D&D: Five Class Playtest Packet Drops Tomorrow
A new Unearthed Arcana drops tomorrow, previewing five new classes, new spells, feats, and more. It’s the biggest one yet!
While the Magic: the Gathering department is busy sending mercenaries after YouTubers, WotC’s D&D team is hard at work on a new Unearthed Arcana, due to release tomorrow. This new five class playtest packet is the biggest one yet.
Weighing in at fifty pages, there are five new versions of classes. New versions of spells, new feats, and of course, the weapon mastery options we saw previewed at the D&D Creator Summit. From what we’ve seen so far, some of these new D&D options sound an awful lot like 4th Edition. Let’s take a look.
New Five Class Playtest Packet Due Out Tomorrow
In a video preview, D&D’s lead rules designer, Jeremy Crawford explains what exactly we can expect to see in the next Unearthed Arcana. The video is just under 13 minutes long, but if you don’t have time to watch it all, here’s a quick rundown of the highlights.
There are five class playtests featured here. There’s the Fighter, Barbarian, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard. Monks are going to have to wait until a later playtest, so if you were wondering how that class goes, you’ve got a while left to wait.
If you’ve been following along with the One D&D playtest, this means we’ll have most of the Warrior group and the Mage group as well. One of the big philosophies going forward is figuring out how classes fit into a system, so that WotC or others can potentially add new ones without having to rerelease whole books to encompass a class’s inclusion (looking at you Artificer).
And the other big showpiece here is the introduction of Weapon Mastery properties. We’ve seen a bit of these from the D&D Creator Summit. In a nutshell, they’re little abilities that characters with the option to use a Mastery ability can play with. It’s not quite cantrips for martials. They don’t, as yet, scale up in damage or bigger effects. But they do let you pretend like you’re playing 4th Edition D&D and add a rider on to your basic attacks.
With abilities like push, you can shove enemies around 5 feet. Cleave lets you hit multiple targets. Topple lets you knock someone prone. The list goes on, but those who fondly remember 4E will see its biggest echo in Graze, which lets you do damage even if an attack misses. Which just goes to show, the world wasn’t ready for 4E then, but its spirit haunts the future of D&D.
All this, plus notes on how backwards compatibility might work will drop tomorrow, check back for more info then!
