Tabletop Builds on One D&D Cleric, Species

kobo1d: We’re back for another round of discussion on One D&D playtest rules, similar to the fivethirtyeight.com articles where they just have a slack discussion with long answers, edit it slightly, and post it to the site. Today we have a handful of Tabletop Builds writers and editors (a.k.a “carpenters”) joining us for a chat. Because of scheduling, we are having this chat a few days later than our previous ones, and again have a slightly different mix of voices.

The topic this time is the third One D&D playtest packet, “Cleric & Revised Species.”

kobo1d: Let’s start off with our general impressions. What did we think of this most recent, more bite-sized playtest packet?

Icebrick1: For the Cleric main class, I didn’t see anything I particularly objected to. I like the concept of Holy Orders, but it needs some work. Moving the first subclass feature up to 3rd removes some degenerate multiclassing options as well. The most notable thing in the document I feel are the reworked spells, which while I to some extent appreciate the experimentation, I don’t think any of them really hit the mark.

Sylv (Tabletop Builds Editor): In general we see the trend of slowing down class progression (e.g., subclasses gained at level 3 and first cleric subclass-specific Channel Divinity at level 6), which initially gives me the impression that multiclassing for dips will be less powerful. Overall, if we agree that the Rogue class was hit very hard, the Cleric class seems to have been given a slight ding, if there is a net effect at all.

I’m concerned about their direction with how they intend to rebalance or redesign spells. We see a save-or-suck spell (banishment) being nerfed substantially, an already bad spell (spiritual weapon) being nerfed unnecessarily, but then two easily obtained cantrips (guidance and resistance) being made very powerful and probably required on many builds, even non-spellcasters.

Haen the Heretic (Form of Dread blog): Ah yes, the new guidance and resistance. Truly the moment of all time, my legion of planar bound Chwingas always wanted to outpaladin a Paladin.

Quetzalcoatlus: Holy Orders are a concept I really liked. It’s interesting to see how freely they’re handling out Expertise or Expertise-like features. Still, I would love to see Scholar get buffed to be more on par with the other orders. 

I’d also like to quickly discuss the changes to Channel Divinity. The new healing option seems like mostly a way to save a spell slot when getting a party member back up, though the damage option seems like a trap through and through. The difference in the number of uses per day is interesting. 

Icebrick1: The funny thing is, as weak as Scholar is, it actually does kind of step on the toes of Rogue for being the “skill expert” class.

Sylv: Right. I get that they did this as a way to put all those 1st-level miscellaneous Cleric features in one (heavy armor, extra cantrip, extra skill, etc). But if they want to solidify the Expert classes as experts, then maybe Scholar should have just been scrapped entirely and replaced with something else.

kobo1d: On the Channel Divinity uses, Quetz, it seems to be another data point suggesting short rests are being downplayed in the future of D&D, but oddly WotC doesn’t seem to want to go all the way in phasing them out, as the Holy Order adds them back as a short rest resource. 

Icebrick1: Seeing that the Thaumaturge option does still use short rests, it is clear they aren’t entirely phasing it out. While I would be interested to see what a Warlock without short rests would look like (hopefully not just a full caster) this to me tells me Warlock’s Pact Magic feature will probably remain mostly the same. 

Soma: I didn’t have as strong of a gut reaction to this one as I did with the previous two playtests. Cleric was a class that in vanilla 5E that I would categorize as…one-note, but functional, relative to the field. It relied strongly on a handful of staple options (bless and spirit guardians, namely) which resulted in a fairly stable if boring playstyle, and customization options within domains/subclasses was in a reasonable spot outside of the two Tasha’s subclasses. I was most shocked to not see any reworks to spirit guardians, which I felt was ripe for a simplified, reworked approach.

I think the addition of Pact Boon-esque Holy Order choices was sensible and something I expect to see in more classes going forward. I do think that heavy armor/Strength focused Clerics suffer specifically at level 1 due to this change, however, as they will have poor Dexterity (due to focusing on Strength/Constitution/Wisdom) but no proficiency in heavy armor. They’ll also have to use their starting gold on armor they won’t be proficient in at level 1, which makes that start pretty rough!

kobo1d: I was also much more whelmed this time, Soma. And similarly baffled by the exclusion of spirit guardians. How do you playtest Cleric without the new spirit guardians?

