Spell Lists

I’m not patient enough to do a full before-and-after comparison of spell lists, but I’ll note things that stick out to me.

1. This may seem minor, but I’m used to the lists of Cleric and Druid spells coming before Magic-User spells (and later, Wizard spells). Having them show up first (because “A” is for “Arcane”) is kind of disorienting.
2. A bunch of Warlock spells have been moved to the Arcane list. There’s going to be less distinction magically between Warlocks and other arcane casters.
   1. Eldritch Blast is an exception, but Hex is not. I wonder who would benefit most from taking Hex? I recall it potentially had a long duration if cast using a higher-level spell slot, ultimately limited only by being a Concentration spell…could that be worked around if cast using Glyph of Warding? I wonder if it could be usefully combined with Hunter’s Mark for a set of very long buffs? An arcane caster could have access to all 3 of those now after taking Magic Initiate only once.
   2. I’d say Warlocks are the big winners here – their spell list wasn’t as good as Wizards’. Sorcerers will also benefit, since their spell list was almost precisely a subset of the Wizard spell list, so getting the full list Wizards had plus Warlock spells is at least something.
3. Divine spell list merges Paladin and Cleric lists.
   1. This could be seen as a dilution of the Paladin’s identity as defined by not having to consider the whole Cleric spell list, but it’s more of a return to the status quo ante – they always used to cast off the Cleric list instead of having one of their own, at least prior to 3rd edition.
   2. This does dilute the Paladin’s identity because a number of key features were built as spells (a bunch of Smite spells, Find Steed, etc.) and those are now available to Clerics before Paladins can get to them. For more pointed examples: the Paladin list used to have Banishing Smite and Circle of Power as 5th level spells – ones the Paladin couldn’t cast until 17th level. That’s still when they get access to them, but Clerics can now cast those spells 8 levels earlier, at 9th level.
      1. I think the big issue here is that having distinct spell lists was concealing the issues with  the poor design that tended to turn class features into spells.
4. Primal seems to merge Druid and Ranger lists. Although the Ranger sees their spell access more expanded, I think it’s likely to be more significant for Druids, who have lots of spell slots to blow on the occasional Conjure Volley, or an upcast Hunter’s Mark. Also, it puts Hunter’s Mark on the same spell list as Shillelagh – that isn’t huge or anything, but it’s helpful for characters who take Magic Initiate and feel they need a bit of a boost in weapon-based combat.
5. Enough spells changed schools that they felt they needed it call it out on the spell lists. A few noteworthy changes:
   1. Thunderwave is now Transmutation. This is probably meant as some kind of balancing thing, but it doesn’t seem like a transmutation effect.
   2. Flaming Sphere is now Conjuration – I’m guessing there were too many goodHu 2nd-level offensive Conjuration spells. I don’t like it because I have a personal attachment to it having previously been a Conjuration spell, but it doesn’t feel totally weird at least.
   3. The healing spells have been made Abjuration, which is stupid. They should be Necromancy (since they deal with bodies and life force), or maybe Transmutation. Abjuration would be fine for spells granting temporary HP, but spells that actually heal shouldn’t be listed as Abjuration (which is about protective effects rather than restorative ones). That, or it’s time to get rid of these allegedly-diegetic schools of magic and replace them with descriptions of the game mechanical effects we mean to convey.
6. Drawmij’s Instant Summons is just called “Instant Summons”. Creator names are often dropped from spells in system reference documents, but Bigby and Mordenkainen spells retain their creators’ names here. I wonder if this is just an accident, or an intentional omissions since Drawmij is a pretty clear reference to a real person involved in the creation of early D&D?

Rules Glossary

1. Changing the term Armor Proficiency to Armor Training is good, since it doesn’t use your proficiency bonus at all
2. Attack action
   1. Ability to equip or unequip one weapon per attack made is interesting, but I note that making this part of the action means it can’t be done as part of an attack made via a bonus action or reaction.
   2. The attack action makes a point of specifying you can make an attack with a weapon or an unarmed strike.
      1. I’m hopeful this means a move away from the term “weapon attack”, especially because it introduced ambiguity around whether a weapon was actually required for one of them.
      2. Does this mean attacks derived from bonus actions and reactions don’t have the ability to be based on an unarmed strike?
3. Barkskin gives temporary hit points. However, it’s also Concentration, which means it isn’t likely to help the caster all that much.
