One D&D: Character Origins I
i have been working on this for a whole day...
So in the previous article, I mentioned that I will be converting one of my D&D characters from the standard 5e rules to the playtest materials for One D&D. I have asked my DM permission for this and dude was cool with it, so this particular character will be the test subject I will be using for testing and reviewing the UA materials for One D&D. Reason for this being because I wanted to test their promise of "Backwards Compatibility" with the rest of 5th Edition. The link to the character sheet I will be using for the next reviews can be found here, whom I will refer to as "Tuikku" for the sake of simplicity. With all of that settled, let's jump in.
For this review, I will be doing the following to Tuikku's character sheet (dw, i asked my dm permission b4 doing this):
- Convert Tuikku from a 6th Level Monk (Way of Mercy) to a Cleric (Light Domain)
- Change her race from a Half-Elf to a full Elf
- Change/Update Tuikku's background, proficiencies, languages and feats
The only condition (thus far) that my DM gave me was to only use my original stat rolls (13/15/13/12/18/11), which I can thankfully re-arrange in any order I wish.
This article will be Part 1 of my review of the Character Orgins UA, I will go through more detail in regards to what I like and dislike in regards to the UA in apart 2
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Overview
The "Character Origins" Unearthed Arcana (UA) primarily focuses on changes Wizards of the Coast (WotC) will be making towards character creation as mentioned in my previous article. In my personal opinion, before the release of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and the optional ruling that Ability Score Increases (ASIs) can be placed in any stat instead of the stat they are originally assigned to by the original rulebooks, creating a character itself felt very restrictive. Ideally, a player ought to not really care about the how a particular race pairs up with their class, "It's D&D after all; we can create any character we want!" literally anyone says. However, in any character sheet, there is a certain expectation for some level of optimization within a character so that it functions effectively with the rest of the party. No, you do not need to worry about being a ultra skill monkey or a min-maxer off the bat to play D&D, most people just want you to make the best decisions when building a character. This will be the critical role you will play throughout what could potentially be a campaign lasting years, or even decades. Therefore, your actions and decisions truly have consequences.
The Problem with 5e
Using the Cleric class as an example, one would want to have high ability scores in Wisdom, Charisma, and Constitution. The scores you roll and/or assign to your 6 character abilities are crucial to finding out the kind of character you want to be, and the rulings of the DM on how this is done are also major factors at play. I am very lucky to dish out the rolls I will be using for this conversion because it allows me the flexibility to play an elf and a wide range of other races, but lets acknowledge the fact that not all races are built equal in standard D&D 5e. An elf only has a lone ASI of +2 to Dexterity; the dwarf gains a whopping +2 to Constitution AND a +1 to Wisdom; and humans gain +1... TO EVERYTHING! That's from the base 2014 Players Handbook (PHB), and before we even consider picking a sub-race for dwarves and elves! That is why there are so many Dwarven Clerics and Human Fighters in most D&D tables.
Aside from races, the Character Origins UA also harks back to the Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos campaign setting's concept of improving the mechanics of Character Backgrounds in the character creation process by linking it to better background features more relevant to the character and giving the player a free feat at 1st level. The original rules for backgrounds from the 2014 PHB are, in my opinion, very boring and irrelevant to the entire process. To be quite frank, the only reason why most people would invest the time in picking a background is so that they can get the proficiencies provided and ignore the features listed in them for the rest of the game. Hell, as a DM, I just let my players pick 2 free skills and a language if they can't think of what background to pick. Sticking by the theme of "Cleric", let's use the Acolyte background based from the PHB.
Acolytes gain the following features and traits:
Skill Proficiencies - Insight, Religion
Tool Proficiencies - None
Languages - Two of your Choice
Equipment - A holy symbol (a gift to you when you entered the priesthood), a prayer book or prayer wheel, 5 sticks of incense, vestments, a set of common clothes, and a pouch containing 15gp
Shelter of the Faithful (tl;dr version):
When heading towards a place of worship affiliated with your deity, you and your companions can get the benefits of free healing and care; however, all materials needed for spells and such for the healing to happen must be provided by YOU (so it's not even free after all!). Furthermore, your fellow acolytes will only provide you (and only you) with support at a modest lifestyle.
If you are within good standing in that particular temple, you may ask it's priests to assist you and the party... if the job is not too dangerous of course.
I have played an Acolyte in a campaign, and I don't think I even considered Shelter of the Faithful to be particularly useful or relevant at all. It's basically "Your church will help you, but you have to pay for it". The most use I had out of it is the free Insight and Religion proficiencies and the rest is pretty much history.