Soma: I think even in more casual tables, the holy trinity of Cleric spells is bless, spiritual weapon, and spirit guardians, so perhaps they’re some sort of scuffed A/B testing with all of the popular spells.

Icebrick1: Well, according to the designers, you just use the old spirit guardians. 

Soma: I appreciated that the accompanying video at least provided more clarity on the fact that “for anything that isn’t specified use the original rules” is intended as opposed to just a vague lack of forethought.

kobo1d: Spirit guardians is such a bizarrely 2014-era spell in design, it will surely be changed.

Quetzalcoatlus: A small thing I like is that the combination of Cleric having find steed now combined with spirit guardians going unchanged is making them even better at avoiding melee monsters.

Xenken: I am so excited for find steed on a full caster. Not even to actually ride (though that is good), just having a Warhorse at level 3 brings a lot of extra beef to the table. Seems like a fun time.

Sylv: Supposedly the reasoning for changing spiritual weapon was that it was too complex, but spirit guardians is one of the most rules-complex spells and it’s also fairly common. The weird mechanic about excluding creatures you can see when you cast it, what entering the area means, confusion between half speed and difficult terrain, etc.

Soma: I really thought that they’d nix the exclusion criteria, let you choose to affect or not affect targets on a case-by-case basis, remove the speed reduction, and just count the radius as difficult terrain.

Icebrick1: It isn’t much, but I do like the new option they added with Channel Divinity. Having something that isn’t situational like Turning Undead means that a situational Channel Divinity from your subclass isn’t that bad. However… waiting until 6th level to get your subclass Channel Divinity seems very harsh to me. 

Sylv: The fact that the Divine Spark scales with Proficiency Bonus makes 1-level dips into Cleric still fairly powerful by the way. You can get guidance, resistance, non-trivial healing for Tier 1, medium armor, shields, bless, and healing word.

I agree with Icebrick though that the class seems blander overall because you don’t even get your subclass-specific CD until 6th level. That seems really harsh.

Quetzalcoatlus: Agree with you on that, Sylv. A niche use or some healing from levels 1-5 is really sad.

Soma: In general, I’ve noticed that one subtle way that some features or classes are being “buffed” is that they are providing simpler/easier ways to expend all of your resources. Bardic Inspiration was changed to a generic heal, so if you have any uses leftover before a short rest ends, you can use them to get healing out (after level 5). Channel Divinity was changed so it can now heal a single target, so you can now use them before a short rest (if you are a Thaumaturge) and then get some back on a short rest. (Of course, Tasha’s pushed us in this direction with Harness Divine Power already). In general, I think that this is a nice step forward that subtly pushes people towards making the best use of their limited resources.

kobo1d: I’m glad you mentioned Tasha’s Soma, because it brings up the continued messaging on backwards compatibility. In this round of material and accompanying video, we see explicit reference to reusing player content from Tasha’s, Fizban’s, and Eberron which…still seems like it might be problematic.

Luolang (Tabletop Builds Editor): For myself, it is still something of a mixed bag like the other playtest packets. There are some key changes to the Cleric, but overall it still remains as a powerful class as in 5E. Moving the subclass choice to level 3 makes sense mechanically, though there is a disconnect from the previous narrative of Clerics (a complaint that was levied at Paladin Oaths coming in at level 3 as well). The addition of Holy Order is neat and Scholar seems like a stab at addressing the odd weakness clerics have at the Religion skill, though it doesn’t compare to the other two options. There are some key differences in how they can use and how often they can use their Channel Divinity options that I imagine we’ll dive into here soon.

WotC does seem to be receptive to feedback, judging by the change to the Dragonborn’s breath weapon mirroring the Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons version as opposed to the previous playtest document. Additionally, some of the spell changes in this document are interesting as well, though a few seem oddly motivated, such as making spiritual weapon a concentration spell albeit with better scaling and resistance now likely becoming a must pick cantrip for divine spellcasters. 