   1. The switch to temporary HP seems like it was designed to work with Wild Shape
   2. Upcasting to allow more targets seems interesting
4. Blindsight is explicit about letting you see anything that isn’t behind total cover, and perceiving creatures that are Invisible or Hidden. This suggests that being Hidden isn’t significantly better than simply being unseen.
5. Climb speed is a much clearer description than was present in 5E, which didn’t make clear what benefits it does or doesn’t provide. Now it’s pretty clear that (1) it only gets rid of extra movement costs for moving, and (2) it only works when climbing vertically. This means it doesn’t help you make checks needed for difficult climbs (though it may not assume those exist), and that it isn’t good for climbing upside-down, for example. It’s also clear that you need the Spider Climb trait to handle #2.
6. Giving inspiration on a natural 1 doesn’t make much sense in-character, but it’s obvious that it’s meant to keep players from feeling bad about rolling a natural 1. I’d prefer the game didn’t fetishize natural 1s and 20s, but I’m sure that’s a lost cause. 
7. Dash changes from upping your speed to giving you an additional Move – Moves weren’t a thing in 5E (that is, you had movement during your turn, but it wasn’t treated as a discrete action you took).
8. Difficult Terrain – whether a space counts as difficult terrain is defined based on criteria external to the creature moving through it. This means a pit or gap of 2-5 feet is difficult even for the Tarrasque or something much larger; a creature that isn’t Tiny makes a space difficult terrain even if it’s the size of a dragon and the creature trying to pass through is itself Tiny; etc. This probably makes it easier to design maps – just mark in advance which spaces are difficult – at the expense of making less sense in play.
9. Divine Spells are defined as drawing on the power of Gods and the Outer Planes; Arcane Spells are also given a definition in terms of what power they draw on. Do they intend to stick to this for setting design? It’s already strange to see a term defined in terms of worldbuilding; it’ll be even weirder if it isn’t consistently applied. I’d think it better to define these types of magic in terms of the types of effects they’re meant to have.
10. Exhausted – I totally hate this change. Exhaustion is one of the few 5E innovations worth stealing (it’s the first alternate damage track for D&D that doesn’t suck), and this change
    1. largely defangs it, by
       1. Increasing the number of levels before death from 5 to 10
       2. Making each level much less significant
    2. Makes each level generic, where previously each level had distinct effects
    3. Relies on variable spell save DCs, which is one of the very bad ideas 3E introduced
11. Grappled – this conditions is much better defined, both in terms of setting out how it ends and in terms of making it a meaningful effect as defined in the condition itself. It’s interesting that the escape now relies on saving throws rather than skill/attribute checks; that keeps some skill proficiencies and Expertise selections from being must-haves? Also, trying to escape happens automatically rather than requiring your Action, though under the old grapple there wasn’t a huge incentive to try escaping – you could do anything you’d normally be able to, except moving using your Speed.
12. Guidance – Now it’s a reaction (good) but a character can only benefit once per Long Rest. That’s bad for 2 reasons:
    1. It defeats the point of making it a Cantrip, since they’re supposed to be at-will effects. Now we have cantrips which are only useful a number of times per Long Rest equal to the number of people in your party
    2. It requires additional bookkeeping – each character needs to track whether they’ve benefited from Guidance since their last Long Rest. That’s bad enough for 1 spell, but as a design pattern which might be applied to other spells and effects it has the potential to lead to a ton of bookkeeping by players who didn’t even opt into that sort of tracking, since they aren’t the ones who took the spell. If the effect is actually that powerful, it should use some sort of resource. This is what the healing surges were for in 4e, and the equivalent resource to use in 5E would be Hit Dice. Or, you know, spell slots.
13. Help limits its ability to assist on ability checks to (1) skills that (2) you’re proficient in. This means that you can’t, for example, help another party member force open a stuck door – something that dates back to OD&D. The wording is also much stiffer for no good reason I can see.
14. Heroic Inspiration
    1. Does the change in name connote that it isn’t meant to be applied to NPCs? If so, the rules should really state that explicitly.
    2. An interesting implication of this: the more often a character makes d20 tests, the more often they’ll roll 1s and therefore get inspiration. Since Inspiration is (mostly) use-it-or-lose-it – the exception being the ability to transfer it to other party members – this is probably meant to encourage characters to use it often. However, this encouragement works better if you tell players about it explicitly instead of hoping they notice it emergently.
