can see within 30 feet of you. They are also blinded until the end of your next turn. Potent Cantrip Sorting at 8th level, you add your Wisdom modifier to the damage you deal with any cleric cantrip.
Soul of Darkness Sorting at 17th level, you gain strength from darkness. As a bonus action, you fade into the shadows. You regain hit points equal to your cleric level and gain resistance to all damage for one minute. In addition, while this duration lasts you can use a bonus action to teleport up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space you can see that is in dim light or darkness. pic.twitter.com/iewjiEVdvq

— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 8, 2018

Hand of Devastation is simultaneously confusing, too good, and too weak. Might make it much lower level. Basic idea – roll twice the dice, pick the highest half for each die type. Felt pretty chaotically destructive to me, might knock it down to 1st level, since it just scales up

— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) July 8, 2018

The Mystic Class – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

June 8, 2018Zoltar Leave a comment

hey everyone and welcome back to the
micros happy fun hour I’m your host Mike
Murrells franchise creative director for
Dungeons & Dragons I and if maybe
perhaps and we watched the stream of
many I is the last you saw of me on this
stream I was having my three shadow
dragons and my minions of a I guess I
won’t try to beat around the bush of
Vecna who is lurking out in the negative
Material Plane fell to the combined
efforts of four mighty 18th all
characters I hope you tune in if you
haven’t if you didn’t turn it in I check
out the videos we have here on twitch.tv
slash D and E to catch up on all the
action I was but one of many Dungeon
Master’s who ran sessions over the
weekend I had a great time I hope if you
had a chance to check to check it out
and tune in that you had fun and so now
I’m kind of riding my post stream of
many eyes hi to roll on in to some more
design work here on psionics and if
you’re looking I mean obviously the
screens up
I see behind my big blocky head we have
the mystic clasp and a blank Word
document well not quite blank it’s blank
say for two words mystic notes so that
might give you a hint as to what we’re
gonna talk about here today chat we’re
actually to talk about the fighter know
the and we’re gonna talk some more about
say onyx hey so hey it’s good to be back
it’s good to be back in the chat you
know tired of the stream was Ord I
actually I flew back yesterday so I had
a chance to get a good night’s sleep it
turns out don’t sleep very well in
hotels but I sleep pretty well when I’m
at home and our Sheltie puppy is jumping
on my head
chewing on my ear so some reason that
was very relaxing I slept very well the
welcome to any new viewers I hope you
have fun essentially our goal with this
stream is for me to show you live the
creation of essentially the first draft
of new stuff for dd5 right now we’re
doing lots of subclasses we’re doing
psionics right now and what we’re gonna
do today is I’m gonna walk through the
mystic character class
I’ll provide a recap of what we done
with sine X so far surfer Nass context
if you’re new viewer not gonna make it
go back and watch all the videos but
what I want to do today is given what
we’ve done so far let’s take a look at
what the state of the mystic last year
at the end of 2017
what we had and what might change as we
look at the subclasses we’ve built so
the so yeah OMI is my audio coming
through I see doom Drake I’m very quiet
guys if you shot if you’re getting
issues we did have we’re running late
because we’re having some issues with
the mic not this mic the mic that
captures the noise I am the mic that
makes the noise at least on this stream
so anyone else having issues with some
audio just chime in on chat Jeremy here
is keeping an eye on things and we’ll
make sure that we’ve got some looks like
okay so may just be my projection – I
did kind of the Southern California very
dry climate now we’re getting some folks
hearing that it’s a little bit quiet so
I will try to project Oh Jeremy’s
getting up this is getting serious now
so people don’t just lose our audio but
I’ll just keep talking so we have a good
testing the smidge quieter than usual
it’s a little quiet how’s it going now
anyone dmn chime in is a spat tk-421 of
you guys is it getting better I want to
see a couple folks who are still a few
things coming in and I’m quiet this
would be now the first hour it’s a bit
quiet for max volume yeah it does looks
like it’s a bit muffled oh okay much
better now it sounds so it sounds like
everyone sitting getting better now
louder better much better better I think
we’re good alright yes better and
clearer heart rate is Derek cuz I’m
gonna turn it down a bit
alright here we go alright you got if
anyone out there in chat just let me
know if my voice starts to tail off
written like that just let us know like
I said we do kind of coming in we’re a
little bit late cuz I the heroes that
support this stream this week it’s
Jeremy well making sure we get getting
everything going and rolling fine
alright so even loud loud even which is
appropriate come in laude knock loud
noxious so
okay excellent all right so I’ll keep an
eye on shad as we go like I usually do
but again just in case any technical
issues just sound off we’ll see what we
can do to fix them up all right
so let’s recap what we’ve done so far
first of all we’ve had a number of
subclasses we’ve built for existing
character classes that are going to use
psionics Oh
share DVI did Scion beat mystic yes it
did so I think it pains me I’m gonna
tell you Chad it pains me I think we’re
gonna call the class to Sion in my
defense I know initially mystic was not
the most popular choice that’s what they
were gonna call the sanic class back in
the 70s but each generation of gamers
gets the D&D that they need so we’ll
pivot to Sion no problem this is kind of
a case to where as a designer and my and
where I’m sitting I can’t really get
attached to names you know we put things
out there often will like the mystic is
a good example of we could have called
it Sion up front we knew that would have
gone over well sometimes it’s best to
test the change even if you’re not
confident in it just because in this
case since we’re play testing it gives
us the chance to see well how would
people react so anyways yeah we’re gonna
call this class the Sion because that’s
what everyone wants and why not do it
that way right make everybody happy
the now it doesn’t mean the mystic can’t
come up somewhere else as a subclass or
is a name but I think one of the pieces
of feedback I got from people was mystic
sound didn’t quite sound like the flavor
of this class and that’s the big thing I
want to talk about today what is the
flavor of this class we’ve walked
through so far and I’m gonna types I
just like typing as I talk someone at
the stream remarked was kind of like Bob
Ross it was soothing as I’m gonna try to
like not get too high energy today but
it also I find as is my type while I’m
going not only do the notes help me but
it is kind of soothing for me Keith keep
the mind focused so we’ve got the
psychic warrior who’s our fighter
psionic fighter we have the soul knife
who’s our psychic monk and we had the oh
now I’m totally blanking we had the the
name of the psionic Wizard was someone
from someone from chat named this class
and I’m forgetting the Mentalist
Mentalist
so essentially we’ve got our classic
telepath we’ve got our sort of you know
an ecologist the psychic martial artist
and we’ve got our psychic bruiser
I think these archetypes are captured
pretty well so far
obviously pending playtesting but I feel
like the the concept behind them fits in
well and so that this is something where
I don’t necessarily feel like we’re
gonna revisit it the specific
implementation might shift but I think
we’re starting to kind of carve out
where these things fit good parallel for
you is the this idea of imagine if we
were inventing D&D from scratch and we
said hey who uses magic right and we had
divine magic in arcane magic and we’re
starting to hold the cleric can heal and
the Wizards more about blasting and the
oh well go on like what about the
warrior mage how do we want to handle
that well that’s maybe you know the
eldritch Knight and the fighter it’s
it’s kind of the process we’re going
through here right now we’re asking
ourselves where do these where these
concepts best served now I’m gonna give
you a little bit of a a forward-looking
thing we you know kind of see where I
think we might go with with subclasses
we talk about a warlock having like a
pact of the missile called the aberrant
just relax by the words but this could
be a warlock has a pact with say like a
AB Aleph or an elder brain so now the
interesting thing about this is I don’t
think conceptually this warlock is
necessarily has a super clear place like
for instance the psychic warrior
imagines we have a lot of abilities that
augment their physical prowess just like
in the wizard spell list we have spells
like shield that are useful for a mage
but also really great for a frontline
warrior so I’m not saying we’re breaking
up lists of spells it’s more saying what
subclass what subclasses within the Sion
so I really need to worry about
supporting so I don’t think the warlocks
poaching any of those within the rogue
I’d like to do there was a class in 3rd
edition called the lurk
and that the kind of way I’ve been
thinking about that character is the
sort of psionic psionic invisibility
this is the character who essentially
erases evidence that they’re around
right their invisibility is more you
don’t perceive them in the sense that
they’re messing with your mental
processes I would imagine this will
probably also lend itself to like I’ve
taken something and you don’t know it’s
gone I open a door and you think it’s
still closed things like that so that’s
kind of where I see that coming in that
sort of information hacking it’s another
thing I kind of thought about it I mean
that’s moving far more science fiction
but it’s that’s kind of the concept the
character who goes in and comes out
without without your knowing and then
looking at the other classes for
barbarian and bard
and like I don’t know if we need sanic
subclasses there there are ones we can
do but the the approach being I don’t
think that they’re gonna intrude on the
course I on class druid so is very same
situation since in such a nature focused
class as with the cleric focused on the
divine I don’t think we necessarily need
that crossover if it’s there it might be
some sort of sonic theme domain for the
cleric it may be aberration theme for
the druid but I don’t think that’s
necessarily taking conceptual space in
the Sion we think of the rest of the
classes the sorcerer and I think the
sorcerer is in a space similar to the
warlock
it’ll probably patterned after something
existing in D&D like aberrations for
instant it would probably more of a look
at the warlock and sorcerer how can they
express that differently and so I think
looking at the classes this is these are
probably the ones so I’m actually gonna
erase warlock not that we’re not gonna
do this but I think what I want to do is
of these four I think these are covering
concepts that I don’t need to cover
directly within the Sion
so yeah in same failure automated air
effect the Ranger a pallid I think it’s
a similar thing if we were to do
something like this it may either be
more response to the flavor around
soundex
or would be taking that existing
character class and finding a way to
express it sonically rather than saying
get think of the eldritch night versus
the wizard we had a long discussion of
should the
warrior mage and the players handbook be
a fighter subclass or a wizard subclass
if you own the Sword Coast adventures
guide you see what the wizard would look
like if you did take that path of the
warrior mage as a wizard subclass with
the Blade Dancer but we felt that was
very realm specific so we’re okay
putting it there we felt the most direct
path for a new player would be llama
warrior first who uses spells also
because if you look at the blade dancers
class features they are require a little
bit more of an advanced sort of grasp of
mechanics like how to make these things
work together where the eldritch night
it’s pretty straightforward you play as
a fighter for your first couple levels
then you pick up a couple of spells and
then you’re going from there
conceptually it’s pretty straight
forward rather than they think of the
resource management when do I use my
blade dance what am I in the front line
what am i in the back how do I manage my
spell list typically mechanical options
that require more of that meta thinking
we see as being the next step beyond the
players handbook the wizard and the sort
of classic I’m the kind of glass cannon
II spell caster
that’s about as techy as we want to get
the players handbook all right so the oh
uh LT virus no sign of healing at all
well no we’ll probably see some flavor
started killing and that’s what actually
a great question – oh it’s blade song
not blade dance did I get it completely
wrong see that’s why I’m the creative
director because now the directive is
please everyone pull out your copies of
sword custom you know I’m horrible with
names
see that’s why changing mystic design
doesn’t bother me because I don’t
remember any way so the but yeah so we
added a question about sonic healing so
what we’re gonna do today and next 40 or
so minutes on a walk through the
existing mystic character class and
we’re gonna we’re not I’m not saying
we’re redesigning the class we’re kind
of redesigning the class oh I think
we’ll probably end up keeping a lot of
this but what I want to do is is touch
on something that C is very important to
tabletop role-playing game design in
specific and role-playing game design in
general
and that’s when you think about it when
you’re designing a role-playing game
there are two main tasks you have in
front of you and I’ll zero in on
tabletop role-playing the first thing
you need to do is determine who are the
players going to portray what are your
archetypes in our game in our world who
is it that what are the roles who take
on and there’s a lot behind that
question this is not a question okay
what’s just this thing right I mean
you’re that’s may see your world
building but it gives direction to it it
makes you think about who do I want to
portray and ideally you’re going to
create those roles in a way that people
who are think about playing your game
would think wow I want to portray that
now you might have a very like Dungeons
& Dragons high adventure you know I’m
gonna go to dungeons battle monsters
okay great I want to be a warrior I want
to be like and you might pull in
characters from movies and think oh my
character to be like I want to be the
plain elf like Legolas I want to play
out like a powerful wizard man be cool
and a thorough volts of energy and just
you know things like that I want to play
the cunning road you know and so when
you come up with those those arc types
you’re essentially deciding this is what
I need to design for my players so that
they can go through pick these things
out and portray them that even applies
to much more sort of if you’re gonna
make a much more sane dramatic game I
call my game doesn’t have violence it’s
all about portraying the corruption of
you know the organized crime the 1950s
you’d still think okay I want to play
the undercover cop or I want to play the
you know the hitman or I want to play
the the mastermind or I’m gonna play the
criminal lawyer you know things like
that you’d still think of it that way
and that’s how I would approach it now
keep in mind that’s my approach
everyone’s approach is gonna vary but
that’s how I sort of my creative voice
flows I like to think of that so what
we’re gonna do here is walk through our
mystic impact answer that question if I
want to play a site-to-site on not
mystic if I’m gonna make a sign a
character who do I want to portray and
it’s essentially with these these
subclasses have shown us all what here’s
here’s roles you that you can portray
you can be the big bruiser tough guy you
can be the martial artist
can be the classic telepathic you know
Professor X character and then what the
road we got this kind of criminal
mastermind
you know just disappearing into the
firmament so what I want to do first
taking here at the draft of the mystic
and zoom back is we’re actually gonna go
to the subclasses first because this
really this is a stage we already have
our classes designed I’m not going to
design a bunch of new ones
okay what about the immortal is a barbed
subclass that actually might be
something to as we go through these we
might end up finding homes for some of
these if we think we want to keep them
but what we’ll talk about that
so the orders are the the subclasses
here the and Daedalus wing how is it
different that’s really something that’s
important here because that’s going to
tell us what we need to get to do here
is we look at these these subclasses if
we let’s say the order the avatar is up
on the screen so I’ll just dive into
that one if we look at this and say yeah
we think this is a character people want
to play now here’s the important thing
ideally your target is people who
haven’t they’re not familiar with the
concept of psionics yet there’s gonna
look at this as a piece of art and a
page and read the description and think
wow i really want to play that person
it’s really helpful if you’re pulling in
examples from pop culture characters
they already know but since this is an
expansion to an existing game we already
have our players handbook out there it’s
not as important if we’re making a game
from scratch you know going back to the
organized-crime game i talked about
where it’s oh I want to play the the
undercover you know the informant right
I’m coming I don’t know your game I just
know the genre I know the story I’m
thinking of the characters I want to
play we’re going a little bit deeper
here because Dungeons & Dragons has
already captured a lot of those sort of
knee-jerk responses you play a fantasy
adventure game kind of like World of
Warcraft Lord of the Rings or Conan the
Barbarian who don’t to play right and
you’re gonna say Archer I wanna be a
warrior right I want to be we’ve already
got those covered so we can be a little
more esoteric with these the important
thing is that we have a clear identity
for all of them
quick question from aids Apia how do I
feel the disaster Baron is coming along
the I’m glad you liked it it’s a little
bit on the back burner for getting it
finished
because I’m really focused right now I’m
getting this the sonics thing is
sprawled out a bit more
we do have almost everything though in
the queue to come out as an on earth
Turkana the scheduling the one thing to
keep in mind we since we do do use an
Arthur canna to play test things for
upcoming products there is a little bit
of a traffic jam there everything is
eventually going to show up in you a
unless in chat we just saw hey this
wasn’t working at all
which I don’t think is the case for
anything we worked on I think everything
that just didn’t work out we revised and
took a different path but so it’s just a
matter of sequencing and when stuff
shows up but I’ve been pretty happy with
the design we’ve done for almost
everything so far so I think it’s all of
its in us in the space now where it’s
ready to go to a UA it’s to matter of
traffic because well you guys don’t know
the schedule I know the schedule and I
know it’s coming up so it’s a little bit
crowded right now but everything will
eventually make its way out there I’m
also considering the Giants or sure
speed rules I love I was actually I’m
super excited about the kid that went
out there I’m thinking about maybe for
extra life in the spirit of being sort
of I’d like to call it enlightened
laziness saving myself time but then
doing something useful and maybe tying
some of these things to to extra life
maybe putting together a PDF source up