To briefly touch on some general rule changes, while I’m puzzled with some of the changes made or retained around movement (such as with the Jump action or no longer being able to freely change movement modes), I really like the addition of the Dazed condition as a concept and I’m hoping One D&D leans more in the direct of soft action denial as opposed to hard action denial in their design. 

Haen the Heretic: Overall I’m rather disappointed in the direction in which they chose to go. The biggest positive is the removal of lifeberry, but it’s too early to say whether it helped or harmed the game’s balance – we need new monsters and encounter guidelines to see that.

The spell changes are very miss and miss. Spiritual weapon was already bad and they decided to nerf it, which makes me wonder who the target audience of these changes could possibly be. The optimizers who never used it anyway? The casuals who generally didn’t complain about it?

Spiritual weapon does however continue the trend of balancing the game around someone else’s really bad eyeball measurement rather than math and quality playtesting. It appears those who failed to learn from history are doomed to design its mistakes again.

kobo1d: Should we move on to discussing specific spell changes, then? It looks like most of us here have aired our thoughts on the overarching changes to the class. 

Soma: My personal belief on spiritual weapon is not necessarily that it was changed because of complexity, but because most people already think it’s concentration. This is part of their path-of-least-resistance mentality I think—to actually change the game to the way they perceive to be played at most tables. Also of note is that it does scale for a d8 at every level compared to every two – concentration is still the killer though. 

Sylv: The spell changes are also confusing because, frankly, I think many casual players also know that spirit guardians is good and a generally good option for clerics. It’s even in the suggested spells in the playtest document. So why ignore such a staple option?

Quetzalcoatlus: Perhaps the designers simply think of it as “good,” without necessarily realizing how much of a must pick it is.

Icebrick1: The choices of spells to highlight are bizarre. My best guess is that these spells are simply the only ones they decided on changes and they are still working on spirit guardians. 

Sylv: I hope that you’re right. Redesigning all the spells is too much obviously and they are just giving us drips to judge initial reactions.

Haen the Heretic: Subclass at 1 was what made Cleric a class I actually took levels in – it was the identity of the armor dip. Though now we won’t even have armor dips since Lightly Armored was a thing that got designed…

kobo1d: And apparently was highly rated in the feedback, Haen. Lightly Armored meta…here we come.

Quetzalcoatlus: Well, I guess Cleric dips now have the new resistance cantrip as a strong motivator of all things. And proficiency bonus scaling on the base Channel Divinity, of course.

Sylv: Don’t forget that your melee martials now just take Magic Initiate to get guidance and resistance and stand next to the spellcasters as buff bots.

Quetzalcoatlus: Guidance + Scholar absolutely making a fool out of the Rogue’s supposed “utility” IS extremely funny to me. 

Luolang: Regarding Scholar, I think the ability to use one’s Wisdom modifier for certain Intelligence based skills as a cleric could reasonably be made as a base level ribbon feature as opposed to being outcompeted by the other options.

Icebrick1: I can understand what led to the changes to guidance and resistance. People didn’t like that the last guidance shown had a long rest restriction, which is unusual for a cantrip, but now it (and resistance) are infinite use, which is extremely powerful. A cantrip known slot is such a low cost to pay for effectively +1d4 to all checks and saving throws to yourself just for the cost of a reaction. You can even apply it to allies if they are close enough.

Soma: I hadn’t even considered Magic Initiate for those cantrips, wow. That is going to be the play, isn’t it? At least, assuming the paltry level 1 options we have seen so far.

Icebrick1: To be honest, I don’t feel a need to be all doom and gloom about it either though, I wouldn’t be surprised if guidance and resistance get changed again.

Sylv: I fully predict guidance and resistance being changed again. But I also don’t like this feeling of getting content that might be purposely incomplete or bad just to gauge reactions. For instance, Heroic Inspiration has changed a few times now and I don’t remember the response ever being positive. Like… at some point, I want just good options without having to give my feedback to the designers over every little iteration. 

Haen the Heretic: To be fair, maybe guidance on everyone is actually kind of good for the game because adding 4d4, 12d4 later on with planar binding, to all checks does reduce the swinginess of the d20 roll.

I wish they went the normal route and just made proficiency bonus bigger though.

kobo1d: Probably the author and most survey readers would never consider guidance stacking.

Haen the Heretic: It’s a happy little accident.

