OneD&D: Expert Classes

Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast dropped their second set of playtest materials for the upcoming OneD&D featuring the rules for Rogues, Rangers, and Bards, the new spell list divisions, a wide selection of feats, and some updates to the glossary. Overall? I find myself immensely impressed – not only with the rules themselves, but with Wizards’ commitment to trying new ideas and responding to community feedback.

So, here’s some of the highlights.

General Rules Changes

One of the best changes Wizards has settled on so far is to normalize subclass feature acquisition. Everyone in this UA gets those bonuses at the same levels, and it sounds like they want that to be the case for everyone. They’ve also moved the “Capstone” feature for each class down to level 18, which makes them much more attainable for the normal game group, and you’ll actually get to have them for some time before the game reaches its end. (I’ve yet to have a game reach level 20, but I don’t imagine it would go much further beyond that anyway.)

Dual-wielding got a massive change to make it much more viable. Now, attacking with an off-hand weapon is part of your Attack action, instead of costing your bonus action. For rogues and rangers, this change is massive. Cunning action and adjusting hunter’s mark just got a lot less painful if you wanted to fight with two swords.

They’re testing out some new stuff with Natural 20s and 1s. They’ve struck the line about an automatic success on a Natural 20 after the community reception, but they want to test having a Natural 1 grant your character advantage when it’s the result of a skill check. I think it takes the sting out of a one, certainly, but it mostly just moves that pain point onto rolling a 2. I talked in my last blog about enjoying the momentum of inspiring each other on Natural 20s, so it’s likely that I’d choose that rule over this one.

Feats of at least 4th level all appear to have an ability score bump added to them now, which is great! My players and I have been talking about adjusting some rules for our next campaign, and one thing we’ve been considering is a much lower budget for point buy, but gaining more power on each ASI/Feat level to accentuate a power curve. Some feats got a bit better than they were before, others had some power stripped down. Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter both lost the drop 5 from your attack roll for 10 additional damage, and I’m in favor. Those two feats presented so much power it was nearly impossible to justify anything else if you cared even a little about optimization. Polearm Master also had its reaction attack changed to no longer be specified as an Attack of Opportunity, which makes its combination with Sentinel much less frustrating.

Rogues

Rogue is, in my opinion, one of 5th edition’s best designed classes, perhaps the best. It has a clear mechanical throughline during combat: you get one big hit, so ensure you’re set up to land it. Its subclasses have all added unique flavor and power without utterly invalidating the others as they’ve been released. I haven’t been a player often throughout 5th edition’s lifetime, but when it comes to characters I made for anything longer than a one-shot, I’ve run rogues more than anything else. My current PC is a rogue that is adventuring in the Sword Coast in some homebrew content post-Rime of the Frostmaiden. My first 5th edition character was a rogue.

Wizards themselves knew they’d done a great job with the class, and so it’s seen relatively few changes here. Most of their features are intact, just shifted a bit in their acquisition. Evasion has dropped to a 9th-level feature instead of 7th, but that truly feels more in-line with its power and it makes room for earlier acquisition of subclass features – which definitely came in a bit too late before. The rogue picked their subclass, like most, at 3rd level, then didn’t get their follow-up features until 9th, 13th, and 17th level. The majority of Wizards’ published adventures end around 12th level, so most had a 6 level gap between their subclass features, then their games were close to finishing.

Slippery Mind at 15th level now gives proficiency in Wisdom and Charisma saving throws, to make rogues even harder to nail down. (That’s four out of six saving throw proficiencies in the base class!) Subtle Strikes is the one new feature for the base rogue, replacing Blindsense, which is a massive trade-up in power at the loss of being able to detect invisible creatures within a mere 10 feet.

Then there’s the Thief. In the interview with Jeremy Crawford, they talked a lot about just letting the thief cheat and break the rules, and boy did they mean it. Thieves gaining a climb speed flat out is an elegant adjustment toward using more concise rules language than before. Allowing them to use their Dexterity for the new jump calculation is great. Permanent advantage on stealth checks so long as they’re not wearing medium or heavy armor? Few rogues do that, anyway. And then they gain an additional item attunement, a chance to save their item’s charges, an ability to use any scroll they find (and with expertise, a way to guarantee they can use whatever scrolls they want), and then, finally, to occasionally get TWO bonus actions? I think this is a huge improvement for the subclass. Two bonus actions might be less powerful than getting two turns in the first round of a battle, but it’s much more game-friendly, and usable throughout an encounter rather than just at the beginning of one.

Rangers

I think the ranger here looks better than ever. Despite some decent updates and subclasses throughout 5th edition, the class never managed to entirely shake off its underpowered reputation from its reception. I’m a fan of them becoming a Prepared caster instead of a Memorized one, giving them the ability to cast Hunter’s Mark without concentration is great, since that spell iconic for their class. Allowing them to take Fighting Styles as feats even though they aren’t of the “Warrior” class group is great. I love roving giving them 40 feet of movement and a climb and swim speed. Rangers picking up Expertise is great, I think Tireless is awesome, and it looks like they nabbed the rogue’s blindsight feature and improved it, going as far as 30 feet of blindsight.

Hunter’s features are interesting, too. They’ve removed the Colossus Slayer / Giant Killer / Horde Breaker choice, and made Colossus Slayer baseline, which I believe to be a good adjustment. They’ve changed the second feature to grant Hunter’s Mark the ability to reveal immunities, resistances, and vulnerabilities. And their last feature is like a rogue’s uncanny dodge, but it hurts someone else? I love it.

Bards

Bards are also becoming a prepared caster (and I think it’s even better for them than it is for rangers), but their spell choice limitation survives in allowing them to access the Arcane list, but only choose spells that are Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, or Transmutation. There’s a lot of good spells there I can recall from the top of my head, however. Haste, Hold Person, Catapult, Blur, Hideous Laughter. The biggest thing here is that their Magical Secrets feature is also spells the prepare! So each day they’ll get to pick a few spells from the list they chose without limitation once they get that feature.

Bardic Inspiration is also so much cooler as a reaction, so you know it’s getting used and might change the result. Also, it can be used to heal now, which is incredible. At 1st level, a bard can heal you for 1d6 as a reaction after you suffer damage within 60 feet. It’s the best healing on the market!

They’ve also given bards a selection of healing spells to have prepared for free, to really emphasize their support role.

All of this to say, these new playtest rules have provided some very welcome context to the way Wizards of the Coast is considering the rules for OneD&D. If we can expect more drops like this, the next evolution of the game is looking very bright. I can’t think of a single piece of this set of rules I didn’t like, so I’m excited to see more. I think the biggest hurdle is going to be a fear that Wizards has a good idea that is shot down by the community for being too powerful or good: like the Battlemaster maneuvers of Fighter were originally intended to be a class feature, and not just a subclass, which would’ve been a much more interesting design space. I’d hate to see something like that get watered down again, but I’m feeling really hopeful for now.

As always, thank you for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.