       1. It’s good that this clarifies that you can’t gain inspiration from a 1 on a roll that doesn’t get used.
15. Hidden
    1. It’s interesting that Hidden is defined as a condition a character has rather than a relationship between characters – you aren’t hidden from some set of creatures, you’re either hidden from everybody or not hidden at all.
       1. Note that hidden ends if an enemy finds you – that means if one enemy notices you but doesn’t say anything, you instantly cease to be hidden with respect to all enemies. Since the condition is all or nothing, you also can’t sneak up behind an individual enemy and try to silently take them out, unless no other enemies are around.
    2. Invisibility has the same effects as hidden, but doesn’t meet the criteria of being either obscured or behind any cover, so you can’t use invisibility to hide – you actually need to get behind something. It’s weird to have these redundant conditions – I’d expect being Invisible to just qualify the character to Hide and give an automatic Hide check, possibly with some sort of bonus or advantage.
16. Hide
    1. Requires a minimum DC 15 roll, even though you’re supposed to track your total for opposed Perception checks.
       1. DC 15 means that a Rogue specializing in Stealth fails to hide 40% of the time at 1st level, 35% at 4th, 25% of the time at 5th, 20% of the time at 8th, 10% of the time at 9th level, and 0% of the time at 11th – at which point you have a minimum roll of 23. I’m not sure I’d find that satisfying – I’d feel like as a Rogue I’m not particularly good at core abilities until at least 5th level, and more like 9th-11th. Other classes would tend to be even worse…
    2. Hiding requires you to be out of any visible enemy’s line of sight. So you can hide just fine if you’re in line of sight of a bunch of invisible enemies.
    3. Hide also requires you to be behind at least 3/4 cover or Heavily Obscured in addition to being out of line of sight. You can get Heavily Obscured by being in total darkness (but not just in shadows, so everyone in 5E has Hide in Shadows 0%), and total darkness is only counted as dim light if creatures have darkvision. It seems surprisingly difficult to hide…
17. Incapacitated
    1. You can’t take Actions or Reactions. Does this mean you can take Bonus Actions, or are Bonus Actions included in other, non-Bonus Actions (but Reactions are not so included)?
    2. You can’t concentrate or speak, but you are capable of rolling initiative. This is a very specific state of being barely able to function. I’m not even sure why you’d bother to roll initiative – why not just assign a value of -10 or something, so the character’s turn comes after everyone else’s? What are you going to do besides roll saving throws or have effects expire?
18. Influence
    1. The language tries to leave control of this very much with the DM, but even so it doesn’t account for things like attempts to Influence non-sapient beings (mindless constructs like animated objects and golems, mindless undead like skeletons and zombies, animals like e.g. giant ants, etc.), nor for attempts to influence creatures across a communication barrier like lack of a shared language. Disadvantage might be good enough to represent communication barriers (especially when dealing with other humanoid creatures when you can at least try to pantomime), but it feels like it would be insufficient in some cases.
       1. More generally, the game doesn’t actually show much interest in communication barriers – I don’t see any real advice in the 5.x family about how to deal with situations where there are vs aren’t shared languages. 
    2. Attitudes are listed in a strange order: Indifferent, Friendly, Hostile. That’s neither alphabetical (Friendly, Hostile, Indifferent), nor does it follow the spectrum of attitudes (Hostile, Indifferent, Friendly or vice-versa) – I’d think one of those would make more sense.
    3. Influence lets you get creatures to take action or withhold from acting, but doesn’t give you a path to actually modifying their attitudes toward you.
       1. The table obscures that each step in attitude creates a 10-point DC difference in what can be achieved. One wonders if a DC 30 roll on a Hostile creature could get the same results as a DC 20 Indifferent / DC 10 Friendly? Before we dismiss that as nearly impossible, recall that the description of DC 30 is “Nearly impossible”…
          1. Speaking of DCs, I note that 
       2. I seem to recall that in 2nd edition at least, Bards could try to sway creatures’ attitudes toward them.
    4. There’s qualitative variance within some of the attitudes, most notably Hostile:
       1. A Hostile creature “doesn’t necessarily attack [PCs] on sight,” (emphasis added), and “the DM might determine that the Hostile creature is so ill-disposed toward the characters that no Charisma Check can sway it.” These differences suggest there should be at least 2 different Attitudes – I’d probably split these into Unfriendly (the current default Hostile), and Hostile (will attack opportunistically, no Charisma check can sway the creature).