Sylv: Guidance stacking is similar in spirit to death ward stacking. I don’t think most tables would spontaneously consider it, and even once it’s pointed out, not think it’s actually RAW.

Icebrick1: Since banishment was nerfed I have some hope some other “save-or-suck” spells have been hit as well, such as hypnotic pattern. Banishment really wasn’t that powerful in 5E as it currently was, but I do think spells that completely eliminate a monster, or many monsters in the case of hypnotic pattern, aren’t great for the game. 

Haen the Heretic: The most powerful spells aren’t being nerfed, the ones the average player has heard about are.

Luolang: On the note of spells that completely remove a monster, I do hope the addition (or re-addition if looking at previous editions of the game) of the Dazed condition is indicative of moving towards a design of control spells and effects applying more so soft action denial as opposed to hard action denial. I’ve already said this earlier, but hard action denial arguably isn’t a healthy dynamic on either the player or DM side.

Soma: I think that nerfing banishment makes sense because that’s a spell people complain about a lot. That’s their problem for running non-LR single-monster fights as their one encounter of the day, though. Banishment is really quite bad now, though, I feel.

kobo1d: Almost anyone can immediately recognize banishment as just…never actually banishing anything now.

Xenken: Banishment is worse but I’d probably still prepare it. In single boss fights it leads to roughly the same Ready action shenanigans, in multi-creature fights splitting the combat even for one round is good.

Also you don’t have animate dead anymore (probably the biggest Cleric loss) so it’s not like you have all that much competition for spells prepared anyway. 

Luolang: Shifting topics a bit, a lot of the classic mythological / religiously inspired spells did seem to get removed from the Divine list, which was somewhat understandable but also a bit disappointing e.g. no more control water, earthquake, etc. Not that these were necessarily staple cleric spells from an optimization standpoint, but I always did appreciate the flavor of them.

Sylv: Speaking of other spell changes, we never talked about prayer of healing, which got some changes. I imagine this is still not worth casting, but any other thoughts?

The 10-minute cast time to get a short rest I guess could be okay to keep conjure animals or pass without trace while still recharging other features (e.g., Spirit Totem of Shepherd Druid). But if they’re going away from short rests, there seems to be little point to this.

Icebrick1: If there are still some short rest features around it might be worth casting once per day. But in general I think if you can take 10 minutes, you can take an hour.

kobo1d: Once again it is weird to have a spell limited to 1/day. It was clunky on last-playtest guidance and it’s clunky here too. 

Sylv: You also have to keep track of who was affected since you can only affect up to Spellcasting-Mod creatures. Realistically that’s not necessarily your whole party, certainly not the whole party + minions.

Soma: It’s very difficult for me to assess prayer of healing without understanding if there have been large scale framework changes to short rests, their frequency, adventuring days, and so on. I feel like it’s clear there is tweaking of these dials but no consistent philosophy behind it is presented, so it’s hard to place it all. I do think this sort of “you can only be affected by x spell once per y” type design creates a lot of fiddliness, and while it may be easy to keep in mind for this spell for other spells at perhaps other frequencies it may be a hassle.

Aid changing to temporary hit points is a bit sad, as it was a unique spell that now has become a more generic one. Also not a multi-target pickup in emergencies. I’m not gutted but it’s a little unfortunate, though it’s an obvious pick for streamlining and simplification. 

Sylv: Tracking the 1/LR restriction for prayer of healing is easier since everyone is affected at the same time. But for guidance it’s more annoying, for instance. Still, I agree that 1/LR-restrictions are awkward. I also just don’t see why there has to be that restriction on prayer of healing unless they want to stop Warlock Pact Magic shenanigans? Hard to say without having more information on other classes. 

As for aid, in the current game, it’s a pretty bad spell when you have Twilight Clerics and Shepherd Druids running around. Even Artillerists. But maybe in One D&D we will see fewer sources of temporary hit points?

kobo1d: They really love temporary hit point abilities lately, so who knows. Aid is more early 5e weirdness we’ve all grown to love, but it is undoubtedly a bizarrely designed spell in modern context.