on DMS guild and like for a nominal
donation letting people grab an edited
version of some of the stuff I’ve done
I’m not sure yet if I’d want to do that
you know here’s the thing I chat feel
free to sound off how you guys feel
about this but this is my kind of
reaction to it I didn’t want to do that
with Sonics I know that could be a
really juicy thing I think soundex is
big enough but I just want to make it
freely available I think that it’d be
kind of fun to do a sort of donation
thing for other material but also just
if you think that the entire thing like
you know just let me know how you feel
you throw in chat I’ll keep an eye on it
anyhow probably ask on Twitter too later
I want to make sure that what we do for
extra life I know last year for instance
we auctioned off a personalized subclass
for everyone now which the everyone I’ve
heard from so far has agreed that those
subclasses will be released to the
general public so I might do those with
extra life too we’ll see I just don’t
want people to feel like Oh sound ex
we’re doing this together
on stream I don’t want people to feel
like on now have to pay make a donation
even though it’s a donation I don’t I
don’t want to take it you know I don’t
force anyone you know to get access to
things where they kind of feel it’s more
in the community space so so now that
I’ve walked it through maybe I’ll just
do it with the the four subclasses from
last year but the yeah and I think I
hadn’t found I think that’s kind of an
ideas we’d really want to get these as
wide exposure as possible that’s always
that’s something I struggled with last
year and that’s why I made the four
subclasses just for one person you know
one before them each one person was that
the we weren’t putting people in the
position of what we need to play test
this so I paid money for something but
now it’s going to play test so I didn’t
have to pay money yeah it’s something a
little bit tricky I don’t want to go to
the extent of writing a full adventure
because that takes a lot of energy and
if you watched my for instance the the
tanks game on Sunday I had like a page
of notes for that I am very much a
middle is DM so I could run into bench
everything turn it into an actual
adventure that you guys could use that
take a lot of work so I want to make
sure anyways oh yes so datalist we are
getting distracted so come on let’s
buckle down okay so what we’re gonna do
first is let’s take a look at existing
Scion special subclasses let’s take a
look at the Avatar so what I want what I
like to do when I think of this is I
write down the Avatar I think myself who
is this person right without looking at
the text this is somebody who embodies
virtues or beliefs inspires others is
the and I really think was psionically
it’s the walking manifestation of
emotion that’s kind of how I think of it
the glad people enjoyed the game I had
awesome players they made it so easy for
me I literally told them beforehand like
you know the first half hours is gonna
be you guys being you guys don’t you
know I’m not I’m not there to get in the
way it’s a different approach to DMing
than maybe for a home game but
especially we have such talented people
I mean I’ll say I don’t know if people
were expecting from Ron’s paladin I
think he was probably the least
well-known of those characters but when
when I heard about his character and
that’s character he plays in Joe’s
campaign this is gonna be easy
and then the Big Show was super he’s oh
he’s a hardcore gamer we had a nice
conversation but building his character
and he on phone about tweaks before and
he was really excited and so I was so
much fun
the it’s fun to be in front of an
audience I gotta admit the okay so let’s
take a look with the avatar
now here’s one thing here knows that our
avatar is Mashable for elements that’s
terminator 455 that’s correct I never
watch that show I need to I’m waiting
against my daughter’s old an apple-pie
watch together so okay so this is
something which now here’s one thing
gonna throw in here when I think of this
this might actually be a bard subclass
that’s one thing I threw out there
because we talked about bards who talk
about inspiring bards are all about you
know bringing out emotion in others so
this might be something which we want to
throw out there as a bard subclass
rather than necessarily nesting it
within the sion now quick side note as
part of what we’re doing here one of the
big flaws I felt with the what was
called the mystic was it was trying to
do too much and it meant that the core
of the character class was all over the
place so the oh and uh
Mirek the Arctic might actually just be
the avatar and maybe we’ll change the
name up what yeah so that in there that
was that was of the fourth edition
character class so what I want to do is
go through and find out which of these
subclasses I can only express within a
new character class I’m sure there’s
others other ones that we have not
accounted for might might float to the
surface and I’ve already thinking of a
few it sounds like it should be named
Bastion I don’t know the Bastion is a
can transform into a turret so that’s
next
overwatch reference for anyone out there
I had opportunity to go to the overwatch
League Denham Elia but just was too busy
too much too much stuff going on next
time I’m down there I do want to check
it out though I do i do love eSports I’m
a big sports fan so naturally alright or
to be awakened this is the character
that I think the The Mentalist has sort
of taken over the awakened is all about
you know bending minds using sanic
attacks so I’m gonna write this down but
I think pretty quickly I would really
intend that The Mentalist picks this up
and here’s why
when I picture there’s a reason why
in x-men professor axe is depicted you
know classically I have not follow
comics in a while but he’s depicted as
hey he’s this incredibly powerful
psychic figure but he’s not physically
he’s not meant to be imposing and I
think when this was a great example of
something where game wise this character
felt like they wanted to have light
armor or no armor few weapons a d6 hit
died and putting it in this class that
was kind of built on a cleric style
chassis was really working against it so
I think that what I would like to do is
just sort of say look let’s let’s put
the awakened over to the mental let’s
not try to follow up on this one the so
then let’s go out to our next one order
be immortal and this is another one
where this is all about using sonic
energy – oops – sustain your your
physical form and I think someone in
chat throughout that maybe this could be
a barbarian I could actually see that a
barbarian that the rage is like some
sort of is a psionic state I could see
that I could also see the psychic
warrior picking some of this stuff up
the that really the mastery of the
physical form i thinkin this is another
one where I wanted the immortal I check
check on chat Titan look at this right
bonus disciplines immortal durability
right starting at a first level your hit
point maximum increases by one per
mystic level this is the fifth edition
designer talk for I really wish I could
give you a bigger hit die but I can’t
because this class is d8 this is one
also when you’re aren’t wearing armor
wearing a shield your base AC equals 10
plus 2x plus con this is essentially
getting at the the aesthetic sort of
choice I was looking for here is that
typically these characters didn’t wear
armor it starts to look a bit like a
monk you know so I think if you’re
playing a soul life maybe that gets so
oldest if you’re playing a psychic
warrior and you just want to go with
light or no armor and build your
character that way or maybe the bar oh
you know what Dov this is the barbarian
so I think maybe the super durable
psychic guy I think that might be able
to go over there
the
yeah okay so I’m seeing I’m not seeing a
riot and shot yet for somebody’s okay
now come to the Nomad this is one thing
where things get a lot more interesting
so we think of the Nomad this is a
character who can bend space and maybe
even been time they’re good at using
soundex to essentially manipulate the
concept of space and time around them
not necessarily you know making like a
wall disappear per se but more I’m gonna
twist twist time in space to just move
to where the wall isn’t if that makes
sense so the our notes here they keep
their mind is a strange rarefied state
they seek out knowledge they perceive a
bizarre living with knowledge they call
the noosphere it’s getting a little
nerdy there but that’s I always want to
drop into a D&D book the so this is all
about going out gathering knowledge and
I like this this is a class who I feel
like do bards they’re masters of lore
yeah but they’re not this because these
guys are about themselves they are not
about I’m gonna also inspire others you
know it would be a poor this is a great
example of trying to say build us into
the Bard I think would be a dead end
because you’d have all these bard core
bard class traits that just wouldn’t
support this archetype so I think we
have our very clear the avatar was like
maybe but this one is very clear this is
this a scion subclass um I like the
flavor grapples you know this could be a
ranger but I think this character isn’t
necessarily walking around with a lot of
weapons also again just that flavor of
like I think the difference is the
Ranger I’ll use it here I’ll use an
example the Rangers traveling through
the forest leading the party because the
Ranger knows the terrain the nomads
might have something similar because the
Nomad is using psionics to learn about
the Train as you go using a sort of
clairvoyant style effect or tapping into
the web of knowledge around it so I
think there’s enough of a flavor
difference there that I wouldn’t want to
go Ranger I think this could be pretty
strong within this so this is basically
our knowledge of time and space this is
almost kind of like a maybe yeah almost
like they mean like Doctor Who I mean
it’s not quite there but this idea that
it’s character who knows a lot
and is using Sonic’s for knowledge and a
manipulate space and time I think that’s
I think there’s also something very
distinct we don’t really have another
character that can do that so I think
this is I think it’s a pretty good one
Solon I’ve already picked up so I’m not
gonna bother with it
I will bother in the sense we’ll make it
as a monk subclass and I gotta say
having designed this it works so much
better about subclass the wujin this is
a weird one so this was basically to get
ours our sonic blaster into place I
don’t think we necessarily need it
because if we think sanic that blaster
you know messing with the elements
this is Ono Matt is dr. Manhattan yeah a
human double-o – I like that yeah that’s
pretty cool
the I think that this isn’t necessarily
one we need anymore
because if I’m like hey I want to be a
sonic guy and I want to throw like lots
of energy around I can just play The
Mentalist and then stock up on some Evo
patient spells in addition to whatever
I’m pulling in from the Sonics bellows
so I think the wujin just goes away the
and this is okay so now you might be
thinking okay way to go Merrill’s you
had like six subclasses and you killed
them all
well Leonid demon yes a new subclass
astral constructor right this is work
that’s go in add a few new ones right
the so that’s the first one we talked
about the stream way ago way ago way
back when we first started working on
this there’s two that popped to mind
first is another other word I’m gonna
click on my right window call the
constructor this is something which I
know we get requests all the time
oops look at me using word this is our
summer this is the character I talked
about on stream a few weeks back where
they create psychic constructs and they
can view them with psionic effects the
classic one would be you know the you’re
fighting a group of works they have
their leader you create a sign a
construct it comes into being and it has
a fear of Eket a CH to it because since
it’s an act not just a you know but I
think it should have some of that ESP
mental flavor
and I might say look I’m actually gonna
reach into the mind of the orc chieftain
and pull out the thing it fears most and
that’s what I’ve created the other works
are afraid of it you’re right and it’s
fun thing about this is it’s a summons
and no one is like well was it was it
having tea like up and you know Anna
Vernis when I got pulled through now
this is purely a construct it does some
nice things world building wise it’s
just clean what’s actually going on the
I also want to have some fun with this
cuz here’s my here’s my weird flavor I
was thinking about this that new pistol
that that essentially this is you
bringing your imaginary friend to life I
thought this would be funny this is a
subclass actually had a little companion
there might be purely psionic that
you’re talking to and then you basically
then give it form it springs into being
and it starts doing stuff essentially
that’s your sort of you might have an
at-will ability to bring it into life to
do a limited set of things then use
power on it to make it do cooler things
the yeah
newbee one it looks different ever
that’s easy I think it’s exactly it if
you remember from the stream of my tanks
game that the moat the first mode of
light never looked at it they saw the
thing that was you know that they wish
for yeah I never once saw something
different right and now there’s now it’s
kind of wait I’m just just grabbing it
as like this beam of light I don’t think
I ever described the actual thing
because in theory I’d have to go around
the audience and ask everyone what would
you see so yeah so that’s one of the
first ones the other one this is a
favorite of mine cuz I always like this
and the metamorph I think we want a cool
shape changer this is the character I
think this is kind of taking the place
with the immortal a little bit and where
the immortal was kind of a warrior was
all about I’m durability think I want to
transform this a bit to being C pun this
is someone who can change themselves and
that could be new creature forms
elemental forms if you were watching the
stream so I custom-built for the Big
Show a sort of very crude but functional
the math was there didn’t look like it
cuz he’s actually did it Wow like I was
kinda he was a great example player to
Rex DMS playing out plans sealing up my
that’s what the dragons are so to come
down but closed it all up the this idea
that he could turn
if he caught it and watch the stream he
took a stone for him at one point gave
him a big booster armor class really
dropped his speed and also let him
deflect attacks that would have gone
through him if the dragons had breathed
again you probably have seen it he would
have had an ability to dampen that that
damage in the AOE because of his
defensive form you know things like a
liquid form you know stuff like that and
this is a class again when you look at
what we have out there the druid is a
shape changer but it’s a very directed
shape change you know it’s I am changing
into things that you find in nature this
is a character that I see is changing
into things and arise to the mind so I
think the I think you want to do
creature forms right but I think it’s a
lot more flexible rather than saying I’m
turning into an alligator I’m gonna
think of something dangerous and turn
into that and it’s more general this
might be an error rather than saying use
the alligator snap lock we’re giving you
statin bonuses and changes and it’s up
to the player to describe what did I
just turn into because it’s only it’s
the you know its power of mind right the
yeah turning to I one of the Big Show’s
forms as a fire form you could have gone
into the and yeah liebe Libre zero I
think some of the immortal disciplines
would go under here because I imagine
there’s probably some sort of like
durability aspect to this since I can
change my form you know you throw me
into water I can breathe water you
trying to set me on fire I can turn into
something that’s fire resistant
especially lower levels I think these
might be some of these abilities that
you could layer on all right so what
else we got yeah oh yeah
zap you know turning into an alligator
made of Nightmare fuel and tentacles
think that actually was it’s a good way
to think of it because there’s some of
these abilities is a player you might
flavor this as I turn into a creature
now I’m gonna use a fear effect like if
I’m a different ability that’s not not
one of my shape-changing ones that maybe
happened how you describe it to other
players like this is what I’m doing I’m
changing myself to make myself
terrifying than augmenting that with
sanic power to make all the orcs run
away or whatever it is I’m doing the so
let’s see a k3 one eight my to subclass
thoughts was wondering if you think it
would be interesting for something Jedi
force themed yeah I think that the the
other’s thinking is some of the other
things working with the astral plane
yeah I think the nomads I might actually
throw in something astral here because
I’m kind of thinking that might be how
they get around and also they how they
manipulate time since the astral is a
timeless realm but I think that’s the
sort of final one I want to do here so I
think what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna
throw via weight you know I’m just gonna
cut this so I think we’re good here
I think I’m gonna cut this because I
think we don’t need it and I think the
avatar I’m kind of thinking we might go
this route but I’m not gonna commit to
it yet but I think the final one is the
telekinetic character don’t know what to
call them yet but this is the character
who you know you know I think that
something could be very flexible and we
could do a lot of interesting force
effects that really it is a specific
like I’m gonna use my mind to batter
stuff around and move it and I think you
know I think this one needs a little
more consideration to give it that the
real flavor but I think telekinesis
since it’s here’s the thing this is a
great example of when you’re coming into
an existing system the telekinesis is a
very high level effect even for the the
Mentalist it was not something you got
till six level so getting this at first
level I think would be fun and I think
it would speak to a some would think hey
that’s yeah okay I want to play it on a
character oh cool oh no no I want
telekinesis right the classic Jedi you
know pushing stuff away from me this is
probably a good case where the mechanics
of the game might drive a might drive an
option we build to basically let players
you know
dip in you play a character they want to
play the right now the system just
doesn’t support now the danger here is
we can’t be too mechanical about it
we’ve got to think of a good story I’m
not gonna worry about that too much
right here right now though because I
think we can get to it the but I think
that that is something which we want to
build and it you know it kind of makes
me feel that then I think with if we
have four to start out with it’s a
pretty strong thing to build in I think
that these the Avatar style things we
might just keep the powers in the game
but not necessarily make it something
that is
a subclass so cuz I think maybe the bar
D we could do to the ardent and in swing
that over to the bar tonight I think
that would work alright so what I hope
this is kind of a shown is it mean
character class design often the first
thing you’ll do is you’ll think of the
subclasses you’ll think of who is it
that I am going to play or is that whom
no that’s not yeah who when I you know
what is the role I’m offering to players
you know when we’re doing this what are
the sort of the incentive are you like
to think it’s it’s a casting a movie you
know who but you know who is gonna make
up the cast of this game and what are
the roles that I want to play and so
starting with this starting with
subclasses is nice because it gives you
more specificity and it also starts
showing you what are the core features
of the class and then what are the
things that we need to make specific let
me throw in and come back to it Mike