       2. Alternately, I’d probably want to assign a creature a numeric value indicating its modifier to Influence rolls, with numbers falling into various bands (so you can have varying degrees for friendliness, for example – the difference between fair-weather friends and found family who may find themselves in challenging circumstances)
       3. Probably I’d set DCs with Indifferent as a baseline (so centered on 10). Then the range would be something like: Friendly (+6 or greater, nominal value 10), Indifferent (-5 to +5, nominal value 0), Unfriendly (-15 to -6, nominal value 0), and Hostile (-16 or below, nominal value -20). Then our table of results could be based on Indifferent:
          1. Below 0: Attacks opportunistically
          2. 0-9: Offers no help but does no harm
          3. 10-19: Does as asked if there are no risks or sacrifices
          4. 20-29: Does as asked, accepting a minor risk or sacrifice
          5. 30 or above: Does as asked, accepting a significant risk or sacrifice
          6. (This means that even an Indifferent creature might be accidentally provoked to attack by a sufficiently inept attempt at Influence)
    5. Influence needs examples of use in play. Lots of examples of varying situations and with different considerations, not because there are a lot of rules but because there are so few rules – new DMs could use guidelines in how to handle these attempts.
       1. The text indicates a party may have to succeed “on one or more challenging Charisma checks” – this is awful advice. Successive rolls are just a waste of time unless they’re meant to represent distinct outcomes; if you’re asking for 3 favors then 3 rolls might be appropriate, but if you’re only asking for 1 it should be resolved with a single roll. Otherwise you’re bringing in iterative success rolls like 4e skill challenges, and one of the major problems those had was that chances of success on the overall challenge was very hard for most people to intuitively grasp based on the chance of success of any one roll.
19. Invisible
    1. One of its properties is called “Unseeable”, which is…another way of saying “in visible”. It’s also exactly the same functionally as the “Concealed” property of the Hidden condition. In fact, aside from the name of this property and the fact that Concealed has a defined set of conditions which end it, I’d expect these 2 conditions should be merged somehow (as I mentioned above).
20. Jump
    1. This is now an action which doesn’t expend your movement, but the distance you use can’t exceed your speed. I dislike this change, since it makes like jumping attacks require special rules lacunae to pull off.
    2. I also don’t like that you have to move at least 10 feet before attempting to jump vertically without disadvantage – I can see why building up horizontal speed is useful for a horizontal jump, but not for a vertical one.
    3. The distance you clear can’t exceed your speed, but there’s no requirement that it not exceed your remaining movement for the turn. I don’t think this is actually much of an exploit – it’s basically just the Dash action, except with a variable-length (but bounded) portion during which you aren’t traversing a surface.
    4. Jump is based on a Strength roll. That absolutely does make sense in terms of the mechanics of the situation, but:
       1. In terms of game mechanics, it will make melee Fighters – the ones clanking around in heavy armor – better jumpers than light-weapon Fighters, Rogues, or Monks (barring class abilities to the contrary – the Rogues in this playtest packet don’t have anything of the sort).
       2. Also in terms of game mechanics, being Strength-based will make Elephants (Speed 40 feet, 22 Strength) better at Jumping than Cats (Speed 40 feet, 4 Strength).
       3. The basic issue is that there’s no consideration for weight – not just encumbrance the character is dealing with but overall weight. But 5E has shown no interest in any of the logistical concerns of early D&D, so I wouldn’t expect this to be addressed.
21. Light [Weapon Property] – the ability for Light Weapons is fine, but the description could be read to suggest that the character must be using different weapon types in each hand – I’d suggest amending the example to use a shortsword in one hand, and another shortsword in the other hand.
22. Long Rest
    1. These are “available to any creature.” Interestingly, this means that both Undead and Constructs are able to take a long rest. For example, a Golem can take a long rest even though the Long Rest description indicates “you sleep for at least 6 hours,” but the Golem description’s property “Constructed Nature” says “A golem doesn’t require air, food, drink, or sleep.” I guess not requiring those things doesn’t prevent the golem from partaking when desired.