Soma: Up to six creatures is 30 temp hit points at level 2. That’s not bad, and remember that Inspiring Leader was nerfed. So I feel aid will still see use. It was always better as a pre-emptive cast when you had reasonable foreknowledge about a difficult day-ending encounter and had the slots to spare, anyway (or as the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option for when multiple allies were downed). 

kobo1d: We’ve mostly focused on Cleric and spells…any thoughts on the updated Life domain?

Luolang: The biggest change to me from an optimization standpoint regarding Life domain is the removal of the lifeberry interaction. 

Sylv: As for updated Life Domain, clarifying Disciple of Life so it doesn’t work with goodberry was good.

Soma: Lifeberry haters rise up. They fixed Disciple of Life, which I like. That goodberry interaction is unholy and then the fact that it was sanctified in Sage Advice is equally unholy. On the whole though, it’s solid. It’s what I would expect for the “base” subclass pick (along the lines of Hunter, Thief, etc).

Sylv: Another interesting consequence of moving Cleric domains to 3rd level is that there are no more 1st-level domain spells.

Icebrick1: Life domain is pretty boring, much like most of the other subclasses shown thus far concerningly. It isn’t bad, mostly because it’s very similar to the existing Life Cleric which isn’t terrible. I appreciate lifeberry being patched up, and don’t appreciate moving the Channel Divinity up to 6th level, but we already discussed that. 

Haen the Heretic: Lifeberry not working is pretty sad. Yes, it was broken, but I fully expect monsters to still be the same unholy murder machines that lead to PCs who get caught in melee requiring stupid amounts of healing to stay functioning throughout an adventuring day.

Icebrick1: Eh, giving an unholy amount of healing isn’t really a good solution to melee people taking too much damage. Trivially, it also means ranged people are unbeatable.

Luolang: I think a lot of how the removal of lifeberry affects the viability of melee martial characters will be dependent on the design of how the warrior packet shapes up as well as what the design of One D&D monsters will be like. Lifeberry might have offered melee a cushion, but its main effect was really buttressing ranged characters and spellcasters to be even more untouchable and extend the gap between melee martial characters and ranged / spellcasting characters. I agree that other solutions are needed. 

kobo1d: Another month, another “let’s wait for the next playtest packet, that might be the one with revolutionary positive changes.”

Luolang: I feel like the Warrior packet will really be the key to get an idea of how this new edition will truly play out in terms of the disparity between martial characters (especially melee ones) and the spellcasting characters. 

Sylv: Unless the fabled “weapon options” are going to include features that increase melee martials’ AC bonus or give them extra healing on hit, I don’t have much hope for that disparity to be addressed. Monks, for instance, will still just explode in melee.

Haen the Heretic: I want to see the monsters before they release more PC options. Until then, we’re measuring without a ruler.

kobo1d: I feel like all these super vanilla options are just rarely going to be picked given the countless powercrept alternatives we can expect over time. If subclasses are even marginally backwards compatible, Life is just dead on arrival.

Soma: I think you’re underrating Life Cleric a bit, as I’ve seen it in play without goodberry and it’s pretty solid. Numbers add up, and a ranged group heal that doesn’t cost a slot is nice to have. It’s not sexy, but I’m not complaining.

kobo1d: Shifting gears entirely to species: the revised Ardling, Dragonborn, and Goliath. How do you like them?

Soma: I’m going to be honest: I don’t care about these species.

kobo1d: Goliath seems much more interesting than in 5E, but PB/LR on all the fun stuff feels bad.

Haen the Heretic: Goliath is the only one worth caring about. I’ll plunder it for homebrew but never play it.

Quetzalcoatlus: Goliath has something going for them, the auto-prone option from Hill is something Barbarians or melee Fighters can enjoy, while the non-spell magical teleport and slowing options are just generally good in my opinion.

Soma: Bonus Action teleports are always nice, even if they are PB/LR. Honestly, that sort of ability being PB/LR doesn’t bother me. +1d10 damage PB/LR is sad.

Sylv: I agree. Teleports and whatnot are fine as PB/LR. Extra damage isn’t. Goliath did get an increase to their base speed, by the way, which is easily missable. That seems to be the only species in this document worth considering, but still not on par with Human.