All of these combined, Standard 5e makes character creation streamlined and simple as it was originally aimed to do, but in exchange, made the options for character creation very restrictive to varying degrees and making certain races better for some classes better than others. Ironically, this issue adds some layers of complexity to the process for new players of the game. The precedence established by the Homebrew rulings shared in the community and the feedback from the releases of expansions like Strixhaven and Tasha's Cauldron have created a good data set of WotC and the D&D Dev Team to use for laying down the initial foundations of what One D&D could look like. And thankfully, they have taken the route of listening to what the community, their greatest stakeholder, has to say instead of listening to the money and deadlines.
Character Creation
With all of that, let us begin the process of converting Tuikku to the One D&D playtest material.
Ability Scores
Using the rolled stat array of (13/15/13/12/18/11) from my original character sheet, Tuikku's ability stats are as follows:
Strength - 11
Dexterity - 15
Constitution - 13
Intelligence - 13
Wisdom - 18
Charisma -12
Yes, I know assigning my 3 physical stats like that is probably not the best decision, but I digress in saying high initiative, good dex saves, and light armor is Good for a monk returning to the world of cleric life. Plus clerics get a free shield and I only need one free-hand to cast spells, so it's fine.
Race & Racial Features
As I stated earlier, Tuikku shall become a full fledged elf! When I looked through the Character Origins PDF, nothing much had changed except for a few things. Obviously, like all races, the Racial ASI was removed, but also the wording ford the Fey Ancestry ability changed very slightly.
Maybe this is for better clarity in saying you gain advantage in ending the effect on the next save after being Charmed. Elves are not the only race to have this type of mechanic, as Dwarves and Halflings also have this new wording in regards to saves against the Poisoned and Frightened conditions respectfully. Honestly, this kind of wording is somewhat confusing in the first glance, and it took me a bit to actually understood what it actually meant. I would personally suggest changing it to say:
"You gain Advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the [CONDITION]"
A new feature added is the Elven Lineage. What it does is classify Elves into 3 Lineages: Drow, High Elves, and Wood Elves. Depending on which lineage you choose, you gain a 1st level ability appropriate to your Lineage and a free spell in both 3rd and 5th level which you can cast for free once per long rest and/or include it in your spell list to cast normally. The Lineages are as follows:
In this case, I picked the Wood Elf because Tuikku was a Half-Elf with Wood Elf heritage.
Background & Feats
So here is how Character Origins becomes interesting. Like I mentioned, the release of Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos in April 2019 set a precedence for a new direction by D&D Dev Team to make backgrounds more relevant in the character creation process. In the playtest material, backgrounds are shown to be greatly simplified, but given more substantial legs to stand on for character options. In general, YOU are the one in charge of making your own background as shown with the guidelines displayed below:
BEAUTIFUL! MARVELOUS! THIS IS ALL THE THINGS D&D PLAYERS ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT WHEN LOOKING UP BACKGROUNDS!
To get into the full spirit of the UA, and also to push the Medic gambit in the backstory, I decided to make my own background! So here it is!
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Name: Medic
Ability Score Increase: +2 Constitution, +1 Wisdom
Skill Proficiencies: Medicine, Survival
Tool Proficiencies: Healer's Kit
Language: Common Sign Language (THIS IS ALSO A NEW THING, AND ITS AWESOME!)
Feat: Revised Healer Feat
You are trained in the field of medicine in high intensity situations. In the battlefield, you are not only a factor between the declaration of triumphant victory or utter defeat but also who is destined live another day or perish in an untimely death. In peacetime, you are the beacon of hope denizens look towards in times of crisis; the first responder to the people's cries for aid and help in the darkest of times. You are devoted to service to both your people and nation as a front liner in the call of duty.
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YES, THERE IS A NEW VERSION OF THE HEALER FEAT! It is a significant improvement from the old version of the feat. Here are both versions of the feat to give you a line of comparison:
(old Healer Feat)
(NEW HEALER FEAT!!!)
Battle Medic and Healing Rerolls are such awesome additions to the revision of Healer Feat, and allows for much more clutch healer moments when a member of the party goes down. It also goes well with the whole "Religious Combat Medic" Theme I'm going for with Tuikku.
As a 6th Level character, I also get an additional Feat or ASI for surpassing 4th Level. I chose the revised Alert Feat:
the new Alert Feat in the UA
The biggest difference that can be noticed when looking into both versions of the feat is the removal of two key features which made the older version of the feat so popular with most players. Instead, they have shifted the tone of the feat itself from high preparedness and awareness against attackers to quick reaction time during the beginning stages of a fight. With the removal of immunity to surprise and the buff against hidden attackers, two very powerful features found in the feat, they have replaced it with abilities which will allow a player to have the first draw in the fight itself. I'm personally very glad that the flat +5 bonus to initiative got replaced with the proficiency bonus, because +5 increase to initiative at 4th or even 1st level is a bit too much, especially if one were to achieve a full 20 ability score to Dexterity at character creation.