it’s got a sweet died fellows asking off
to have a question was more coxed
eternal champion idea part of the
inspiration of the session yes 100%
the tower of hopes defiance was
thoroughly inspired by Moorcock and his
approach to the multiverse in the plains
and I’ve always found that I’ve always
really loved that that Michael Moorcock
stories we haven’t read them Elric the
eternal champion well worth reading
fantastic stuff Moorcock’s a great
writer another one that inspired me not
directly here but is uh Zelazny amber
series for me amber is very inspiring
when I think about the Gods my takeaway
from reading amber was that if you were
immortal and you had immortals in your
life whether it’s your family or just
people you know give it enough time
eventually those other immortals would
be both both both your best friends and
your worst enemies because you just have
such a long history that you’d have a
reason to save their lives and give your
life for them and you’d have a reason to
want to kill them you have so much water
under the bridge so yeah definitely more
cockin Zelazny or cheek huge influences
on how I think like cosmic D&D the see
what else we got here the oh cool you
met you met Moorcock that’s know I’ve
never met him I have never not had the
chance so anyway so this is kind of what
we’re looking at here so the next step
work in a character class okay River
this is just how I do it everyone you
know game designs a little bit finding
your own voice so you’re gonna probably
if you’re such if you’re starting out
whether you’re 10 or 50 or whatever
somewhere in between if you haven’t done
a lot of game design we’re doing it for
a while it took me a while to kind of
really establish how I do things I did
it for a few years many years actually
before I really felt comforting oh this
is how I like to do it it’s all about
finding your tools your toolset and what
you do so what I like to do at this
stage is then look here what we’ve got
here I’m actually gonna put this one in
italics just to remind myself that I’m
not really considering it looking at
these were to think to ourselves what
binds these characters together and very
simple stuff we have to do right now but
it’s useful to do this like what kind of
hit die do we expect this character have
so chat feel free to throw in your
thoughts but d68 d-10 maybe even d12
looking at these thinking of the Scion
and thinking of these four subclasses
where do you sit think Oh Ramona are
Bergsma the telepath we actually saw
that being thrown over by the The
Mentalist subclass of the wizard maybe
because we saw the telepath is being
probably physically less capable than
the other subclasses in this class so
I’m seeing some do you say 200 dark
elven double ODST yes there was highly
varying class for hit points would you
roll over here and said that’s like I
below 9800 one oops so I’m seeing a lot
of d8 d6 is 50 tends to d4 gold cliff
trust being I kind of class tyrant we
tried to test that with the Ranger at
one point to d85 people hated it
d6 are dat dark islands still voting for
that d hundred the so I think I’m seeing
a lot of d8 the one line of the druid d6
or d8 I think Daedalus winged miking d6
but d6 I don’t know if it’s well looking
at these subclasses you know here’s
machining I think well hmm d6 I’m seeing
actual eye people going up calling for
d6
that would be interesting because that
would well I don’t know what that would
do the would the wizard subclass we’d
figure it out later all right in a few
da it’s okay you know what I’m gonna
arbitrarily go for ya it might be too
much you actually looking at these
classes we’re not seeing anyone except
the metamorph who’s gonna get up in your
face and do damage to you and with the
metamorph we can build in those hit
points than the powers you know I want
to do this so here’s something I like to
do whenever I have a design where it’s a
though cuddly evil member cezzah
Warriors gonna be over in the fighter so
it’s kind of like having the Elder
tonight over in the fighter so we don’t
worry about the wizard itself being
tanky all right you know car games d4
let’s go back old school I’m gonna throw
in the d6 it done here’s why I think if
you’re you have a choice between
something that brings you more toward
the middle of your existing population
and something that pushes you to the
edge I think it’s good your first try to
go to the edge because that might prompt
something a bit more interesting now
here’s something that’ll definitely
happen though right if we find and I’ve
seen this happen in game design let’s do
a d6 that makes sense okay what’s your
first class feature your first class
feature is you get extra points right
like we no no let’s get rid of that you
know if we were to say we don’t want
this character that armor but then we
wanted to give them some you know funky
way to get their AC up like that’s we
will do the thing of what you just get
to add a second ability mod to your AC
that’s the easy thing to do if it starts
getting more techy the metals like just
give them armor okay let’s go let’s go
with d6 the you did dark elven do you
made a great case I was so tempted just
go on G percentage no I want to go the
opposite end right we’re gonna go crazy
with lots of hit points but that would
you know I gotta admit it’s kind of
funny to think I now kind of want to
make a character who’s one class feature
is they get like 50 hit points per level
and that’s it like no proficiencies
nothing it’s just you just you just take
up a 5 by 5 by 5 square and that’s your
entire job and it takes forever to kill
you like maybe give you super good
saving throws the
so okay so I think that’s an extra one
what about our armor we’re just talkin
armor throwing does this character get
armor did we think any any armor versus
Oh
eighty-three 180s if we do d6 that might
actually mean then we want to do a
telepath in this class well see though I
don’t want to bite off more than we can
chew at this stage well what I’d like to
do is work for the class features first
and then see and then what implications
that has for the wizard so we’ve got
okay so armor do we guys we got this
character is a default wearing armor
light nah see weighted comp there do ya
like that
the new class the roided counters huge
it’s anti pile of meat no armor light
armor plus it into the bins
okay so yeah I think we’re saying armor
and I think we could if you wanted to
give the inability it’s like int mod two
armor if we wanted to get but that that
might be a choice that actually might be
the sonic version of major armor but
we’ll get to that
okay so normal weapons do we feel like
these guys are using any like basically
we look at do they use swords or are we
just looking at bows I don’t you know
yeah shields no armor yeah no armor but
a really sweet looking at stabby burger
game that’s it gonna be stylish you’re
gonna go to the dungeon simple weapons
dagger staff cleric weapons yeah I think
he okay simple weapons no swords yeah to
have clubs short pros yeah okay so I
think we’re looking it’s it’s simple
weapons I don’t think we need to go as
far as the wizard list with it’s that
kind of funky idiosyncratic list we can
just go simple weapons so yeah weapon is
the mine scarecrow scarecrow King
thirteen thirteen exactly the mind is
the deadliest weapon alright so now
let’s take a quick look back here’s what
we ended up with a mystic and I think
this is where you’re gonna kind of see
some of the tension I felt in the class
so we had d8 hit points so we’re gonna
we might where to try dropping that down
and we can’t blight arm in simple
weapons now this here’s the thing that
when i look at these subclasses i don’t
see any reason why I need to like
address the armor and weapons issue
again that was that’s a good sign of a
class might be stretched beyond its
bounds if you’re like well but this guy
needs armor we did identify the
metamorph might me
more hitpoints but that might be a sort
of a class feature that’s giving healing
or additional polloi and so we can
figure that out but but I feel more
comfortable this because we – tell me
hey here’s our for current subclasses
one of the men the the metamorph has a
recovery feature I mean we already had
this right here as durability and
healing that’s it we’re not doing that
because mechanically we need to patch it
over we’re doing that because we think
it’s in flavor and that’s always a good
place to be if you’re doing things for
subclasses it’s in flavor as opposed to
this guy’s just get in this class is
getting its ass beat in combat we just
we need to give them better armor cuz
cuz otherwise they’re just getting you
know to go you know your flavor is not
working well with your actual story with
your actual mechanics so it’s good here
that if we had a character who could
recover and is durable but it makes
sense it’s the story driving this as
opposed to like well we’re adding it in
just to make it work for instance if you
know you can imagine a world we said
well it’s a shape change you’re getting
claws and a bite and stuff like that we
didn’t really think of durability as
being key that that would be a real
tension with d6 a new armor but I think
we’re good here even the armor part I
imagine when you change you’re gonna get
better armor I imagine that that’ll be a
feature alright good so and I think
that’s probably the no am I gonna bow I
don’t I think that I might would
probably be using more like I’m twisting
space to to hit you from short from long
range
like with short range attacks I we’ll
see we’ll see so the nice thing is when
we go back and look up here right we
could see his psychic warrior we wanted
to armor and more hitpoints so it would
have been pushing against it soul knife
same way they mix it up up close the the
rogue the lurk we’ll probably need some
of that you know because they’re gonna
be off on their own a lot again this is
something where maybe this kind of this
rolls over and becomes I mean we might
keep it we just might see it this is a
good option for if you don’t want to use
the class but you want to use Sonic’s
like you might in your campaign use this
I think we’ll keep it but I’m not too
worried about trying to make it the
defining you know men tools but we’ll
get there it said let’s tackle these for
them then see where that that it should
resolve itself I want to give us the
opportunity if we feel that d6 isn’t
working to go back to a d8 I don’t want
to lock us in quite yet all right so we
get five minutes so let’s take a look at
so this is a very simple case now this
is all it’s a matter of you know killing
your darlings let’s see what we created
last year and let’s see how much wood
survives saving throws intelligence and
wisdom I don’t think that’s gonna change
the sonic class being very mental makes
sense our skills Arcana history insight
medicine nature perception and religion
these are all mental skills without
going to charisma related skills I think
looking at these four right here that
makes sense the avatar is a little bit
of one who is out there like well it
seems like they should be charisma
driven but that’s also a very nice way
to do it too
if you’re looking at a class that is
using magic or has a spell casting stat
and you have a subclass that naturally
seems to want to push that to somewhere
else a subclass is a great great way to
resolve that because if we make you know
the art into subclass of the bard or the
average how would we call it
it’s a charisma casting class that just
takes care of itself
I don’t need to put in some weird thing
here to make your charisma relevant same
thing if we wanted to pick up this idea
of the immortal I could imagine if the
Barbarian if we did is a barbarian that
could specify in its psionics class
feature some class featured that you may
be using Constitution as you’re casting
stat so okay so I think these equipments
whatever that will just be based on the
features here’s a nice table which will
just skip the table is very important
but we don’t need to worry about it
let’s take a look at our class features
so I if you follow the stream for a
while you know there’s a big decision we
have to make up front about our sub
class and that is does your sub class
come in at first level third level or if
you’re the weird outlier that is the
wizard which is one of our core classes
but whatever odd second level and I
think shad sound off I have my
suspicions I don’t think this this is a
super tough question but I’m just
curious to see does the does everyone’s
expectation in chat line up with what
I’m thinking what level do you think you
should be making the the sub class
choice Act first purser second fifth the
banana will go crate just me a level I’m
gonna play for like a couple weeks where
we go third first second third first
looks like first is coming in for a lot
of characters a few points per second Oh
get to the second – oh that’s right
that’s right I get to second but I’m
seeing out of first 20th level red lets
you play this that’s like you know the
reward was now you get a subclass choice
I just love the idea now that that’s
someone would play D&D for a while I
think that’s noir like I was doing
classy no don’t you get a 20th level you
get to pick you know you can be a farmer
or mechanic dark out you know dark out
but down below I got a minute I like the
the the persistence in the number 100
hundred let’s make this a hundred level
class and we can make it I can you XP
table will divide you like your level
divided by five is your actual level or
know what forget it 100 level yours
isn’t your five times stronger the okay
lotsa for D fourth I share DB I will
make it random that would stand out
see you guys you don’t have to read the
feedback when the I read those comments
the special tip of the hat person who
put like I think one time someone put
some erotica in there like oh hey that’s
a nice little you know this is violating
our computer policies here at Hasbro but
the it was definitely a change of pace
okay so I’m seen a lot of boats reversed
in a second the you want more post
twenty Khan say the classicism
guaranteed to go to post twenty I see a
lot I think the manic isn’t waiting for
front I got one very ardent supporter
fifth level ok I think what you know I
think the second level I think actually
is I’m even example what of why second
level was not something that’s gay and
had no fainting at the hitting the nail
on the head first since the subclass
defines the playstyle that’s very true
and that’s a very powerful argument in
favor first and here’s I seeing people
saying first and second and I’m gonna
sort of show you like here’s why the
wizard doesn’t get it at first you wait
until second and that’s really just
because we felt there was enough stuff
going on at first level but we want to
just get in your hands as quickly as
possible that we could afford to wait a
level that we wanted to make any known
animal try to remember how much you know
what this is a little there’s a little
bit of a technical thing right here
excite I’m not oh wait no I think I if I
go to Dena beyond I think I have someone
else’s account up yeah here we go so
let’s take a quick look we have a minute
oops
it’s good at characters and classes
official and let’s go the wizard so if
we take a look at the wizard in its
progression what you see here is arcane
recovery is coming in at first we felt
that was really important for play that
while the arcane traditional stuff was
pretty cool we wanted you to get make
sure you are getting more spells and
tying those spells into the short rest I
mean obviously although the mechanic
works because that’s probably was a good
balance for it but it needed the players
at 451st level you were playing a bit
longer adventurer you had the chance to
rest as a wizard this gave you another
reason to want to trigger one of those
short rests and for any character that
had a short rest stuff going on this
just felt like a good way to get across
a short rests your first level take a
short rest
essentially power back up these are a
little trick I do oh and uh Edna feign
white why does a druid let I’ll take a
quick look yeah but I was little I
kidding I’ll go to the druid um this is
really about teaching about short and
long rests my trick I know first of all
characters are very fragile so typically
when I’m running a first level adventure
I give the players copious chances for a
short rest and I essentially designed
them with you know section of the
adventure short rest finale so I ran a
dungeon like a month or two ago where
there’s all this sort of initial
exploration kind of a mini boss
encounter yet the kind of solid like
it’s a it’s a trap and a Mike of south
and before you go into the final big
room like it’s telling you know here’s
the vault door when you open if there’s
danger on either side but we’ve cleared
out this tomb otherwise so let’s just
take a short rest and for first little
characters that’s essentially powering
back up they’re almost back up to full
so yeah let’s go and now one caveat I
don’t remember if this account has the
that would have the druid available
let’s take a quick look here we go so
now now the second interesting so I
can’t quite remember why we did for the
druid oh because of wild shape coming in
we wanted drew dis yes exactly so this
is a good example of the reverse we’re
keeping things pretty simple for you at
first level we didn’t want wild shape
and spell casting to come in at the same
time so giving you spell cast when you
felt especially for a first time player
and this is a good example of really
designing for the first time player
obviously if we played druids before an
experienced player getting spell casting
in wild shape is probably pretty simple
for you but if you’re a first time
player we didn’t want you to feel like
oh I’m learning spell casting and I’m
learning wild shape since the circle
spoke to wild shape we had to wait until
you got wild shape before your circle
abilities could kick could kick in so
that is really what would determine
whether at first or second for this
character class for the Sion we would
just have to look as we build it out
what are the core features that all Sion
the share and then does it make sense
just to give you hey they’re pretty
light it’s nothing too serious I need to
give you up front so I can give you your
subclass at first which I think probably
is the path bid go down or is there a
reason to delay until second and that
would need to be the subclass is
speaking to a pretty meaty class feature
that’s shared across all characters
width of the class or there’s another
mechanic that we feel like it’d be very
valuable to have a first level to help
you play that character I mean
essentially with the wizard having the
d6 hit points and pour weapons and armor
now compare that the druid was a d8 and
can be effective up front you know
keeping mind druids you know their their
proficiencies you’re getting medium
armor and shields so you are essentially
if you need to be the backup fighter you
can do that where the wizard was very
dependent on spells and encounters so
yeah so we’re at about three minutes to
the top of the hour ah
we’ll call it there we’ve got a pretty
good place now that we kind of see who
this can this character class we see who
it is becoming we’re seeing the
relationship between the subclasses we
built the ones I kind of think um is
like load-bearing subclasses like this
is getting the full suite
across the the concept of sanics in the
game and I think we’re gonna predict it
a place so next week we’ll talk about
core class features for the Sion which
in the process of that will also have to
start thinking about class features that
we’ll need for these the subclasses
essentially that that process will be
what are the things that all of these
characters need to be able to do and
then what are the things that they get
to do themselves so I hope that was fun
for everyone had a great time thanks
taking part chat for helping me solve
some of these issues
and I will see everyone next week so
take care
[Music]
Great stream today everyone! Chat was hopping, and the ideas are flowing. Can't wait for next week.

— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) June 5, 2018

Does the “natural melee weapon” of the minotaur’s horns works with Divine Smite?

June 6, 2018Zoltar Leave a comment

@JeremyECrawford Interesting point in Dragon Talk today, you mentioned the "natural melee weapon" language of the minotaur's horns means it works with Divine Smite (and magic weapon?).

That seems at odds with previous answers regarding bite attacks. Is this a revision?

— Dan Dillon (@Dan_Dillon_1) May 15, 2018

Or are PC minotaur horns/centaur hooves somehow mechanically different from a monster minotaur's horns/monster centaur's hooves?

— Dan Dillon (@Dan_Dillon_1) May 15, 2018

That was part of a discussion about the magic weapon spell. I stated that it was meant to be cast on weapons that are objects, but that casting it on natural weapons would break nothing.

— Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford) May 15, 2018

Gotcha. So paladins can smite with whatever natural weapons by intent, and magic weapon at DM’s discretion? That's right!

— Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford) May 15, 2018

Jeremy Crawford on UA Minotaurs & Centaurs

May 31, 2018Zoltar Leave a comment

okay and welcome back to Dragon plus I’m always looking off in the wrong way it’s that camera oh I do the same thing where I was wondering what are they looking at we have no idea what we’re looking at somebody I don’t know if it was you or somebody else mentioned this had been my most tense hour of the week and now it’s the most relaxing hour of the week because I’m not I can step away from my desk for the next hour yeah yeah we get to just chat about D&D yes it doesn’t get much better than that so uh boy where to begin obviously we have back Jeremy Crawford I’ve got a new bio for you because I just put it up today oh wow Jeremy Crawford is the league rules designer of Dungeons & Dragons in addition to being the game’s managing editor he led the design of The Player’s Handbook and co-lead design of a variety of other DMV books including it the Dungeon Master’s guide XANA Thor’s guide to everything and Morden cannons Thoma foes which I even brought with me because today’s the wide release so of course it’s like I have to carry it everywhere I go today now this part this is new information for me before coming to Wizards of the coast he wrote for the games Blue Rose Warhammer Fantasy roleplay and mutants in master life you learned something every day and I did not know any of that so I know I might have suspected that you had other industry but but I’ve now been a wizard for almost 11 years working on D&D so I mean at this point it’s just he has made many many Dungeons & Dragons books yeah well welcome back for folks that were with us two weeks ago we sat down with Jeremy and to speak about minotaurs and Centaurs released in the latest unearth Arkana we wanted to continue that conversation we do have some news and announcements leading up to the stream of many eyes taking place boy this weekend which little frazzled because it’s taking place this weekend June 1st through 3rd in Los Angeles California we hope that folks in the area might be able to attend there are still tickets for these Sunday games but please jump on those quickly as they are getting snatched up and you can always stream the entirety of it on our dandy twitch channel which you are watching right now and if you’re there and you see me make sure to say hi I will be there for the whole thing and bind earth of alphabetical order you are now our number one special guest oh look at me well I like spotlight yes this was the we were gonna do some new headshots so we’re gonna schedule you for an updated although this is quite well well thank you but just outside my house so Before we jump into talk we covered in the minute our last time we were gonna talk a bit more about the centaur other side yes but before we jump into the Centaur we did have some questions as mentioned we get great questions in the chat we don’t always have a chance to be able to to respond to them so we look back through the chat logs and compile many of the questions you did not ask you did not like my question I created what chiropractic care does is sent our request maybe if there’s time at the end of the stream I’ll get into chiropractic care for centaurs and other hybrid bodied beings is this personal question because I’m in physical therapy now for sciatica oh no oh man what what does a centaur have to do this is my other question true or false the organization of evil centaurs is known as the centaur ouch you came at me right with the pun dagur wow man it just it’s just so obviously but you were so subtle I was not able to cast the shield spell fast enough to make it so that my my ears would not hear it yeah there’s a reason dad jokes and bad jokes are sounds and you are a dad where he issued a book a book of dad jokes yes yes I think I think so my my stepdad in particular is amazing at dad jokes and also at puns and I think he was so amazing that it like it fried out in my teenage years all of my tolerance for it because it’s like I got the best but I got so much of it I can’t take it anymore I had a university professor that if the conversation stalled out like if she had a question nobody was right she would just start giving out puns until people I stopped and they started participating Wow well I worked well but that’s sort of like a store cranking the music up yes well in that case they’re trying to get you to get get you out of the store so we asked you last time what are you reading watching playing do you have any new or different answers for us as a lead-in yes reading cuz I’ve I’ve been kind of a voracious reader lately so this past week I read this charming fantasy novel called the witch’s boy it’s by Kelly Barnhill it’s I think written for children but it’s a great read for adults too about the son of this witch who ends up having to bear her magic and it is very perilous magic good story I recommend it all right which is what was the the Irish legend Oh so yeah last year last time I recommended that if people are interested in learning more about Irish mythology a fun place to start is Lady Augusta Gregory’s book gods and fighting men and that gives you a great survey of different Irish myths including the bit I talked about last time where you you basically get a description of a bunch of different types of spellcasters you’ll also see different inspirations for certain magic item and whatnot that appear in D&D in addition to just getting exposed to a great myth tradition this is why I have this live stream just so I can ask questions as as far as playing Saturday we played my dandy home game big treat because normally we’re we’re usually only able to schedule maybe one session a month because of our schedules but this month we got to play two Saturdays in a row so that was a great way to kick off the Memorial Day weekend spent good part of Saturday with yet another crazy session in what has turned out to be a totally bonkers whore campaign and this is UDM this camp yes yep this is the campaign idea and you weave in things that you would like to play test as well so I guess I probably haven’t told you before told all of you listening on the stream that one of my rules in my home game is that for that game this is as opposed to games that I play here at work because we also play D&D here in my home game no play test material though because I want my home game to truly be a home game not only so I can relax playing this game I I’ve loved my entire life but also there is actually an important work reason for me it’s so that as the game’s lead rules designer I never lose touch with what it’s like to play the game using the material that everyone out and out in public has to use because not everyone listening has access to all of the stuff that you know we’re constantly developing I’m because we’re working on things that won’t be out for several years and if I had too much of that stuff in my home game I would really quickly there would be the risk of me quickly losing sight of the current state of the game as it exists out in the world outside of the walls of Wizards of the coast so I like to play it in it sort of its store-bought version although the campaign itself is entirely homemade and then that also means we get to relax because you know several of my players work here at Wizards you know Chris Perkins is one of my players James Wyatt is one of my players it means we can sit down we’re not play testing anything we’re just enjoying Dungeons & Dragons all right so we did have some questions that folks had submitted as well that we did want to cover again before we get into a bit of a discussion on the Descent time we had a couple of questions come in luna pine and ghost tack 159 i guess there were 158 goes tax before but it was kind of a broad question about sort of Magic the Gathering tends to look at a lot of different real world cultures mythology’s areas to weave into their various card sets on the on the D&D team is there a similar approach are there other cultural areas that are being considered that have been considered how does that work so DnB going back to its inception in the 70s is filled with inspiration from different myth traditions in our world so you know going back to first edition the game pulled in material from Norse mythology Celtic mythology Greek mythology Egyptian mythology and more I mean Arthurian legend even the Cthulhu Mythos you know was a big part of it there was inspiration from the the cosmos in Michael Moorcock’s Elric novels and you know and on and on and on and on and so those influences have always been a part of deities DNA and then as we’ve developed the game we definitely continue to dip into not only those myth traditions but into others as well rarely to bring them over wholesale in 5th edition we’ve maintained in the players handbook the list of Norse gods Celtic gods Egyptian gods and what have you partly because it’s traditional for the game we’re unlikely to do that with the gods of other real world Pantheon’s but we’re certainly open to being inspired by them there there are elements speaking of other myth traditions in Morden Kanan stoma foes and some of our cosmic storytelling that are influenced by Adam Lee and my own reading of various stories in certain Eastern religions Adam and I have both studied Hinduism in fact when I got my master’s degree in religious studies the focus was on ancient Christianity but also I spent a fair amount of time studying vaishnav Hinduism and so that actually influences some of the the cosmic storytelling that I do and I know that Adam has some of those influences and there are other members of the department that also like to dig into you know the ancient stories of our own world so that we can build resonant fantasies stories in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons right I mean as a separate world of Dungeons and Dragons is still hard to completely divorce it from the players the creators having a grounding in real world pathology and not wanting to influence it or or being inspired by it I imagine yeah and and it’s often found that fantasy is the most powerful for us when you can kind of trace a thread that goes back to something in the real world and that can be something cultural in the case of myths as we’re talking about but then something I loved that j.r.r tolkien talked about is it also means including everyday things fantasy often is best when you know people are drinking ale and in simple bread and walking in a beautiful forest and near the mountains like unlike science fiction which is often filled with the alien fantasy is often filled with the familiar but then that familiar thing suffused with magic and so it to me really successful fantasy does a good job of balancing these ancient familiar things you know rocks and bread and wine and mountains and gods and mixes those in with with magic and monsters and adventure and it turns into this kind of this very special alchemy that has inspired humans for thousands of years I know we’ve talked about this before I mean that that point in the force awakens with raised bread you know mmm magic element again it’s my story but as we’ve discussed Star Wars certainly arguably as strong fantasy at least in the original trilogy is as anything else yeah yeah electrum electric um alright sorry however it’s pronounced there is a question any ideas for campaign this is coming from a user that was starting off dungeon mastering mmm-hmm and wants to know about where to get started what advice for kicking off a campaign whether it’s running one creating one what what might you recommend for that wow I could do a whole series of these talks just on campaign design maybe we should work that in in the future once so the really short answer I’ll give which again could be instead a multi how her answer is when possible start small what you want to do is don’t design don’t spend months and months and months designing this math massive story only to find in the first session that your players are going to go off in a totally different directions as they will because they will what’s important is always just have your next session designed and and have a broad framework of material that can lead to later sessions and when I say a broad framework of material I mean have some interesting places for your player characters to go to have a few fun NPCs for them to talk to and have a juicy villain or two whose motivations will help drive the story because often I find that if you have even just one really good villain who has ambitions that could drive multiple sessions of play you will often get weeks and weeks and weeks of D&D play out of just that villain and that villains minions and then you’ll start coming up with other villains who oppose that villain and then often your prep well you’re as a DM we’ll just turn into deciding before each session all right what’s villainy doing what’s villain be doing about it what are the the three MPC groups doing about it and then you basically just set them all running and then in the session you just watch what the player characters do in response to all of these NPCs and villains crashing into each other or you know going to some interesting location like a dungeon or a castle or a haunted temple or whatever that location is that you’re focused on in a particular session I have very suspicious players I have never started off an adventure where the patron hiring them for the quest or whatever MacGuffin they’re trying to get after they are not immediately convinced that he or she is developed somehow they’re sure that’s that’s the one trying to get in my way so I speaking of that I have to be careful with some of my long-standing players not to at the beginning of any game have what a person I know to be a benevolent NPC yes not to sound too much like a hag and because I use so many hags in my campaign that if it’s just like kindly old woman they meet it’s a hag so sometimes sometimes if you use certain tropes enough you’re it can it can cause your players to just they start they start thinking something is hiding in every bush that was the question I wrote down and because that’s kind of the trope which is whatever half you think you’re gonna set for your players go this way they’re gonna go that way mm-hmm do you ever intentionally design sort of quote-unquote false doors where it’s clearly meant to be this way and you because you know they’re gonna take a left turn so you’ve planned that left turn all along and and and that false door never really led anywhere in the start do you do you design your adventures anticipating players to go off the rails almost immediately oh yeah I and that’s why my prep tends to be pretty light I make sure I have enough material to improvise with for each session but I do not fix in advance you know what I’m expecting them to do I’ll have kind of broad story beats and this is again why I focus on here’s what like the villains are gonna do here’s the danger they’re gonna put the player characters in and then I see what what do the player characters do in response and that makes it really fun for me as the DM because then in a way I get a show you know I even though I’m running the show at the same time I get to watch the show because the players are the ones deciding what their characters are doing and they will often come up with things that I didn’t expect great example of this from my game on Saturday the group spent a good deal of the session in the Faye wild keep in mind I never planned in this campaign that they would go to the Faye watt this is a gothic horror campaign but they decided for various reasons I won’t get into right now because I could gobble up the Hat you know the half an hour going into the ins and outs of the story but they decided to go to the Faye wild and that ended up essentially being a session that designed itself and all I really had to come up with was the place that they were gonna spend time in and the main NPC they were going to be talking to and their the the session unfolded and it did end up having a hag in it I can’t resist them so much and we and we kind of talked about in the past when you guys you when you design when when the D&D team designs elements there’s there’s no you know killed darlings they’re just set aside mm-hmm do you do the same thing for your own campaign in a similar way oh you guys want to go to the FEI wild I happen to have a file of other and encounters that I’ve had in my mind I didn’t know where to plug it in but now I can just pull that one absolutely I save things constantly so I might design something that the players decide never to go visit and so I just hang on to it and when I have a chance to use it later I use it or I also going back to my session on Saturday I had some important story information that I needed the player characters to get so that they would know what the heck was ahead of them at the story because I don’t like my my player characters to be wandering around not knowing like what are we supposed to do but they actually missed entirely the NPC I thought was going to be the information givers so I just took that information and gave it to another NPC and they ended up getting getting that information from a sage in the Fae wild in Saturday session not at all what I had planned but I liked it better because I didn’t plan it because then it that’s real the real magic of this game that again I as the DM got to watch the story unfold in ways that I had not planned in any way so if you’re prepped enough and you’re giving your characters your players agency enough then it’s it’s sort of you get to sit back and just interact with them in a fun and meaningful way as opposed to I don’t know force things along artificially right right and that’s that’s why anytime I give people prep advice I go again and again back to this idea of prepare a framework don’t prepare exactly what they’re going to do create a set of dangers but they’ll have to reply to create a set of NPCs that they can interact with and create a set of villains whom they can oppose or they might decide to help them like I don’t even assume that there there are some vampires in my current campaign that I was ready for the group to oppose a year and a half ago when they first met them they have yet to get into a meaningful fight with them and I keep kind of unwittingly helping the vampires so again I I tried to assume as little as possible going into a campaign about how they will react and then by doing that it means I can respond very nimble II to what the players have decided to have their characters do because I’m not blocked by my preconception of how something is supposed to end up now what that does mean though is I also keep having my villains do their thing on the side and so what that means is if the players just decide never to really try to stop them yeah the villains can win so in a way my is this has happened this has happened yep so in a way Mike and my campaigns are Lu’s abaut even though of course you never win or lose in D&D you’re always winning if you’re having a good time but but I have more than once over the years have had essentially the player characters lose a campaign in terms of the big story because they just didn’t they didn’t go after the villains aggressively enough and I just like players you can do whatever you want I’m not gonna railroad you but the villains are gonna keep going I would find that a more satisfying campaign as much as I find that a satisfying Movies ripped as well yeah right don’t once again I’ve said this a hundred times to you once I know what the heroes are meant to do then they’re gonna do it and I’ve lost a great percentage of interest well and what’s also interesting is not only is that important to kind of constantly have them hungry for what what are we gonna do next what’s next what are we supposed to do but then if they lose you know yours later my players who are in those campaigns we’re basically the villains one they still talk about those campaigns so it actually can be thrilling when the villains win yeah because partly because then the players really see our choices really mattered that we weren’t on we were not on Rails the choices we made led to this outcome and that is really powerful because then there really makes it feel like you were in a living breathing world where what you do really matters on the flip side that means when my players win when they are victorious they know they earned it that you know they made the choices that led to this great victory and my campaigns tend to have very epic finales so if they are victorious they have usually accomplished something that you know will be remembered for the ages nice well so electrum I hope that gave you some thoughts and ideas for starting up your own campaign I definitely concur it would be great to do at least a session dedicated to campaign design we did have a question about adventure design and adventure and we’ll get to down yeah there is a great deal of even online resources that I would like to pull together especially for new players new dungeon masters where do I start what tools are available and there’s great tools that are available between the downloadable rules D&D beyond the starter set obviously has lost mine a fan delvar in it too to be able to run it anytime so yeah so why don’t we uh why don’t we jump into the the Centaurs Jeremy behind the screen we’ve got – sorry – Jeremy’s in the studio why don’t we put up the Centaurs stat sheet and then folks viewing from home so these are the the Centaur traits these recently appeared in unearthed Arkana which is available now on the DND website of course also I believe it is available on DD beyond yes it’s now and Indian beyond so for playtesting purposes last time we kind of walked through in particular minotaurs that they had recently well not recently but minotaurs had appear a while back in on Arthur canna and then made a reappearance and in this most recent one centaurs have they appeared in uh north or Canada previously nope this is their first time to show up as a playable option in fifth edition it’s worth reminding everybody that nothing in unearthed Arcana is official these are all play test elements that we’re trying out sometimes these elements do end up in one of our books as you saw with many of the options that were in zennith ARS guide to everything so once we put the surveys out for any of these things do please give us your feedback we’ve read all of it and your feedback can help shape the future of these options as well as the game as a whole sometimes the options because of the feedback they go away forever other options we dig in because of your feedback we make changes and they’ll show up in a product later and become an official option so sent our Minotaur that you see right now again this is a draft and we’ll see what you think I’ve been reading feedback already on reddit Horace that’s right that’s right a draft horse the puns I’ve been reading feedback are on reddit on Twitter and elsewhere already but the surveys are especially helpful because we end up getting feedback usually from so many of you all right so the Centaur first off I should point out because the Centaur size was a big topic of interest when we first released this I should point out that D&D for many years going back at least goodness gracious at least twenty eight so it’s been twenty eight years at least if not longer the D&D has actually had centaurs of different sizes the classic monstrous centaur that appears in the Monster Manual is large and that’s been true going all the way back to the first edition Monster Manual but D&D Dragonlance as well as in alka deem introduced other centaurs who are medium and in our art over the years we have shown centaurs of both sizes we have also when it comes to centaurs backgrounds talked about them being monstrosity zazz they are in the current Monster Manual but there have been also times in the game’s history when they’ve been strongly associated with the Fae in fact even in the fifth edition Monster Manual where their creature type is monstrosity we still talk about them actually interacting a lot with elves they know the Sylvan language which is the language of many fake creatures so they have long had this association with the Fae and again there have long been different sizes of centaurs so I wanted to bring that up because some people thought whoa this is crazy centaurs have always been large and so it’s important to bring out this little history which honestly would have been a great thing for us to put in the unearthed Arcana article to say hey there are both types of centaurs in the D&D multiverse this playable version of the centaur is focusing on the medium type and in our last video when talking about the Minotaur I also mentioned that there are also game design reasons for us to push player character options toward the medium size as opposed to the large size if there’s time later on in today’s stream I can drill into that a little more if people want to ask about it in the stream but first I want to talk about some other things specific to the Centaur absolutely so yes again if you have a question please press your comment in the chat with a question all caps is easy way to catch our I will try and catch them as they come otherwise we’ll definitely save them for for a follow-up also I want to say in terms of sort of different types of centaurs it’s important to remember that in the DND multiverse we have long had this notion of there being different types of the same creature you see it actually in some of the playable races where elves have many different varieties and we get into the story of that in Morden Canaan stoma foes dwarves have different varieties and sometimes the varieties get dramatic enough that even their creature types can be different we like in Morden Canaan stoma foes we say they’re even there are some Aladdin who have been in the mortal world long enough that their creature type is humanoid and there are other elad rune whose creature type is Fae we also have creatures that are the same type of creature but have different sizes and so yes in fact yes yes hag’s we have many different sizes and whatnot so I just want it it’s important to have that broader context also to address another fun thing about the speed and this this one amused me a bit because one bit of feedback I saw a number of times was well son tars the playable ones should be large because the horse is large this is a funny bit of feedback to me because there is no stat Block in D&D called the horse in the Monster Manual we have three horses there is the pony that is medium there is the warhorse that’s large and there’s the writing horse that’s large so even in our horses we have we have a variety and one is medium and to our large also it was funny too to see when the centaur came up that people were kind of needing to learn a little bit about horses because some people I saw thought ponies were baby horses they’re not so that ponies are ponies are just a type of horse that would be my immediate assumption for respond right you’re telling me that’s not that’s not correct a pony is not a baby horse a pony is is is a type of horse that is just has a smaller body than say a Clydesdale or another very large horse what would a baby horse they’re like what are they folds or is that am i mixing up animal types but yeah not a pony Nicole’s the Colt thank you thank you I’ve even watched Colts be born no personal fact my mother was a she was on she was an administrator at Cal Poly and San Luis Obispo in California in the animal science department and one of the things I what I got to enjoy growing up is going out and looking at the horse unit and even that includes getting to see them be born I’m realizing now than the Indianapolis Colts the football team their mascot then would be it’s a baby horse the Chicago Cubs I you know baby bears so I erase that right it’s not so far afield all right so let’s so let’s dig in so the Centaur is strong we see strength score increasing by two and then the wisdom score increases by one this edition of wisdom was something I actually did fairly late and I did it to really dig into the fact that particularly the medium-sized scent arts that have appeared in dnb’s past like in Dragonlance and Alka deme have been very associated with nature having sort of perceptiveness you could see them being effective druids and Rangers so this is one of the reasons why I gave them this increased a wisdom in addition to the increase to strength because of their their mighty builds and it’s a good to point out that often would we make these abilities score adjustment decisions in fact almost all of the time it’s being driven by the DND story of the particular species and we look at that story and we see what would be appropriate and also because we we lead and this is appropriate talking about a a people who are part horse we like to lead with a carrot rather than a stick and in terms of guiding people toward particular class options we don’t mandate that any race option be aligned with a particular class option but traditionally the ability score increases sort of not positively nudge you