Icebrick1: Goliath is at least a little interesting to me. I like the options, though they aren’t balanced against each other at all, the ability to automatically prone on hit with no saving throw seems fun to work with.

Dragonborn confuses me a little. It’s okay, but why not Fizban’s version? In the feedback video they say this dragonborn is supposed to be more generic, but the options from Fizban’s seem plenty generic enough to me.

Luolang: The change to the Dragonborn’s Breath Weapon to mirror Fizban’s Dragonborn does seem to indicate at least that WotC is receptive to feedback.

Sylv: Agreed, I do appreciate that they reverted the change to Breath Weapon on Dragonborn to the Fizban’s version. I don’t understand why Ardling was changed — a holy analog of Tiefling seemed fine. Goliath gets some cool options, particularly if your table plays with Oversized Weapons. But still… nothing I would ever take or consider over vanilla Human.

Quetzalcoatlus: I personally wanted for Dragonborn’s Breath Weapon to substitute an attack as they currently do, but the level add-on from before was a more attractive damage calculation for me, as it scales every level and tends to be a bit better at nearly all levels.

Luolang: Dragonborn do now get 1/day flight for 10 minutes by level 5, which while it’s not the unlimited flight of winged tiefling or the like, still seems like a pretty good option to use that will last for multiple encounters.

Icebrick1: I’m not really a fan of Ardling in concept in the first place, and the rework doesn’t seem to have given them much to work with mechanically. It might be decent solely because you can get resistance but the animal specific options don’t make me excited.

kobo1d: I saw a poll recently on Ardling vs Aasimar, I think people just still want Aasimar to be the anti-Tiefling.

Sylv: As for Ardlings, what do they even get? They get a Divine cantrip that can change per long rest, Perception proficiency, and some movement option. But Human can already give you the cantrip through Magic Initiate (and more) and the Perception proficiency. The movement option from Ardling absolutely does not match the second cantrip and 1st-level spell you get from Magic Initiate. So if we’re just going by pure power comparison, I don’t see what niche Ardling is filling.

Icebrick1: This is getting into personal preference, but I don’t think Ardling is meant to be a Tiefling replacement, it’s just meant to be a generic beastfolk race option (that they gave divine flavor for some reason). Personally, I’m not a huge fan of these types of races in general, I feel like a lot of players make very goofy characters with them. Which can be fine, but I often find it a little bothersome. 

Haen the Heretic: I’m generally not a fan of races/species/whatever that have that much more hair than humans or have fur. If only they at least had cool tech.

Quetzalcoatlus: Maybe they were going for an Egyptian thing with them, or just a general beast-human hybrid? Just didn’t really execute it quite well. Just came out as very generic flavour-wise. 

kobo1d: Generic flavor? In a modern D&D product? ShockedPikachu.jpg

Quetzalcoatlus: Who would’ve seen such a curveball coming.

Soma: I feel like we’re all pretty tapped out on opinions on the new species. We still have some overarching rules glossary changes and a handful of feats. 

Icebrick1:  I like the idea of Epic Boons in theory but most of them are rather boring.

Sylv: I also just can’t get excited about 20th-level features when Tiers 1 and 2 are still a mess. 

Soma: There is such a limited amount of level 20 playtime that it’s hard to care about Epic Boons, yeah. Both in actual play and in the products WotC releases.

kobo1d: They are also still quite unepic. They don’t wow me so much I can temporarily delude myself into pretending a game will get to 20. Someone at WotC should pull up a copy of the 3E Epic Level Handbook for inspiration over the holidays, I guess.

Sylv: Right, one extra 5th level spell slot when I already have so many spell slots is just not epic, even if that spell is probably wall of force or something.

Haen the Heretic: Let’s be realistic, level 20 will still be the true polymorphed wish-mess we all know, love and hate.

kobo1d: Was there anything else within it that you wanted to highlight in the updated rules glossary?

Sylv: The only other changes in the glossary from the base game that we haven’t really discussed are: Attack, Influence, Light Weapon Property, Long Rest, and Magic Action.

Some of the changes are trivial, like Attack and Magic actions. But Light Weapon Property and Long Rest have significant changes.