    2. A long rest restores all HP (which it already did in 5E), it also:
       1. Restores all spent HD (previously it restored up to half the character’s total HD in spent HD, so full restoration required up to 2 long rests)
       2. Undoes any reductions to Max HP (totally new; there was no single mundane way for characters to recover from this in 5E))
       3. and Undoes any Ability Score Reductions (also totally new)
    3. Also, if the Long Rest is interrupted but it lasted at least 1 hour, the characters gain the benefits of a Short Rest.
    4. In other words, Long Rests have been made more powerful. I don’t like this, because it provides even greater incentives for players to use Long Rests as often as feasible.
       1. I also don’t like that this turns nearly all threats to characters into one of exactly two possible outcomes: (1) lasts “forever” barring powerful magic (death, petrification, loss of limbs, permanently polymorphed into a toad, etc.), and (2) nothing a good night’s rest can’t cure. I like the idea that there are injuries and ailments you can recover from, but only after some noticeable amount of time like a week or a fortnight or a month – better still if there’s some amount of continuous recovery over that time. There don’t have to be a lot of these, but it does make the risk of adventuring feel a bit more real. Currently only exhaustion meets my needs.
23. Magic [Action] – this is how you cast a spell with a casting time of 1 Action, and how you cast a spell with a casting time of 1 minute or longer (those apparently all require Concentration…). There’s nothing here about casting times greater than 1 Action but less than 1 minute – perhaps those don’t or can’t exist? There’s also nothing here about what you do to cast spells with a casting time of 1 Bonus Action or Reaction.
    1. Requiring Concentration while casting longer spells – which implicitly affects all rituals – is one way to get back some of the classic D&D ability to disrupt a spellcaster by doing damage, though it’s much less reliable now and not likely to affect anything they’d attempt in combat.
24. Move
    1. You can’t use more than one of your Speeds in a turn unless you can take additional Moves (by using the Dash action, for example). That’s honestly a lot easier to explain than the prior rules about accounting for multiple distinct Speeds.
    2. Your Move can be broken up around an Action, but there’s no mention of whether you can do so around a Bonus Action or a Reaction used on your turn (run toward pit, cast Feather Fall as you go down, take Action at bottom, resume running).
       1. As in 5E, the term “Action” seems to be overloaded to refer to the set of all Actions as well as a specific member of that set. This is very confusing – I’d rather they adopt unambiguous terminology, e.g. “An Action is one of the following: Major Action, Minor Action (formerly known as a Bonus Action), Reaction.”
    3. There’s a lot of things that can cause you to spend additional feet of movement – it would be nice if there was a centralized list of that somewhere. So far as I can tell, it includes:
       1. Moving through difficult terrain
       2. Climbing without using a Climb Speed or Swimming without using a Swim Speed
       3. Moving while Slowed
       4. Zeroing your Speed causes other speeds to be zeroed as well is a good rules clarification, but it fights against the imagery of someone successfully grappling a wingless flyer who then proceeds to fly/flail around, trying to scrape the grappler off or just smash them into nearby objects. I think the issue is that this makes sense if all a creature’s speeds come from muscular exertion, but some forms of movement seem like they probably don’t – imagine two people grappling on a flying carpet.
25. Ritual Casting – you no longer need a class feature for Ritual Casting, as long as you have the spell prepared. Previously some casters had Known spells instead of Prepared spells, but Bards and Rangers were among them and in this playtest packet they’re listed as having Prepared spells, so this probably applies to them and to all casters. This seems like it will be a minor benefit to tertiary casters (Eldritch Knights and Spellthieves) and secondary casters (Paladins and Rangers), and possibly a significant benefit to Sorcerers and Warlocks, neither of whom previously had the ability to use ritual casting. It might also be nice for characters who take the Magic Initiate feat, though they only have a single 1st-level spell and can already cast it once per day – it would take very particular spell selection to get any real use out of this.
26. Search [Action]
    1. I sympathize with the desire to unify similar things under a single block of rules – see my comments about Invisible, Hide, and Hidden, above – but I think using the term “Search” to describe attempting to discern a creature’s state of mind or ailments is weird. I almost wonder if the Perception skill should be renamed to Notice and this action have its name changed to Perceive. This renaming would likely be more disruption than it’s worth, at least in a half-edition.
