D&D: One Spell in 5.5E Speaks Volumes About New Design Direction
One spell, right from the jump, shows you just what WotC has in store for D&D 5.5E as we head into the launch.
D&D 5.5E is at hand, and if you lived through the Edition Wars of 3.0 -> 3.5 or from 3.X -> 4th, then you know what you’re in for. If you were into D&D at the tail end of 4th Edition, the new book feels a lot like the release of Fourth Edition Essentials. It’s new but not totally different. It has a lot of the same ideas, the exciting ones, but injects them with small and large changes that may make all the difference.
Perhaps the biggest change is to the layout itself. D&D is not that complicated, but try and find any rules that you want, and you’ll have an easier time explaining THAC0. Not so in the new book.
But we’ll get into how usable the book is in the coming days. For now, I just want to highlight one shocking change (pun intended) that shows just how differently the new edition is going to play. Why is that a pun? Because the spell in question is Shocking Grasp.
How Changing One Cantrip Signposts a New Edition
It all comes down to Shocking Grasp. Last week, looking at some of the previews out of Gen Con, we wondered if WotC was starting to move away from things like Legendary Actions and Lair Actions. Because the Ancient Green Dragon didn’t have any – instead it had several Reactions which it could take. Each had its own trigger. And if the Green Dragon was in its lair, it had access to more.
This is where I invite you to turn your 5E rulebook to Shocking Grasp as it is in the “current” ruleset. Don’t have one? Here it is straight from the SRD:
If you don’t want to read all that, here’s the important part: “on a hit, the target takes 1d8 lightning damage, and it can’t take reactions until the start of its next turn.“
Meanwhile, in the new Player’s Handbook, Shocking Grasp is subtly different.
Lightning springs from you to a creature that you try to touch. Make a melee spell attack against the target. On a hit, the target takes 1d8 Lightning damage, and it can’t make Opportunity Attacks until the start of its next turn.
And this one little change to a cantrip helps unpack a whole lot of things. For one, it looks like the new edition is going to move away from things that exist outside of Reactions.
Because otherwise, why make the change to Shocking Grasp? It only prevents Opportunity Attacks now, not Reactions. So one cantrip won’t shut down the offensive power of an Ancient Green Dragon, say. Which is good, it shouldn’t.
But it’s one of those examples of how you can’t really play in the 5.5E sandbox with all the same toys. A lot of spells have been rebalanced and reworked. Not all of the ones you’d think, mind you. But more on that later, too.
But the fact that Shocking Grasp doesn’t shut down all Reactions says that a lot more Monsters are going to use their Reactions. And, too, it matters to players. Characters, by and large, have a lot more Reaction stuff available to them. Not every class/subclass combo will, but it feels like there’s more for classes to do with their Reaction. The “action economy,” so to speak, reads a little differently.
I think that’s great because it means that Shocking Grasp won’t shut down a Player Character’s fun, either. If an enemy spellcaster hits you with Shocking Grasp, you can still do pretty much anything as a Reaction except a vanilla Opportunity Attack. Things like a Battle Master Fighter’s Riposte Maneuver will still let you attack someone if they provoke that Reaction.
Which is nice. It’s a streamlining of things. I think the Ancient Green Dragon we saw looks a lot more usable. It’s easier to wrap your head around “make sure the Green Dragon uses its Reactions which trigger when _____”. DMs are still going to forget about it because that’s just the nature of the game.
I think we’re going to see a lot more powerful enemies with Reactions. Vecna was that way in his latest appearance. And that feels like a flag-planting for how the game will feel different in a hundred little ways. A few really big ways, too. But those are mostly in the specifics of how classes play.
I think that the more delicate, longer-term adjustment is going to be getting into the 5.5E core mechanics. But that’s an uphill battle, no matter what. There are still DMs out there who run surprised by the way they sort of remember it is working in 3.5E. At any rate, we’re excited to dig into the new book.
And no shade to you if you’re still running anything like 3.X did it. Those old habits die hard.