in particular directions but of course you could ignore it even though these bonuses are to strength and wisdom you could make a centaur wizard and we have we that’s why we don’t handicap you from going against type do you have a chart anywhere like a heat chart of here are the ability score bonuses that certain races have and seeing okay there’s quite a few races that are hot here and we don’t have any race that gives you a bonus say with I’m trying to think of it a charisma and strength so you know you know so we all of that stuff is in spreadsheets suspicious especially for the official races but it’s really good for everyone listening to no we don’t do what I call we don’t do fill-in-the-blank design that’s where I was so so often fans will point out well hey we don’t we don’t have many races that sort of favor intelligence for example so Wizards you should do that well that isn’t art design ëthis our design athos is we design things to reflect the story of the material that we’re modeling in our story based game we’re not going in and filling in a matrix and say well we don’t have enough intelligence races so that’s what we’re going to do so you like the nooks and crannies of the of the game system where there are certain gaps that could exist and there’s some strengths that exist right not a need to fill it all up absolutely not we have not designed the game for it to need all of those little spaces to be filled up in the same way one of one of the one of the design approaches that I would bring up to the team when we were designing fifth edition and that to this day in fact just last week I reminded one of our designers of this that to always avoid needless symmetry it’s really tempting for us as designers as nerds too we want to fill in all the blanks and that can lead to some really odd design and we’ve done it before in our department and so we very consciously avoid that kind of you know I’ve made a spreadsheet and I’m gonna design something just because it fills that spot it needs to be resonant it needs to be grounded in a story it needs to sing with the other parts of the game that people already have this is peaks and valleys I think what I was going for instead of nooks and crannies but but going back I used to play a game called asteroids call mm-hmm and there are different weapons that had different damage types and there was always hey there’s a lot of swords but none of them do the blunt damage type and you know as their swords right there never will be a baseball bat right right I mean similarly I get asked sometimes you know is it intentional that some abilities get used for saving throws more often than others yes that’s intentional there there are never going to be as many things in the game that make you make an intelligent saving throw as there are that make you have to do a dexterity saving throw for example and and we’re very aware of how the different abilities are used and you know what what things in the game push you toward different things and in in we are almost never going for symmetry when we make those design decisions we want a balanced experience not a filled-in matrix if that makes sense all right let’s let’s keep going the centaur has a base walking speed of 40 feet this is a juicy ability and actually frankly this is where a lot of the Centaurs juiciness is a for some reason I’m liking juicy today maybe I want some eye candy or something it this is aware a lot of the appeal of the center is that and you and where you’d expect because this this these people have horse like legs that a traveling type of race yeah and so forty feet is is fantastic now associated with that influenced by the centaur in the Monster Manual we have this charge ability and by the way whenever we are designing a playable version of a species and are taking inspiration from a monster stat block will often try to echo something in that stat block it doesn’t always pan out we will often find in play testing will end up flushing the thing that came from the Monster Manual and designed something else because frankly we design things and monsters to work for monsters and that’s it actually another great example of how the game does not designed with a bunch of symmetry in mind player characters for instance are intentionally different in how they function in many ways from monsters and so that means there are some things we design on the player-character side where they’re awesome as options for a player character but kind of junk in a monster just last week I was reviewing a stat block for a book we haven’t announced yet and the monster had in it abilities that were mimicking some of the rogues abilities in the players handbook and I ended up cutting the abilities and telling the writer of that particular stat block the ability or mimicking is great if you’re a player with just one character to control and you can deal with some of this fiddle enos that’s the same set of abilities that you put in a stat block unless it’s a legendary creature and the DM is just focused in an encounter on running that one stat block that DM might have three or four different stat blocks there you in a particular encounter so that ability that was great in the player-character you suddenly put it in a snap lock and the dm’s eyes are gonna glaze over and say I don’t want to use this in my game so that’s why sometimes when we take inspiration from a stat block for a player character option the same kind of thing can happen where it just doesn’t feel as natural on sort of the other side of the DM screen so we’ll see where charge goes I already know and I knew this when we sent it out into the world that some people would bulk at this being an ability that recharges on a short or a long rest because what we have found and here I again I was like to pull back the curtain when I’m on talking with everybody what we have found ever since the D&D next play test is that if it’s a magical ability and we say once you use it you can’t use it again until you take a shorter or a long rest no one blinks I mean most people don’t blink I say no one but though you know we always get feedback of all sorts yeah but by and large D&D players will say yeah that’s fine mm-hmm if it’s a non magical ability and we say the thing recharges on a shorter or long rest often that will be pushed back because this is this feels like an innate ability of Who I am and I should be able to do this or not it it’s interesting that when we’re in the realm of magic we have found that players are often able to easily suspend their disbelief about how often things work because it’s magic so it’s already you know not following the rules of our world if you’re shooting lightning bolts out of your hands or you know transforming into a pixie people are able to accept the the rules of magic being mysterious right but as soon as it’s about how your body functions people can get uncomfortable about well why and that’s that is always the question I want people to ask is why because again it’s a story game it needs to feel natural so often what we’ll do and it never surprises me when I see people on reddit on Twitter and elsewhere suggesting this as an alternative is we will instead tie the number of uses to an ability score modifier or we will redesign the things so it can be used in an unlimited fashion now this chargeability we’re unlikely to let you use in an unlimited fashion it’s it’s a little – to use today’s word of the day juicy for you to be able to use it an unlimited number of times per day but we could certainly tie it to you can use it a number of times equal to like your constitutional modifier or something like that and what we have found it’s funny as soon as we do that people are usually okay with it because as well if they can see kind of a narrative connection yes to your care to your character and that’s also can be satisfying because then people feel like it’s something they can grow into that as that ability goes up I get to use it more times and one of the satisfying things in D&D is that sense of growth so there is a good chance that if the Centaur keeps this chargeability at all and if I wanted to keep it as juicy as it currently is or make it even juicier I will probably tie number of uses to an ability modifier I’m thinking in my life there’s not many activities I can do without a short rest I think I think often when we are doing initial drafts we we will use just the short rest on long rest as the recharge mechanism partly because it actually gives us the number of times per day maximum that we are comfortable with but you know it also could be the fact that many of us who work on the game or middle aged and maybe we we get tuckered out faster than our younger players in da again yes I could do this charge once and then I’m gonna read for an hour and then I can do it again all right let’s go on to hooves the hooves these are a natural melee weapon pretty straightforward similar to the Minotaur which you you because again this is Jeremy do we have audio on when we lose audio oh did we hit we have no sound alright are we back are we back we’re back alright yay okay so powerful build it we’re gonna take this back for the last 20 minutes you know everyone gets to hear it all over again and I’m gonna say completely different things alright so far it’s tiny yes yes the center is now tiny and has wings which that is a thing from DN DS past weird that next time when we delve into misstara we will get those delightful creatures and I’m not being sarcastic because I I have a I have a high tolerance and enjoyment of cute things so we are we lost from hooves alright so hooves all I said about hooves is that they’re like the minotaurs horns and that you can what people with them it’s essentially a weapon you have with you all the time and so I wanted to go on to echoing build which is this really three tweets three traits in one so the first trait inside equine build is basically a modified version of powerful build that goliaths have the main difference between this and powerful build is powerful build in addition to increasing your push drat you’re pushing and dragging capability it also makes it so that you can lift things easier echoing build doesn’t do that it instead just makes it easier for you to push and drag things using your your horse half now the next part of a coin build is honestly something that we could have done in the monster centaur but didn’t bother because the monster centaur is controlled by the dungeon master but as soon as we take some things that work just fine in the DMS hands and put them into player’s hands they will sometimes need a few extra rules and so we realized we needed to account the fact that a player character who has four horse-like legs with hooves on the end is going to have a hard time climbing ladders and other things that are designed to work with human-like hands and feet yes that was my question kind of sent our climb a ladder so we we had an earlier version of this that basically just said your DM will decide that you can’t climb certain things but we decided we wanted to try out this approach of a simple rule where it just it costs you more feet to move on certain surfaces which is really just us tinkering with an R in the existing rule which I often like us to do because that way you feel like the game is sort of evolving naturally within itself it’s building on itself it’s not becoming too complex and it was also too juicy for to resist having it cost you four extra feet because of your 4 extra feet oh yes I’m not kidding James James why James Wyatt and I did that I beg all of your forgiveness I sent our organization oh so I am also guilty of many dead gems all right so finally the last bit of echoing build this this this multi-part trait is that a that the Centaur can serve as a mount for another medium creature yes and we put this in here at the last minute because we thought oh it’s so iconic for people to ride on Centaurs of various sizes you know there and so we thought well let’s put this in now I’ve gotten some wonderfully hilarious tweets about centaur stacks and what not about centaurs all climbing up on top of each other as I said by Twitter if that is your bliss please do it D&D is your game oh because our medium creatures they are medium creatures yes and so let’s take a look at the rule here because this is actually a great example for me to talk about rules design so it says a medium or smaller creature can ride on your equine back if you allow it in such a situation you continue to act independently not as a controlled mount okay one of the things that this rule is not doing well and I will critique this rule that I wrote which I often like to do because as I’ve off as I’ve often said one of the keys to being a game designer is be ready to critique your own stuff and kill your own stuff so one of my critiques of this rule is it is not obvious enough to the reader that this is tweaking the mounted combat rules in the combat chapter of The Player’s Handbook it just sort of assumes hey you have the rules in your head reader and here’s a tweak to it so one thing that would immediately help people comprehend the purpose of this a little bit about mounting is to say hey there are mounted combat rules go take a look at them now read this and this will hopefully make sense because the mounted combat rules say that for a creature to be a mount it must be one size larger than you it must have an Anatomy that is suitable for you to write on it and then once you’re writing on it that creature then either acts independently or it is entirely under your control okay so what this rule is doing is it’s saying very indirectly that when you use the mounted combat rules you’re still going to use those rules but with the two exceptions that are in this role which is you can be a mount for somebody who’s your size or smaller because normally the rule is they must be smaller than you and once they’re writing you you are always an independent mount it is not an option for you to be controlled by your writer what this does not do is get rid of the general rule about anatomy being appropriate and so that’s why we didn’t feel it was necessary to say tarz can’t write each other because they’re the general rule already covers anatomy and that if the DM decides that horses riding horses or horse you know a person with a horse like anatomy riding another person with horse like anatomy is appropriate anatomy that is that DMS prerogative and again follow your bliss but it’s important to know the intent here is that this is making two exceptions to the mounted combat rules which otherwise stand and that’s how exceptions to the rules always work whenever we make an exception to a rule we are only overwriting the parts that we explicitly overwrite otherwise the other rule stands now that all said this rule could be written better so that it actually tips you off as a reader of oh hey I need to go over and read the mounted combat rules now that all said there is a good chance that in the next round we would just cut this this bit about medium creatures writing these medium centaurs unless people are jazzed for it and then we’ll keep it alright we are almost done with the Centaur and I mean even how about we shall we be naughty and go a little pest we’re good let me let me shoehorn in a couple of quick announcements before we finish up with the Centaur we are in route to the stream of many eyes many of us are there already Pelham is already there Greg Tito is already there Chris Perkins might or might not be traveling so there is no DNG news today and dice camera action will be postponed until the Friday dice camera action game so I think Chris Chris is actually taking today off to prepare for well partly what he said this morning as having a day off yesterday he got a little too addicted to having a day off it might also have been there was too much insanity and my D&D game on Saturday no I think I think Chris is unbreakable yes so uh so this will be until we get to maze our can of this evening so no Dean dnews no dice camera action today we are so so we’re gonna go let’s go a little past three oh yeah no we’re fine going a little a little all right all right especially since we’ve lost sound there for a bit and we can we can wrap up the Centaur and then maybe answer a couple questions so maybe we’ll go toward like maybe 310 315 sure all right unless unless the stream says no and hits the gong and so it gets us out of here all right next up survivor this is this is a what I call a ribbon for those of you who haven’t heard this term before this is a term I came up with when we were designing fifth edition to refer to any feature in a character class or other element of the game that’s really there as a piece of character building a part of the world it is almost never meant to increase the character’s power if you’re wondering why I call it a ribbon it it it it is because actually I talked about it’s us tying ribbons in the character’s hair so you can imagine because they’re all so often things we add late in the design so it’s sort of like we have this fully formed design and then often I will come in at the end and tie these ribbons in the designs hair and then send them out the door I was thinking of a participation that that you can also you can also imagine it that way but so that said survivor is a ribbon this is not increasing the Centaurs power in any way this is a power neutral ad but again is tying in to the sort of reign jury and druid eel or that we were modeling when looking at the sort of medium centaurs of our of Dandy’s past for inspiration now we get to the hybrid nature trait which I talked about in our last stream about the Minotaur this is me experimenting with the creature having more than one type right quite honestly since and here again you get to see game development happening alive sin releasing this I’m already over hyper hybrid because because I have convinced me last time I know I want to try and see if there’s interaction so so I am demonstrating live on camera killing killing my own darlings it partly because I did a number of studies looking at our different creature types looking at other ways of achieving the design that I want us to achieve you know and realized I can achieve what I’m going for without walking down this potential crazy train of giving people more than one creature type for instance there’s a very good chance that if we take this centaur to the next step that its creature type would become Fae particularly because these medium centaurs are based on our most fail ike centaurs I had mentioned concerns about having nonhumanoid player characters particularly because of some hidden sort of immunities you get like suddenly a spell you know that targets only humanoids doesn’t work on you but since then I’ve I have analyzed all of the options in the game that do do that and actually the benefit you’re gaining from that immunity is pretty low because and also the number of monsters you’re going to meet who rely on casting hold person on you or something like that they’re actually are actually quite low so it’s a bit of complexity without a lot of utility and so that and that’s why the hybrid nature thing it it I am often eager to kill design including my own that ends up posing more questions than it answers so a good rule serves the DMS and the players in a straightforward way as possible the danger with this hybrid nature is it just starts posing all sorts of questions and we designed our game assuming everyone has one creature type that said we could make this work but also a decision I often have to make as the lead rules designer is what is worthwhile for us to make work because making these things work and have them not disrupt the game as a whole is an investment of time for us and I always have to decide what’s worth it because we want to make sure everything else is working well and I don’t want us to have to do a bunch of infrastructural work to make what’s ultimately a niche option functional when we can do it in a more straightforward way okay finally the these centaurs can speak common in Sylvan very appropriate especially for their they’re sort of Fae like origin so that’s that’s a little a fly through the centaur we had let’s see if we out gosh lots of questions yes can I kind of sent our write a broom a flying but that might just be for that that the DM can so in many of these many of these questions like what is an appropriate Anatomy for one thing to ride another these questions actually already exist in the game if you’re playing with just the players handbook because of the ability for people to change shape you know you already there’s the possibility that because of different body altering spells in the game and different magic items you can end up with an unusual Anatomy and anytime unusual and ahead of me meets some other object in the game if the rules don’t say how it interacts it’s it’s really up to the DM and in this and there’s no real wrong answer when it comes to crazy corner cases I say DMS follow your gut go for what’s the most fun for your group if you make a decision that you regret just let your group know and make another decision another time there is no change in evolving how you run your home game always in the pursuit of what’s fun for you and for your players let’s see some more questions we’ve had a quick one about you had mentioned in passing about a book and development when will new books be announced we will be making announcements at the stream in many eyes on the uprise weekend mm-hmm yes so look for that at 4:00 p.m. on Friday 4:00 p.m. Pacific time I don’t think in that particular case but as far as the the next books coming out do MMX yes I guess there are other centaur races that the let’s see honey things from dnews past oh let’s see what’s this one this is from raving ROG Jeremy what PC race would you want to add to 5e if you could add any from the Indies past that is a good question I so I love kind of all things faith so I would just keep bringing back certain Fae options that have appeared in the past satyrs we’ve had in the past yep we had Pixies in the past all of those I think would be fun to bring back at some point I forgot to ask you the Oxford comma yea or nay Oh the Oxford comma we use the Oxford comma in our books partly that’s because our publishing relies on the Chicago Manual of style and Chicago is all about the the Oxford comma I also like the Oxford comma because it’s hard to go wrong with it doing ap style where you don’t use the Oxford comma it can be very easy to end up with with goofy constructions where you eat shoots and leaves yes yeah you can you have the funny thing of like you know the valedictorian thanked her parents Nietzsche and God and if you’re missing the second comma then suddenly her parents are Nietzsche and God so yet where we are in an Oxford comma house any potential for playable races that it would include perhaps the gif or an Uzi or something along an outlander let’s say outliers on those lines possible that’s possible yeah like the gif which are in one Canaan’s Toma foes again our baby that came out today yeah if enough people want the gift let us know and it’s possible that it would be playable in in the future especially if we did something in the future that was focused on spell jammer then there’s a really really good chance that in a product like that the gift would be playable hey you know we did portals last year for extra life maybe there’s a case to be made for something like that as well yep oh I see someone saying the manual manual of style discussion is the nerdiest part of this so watch out I could do an entire talk on a Chicago mobster let’s see oh dude there was one about playable content beyond level 20 if beyond 20 yeah so oh here we go is there a possum Jake for 13 question is there a possibility of adding prestige classes or levels 21 through 30 or will we stay capped at 20 the the level cap is unlikely to go above 20 part of that is we find and this has been true throughout the Indies history except for in 4th edition when the game’s cap was 30 that very little play occurs anywhere near level 20 and in fact even in an Edition like 4th edition where the levels went up to 30 it was rare for play to go beyond level 20 so we’re we’re far more interested in just giving new stories for people to play in levels 1 through 20 and for anyone who hasn’t seen these options because I discovered actually quite a few people haven’t seen them there is a section in the Dungeon Master’s guide that gives a set of epic boons for 20th level characters and we designed those is essentially a way for you to keep advancing at the level cap and the boons are really neat because they give you a set of almost superpowers where you become this being capable of things well beyond what a regular adventurer could do if we find in you know the next few years that there’s huge demand for love for play at the level cap or beyond we would explore options but right now again and we’ve seen this not just in 5th edition but in first edition second edition third edition fourth edition like even when when pick options have been provided that go beyond level 20 very few people use those options no matter how they’re designed no matter how straightforward they are most people tend to want to play between about levels 1 and 10 or 12 or so and so that’s that that is where we tend to focus our efforts but we we do as we did in Morton Canaan’s Tama foes make sure that we do you know each year have something for DMS to use it at higher levels there’s a good chance you may or may not hear about something soon that also has some higher level stuff in it so but yeah keep talking to us we we listen we it is rare for us to say we will never do something because one of our our main things is listening to all of you and play we play DMD constantly so we’re also always have our eyes out for things that pop up in our own dandy play and and see ha there’s a new direction for us to go in we’ll see maybe one more we’re getting close to 3:15 so again thank you so much for everyone tuning in thank you to our followers and subscribers as always it’s all greatly appreciated we will be seeing many of you hopefully during the stream of many eyes taking place in June 1st through 3rd on the DD twitch channel look for us 4 p.m. Pacific on Friday – to kick things off and yeah there are still a few tickets available for the sunday games so if you are in the los angeles area please consider a ticket and you’d be able to get get your feet into the set and watch a live game and get a cool bag of dean d swag which I believe includes a copy of Morton Kamen’s nice yes yeah and come so you can talk to me yes so take a look at the DMV website we’ve got the list of special guests that will be appearing we continue to add to that as the the days go by so we got one more one more question and that will go on yes yeah yeah up one here rebooting settings there’s I’ve seen dark Sun pop up multiple times so more than once I see here is dark Sona when not and if so in the core books we have direct and indirect references to almost all of Dee Dee’s classic settings and so we consider all of them possibilities and we we are fans of many of those settings like I often say on Twitter how much I love dragon lands I love Ravenloft there are things I love in gray Hawk and misstara and dark Sun and you know many people in the department have different settings that are you know their favorites and all of those things are are definitely in the realm of possibility okay that that we as we did with cursive straud you know we we like thinking about going on journeys to different places in the multiverse and really it’s just about you know when is a good time for us to do it and you know how best can it slot in to the other stories we’re telling because we also we really kind of like this organic field that we’ve started to develop of feeling like the products tie in with each other in various ways so I’m hearing a firm non-committal but the doors are always open well and I think I think you can look at even a book like Morden Kanan stoma phos which is filled with with references to many different D&D worlds that you can see that in product after product that those pot those doors have possibility remain open right it’s it’s a different approach right I mean if not a book maybe there are pieces that have already appeared and books and continued will continue to appear folks moving forward yeah yeah cuz we at the end of the day whenever I get asked like what is what is DS official setting and the answer I always give is the official setting of D&D is the D&D multiverse which includes all of the classic worlds and it also includes your home campaign settings that there’s this idea that all of these worlds somehow tie together in in the grand D&D cosmos you know with these cosmic villains trying to worm their way into different worlds where you can go on you know grand planer adventures and visit these different places so that ultimately is the DND setting and that’s why we focus on the multiverse in the players handbook because you’ll notice then The Player’s Handbook no particular world is focused on as like the world of D&D we mentioned you know we mentioned Dragonlance we mentioned Grayhawk we mentioned the Forgotten Realms we mentioned misstara and more ever on and and so on and that’s because again the setting it’s at all of them and we’ll just see where where the journey and that great multiverse takes us all right and we’ll be finding out more of that journey on on Friday that’s my Segway yes again thank you for tuning in today and we’ll see you on Friday again for folks tuning in a little bit later here there’s no dandy news there’s no dice camera action today folks are getting ready for the stream of many eyes in Los Angeles on Friday through Sunday and and we hope to see you then so thanks as always if we did not get you a question we will be going back through and collecting them so please do not feel that it was sent out into the ether we do read all questions even if we don’t have an opportunity to to address them all all right well it was a pleasure as always Jeremy thanks Barton we’ll we’ll do it again real soon great bye everyone [Music]