    2. I thought 3rd edition grouping all perception under Wisdom was pretty weird, and as of 5E analysis (at least for Medicine) is being grouped there as well; I would have thought Intelligence should have played a role in these attempts. I understand that keeping Medicine associated with Wisdom reinforces the Cleric’s role as a healer, but I’m a bit put out that Wisdom has become better-defined only by becoming less intuitive to me: Friar Tuck has sharper eyes than Conan.
27. Shortsword – making a shortsword a simple weapon seems like a very minor change, which leads me to wonder what motivated designers to make it.
28. Slowed
    1. This is a new condition – or rather, defining this as a condition instead of as the effects of the Slow spell is new. This presumably means numerous effects will be able to inflict this condition.
    2. Compared to the effects of the Slow spell, this is a gigantic nerf. Also a very necessary one – the spell used to hit enemies right in the action economy, dropping them from Reaction + (standard/major) Action + Bonus Action each turn to just one of {(standard) Action, Bonus Action}, they couldn’t make more than 1 melee or ranged attack per turn regardless of their abilities and magic items, and making 50% of 1-actions spells require an extra round to cast. The new condition emulates that by making all movement less effective (as if everything was difficult terrain), but imposing no limits or penalties on other actions
    3. The old condition gave a -2 to AC and Dex saves; now the character has Disadvantage on Dex saves (a buff to the effect) and attackers have advantage on attack rolls (a buff to the effect). The overall effect is still a giant nerf that was very much needed.
29. Study [Action]
    1. I think most Medicine rolls should go under Study rather than Search, but as noted above it’s probably intended to stick with Wisdom to keep Clerics as the primary healers
    2. The idea of “studying” your own memory seems weird to me
    3. I don’t like the idea that we need distinct types of actions for Intelligence vs Wisdom checks. More precisely, I don’t think we actually need two distinct actions, and we probably shouldn’t have them.
30. Tool Proficiency – if you have both a tool proficiency and a skill proficiency that would apply to a check, you get proficiency bonus from one and advantage from the other. The specific wording under tool proficiency suggests that a character who has a skill proficiency which has Expertise applied to it, and also a tool proficiency (but without Expertise), they get the proficiency bonus from the tool proficiency rather than the doubled bonus from the skill proficiency, and the skill proficiency only gives advantage. A couple of quick examples would clear this up much more easily than trying to word everything perfectly.
31. Teleportation
    1. All equipment worn and carried goes with you, but creatures you’re touching don’t unless the effect specifies they do
       1. This means you can teleport out of a grapple. Put another way, it’s difficult to prevent a teleporter from escaping
       2. Can you wear or carry something which itself bears a creature and have them come along that way (e.g. you’re wearing a backpack containing your familiar, or a baby you’re trying to take back to its family)?
       3. What are the limits on what you can be considered to be wearing or carrying is probably a broader question, and also relevant to spells like Polymorph as well.
    2. Teleportation doesn’t expend movement or provoke Opportunity Attacks. I suspect the former wasn’t much in doubt, but the latter was – good to have that clarified.
32. Tremorsense is defined more by its limitations than by what it lets you do: locate things. Notably, it doesn’t let you locate objects which aren’t moving, but it does allow you to locate creatures which aren’t moving (including golems and corporeal undead). It also doesn’t count as a form of sight.
    1. How this works with Hiding is weird – if the creature has both Tremorsense and sight, you can’t hide if you’re in line of sight, but if you break line of sight (say you’re both in total darkness) but within the range of the creature’s Tremorsense, you can hide even though the creature knows exactly where you are. I don’t think this is an issue with Tremorsense, just with the way the rules about hiding are written.
33. Unarmed Strike
    1. Everyone is proficient with unarmed strikes. Given that even Wizards are assumed to be proficient with fighting using multiple types of weapons, it’s reasonable to assume they practiced some form of unarmed fighting while they were learning to knife fools or stave in their heads.
    2. You have a choice of Unarmed Strike effects, chosen when you hit.
       1. Damage does 1 + Strength Bludgeoning. There’s no minimum damage rule in either this playtest packet or the 2014 PHB, so if you have a Strength penalty you might end up doing 0 damage.
       2. Grapple – the target is immediately grappled, and can’t try to hit their Escape DC until the end of their turn (which means you’ve already interfered with their next turn to some degree). Note that being grappled limits your movement and gives disadvantage on attack rolls against anyone except the person grappling you, but
          1. Doesn’t give them any special ability to attack you
          2. Doesn’t impair your ability to attack them (with, say, a greatsword or halberd)
          3. Doesn’t impair your ability to cast spells, concentrate, or do anything that doesn’t involve using your speed or making an attack roll. You can also use a teleportation effect to get out of a grapple.
