Sounds like this will very much be in the vein of “5.5” plus adding some digital tools that look pretty cool, though I have very little confidence in Hasbro getting it right.
Here’s a direct link to the first batch of playtest material for anyone curious. My initial takeaways are that it allows mixed racial backgrounds easily and there’s a much greater emphasis on feats than 5e.
I'm surprised its been eight years since 5e came out. I must be getting old.
I like that they moved ability score increases to backgrounds, but kept the fantastical elements on races. That seems like the best compromise to me because the critique of the old way of doing things was that it was kind of fucked to suggest that a certain race of people are just stronger or smarter or whatever, but taking away all of that Tolkien stuff would have made being an elf or a dwarf or whatever else a whole lot less interesting.
That said the fact that they want to include a "make your own background" out of the gate kind of makes the idea of having pre-packaged backgrounds obsolete - who would ever choose a package of abilities when they could instead choose exactly the abilities they want?
I also like that a couple races can choose to be medium or small based on their character concept - Mouse Guard Ardling here I come!
Feats seem like they're being made with exactly the same design goals as before, which is fine but I've come to prefer PF2e's way of doing it.
Not much else to comment on since there's not much else here. When they release some more playtest material (ie classes) I'll put up a recruitment thread on here and run it.
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Tieing some stuff you want to scale to proficiency bonus is cool, but overall the feats as presented seem underwhelming right now. It seems like they want to get away from the GWF/PAM/TWF/CE supremacy that currently exists, but didn't have anything interesting to replace it with.
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Great Weapon Fighting, Polearm Master, Two Weapon Fighting, Crossbow Expert. One or two of these feats is basically mandatory for every martial character in 5e, because they directly increase that character's damage.
The feat system naturally encourages everyone to take combat-related feats because it makes you choose between increasing your combat effectiveness or increasing your versatility out of combat - but combat is the place where your and your friends' characters are most likely to die so of course it makes the most sense to pick combat options whenever possible. This is one of the major design problems that was introduced in D&D 3 that was not fixed in D&D 5, though it was significantly reduced by reducing the number of feats so at least the players that need to pay the feat tax can move on to more interesting choices relatively quickly.
Pathfinder 2e fixes this problem by having multiple kinds of feats. There's skill feats (which are ONLY non-combat feats), general feats (which have some combat stuff but it's pretty minor), and class feats (which are almost all combat stuff). This gives breathing room to players to make choices that make their character more interesting, because the number of combat-related feats you can take is less than the total number of feats you get.