Psionic and spells – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

May 30, 2018Zoltar Leave a comment

hey everyone welcome back to the Mike Romero’s happy fun hour I’m your host Mike Murrells the franchise creative director on Dungeons & Dragons apologies for the little bit of delay getting fired up we had just technical issues you know long after a long holiday weekend which i think is everything running but luckily a superhero appeared in the form of Shaun and got everything kicked off can’t seem ease off camera but he is the star of the show without him we’d I wouldn’t have screen to BAE so thank thanks much to him so this week psyonix so this weekend I did a lot of yard work which gave me a lot of time to think and really start pondering psyonix so we’ve got some interesting stuff here some interesting things so the chat we excited about sanics I hope we are I’m looking down at chat we’ve got things a little set up a little bit differently here with things angled yes everyone thank goodness for shown the so I want to show you something can you see if you can see off the screen right now I have it in read mode chat let me know if this is like really hard to read I thought maybe this would be easier to see because we’re going there’s no paved roads here Dini beyond is super handy dandy but it’s not gonna necessarily help us in this case because we’re talk about soundings and we don’t have it the system yet officially at least so the everyone just just give me a trip if you can’t see it but what I want to show you here is one of the several parts so we have a lot to talk about with psionics okay first thing I want to point out is so check it out I had some time this weekend I went ahead and started writing up stuff like so we can actually use it imagine like there’s some cachito Oh see there we go our trains Derek there’s a sonic spell list now yes there is released there might be so I want to talk about the part behind mics my nice big square shaped head the I’ll move stuff around I’ll flip for the pages this case I kind of like my head is useful the you know let me see if I can I’ll just try to zoom in just a little bit more there we go yeah there we go and actually this would be nice because uh I’ll walk you through page by page I know my my block shape balding head is in the way of some of the text but I always try to remember to not talk about a text till I’ve flipped it over so let’s talk a bit about what we’re looking at here so there’s several things that came to me while I was raking up crap from my backyard not always literally crap depending on how what the dogs eaten but the the first thing was if you remember the back when I first started doing the the sanic wizard I was complaining about oh we’ve got you know it’s so hard to do this because if you give you all these sonic powers then other classes can use them so the super obvious thing is to make a separate spell list psionic spells the and really what that does is it keeps things from falling into the hands of classes that I we don’t necessarily want using them so that was something which was just like I was complaining about it and starting trying to design around it and whatever just just make it a separate thing it’s easy right like it’s one of those such an obvious solution you just wonder why didn’t I think of that you know so so there you go so that’s our first thing so okay we have our sonic abilities they’re coming into the game we don’t have week we can use these subclasses now without necessarily things bleeding over to where we don’t want them to go the the arch range Derek the spell is sighs it’s TBD I think it might be like Ranger or warlock sized but it’ll kind of depend on what we actually want to do with the spell list the my if you look here at the psychic warrior under spell casting I under let’s see spells known right it calls out you know three first level spells of your choice from the psionic spell list so my goal would be that that spell list is robust enough that something like the psychic warrior doesn’t have to dip back into other class spell lists to get all its abilities so this is kind of like the first starting point now I think that this works pretty well for the subclasses if we want to do that so we talked before but having that middle ground for Dungeon Master’s who think I want to add some Sonics to my campaign but I don’t have to learn it in another entire system this I think could work pretty well the and as far as a Northland Kyle I think you how many’s how many spells they will have in total it how many I have in mind it’s hard to say I think it’ll be something where we’ll I’ll work on some of the subclasses and then eventually get to the class and kind of see where we end up I think I’d want to earn the side of having fewer rather than more because we can just pull in spells from the regular spell list and I think I would do that or the very least just give you access to them just to keep things simple because again one of the ideas here is we want to give you the flavor sanics without Dungeon Master’s having to learn a bunch of new rules all right so that’s but that’s only one part of what we’re talking about you know that’s kind of like what what that did for me was really conceptually make the subclasses have their own space it’s a shared thing across all these subclasses and I think it feels like it we’ll see I mean you don’t know you’re gonna do we’re gonna do play testing we’re gonna push ahead and see where we end up it might not work but at least it’s a promising path so that’s part one so part two I was thinking a lot about spell points and one of the things that’s struck me with spell points is where they sit conceptually in our design framework for fifth edition’ D&D one of our big things with 5th ed was to say we want to give you not as many choices as you may have found in 3rd or 4th edition but make those choices bigger and that’s what directly led to such a sub classes to sub-races this idea that I want to be an elf now what kind of else do I want to be I can be a high elf I can be a drow and those come with a lot of things and there’s a bundling to it the same thing with classes I class itself is just you know it’s a big choice I can be a wizard or I can be a fighter there’s a two very different classes and by design in fifth edition meant to be very different to feel different right I think that’s one of the things that that gives a role-playing game long legs you know you can play it for years is if you really feel like you can make genuinely different characters and then within that class you’re picking a subclass rather than saying every time you gain a level pick something we’re saying you pick one thing and you get to play through all of that there’s a lot of reasons why we did that I want to touch on a couple the main one being it’s much more accessible for new players or players who aren’t into optimization a player just says I want to be a great Archer so I can just go through and that you think the fighter or you know one of the the weapon abilities you know that menu of abilities again one of them is just it’s really good to arrange characters just just take that it makes the language of the game simpler you know as a player you know what you want to do so you just do it we’re not hiding it behind you to figure out how these three things work together to actually make it work and so forth at the newer player for the less mechanically invested player it’s easier it’s also easier for us conceptually because we’re having bigger ideas like instead of instead of saying like hey this fighter is an archer but what we really mean to say is they took this and this and this and this and this we’re saying this fighter is an archer Archer is a subclass they picked Archer that’s just what they are or samurai or Eldridge Knight the so that’s the that’s kind of the reasoning behind going for fewer choices but bigger choices it also means our design going forward in the future can be a lot more evocative because when you’re designing something big you have a bigger complexity budget to play with you have a bigger power budget to play with and so when you’re looking across those like three to five class features you can build something that really is driven by having all these things build on each other rather than throwing out lots of individual little pieces where there’s powers and fourth edition or feats in third and relying on players to find the combinations because invariably as a designer your intent there is let’s let players build whatever they want I think that’s a little bit you know at the end of the day looking I worked on a ton of 3rd and 4th edition stuff your a little bit as a designer kind of you’re leaving a lot of your players out to dry like they just they don’t want to have to figure that out but you are also opening the door to just that’s where abusive combos come in you’re kind of assuming you know people will find combinations to express a say a unique story but in practice usually what happens is you have players driving combinations that are upsetting the power balance of the game and therefore making the game less fun for everybody you know whether intentionally or not I think a lot of cases people don’t you know they you do it that sounds cool or I just I want to get big damage number and then it might lead to an unhappy conversation the table so that’s all the reasoning vampire night on you a I’m hoping I don’t know about soon because we do have a schedule because remember you a feeds into our future products so often you see things in you a because we’re thinking of publishing them somewhere the and it’s not exactly sure where this might land because it’s still pretty early I know it can be frustrating it feels like it’s been forever for work in psionics but like we are committed to taking the time it necessary to make something really work for the community of D&D Player’s if you remember we took two and a half years playtesting v and there are still things like now I mean it felt great we launched it but there’s like back and like fix that up we didn’t quite know it there’s still things we missed right so for me play testing is super important we want to take our time so the so that’s why fifth editions philosophy is fewer bit bigger choices so then we come to yeah the bonus actions right hey call me tell me yes the house but that was such a big thing anyway don’t to get that don’t try sidetrack me alright China the so when they look at cyanic power points power points are really all about that optimization like lots of little choices combining to make a big choice I don’t know if philosophically they’re necessarily a good fit for 5e but also we already have that option the dmg so I don’t know if saying Sonics is defined by power points is necessarily a good path but that leads to the second idea I had all right because I was thinking okay I think a sign expel list can work I’m gonna skip past so I got the psychic warrior here I did this got the soul knife here yeah actually made me go slower so you guys consider don’t worry about reading it I’ll go back we’re only in like 15 minutes in so I want to get to the back I wrote up a couple of sonic spells waving a laser pointer in front of me that would definitely like oh hey well you know cat like right I did actually you know I was one of insistent putting the two back see in the game which I’m sorry or you’re welcome depending on your view on that race the and Wolford what I’ll do is ever has specific questions and I’ll try walk through things in a more detail what I want to do that was kind of show you go to the back here and look at some of these sound expels because this is where things started to come together for me so if you take a look let’s take a look actually mine fist is a boring one so I wrote these up you know said just to eat over this weekend I was like ok cool the one though that actual went to show you that I don’t know what I can’t get it the second page hang can edit this ok now we could see live as I try to use word alright so here’s how I’m gonna do let me just throw in a page break here and then you get to watch me try to figure out how it was I like doing that thing and this turns into 30 minutes of using ms word with alright so take a look at sense mind because this is what I want to use as the example here what I’m thinking of so since mine is a sanic can’t trip uses one action that might not be where it ends up because I wrote these up that I had an idea components none oh hey we’ve got kind of a little bit defining trait of soundex they don’t have Penta components but then take a peek at that concentration make the odd direction up to one minute might be wrong we might change that whatever this is a can trip that requires concentration okay so imagine this world let’s take a little peek at sense mind by shutting by shutting down your normal senses you extend your mind into the scenic landscape around you for the duration of the spell you are blinded and deafened so what I was thinking it was like you kind of sink into this other sensory world and you can use a bonus action to sense the presence of creatures within a 30-foot cone you learn the number of creatures within the cone in their creature type you cannot detect undead or constructs with the spell a flavor drawback because we traditionally have said undead or like very Hardware feckless onyx but whatever spell is blocked by one foot of stone why don’t you become a metal thin sheet of lead or three feet of water dirt that’s just pulled from the tech magic now imagine this you are a sonic character so we have this idea of disciplines and there are these things that build on each other so imagine if when I go in a sense mind great it’s can trip and let’s say this maybe sense mine’s a bonus action go into sense mind bonus action close my eyes block my hearing down the sensing Minds now imagine there’s a set of spell that our first level or higher that say something like when you have sense mine activate cast the spell it does things like you’re jabbing into people’s minds you’re taking control of their brains you know their prints yeah physically making your brain dancer I didn’t you’re taking control of them you’re reading their mind it’s a mode you go into and it’s kind of capturing this sense of I learn a thing and as I gain levels and I get more spell slots of higher level I’m getting better at it and I can get bigger effects out of it now imagine sense might and now I’m gonna I’m not gonna try to write this but you know whatever I’ll take notes on it so imagine that if that’s kind of like our baseline piece and let’s zoom the so much more oops no it’s still in so imagine that if that’s our sense mine thing which I actually might want to call it like you know enter mindscape I might give it a more you know flavorful main yeah flavorful name this probably becomes up to 10 minutes Caston time is probably one bonus actually and maybe instead of 30 foot code I’m gonna say a 60 foot cone and now I’m managing I’m just gonna make something up this is gonna be pseudocode but I’m just gonna kind of copy and paste it if I don’t know how we’d present this budge you can imagine there’s another spell you know and now what I probably want to do here is by show you okay you extend your mindful sonic landscape around you so imagine this it’s a you know whatever the cloud sanic spell don’t know what level would be it’s one action its ranges that say 100 feet opponents none duration is instantaneous got it in one and what this just says is you know our our pseudocode while you have enter this could be you know this is maybe like the sonic static this is not something we do but there you go just this idea that I have a say it’s a it’s first of all spell slot and then I have enter mindscape I throw this up I’ve got concentration going and now I can do things like I’m gonna flood the air with Sam ecstatic just making everything you have this disadvantage on wisdom saves or creatures of your choice you write things like that let’s see paladin Davros the interaction connects and spell casting imagine in this case they would be they would just be spells for the interactions but we would have an option if you want to make them different the what else we got here I thought I thought so another question about the oh they call me Tomy worried about its concentration one of things I thought about and this might be something that would just do I mean I’m like 90% thinking I would do this is that these this enter mindscape ability here may have something like this but and that this is not final cut but the spells duration cannot be ended due to damage whatever we throw in something there that says your constant things that could break your concentration can mess you up but not taking damage is not one of them and that just might be a signature thing just so you’re not constantly worrying about it the data love swing DeeDee meets inside out it’s exactly right that’s the look a trooper does the return of Sonic’s mean will get thought eaters again yes the crazy platypus guys one of things I thought about what this is that does mean with some of these creatures we could potentially have some really interesting interactions between if we get our rules right what I’m imagining is if I’m psionic and I’m using one of these sonic and rips I might have a creature that sonic that may say something like you know any gate dependent how I get the wording right we don’t want to make it complicated but we might be able to pull out some of that feel of like the sonic combat like hey I’m gonna sanic mode you’re in a sonic mode that means we can enter a different way what I was picturing in my head was just something really simple like if I’m in if I’m in a sonic mode and you’re in a sonic mode – there was just something I can do on top of my turn – just her a little psychic energy yeah you like basically a clash of the minds the you know maybe a rider on top or there’s like this sort of struggle for sonic dominance the way I kind of thought of it is it’s almost like you know in in in Wharf area this idea of air supremacy like there might be some struggle to like control the airspace well in this case the Sanok space around a battlefield I don’t know though I think I’d want to design basically though the functional spells first and then see where that goes I think it’ll be fun though right if Sonic characters were afraid of like the thought eater and they maybe they never read any the most characters might not even notice them it’s only when you’re like in a sonic mode the treatment can interact with the creature but that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves it’s more on the flavor stuff but the the oh yes and tell me I think in this case the blinding and death thing I would pull this out originally that was when I was thinking just as a can trip because essentially it’s like a detect magic it’s very useful divination can trip so I think he I would get rid of that good call that was more when it was a flavorful and it had to sit alongside other countries the a can trips as divination tools we try to be very careful of because we don’t want they’re so easy to spam we don’t want the game to become the Dungeon Master’s running the game and the player is just like I use my sense life I use sensing you again and again and again and they could slow the game down so but in this case I’d be ok with it because there might be some other thing we’re throwing here earth just kind of assumed that this is gonna take up some of the complexity of your character good play test and we’ll come that off but the so the what’s kind of fun about this though is I talked last week about the Summoner so one thing you can imagine just do a quick copy paste here is that you could have a canned trip that summons a creature in 3rd edition in the 3/5 psionics book there was this idea of astral constructs so we could have one faster construct again the pseudo-code don’t try to play with this oh because it’s gonna make no sense could be one bonus action range say 30 feet points none constructs it and it’s basically you summon a and let’s just say one-hit die asshole construct and in the can trip mode it might be you know it uses your actions to do stuff yeah it’s a can trip it’s pretty simple and you need to control it now the benefit here is it’s basically it’s an up gunned mage hand I could like use my actions to make it move around go grab stuff while I’m just standing still and then what you could then do is you know upgrade HD with spell slots that’s an easy one you could give it special abilities we talked last week one of the things could be I create my astral construct then I look you know I pick one creature and I pull one of its spheres out and fuse it with the astral constructs so now what ever else sees this kind of like you know ectoplasmic creature the creature have targeted seems like its greatest fear now I’m standing there bearing down on it it could be a way to deliver a motion-control type effects you could see someone you really trust so you’re willing to you to do whatever you say right the arch rage Erica the question about psychics in general will there also be room for how categories are magic interact you know the like divine in arcane the the one tricky thing is we’ve never really done that so if we were to go back and do it there would be some amount of rewriting existing material and we’re always a little really crazy about doing the axe I thought it added weren’t clear if the complexity that added added in would be worth it the the raping ROG please make an astral summoner class don’t shoehorn it into an existing thing I think what we’ve got here is that this would be something that would really come to life in the mystic class itself because one of the things this kind of gives to the third point one of the things about this when you look at this construction of spell well wizard could take this and spend their spell slots and cancerous on it like reggaeton playing the psychic wizard no problem I can do this but you’re not really gonna have any spell sorry class features that speak to this spell because you’re sort of riding on top of the wizard chassis and then as I thought about that felt kind of right you know when you think about the eldritch Knight compared to a wizard they’re really specialized you know there’s some restrictions on which schools they can use and their class features are really about combining fighting with spell casting so what I imagine is that the full mystic character class probably built on the cleric chassis that’s where it’s built right now d8 hit died not getting your multiple attacks you’re really relied on and that’s that’s what a lot of the issues with the mystic came from trying to do so many things up one chassis so what this would do is we’d really focus on saying the mystic rather than having to include the soul knife rather than having to include the psychic warrior we like for me one of the hints that you’re dealing with a kind of an incoherent class a class that’s doing too much is when you have to give out weapon and armor proficiencies based on subclass now it’s not a given right some classes that works I think the cleric it actually works pretty well because we start you with medium and then we’d say is this more of a marshal most domains a pretty marshal in flavor so you got your heavy armor but I think that’s okay because you’re used to thinking of clerics is kind of you know having the different garb they wear based on their thing my secret thing is aside I always liked playing clerics and light armor like playing clerics of nature or who are of the sea really I wear leather armor ever really high dexterity and high wisdom and I might be more of an archer or your arm using finesse weapons or something like that the and so the idea being that when I was working on the mystic and really having a stretch like these these subclasses just feel like different classes and that’s what kind of helped fuel some of this so maybe throw in some more questions here mr. quaint 11 could enter mindscape be more robust as a common class feature of psionic subclasses that’s the thing I would yeah that I would want to look at and this would be part of the next phase of the design step is one of the tensions that this approach does have if I have my psionic subclasses in the Senate class where do I one of what goes in the spell list that they share that I know is now Universal versus what becomes unique to the class because making the classes unique elements really stand out I’d want I want to do that by making them really feel like these the signs of a true psionic master so it would really matter it really depend on where he put those things one thing for instance that I could see doing this again off the top of my head but have some rule for just the sign at core class is that they might be on the maintain concentration on to sign at Kent trips at once and so then you just immediately feel I’m a lot more versatile right I can play these other classes and really focus on one can trip in one style but if I want to be real master of a bunch of them I want to play the mystic the falling of our twenties Derrick yeah like the tech magic will be universal right so rather than saying sonic detect magic we would just say the detect magic spell is on is on your spell list and then we might just have a class feature or somewhere say look your your components are none if you’re using it as a psionic user but I don’t know if we want to go that far and that would probably just rest on the class itself rather than the other classes the so yeah um yeah defiant Mars kicked with spell slots that’s that’s a good way to think of it if your Magic the Gathering player yeah this idea that you play some cards the kick mechanic is I have to save a card it could be two mana total whatever color it’s like a 1/1 creature that does something when it’s tapped and it could save this card is kick to get some +1 +1 tokens or you get cast the spell effect it’s kind of how I feel this except that card stays in play and then I keep spending men on it to activate it and it’s got a lot more abilities on it the so yeah the I think this could be a pretty interesting approach because what I wanted to do was capture that flexible feel of spell points without using spell points because I just felt like we were really struggling against this idea of that that really high little have a high level of precision that spell points allow for just not necessarily fitting into the default design idiom of fifth edition the because that is really about this points make a lot of sense if you’re saying I want you make lots of small choices that then combine into reflect your character as a whole or your characters actions so the this I think might be a good middle ground but wise I also think about it what it really means is if you decide I want to use the spell point system so I’m going to just go to the dmg and use it essentially translates into something that looks a lot like spell points from earlier editions where it’s you’re using a can trip that’s zero points you know can trips cost or free and then I’m spending points to augment that can trip I’m giving this thing special effects a new additional powers and so on now one thing to keep in mind going to come up here to mine spike this is just our simple damaging sanic spell I don’t think this would necessarily be one that would be concentration because I don’t want to I don’t wanna go hog-wild love this and assume everything has to work this way so it’s also possible that rather than being can trips these can be reclassified as something else and in this the within the subclasses it could just say hey you get a sanic let’s say discipline and so we know they’re distinct from Canter’s one thing that why I kind of like that is that the it makes it distinct in your