       3. Shove has no way of resisting it other than to be more than 1 size larger. Or just not get hit. This is much quicker than having the contested roll from the 2014 version of shoving, and prevents someone from Expertise in Athletics from being extraordinary good at shoving people around. 
    3. This is a distinct improvement in terms of unifying unarmed strike options. I suspect this will become more significant when the redesigned Monk becomes available. Grappling still seems weak because the grappled condition appears to be mostly pointless – you can redirect someone’s attacks at yourself and (maybe) carry them around in place. It’s more about tanking a specific enemy rather than doing anything to stop them by inflicting damage or even getting in a position to hurt them.

A bunch of feats come with +1 to an attribute now. That makes them seem much better, but it’ll have weird side effects – some feats will become worse choices as you gain levels and your primary attributes top out, at least until 20th level.

These feats are a mixed bag. Some are definitely improved from 5E, others aren’t much better, some don’t have any basis in 5E (like the Epic Boons, which are all awful)…and then there’s Lightly Armored, which seems like it’ll become obligatory for Wizards, and possibly some Sorcerers as well.

1. Ability Score Improvement – looks weaker in the face of other feats giving a +1 to various attributes. Not weak enough to go unselected, of course – this allows a character to maximize their primary attribute by 8th level rather than 12th. That’s why I don’t like it very much – it’s a straight-out attribute increase which is likely to be too tempting for many players to avoid in favor of something more distinctive and interesting.
2. Athlete
   1. Here’s another example of similar names causing confusion: you can have the Athlete feat without having the Athletics skill proficiency and vice-versa
   2. A character apparently can’t extensively train as an Athlete without already being physically fit. As far as I’m concerned, this makes this an inferior version of the Physical skills from Palladium RPGs – at least those can model, for example, Mob Psycho 100’s Shigeo joining the Body Improvement Club to start improving basically from 0.
3. Charger
   1. A feat for what was classically a basic maneuver is exactly what’s wrong with feats, and what has always been the problem with them. The cost is much too high for such a small improvement – experienced combatants who know how to use a wide range of weapons should know how to charge. Hell, junior high football players know how to charge, yet this ability is not only a feat but one that requires the character to be at least 4th level? This sort of thing is why I think that feats have encouraged bad design in D&D.
4. Crossbow Expert
   1. The requirement is “Proficiency with Any Martial Weapon”. Does this mean proficiency with at least one martial weapon, like Rogues have, or proficiency with any in the sense of all martial weapons, like Fighters have? Given some of the abilities I suspect the former, but it would be better if the wording was clearer.
   2. Ignore Loading – in other words, ignore one of the few things that makes crossbows distinct.  The real problem is with the lack of mechanical distinctions between weapons in D&D. At least this is enough of a mechanical improvement to reflect extraordinary ability
   3. Firing in Melee looks like it was tailored for ranged Rogues. Good for them, but I don’t feel great about feats that seem like they’re targeted at a single class.
   4. Dual wielding – isn’t this ability captured elsewhere, for all weapons? Or is that only for melee weapons?
5. Defensive Duelist – Parry is like Shield, except it takes a while to get to +5, it’s at-will, and it’s only good against 1 attack. A high-level Wizard can cast Shield at-will, so this should really get better over time – not just the AC bonus, but also how long it lasts.
6. Dual Wielder
   1. Enhanced Dual Wielding – I can’t tell how good this is supposed to be. Or rather, I can’t tell in what way this is supposed to be good. I don’t like the feat on that basis – I’d like to have an intuitive sense of exactly how a mechanical benefit is supposed to actually benefit my character, even if that requires providing an example.
7. Durable
   1. Speedy Recovery – There’s no limit to how many of your Hit Dice you can burn through this way – 1 per bonus action, and limited but the total you have. That means this is great for a Druid using wildshape, since they get he HD of the assigned form. Normally that doesn’t help – they can’t use those without a short rest, during which the wild shape expires – but this allows those HD to actually be useful between encounters. It’s also useful for someone using Shapechange, and appears to be useful for creatures who are under a Polymorph effect. I suspect this isn’t intended, but that’s a problem with shapechanging effects in 5E.
