The new One D&D and EVERYTHING you need to know

Inspiration "is meant to be awarded for being true to your character" Pretty sure when I DM it's given out if someone makes me laugh or comes up with an ingenious solution I didn't see coming

On the subject of 'no more editions'... I feel like asserting that one has reached perfection is a risky proposition.

So many buisnesses that rely on editions / versioning try to go "this is the last one" and it never is. And in this case, I feel like it's an attempt to make people see earlier versions as purely inferior so they don't stick around. Making it tougher to talk about which specific version you liked certainly helps.

Thanks for covering this. And, of course, the player base is going to end up calling it either 5.5e or 6th Edition no matter what WotC has to say about it, so...there's that. They've already tried to do this once before (way back in the earliest days of 5th Edition, no less) and it didn't stick. lol

"we're doing away with editions!" And the fans said "no."

I've always felt that the monster manual should have been included in the DM's handbook

Build-a-background and more integrated feats might be pretty nice. Feels like they're acknowledging what D&D has become, wheras when 5e was first developed they were trying to recapture that old-school crowd. I don't personally enjoy modern D&D much but it seems like Wizards is at picking a side and embracing it, which should lead to stronger core rules overall. Great for people who love 5e.

Mechanically, I could take or leave half this stuff. It isn't wildly crazy, not with all the 3rd party/homebrew stuff that's been popularized. But the 'One D&D, no more editions!' is an extremely arrogant stance, and not likely to be proven a success by history. Even if they just do bi-yearly corebook updates to 'One D&D', they still will have their tweaks as they always have. I can't imagine new players trying to coordinate with their group which printing # or year # of which supplement they need. And the minute Hasbro is dissatisfied with the money One D&D is making, they'll just force another edition- in name or no.

Building their own VTT is literally just a step towards getting people even more stuck in with D&D specifically. Keep people there and hopefully they won't even notice that other games exist, and if they ever do they'll be like "oh but I don't want to use this other VTT though"

I really like the idea of getting a feat from your Background, I'm much less keen on getting my ability score increases from them. I much prefer GabeJamesGames' class based version for those bonuses. It would ask you three questions and those answers would determine a +1 to a score. Like, "As a Druid to you connect more to Flora or Fauna?" and depending on your answer it would give you a +1 to Intelligence or a +1 to Wisdom. I like the agency combined with helping players come up with role-play ideas early if they're struggling with it.

Some welcome changes but the very notion of "One D&D" feels like they've decided they're never going to address the inherent problems with the system - but last time they did that they made 4e and everyone jumped to Pathfinder because WotC moved their cheese.

It's still weird that humans and tieflings and such can be small if so choose, but dwarves have to be medium, even though they're smaller on average. There should be a choice to be a small dwarf

"All new races." by this they mean fifty new types of anthropomorphic animal.

I didn’t mind the racial ability boosts and boons, I really enjoy how pf2e made character creation modular. You still get your racial modifiers but you get to tack on numbers depending on what background, class, etc one chooses. Perhaps wotc was unable to do this without being too similar to what paizo did. I’m interested to see what changes.

Sounds like they are moving towards where Paizo already is. That's a good thing as Pathfinder and Starfinder in particular you can be literally anything as a player race

In other words WotC wants you to forget there is a 1E-3.5E

Wizard straight up went "Aight you freaks, play your fursona have a blast"

Sounds very much like Pathfinder 2nd, what with feat changes, backgrounds, etc. Not a bad thing, as Paizo does a good job with this, but I'm curious how close these two systems will get.

I hope they aren't going to change the classes/subclasses too drastically. There are so many cool subclasses that have been released for 5e (expansion books, critical role books, etc.) that It would REALLY suck for them not to work anymore for the new edition.

I don't like this new inspiration; the reason people never used it as-is is because single use advantage you have to declare before you roll is not a good bonus, as it's so easily wasted. Most groups I've played with have always treated it as a re-roll instead, which actually gets used. Also it's such a weird change to the trigger; instead of encouraging good roleplay, it's now rewarding luckier players for being lucky. I'd much rather trigger it on 1's as a bounce back mechanic for less lucky players, but a 1 single use isn't really enough for that. Wasted opportunity to properly change it IMO.