mind you know we could write things we could write a class feature that says hey you can you can concentrate on two disciplines at once I’m not worried about if in the future we add other can trips that require concentration and there’s some weird cross effects there that I don’t intend so this might be a case where some specificity could help the it also just might be and it’s a nice little callback to an existing term we’ve used the but I imagine these these would just appear on the spell list as you know your spell list a jerk and trips here’s your disciplines here your spells that’s that it’ll be a new category the Harmelin wordsmithing thank you data this way always always strive to maximize Mike Romulans in the pallet pallette endeavors would you still include the visual odd auto honorable displays of using Sonics how with a contract to hide them I’m kind of thinking that for you know and my initial thing was throwing in components none making Sonic’s a lot more subtle but I’d want to think about that a bit Oh arts my drip out mine spike is already a second little spell that I steal there already is a name we’ll call this mine strike just give down whatever it’s thanks calling that out the thing was too good to be true if it’s out there the so yeah the what I think the key here would be the is just making sure that this system doesn’t get too sprawling my main worry right now I’m thinking about it is let’s good let’s take a look at our astral construct right I’m looking all the things that I’ve got here you know I can update upgraded state dice with spell slots some of the special abilities would be you know inspire motions yeah we get so like you have damage boost attack like spells what I don’t want is to make this overly complicated to the point where if playing mystic I’ve got like my disciplines and I’ve got all my spells of autumn and specific disciplines and how many spells do I have to give you to make sure that’s that’s satisfying without being overwhelming because naturally I think you know especially if we stick this idea that the mystic and concentrate out of multiple disciplines there’s a natural very big stress on the number of spells now and if I was to say one thing that does like when I see new players dealing with D&D the number of spells you know it’s I don’t want to say we may have been too generous in the core game I just worry that there’s a gap between learning D and E and then mastering I know a lot of spells especially when you’re picking through which spells do wanna prepares a wizard or just you know as a cleric going to the entire cleric spell list so now that wouldn’t be as much of a weary on something like the mystic the because we are assuming that’s coming up in a span ssin so you’re probably a little bit more comfortable with mechanics at that stage most we assume we don’t assume beginning players for instance own the zenith ARS guide or Morton Kamen’s in fact there’s a quick aside because today is the release day for morning canyons time of those one thing I’ve noticed in actually this is was something we wanted people talking about more to use compared to Volos saying o Volos is probably the better purchase for the new DM because warden Candis is more for higher the higher challenge monsters and plainer stuff it’s actually by design that’s something we think of we want it to be pretty clear if you go to your friend for friendly local game stores a new player if someone’s there working at the store who knows the DND line they understand kind of what the sequencing is you know it’s not like what book should I get next on know it’s like well it makes sense if you’re running this type of campaign buy this book if you’re just starting as a DM but you want more monsters let me start with Volos then grow into Morton Kamen’s so things like that so it is something we keep in mind you know whatever product that this might show up in since it would be later on in the release schedule we can probably afford to add a little more complexity or sumn mastery this might inspire can be your first character so you might draw on some of your knowledge of playing a wizard or some like that so okay so this is basically what the kind of the three pieces coming together are get this idea of a sonic spell list so now I can safely fence off those effects I don’t want every wizard to get it also means that if you just don’t have a sign a character in your game you don’t have to worry about this stuff because that was another worry I had was okay great we give you soundex whether you like it or not as a dungeon master now any wizard or any cleric and start picking these spells up and that’s just I don’t know if I want to burden every DM with that so that solves that then we have this idea that if we have these disciplines or can trim disciplines are basically up gun can trips not power wise but more in flexibility wise where do those rest and those delivering a lot of our sonic flavor and then having a full Sonic class that can really specialize in these things and make them come to life in a way that the subclasses can’t quite match the subclasses are hitting their flavor but it’s the mystic class that can really bring it all together so the m draco how would you release the revised ranger that is still something which is in process so a quick aside on that we are putting together another update survey for the game as a whole I think it’s gonna come out maybe in the fall or late summer the idea is what we want to do is if you remember if you’ve been playing this long or take part in our surveys about two years ago we did a big survey maybe three years ago now on the basically the the to the game the game came out we want to ask you about the character classes what did you if it was working what did you feel was not working that was where we learned there were a lot of issues with the Ranger and the way of four elements monk very high dissatisfactory like noticeably so compared to everything else everything else is kind of clustered around together you know there’s a ranking but the bottom ranked thing other than the Ranger was was not so far from the top rank thing that we’re worried so that’s how we identified those problems now that Zan’s is out we want to rerun that survey to see how have things changed especially because we have so many new players coming in before we start making like real changes like and if we make a change we’re gonna commit to it or giving you a new option we just want to verify that with a few more years under a you know a few more years of tread on the tire so to speak we’re not making a quick shift that maybe people don’t need as much so the arc trader derick the server results are actually we are pretty we don’t publish the full raw numbers we talk about them in general but that is something that falls into what we consider to be a trade secret so that’s not something which like has where we’re not spending money in time to generate all this you really useful information for us and then just just publish it the UM but we do always try to talk the community so you when you’re looking at what we’re doing we can say hey here’s what we learned and so this is why we’re working on this I always I like that we can we can frame things in terms of the feedback there are a lot of things that which are kind of go more into the business side of things that we don’t necessarily want to share the all right so the yeah Mad Hatter him do people still care about these old problems I mean it’s not quite exactly the question the main thing is in a universe where you have more options to the Ranger and more options to the classes is this still as big of a problem now to be my point of views I don’t think we’ll see much shift because I think the I think what we’ll see is the overall happiness the ranger will probably go up but I still think that the Beastmaster Ranger is gonna have some real serious issues because one thing I’ve even looked let’s let’s look whatever we walk through here right I just described the canned trip for astral construct is essentially I mean the hit dice thing aside I’m using a canned trip and when I think like thus weakest expression of having an allied creature on the table it ends up looking a lot like the animal companion which is probably doesn’t speak very well if the animal companion actually functioning well as something which is a subclass defining feature so but we also again we don’t want to rush ahead and make a change to the core game we might be being we might be in a position where being too conservative especially for like if you’re engaged enough for the game to be like on this stream chatting about design geekery with me you’re probably like why I just fixed this but we always have to keep in mind the real strength of D&D is the new players coming in so we’re really person may be overly cautious about disrupting that we really just don’t have me a position that we’re getting people confused when they’re coming in the game so it’s something we’re always very clearly aware of and I think at the end it’s good for everybody because it means more players means it’s easier to get a group where it’s if you don’t want to DM it’s easy to find another DM so it’s something we’re really aware of the okay so we’re wandering all over the place for stream associate about Sonic so let me walk you through the psychic warrior now this is just something I put together over the weekend so kind of drawing on some of the stuff so this isn’t final but I want to show you some of the stuff I built out here so spell casting this is just what it is right this shouldn’t be anything bizarre here what I imagine though if we did go with this idea the the the disciplines that this would probably say you learned too can trips and you also learn a discipline so I kick destroyer so essentially this was a pretty simple straightforward thing what I wanted to do between psychic destroyer and psychic guardian was pick up this idea of the using your sonic energy to augment yourself so psychic Ghost Rider is essentially a converted spell slot into psychic damage on an attack kind of like a smite psychic Guardian was convert your sight your spell slots into a shield effect for your allies so or yourself so you’re good at protecting you’re good at harming this is probably something where instead of being a bonus action actually right now this is just pill pickups mic so it’s not it has no action here I’d probably cost both of these with your reaction just to kind of have you the sense of my offense or defense this round if you’re gonna its new spell slots psychic storm is when you cast a sonic can’t rip or use the attack action your turn hostile creatures than ten feet of you seen feet of your and if you take psychic damage equal to W intelligence mod minimum one so this is just this is their add some extra damage it’s essentially the extra attack you get when using a can trip that’s the comparison for the Yeller tonight sonic recoveries when you use second wind you regain this first level spell slot now it’s an expended for several spell slots you can’t use this to pile up extra spell slots the opposite of time potency eyeliner it’s sonic surge at 15th bubble you gain the ability to channel additional psionic power when user action surge ability till the end of your next turn if your attack or spell causes a creature to take psychic damage that creature takes an additional one D 10 psychic damage H you can only take this digital damage once during your turn this is one I’m not as crazy about but just it’s a good you know this done is a very strong argument this but what it does is it encourages you to attack lots of people which might not actually be not always the best strategy so and then mind cleaver your tax leave behind traces of disrupt its disruptive psychic energy if you hit a creature with a weapon attack you cause it to become vulnerable to psychic energy until the end of your next turn once you use this ability you get if it’s its cooldown as short or long rest again that works on a psychic destroyer and a lot of your spell’s taking a look at the way of the soul knife so this was similar what we talked about last week I don’t think I did anything really oh wait did I copy and paste something and then yes I did psychic lash slash shows up twice but I think I just don’t need it delete one so anyways so we got the sole knives coming in this lets you do psychic piercing slashing or bludgeoning with your arm strikes I through the range here in addition you can use a bonus action increase the reach of your arm strikes by 30 feet until the end of your turn I don’t wanted that to sit on the bonus action so you sort of thought like which way do I want to go with my action this turn don’t hit someone from far away I’d wanted to do something more exotic so the after so you know for psychic surgery why not adjust to be maximizing psychic damage yeah that could be good you know because then we’re staying within the bounds of what the system expects it’s a pretty good a suggestion Grum will fist the let’s see okay i go back to reading mode i can because i’m reading and now we get to do like mike learns how to use ms word here we go and just chat just chime in if this is a little small the so way of the soul knife i’ll click over to here get my head out of your way no it’s not yeah that’s gonna the river okay so my head’s gonna be in the way doing it sorry everyone that is not working the way I thought it would the okay sorry my head’s gonna be in the way cuz I can’t get it to I could have sworn it was going over once by page mode no it’s going over both pages at once okay again welcome to my Camaros is happy fun hour where we learn to use microsoft word a program which i’ve used for like 25 years now and still and barely proficient with your welcome so here we’ll just kind of go here I’ll zoom in a bit so maybe he comes in so we’ve got we talked to this last week with psychic slash essentially building on the way of the open hand this idea that when you flower your blows you get to pick a sonic effect to drop on top of your own arms drinks it’s a life drain gives you temp it points invoke terror lets you make someone frightened of you these all basically last for one round I’m invoke wrath disadvantage on everyone except you astral slide teleport someone ten feet away and synaptic overload this is where you tag someone with vulnerability to psychic damage until the end of your next turn that vulnerability uh Graham Rufus thinking of that it might be showing up a little too often so that would be maybe going up max damage then we’re getting more of a combo rather than just everything’s overlapping but we’ll see our site this tied into some of the flavor we talked about last week this idea that these characters may be being almost like bounty hunters they they’re good at like honing in on people so as an action sector creature you can see this is meant amuse outside of combat so it’s an action creature makes a wisdom save it has no knowledge that you forced it to tempt the saving throw so this is kinda like it’s almost like a passive attack you’re not hitting someone so hard they notice it and if they’ll save you learn if the creature shares any aspects of its alignment with you you learn its current hit points its current attitude and intentions toward you or one other creature object or location of your choice in addition for the next 24 hours or until you use this ability again you can use an action to determine the creatures distance and direction from you one of these I’ve tried to do here was this idea that if you want to learn multiple things you have to proc multiple saving throws off the target and one you know one successful saving time of the target shuts you down so there is a little bit of a planning element here you don’t just get to learn everything for free you’ve got to try it a few times do you just you know learn one thing and then wait cuz you want to attract this guy you know it’s a little bit of a decision for the soul my figure if they want to do spectral blades you can cause your blades to phase through physical objects and defenses once during your turn you can choose to forego one arm on unarmed strike in place of forcing your creature within the reach of that stack to make a deck saving throw failed save it takes your unarmed strikes damage half or half of it succeeds this is capturing the idea of the attack that can’t miss maybe I’m just phasing through your defenses to disrupt your life force that might need to be a restriction of this psychic damage only so we’re just basically in fifth and if we have an effect like that it becomes a dexterity saving throw because it’s purely can you get out of the way your armor can’t help you rather having a touch of AC or anything else the psychic forum is essentially this is something I liked I just threw it in if you were last week we talked this idea that the energy you manifest to make your blades you can become that that energy use it to become your entire form so the bonus action you gain resistance to all types of damage fly speed of 30 and the ability to pass through solid objects but not and your mood within them it’s been if it lasts for one minute it cools down on its cooldown as long rest cool down it would need some extra language there so but that’s the gist the gist of it then we come to the wizard and this is what we talked about yeah I kind of thought about the wizard what do you get so what let’s say let’s have a frank talk about sanics Sion do we like Sion or do we like mystic chat let me know I’m gonna I’ll take a look I keep an eye over there to see where we go I kind of I like mystic is the class name because it just feels like something that is more it’s a little bit feels like something people would say in the role of D&D that I can picture you walking in to a tavern and say oh he’s a mystic rather he’s a Sion but I see a lot of Sion loved a few words me there maybe the class should be the Sion Crawford I think like Sion if you stick around for his show coming up next you can ask him but I’ll probably throw a poll up on Twitter the and see where that goes but the I mean yeah Daedalus a mystic is very gentle yeah that’s pretty generic the and Professor nightshade mystics are too much like soothsayer yeah I could see that you think mystic it just doesn’t quite match it see okay we’ll see but now I had Sion here for the Wizards maybe the mist maybe the wood becomes the blue Jen but that feels – I’m not crazy about that because that’s just like if essentially if you use I think I was looking up online I think wow Jen I think it’s Chinese derived it’s just kind of funny like the you know the Chinese word for wizard means like psionic wizard that’s just okay don’t know if I necessarily like that makes sense rather get something more something a little more interesting and then level we do a Chinese translation someone will find a way to translate it the yeah okay so maybe we’ll just go Sion I’ll Mentalist grumbles yeah okay known as mentalists boom I like it this is what we talked about a couple weeks ago essentially what we’re giving you is an op gun Espie feature you know it’s kind of interesting because this is this is kind of giving you disciplines maybe I might redesign this based on what I’ve done with Sonic so far I will see this basically gave you access to detect thoughts but it improved it in some ways I won’t go through need at all because if you just look at the spell they see it let’s use the spell with bonus actions instead of actions you get telepathy at the second level this does not tell you you can grab spells from the sonic spell is Jax I just did not even get to it it’s working on the weekend folks can’t carry down the telepath just you get telepathy telekinetic mind essentially let you cast telekinesis early normally I think you’d have to be I love and level the cast at this lets you cast it it’s six level but instead of making the spell better it includes some drawbacks which then eventually fall away once you’re high enough level to cast all the time and then we just we improve those features so yeah that’s where we ended up so I think that the the school of psionics would need to get some revisions based on this introducing disciplines so that brain fighting no crazy I just you forget it fighting brains big giant brains elder brains beware the alright so the infinite core how important you think separating Sonic’s and spell casting ins through the lens of something like darks and even so that that is a big question I you know I kind of feel like while there are story reasons to make them separate that it runs back into this does the cost of keeping those the two things separate and having two systems run in parallel and then have to chart out all their interactions is it worth it are you getting the flavor that you want out of that to a sufficient level and I don’t know if you are in running so went back when I played in ran three five I had players use psionics and I never really felt that going that path was really worth it now that’s just me that’s what I think I would do with this design is make Sonic’s part of the existing magic system and then ask in the subsequent playtester raise does that feel like it’s working would you rather have them driven further apart because I think if you’re a long time player you’ve lived in the world where psionics was different so I kind of want to add invite everyone that’s inviting you to live in a world or the same and then see does that feel good does that work because I do one of the things that’s always been interesting with Sonics is that the it’s something which is fairly popular but it’s not a given for campaigns I really think there was if when Sonics especially in 3 5 you could probably learn a lot about a gaming group by whether they use psyonix or not and my experience was the groups that were ok with a lot of optimization we’re totally fine with Sonics because that’s just how they played and then the groups that really just like wacky characters were okay with sanics and that you and then everyone else was just not interested they didn’t like they didn’t like the wackiness and they didn’t like the power level the because I think the optimizers was just not the puzzle to solve you know it’s everyone’s throwing up play on wires characters so sure however you get there it’s fine then I think the players the campaign’s are more likely just make interesting characters my experience is a lot of those teams and players don’t really care about power level so they would just think odd to be cool to play a Sion with just like these disciplines whatever and they weren’t seeking out like hey how can i optimize my points the but I think is just a matter of the dm’s ability or desire to learn more rules so I think what I’d like to do is try to move things so it’s a bit more easier for DMS to pick up and feel like they can integrate them into the campaign and to see more use of them overall again it’s tricky because the Sonics were popular especially in 3 5 in 4th we just did kind of I mean had to exist within the power system so it wasn’t quite the dramatic difference that you saw in 3rd direction you know we’re trying to go that way but yeah um kittens and mittens Mike do you think mystic sonic would be its own book release no probably not I would rather put it in another book either like the dark Sun setting book which you yourself kids and men’s point out or I could see some future date if we do another book legs and that’s an F saying if I won’t be as far as we did but it’s probably yours off I could see this showing up in dark Sun I could see this showing up as a chapter in that book the one nice thing I like about this approach is if we’re combining this sort of spell list and style of spell with a discipline into one package and then have a sort of subclasses in a class and orbit around it it makes it very nice like here’s a chapter do you use this chapter or not in your game I wouldn’t want to try to make it an entire book on its own because I think that would force us to do more with it than we want to if you’re typically speaking for us a hardcover book has to be about 160 pages and I don’t know if we would be able to fill those 160 pages in a satisfying way as opposed to like a 64 pages that’s a really meaty feature of a book the poor yes so if in there I don’t want anyone reporting this is news right though but just you know the sometimes people can overreact to stuff what if you make sure people understand where we’re coming from yeah this entire approach right if you hate it or you love it be hate it take solace in the fact we could play test this and Everton will hate it that’s done if you like it tamper with your enthusiasm with the realization that if everyone hates this then win play test then we’re knocking it we’re not gonna do it at the end of the day the communities in the driver’s seat and as a designer I love that because it just means I can afford to try wacky things because I know we’re gonna validate it with everyone watching who’s playing and DMing you know so in a lot of ways it’s very liberating you know I didn’t get I know it can be frustrating sometimes you know I’ve questions what the Ranger and stuff people want stuff change really quickly but we want you we’re in this for the long haul so that’s kind of one of the drawbacks that except you know that to hit the claw quality level we want to aim for it means we moved me slower than you think the yeah so I think we are at about less than five of my understanding is Jeremy Crawford is gonna be up next talking bit more about the sort of final design step he doesn’t I mean I talked to him a bit about this morning about the stuff so if you guys are hanging around for that stream and ayran shot asking him questions the he might have no idea talking about the but yeah this is something though initially he liked the static discipline concept so we’ll see we’ll see workouts the but yeah so everyone I’m gonna throw a poll up on Twitter when I get back to when I’m on able to tweet without thinking to meeting or something like that caris to see where the mystic Scion vote breaks down think about this stuff I’m gonna the dosti I’m gonna start announcing settings to alright everything all the plans up here see if you’re sonic you better reach out through this live video feed and read my mind for all the stuff we’re gonna announce it stream of annihilation that’s not screamin at Eastern stream of many eyes this weekend and then the stuff we can’t announce this coming weekend but it’s still on our future but anyway thanks so much everyone this has been I love the show I love being able to share of the stuff with everybody I find it so inspiring it’s so much fun and I kind of like you know seeing the Argon’s play out and where we’re gonna come from because really this entire thing it is a community endeavor right the end of the day D&D is all about us collectively and how we play the game of what we want out of it so yes defiant Mars time to transcribe and go homebrew yes exactly that should be like how I end all the things like homebrew build stuff the and help push the conversation of D&D forward so thank you very much for tuning in and next week we’ll probably on what I’ll do is maybe you start tinkering around with some more other disciplines flesh tomorrow the one drawback to doing this on camera right now is I haven’t done this yet so it’s nice to do it and then talk about it then start doing it on camera rather than just try to make it up as we go completely so thanks for yes I the stream and many eyes will be recorded of the winter live stream and release it on youtube so tune into twitch over the weekend submit can’t catch a live check out our our YouTube channel we’ll have clips there and the entire videos alright take care everyone and I’ll see you all this weekend so tune in to watch my games [Music]