This also comes up later in the UA, but races no longer have prelisted languages in them. In the Character Origins UA, you know at least 3 languages off the bat: Common, A one from your background, and one from the "Standard & Rare Languages Table" as shown below:
With this in mind, Tuikku knows Common (by default), Common Sign Language (Medic Background), and Elvish (Standard Languages.). Honestly, I find the shift of languages away from coming with race somewhat relatable. While Standard 5e races already have their language proficiencies built into them, like Elves knowing Elvish, with the Common Origins UA, it is entirely possible for a character to not know their own mother tongue for one reason or the other. I, as a Filipino who has lived in the Philippines for my entire life, am not strongly proficient with speaking Filipino. It's weird and concerning, but it's true and there are a lot of other people who have the same or similar predicament. It's just a haha funny moment there.
The Final Results
Well, after many technical errors on my end in regards to how annoying Adobe Acrobat is as a PDF reader, and Blogger just suddenly nuking the last 10-25% of progress I had writing this article, I present to you the new Character Sheet of Tuikku Kemppainen. The entire process was fine, though there are still some bumps along the road that need to be worked on, mainly on races and feats which will be addressed later on.
I have also rearranged the D&D 5e character sheet, because it is very fucking annoying in PDF readers like Adobe Acrobat. If you agree with this sentiment, you can access the blank editable PDF version of my masterpiece here.
Criticism & Feedback
Overall, although WoTC made a very effective marketing campaign for setting up the absolute hype for the future of D&D and what the next iteration of core rulebooks will behold for this community of nerds that have pretty much surged in popularity during the pandemic. I feel their actual execution of sending out the material they actually want us to playtest falls short in terms of the important objective of collecting user data and feedback. In other words: They did not send us enough material to effectively playtest.
I will use the original Strixhaven UA as an example. When that was announced, introducing the concept of new mechanics for common subclasses shared by the Wizard, Warlock, Bard, Sorcerer, and Druid, I basically pulled my party to a short campaign where they have to use the subclasses presented by the Strixhaven UA. I do not want to go into the nitty gritty of it, but everyone had fun with the subclasses and some changes could be made in terms of balancing Lorehold. Strixhaven is a good example of effective playtest material because it allows D&D tables to have an opportunity to test the material with a goal in mind, to see how busted/underpowered/balanced the concept is. Unfortunately, the concept was scrapped due to negative feedback, but at least they were able to get actual feedback on it.
Here with the Character Origins UA, they only gave us guidelines for character creation, 1st level feats, and Cantrip to 1st level spells and expect us to have an actual session with that material whilst everything else stayed the same. I do not feel like anyone would go out of their way to make a oneshot or campaign just to accommodate that, nor do I feel most players would invest their time in converting their Standard 5e character sheets to the UA. I have done it purely because I didn't want to play monk anymore. The Dev Team is just giving this piece by piece, and this approach would not sit well with the community for long. I would at least thought they would give the full spell lists so that spell casting players would at least consider shifting from the traditional method of checking if their class has access to that spell to referring to the Divine, Arcane, and Primordial spell lists. Even if the spells listed are just limited to what is stipulated on the 2014 PHB, it would be enough playtest material for the community to actually have a good grasp of what to do and what they should be looking out for.
In regards to the actual process of character creation, although I was singing praises of the entire module itself, I feel there are some things that could be improved or done better in next upcoming releases or updates for One D&D. My concerns are particularly focused on Races, Backgrounds, and Feats.
The Problem of Races
Focusing on Elves for now because that was the point of this article with the rest to come on part 2. I mentioned that the wording for Fey Ancestry is somewhat confusing in the very first glances and sounds somewhat "clunky" if that's the right word to use. Dwarves and Halflings have a similar ability against the Poisoned and Frightened condition, which uses the same wording. Only suggestion I have is to change the wording so that it would be much clearer to the reader, like the suggestion I have given on that portion of the article. The race overall does not offer anything new other than the Elven Lineage trait, which is my biggest criticism over the races in the UA in general.
In the document itself, Gnomes, Dragonborn, Ardlings, and Tieflings are the only races with features similar to Elven Lineage which affect their sub-race, which I kind of found to be strange. When Jeremy Crawford talked about it (here), he basically justified omitting sub-racial features for races like Dwarves because the new mechanics for Character Backgrounds will be responsible for carrying the weight of most cultural lineages.