Luolang: On a neutral note, there seems to be some effort in changing up how Long Rests function that seem to address the ability or practicality of rest casting with the new rules on interrupting rests. (Though the change may also have introduced an unintended exploit in accumulating the benefit of a short rest multiple times in quick succession.)

Sylv: It seems they are still vacillating on whether they want to allow rest casting. Right now rest casting is still allowed in the playtest. But it seems their intent is to eliminate it. However, their own rules for that are really ambiguous. Does one combat count as one interruption? What if you cast a leveled spell during that combat? Is that two interruptions?

kobo1d: It seems more clear than ever to me that they are trying to eliminate rest casting. They didn’t quite succeed, but they are closer than ever! Our readers are likely wondering how rest casting survived this version of the long rest, so if anyone has a concise explanation, it would likely be valuable to some folks.

Sylv: As Luolang said, the rules also allow for SR exploitation. Further, these rules to me only seem to limit the number of spells you can rest cast because there are only so many hours in a day. For instance, if you accept that you can rest over 16 hours and adventure the other 8, then really you can just cast 8 rest-cast spells. 

Rest casting didn’t so much “survive,” it’s just that now if you cast a leveled spell during your LR, you need to rest for an additional hour. 

Soma: I wonder if they are simply assuming that players and DMs will not want to play the escalation game of extending rests/threatening interruptions? Rest casting has some interesting interplay with the half-hit dice recuperation of consecutive adventuring days, but that is gone in One D&D.

Sylv: In my experience, casual tables tend to overestimate the frequency of nighttime threats and ambushes. So perhaps by adding the “1 additional hour” clause, the designers think this will stop rest casting but also allow certain necessary spellcasting during an ambush combat.

But it seems to me that you just extend your rest X more hours to get all your rest-casting in. There really isn’t much mechanical difference between resting for 8 hours and resting for 12 hours, for instance. You just can’t use all your spell slots at higher levels since then you’d be resting for more than 24 hours.

Luolang: To end rules discussion on a positive note, I’ll reiterate that I like the addition of the Dazed condition perhaps as an indication of the game moving more towards prioritizing soft action denial abilities over hard action denial shutdown abilities. On the more negative end, this playtest document continues the trend with some puzzling changes presumably to streamline movement in combat by retaining the Jump action from the previous playtest packet but now also restricting against changing movement modes, which just seems to make combat as a whole less dynamic. 

Soma: Finally – do any of you have thoughts on the accompanying video? I always come out of watching those with such mixed feelings. 

Icebrick1: The feedback video we received was really surprising to me. Savage Attacker wasn’t something that got bad feedback?

Quetzalcoatlus: I partially blame this on the fact that the feedback survey is really badly designed by itself.

Luolang: I’ve not myself seen the most recent video – have they clarified or walked back the backwards compatibility component of One D&D?

kobo1d: Yes, a specific example is Gem Dragonborn where they are just fully assumed to be a parallel option still.

Luolang: I don’t think judging by the direction of One D&D it can be reasonably said to be backwards compatible with 5E material. There are multiple conflicts or errors that will result in simply attempting to insert a 5E subclass as part of a One D&D class and there are numerous base level rules changes that already are stacking up to make a different game. While I had personally preferred for One D&D to retain a true backwards compatibility approach, it seems the designers are moving ahead with creating a genuinely distinct edition of the game, even if there is mixed messaging around this.

Soma: I always viewed “backwards compatibility” as functionally meaning “you can use the 5E hardcover of Curse of Strahd (or any given 5E module)” with reasonably low amounts of effort, but as even things like spells and movement change significantly, I no longer even believe that is going to be possible. It seems like quite a bit of work will be cut out for DMs. 

Soma: Anyone have any final thoughts on this packet? It was (intentionally) shorter than the others, and I think as a result the fervor towards it was certainly lessened. For me, it presented a lot of lateral changes and didn’t address the elephant in the room (spirit guardians), so it ended up a bit of a mixed bag…I really need that Warrior packet. 

Sylv: I agree with you, Soma. I also am still withholding final judgment until we see those fabled weapon options. It’s just so hard to really judge anything precisely when we have no idea whether melee martials are still paper dolls or whether monsters are still as dangerous as they are now in melee.

kobo1d: Thank you all for your responses once again on the One D&D playtest material!