Centaurs, medium creatures and ‘a tower of Medium creatures’

May 30, 2018Zoltar Leave a comment

@JeremyECrawford @mikemearls @ChrisPerkinsDnD #wotcstaff

Just so you know, the #DND hive mind has already decided that a medium centaur can ride a centaur riding a centaur … (repeat) … riding a centaur.

The puzzle is solved. It's centaurs all the way down.

— DM Dean Wants His Tome of Foes (@DeanMSimmons) May 15, 2018

If your DM decides that "a Medium creature" actually means "a tower of Medium creatures," that's an amazingly trippy, English-defying campaign you're playing. Live the dream! 🐎🌈 https://t.co/nYfxFeol5i

— Jeremy Crawford (@JeremyECrawford) May 15, 2018

Centaurs are now AL legal so long as they ride or are ridden by another PC centaur. https://t.co/Ox4KBFo8FJ

— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) May 15, 2018

I can’t figure out why Centaur aren’t Fey creatures?

May 30, 2018Zoltar Leave a comment

So I just found out Centaur are classified as Monstrosities in the Monster Manual.
Processing this is hard. I can’t figure out why they AREN’T Fey creatures?
It makes logical sense for them to be Fey!@mikemearls @JeremyECrawford I know you probs hate me, but throw me a bone here that’s my preferred take, honestly. at the time we leaned in a more traditional direction

— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) May 15, 2018

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Centaurs, medium creatures and ‘a tower of Medium creatures’

I can’t figure out why Centaur aren’t Fey creatures?

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