When I first read of this when reading the document for the first time, I was not that pleased with the shift in clumping all Dwarves into a single cookie cutter race, but then I realized the current official dwarven sub-races out on Standard 5e are not really too different from each other. Crawford said himself that the difference is just the terminology, for Dwarves, Humans, Halflings and Orcs do not really have the strong affinity for lineage as compared to Tieflings or Elves. Essentially, their lineage does very little to affect how they actually function as people other than what their upbringing was like, which is covered in Backgrounds. The Dwarf racial traits presented in the Character Origins material pretty much just added Dwarven Toughness from Hill Dwarves and gave Dwarves more tool proficiencies via Forge Wise. They literally just, in Crawford's words:
"Made the Dwarf the Dwarf-iest Dwarf!"
I'm just sad that the Duergar from Mordenkeinen's Tomb of Foes (MToF) are not seeing light in this UA. If they have Drow for Elves, they should have Duergar for the Dwarves. Speaking of MToF sub-races, I'm also guessing that if a player were to not want to use lineage options presented in the UA, they are more than free to use sub-races from other sources. Again, they made it really clear that One D&D is still compatible with the rest of Standard 5e. For the case of Elves for example, if I feel neither of the 3 lineages would fit my character, I would just straight up replace Elven Lineage with the abilities of the MToF Eladrin, minus the ASI and after asking permission from my DM first.
I feel that in regard to this, the next releases of Unearthed Arcana or updates by the Dev Team must address the question of "what if players want to use the sub-race features from other sourcebooks and expansions?", obviously for Gnomes, Dragonborn, and Tieflings, this is very easy to answer: "Just replace the lineage options with the features of your desired sub-race". or something similar to those lines. But how about the other races? Dwarves, Humans, and Halflings have sub-race options in other expansion materials, how can they fit themselves with those expansions if One D&D updates the core features and abilities of those races to what is shown in the UA. Would the sub-race features and traits add on to the core One D&D Racial features, or would players have to revert their characters race back to Standard 5e?
Very glad that Orcs are finally in the core roster of races.
The Problem with Backgrounds & Feats
Backgrounds are fine though, I feel there isn't too much of a problem with them depending on how you look at them. Good move to shift ASIs from Races to Backgrounds. However, with the revision of custom background rules to make then more relevant and powerful, the assignment of ASIs somewhat backtracks the goal set by the UA to shift focus away from optimization. It's not necessarily my playstyle of D&D, its just an issue of "not everyone will love everything" and "people will always find a way to break the game". Honestly, Focusing more in what stat increases to assign for your cool new background is much better than riffling through races because of their features and constantly changing character concepts as a result.
Moving on to feats, the decision to rewrite the mechanics of existing feats and reorganize them by level is some what of a mixed bag to me. For one, this system allows for a okay safeguard against players becoming overpowered by stacking feats in early levels, as there are some feats that can boost a player way too much in early levels, like Alert, Spell Sniper, Sharpshooter, and War Caster to name a few. The revision of "1st Level" feats like Alert does leave some room for concern, mainly on if the removed features on feats that are deemed "too powerful" by the Dev Team would be moved to new feats at later levels, or completely removed from the rules set.
Conclusion
Character Origins, being the first of many playtest materials to come as we await for the release of One D&D in its entirety on 2024, is a good first glance into what we should expect to come in terms of rules changes and new mechanics; however, it alone, in my personal opinion, did not make a very strong first impression in terms of actually functioning as playtest material. It is too lacking in terms of content to make it viable for actual play, needing most players to refer back to the rules in Standard 5e while making characters using the UA and thus creating a level of inconvenience off the bat. From my experience actually converting one of my characters from Standard 5e to the UA, it was quite a bumpy experience which left some more to be desired.
In my opinion, the promise of "Backwards Compatibility" by the Dev Team is the most difficult, yet consequential, hurdle they must overcome. Not all of the changes being introduced to them will be accepted by the whole community, with the great stress test being the question of if D&D table would be able to utilize a combination of both the 2014 PHB of Standard 5e and the potential 2024 Revised Core Source Books to be released under the banner of supposed "progress and innovation" of One D&D to better fit with the needs and playstyles of D&D tables rather than be mutually exclusive one over the other.
Nevertheless, the release of the Character Origins UA has introduced some positive changes to the Character Creation process which pulls a player's shift of focus away from optimizing stats to making a character that fits well to the story they want to tell, albeit to a very limited degree. Although, it has also introduced some new problems towards the balancing of mechanics and the feasibility of actually playing a character with the small amount of playtest material we are currently given.
Therefore, the input of the community at large to what can be improved in regards to the potential flaws and issues raised in the UA and subsequent releases will be paramount to the future of One D&D. But for now, we would just need to wait and see what the D&D Development Team over at Wizards of the Coast have planned for the next generation of the World's Greatest Roleplaying Game.
-- YugiBearz
p.s. Give us a glimpse or sign that the D&D Character sheet will also get reworked...
#MakeArtificersGoodAlready!
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