8. Elemental Adept – the damage benefit is worth almost nothing – about 1/(die size) points per die. For a basic Fireball (8d6 fire damage), that comes out to 1.3 damage total
9. Epic Boons – all of these suck. All of them. Some of them are insultingly bad.
   1. Epic Boon of Combat Prowess – once per combat you can turn a single melee miss into a hit, and that’s supposed to be a 20th level ability? One additional melee hit per combat hardly seems worthwhile – either you’re hitting most of the time and this makes very little difference proportionally, or you’re almost never hitting and a single additional hit is unlikely to do anything significant.
   2. Epic Boon of Dimension Travel – Once per combat or rest you can use a 2nd level spell. Meanwhile, a Wizard of a lower level gets Spell Mastery and can use 1 1st and 1 2nd level spell of choice at will. Weak.
   3. Epic Boon of Energy Resistance – resistance that’s changeable after a rest seems decent. It’s a bit better than Protection from Energy, which has a more limited set of resistance choices, lasts no more than 1 hour, and requires Concentration. On the other hand, Protection from Energy is a 3rd level spell, which means it’s available at 5th level. Is this enough better to be limited to 20th level? Uh, no.
   4. Epic Boon of Fortitude – +40 HP maximum is just Tough taken at 20th level. Adding con modifier to HP recovery once per round is pretty minor as well. For a 20th level ability this is garbage.
   5. Epic Boon of Irresistible Offense – ignoring all Resistance seems worthwhile. Coming online at 20th level means it’s too late to build anything around.
   6. Epic Boon of Luck – Once per encounter or rest, add 1d10 to a d20 roll. That seems pretty weak for a 20th level ability
   7. Epic Boon of the Night Spirit – Invisible in darkness while not moving. Isn’t there a Warlock invocation that does this at much lower than 20th level? Isn’t this basically just a Stealth roll?
   8. Epic Boon of Peerless Aim – like Epic Boon of Combat Prowess but for ranged attacks? They have to separate something this weak into melee vs ranged versions?
   9. Epic Boon of Recovery – Once per long rest recovery of 1/2 your HP max as a bonus action, and succeed on every death save except a 1. That’s…OK. It still seems pretty mild for 20th level, but unlike some other epic boons it doesn’t feel insulting
   10. Epic Boon of Skill Proficiency – proficiency in all skills. I guess this at least creates the image of omnicompetence, but skills are weak in 5E so this is weak as well. Especially for 20th level
   11. Epic Boon of Speed – +30 feet to speed at 20th level? Come on
   12. Epic Boon of Undetectability – this is much weaker than an old Nondetection spell.
   13. Epic Boon of the Unfettered – a bonus action disengage is a 2nd level Rogue ability. Letting it also end the restrained and grappled conditions is, again, not much at 20th level.
10. Fighting Styles are just feats exclusive to Warriors now, huh? So a 1-level dip into a Warrior class means characters can keep picking them up with whatever feats they get? They’re even 1st-level feats, so characters can pick up one with their initial Background feat. They aren’t super-powerful, but they might be just good enough to make this worth something…
11. Grappler – ???
12. Great Weapon Master
    1. A bonus action attack on a critical is no great prize – that’s infrequent enough you’ll ideally have lined up something to do with your bonus action the other 85%+ of the time. Being able to get it when you drop an enemy is better, but it’s still mostly an ability for slightly increasing the rate at which you clear out weak enemies. Since you can’t get this feat until 4th level, you’re probably 1 level away from getting Extra Attack, which will make this extra attack feel proportionally less valuable.
    2. Extra damage equal to proficiency bonus is decent, even if it’s only once per turn
    3. The attribute increase has an interesting side effet of not only directly making the feat better, but also making your attacks more likely to hit and therefore more likely to trigger the feat’s other benefits.
13. Heavily Armored
    1. We won’t know until we see the whole ruleset, but I believe this will be one of the very few ways to pick up Heavy Armor Training if you don’t start with it at 1st level – some Cleric domains had it previously, but multiclassing in general didn’t let you get it. That said, I don’t see much benefit in waiting after 1st level to pickup Heavy Armor Training – if you didn’t start with it you’re either spending 3 levels depending on a Dexterity bonus that’ll be going to waste, or you’ll spend 3 levels at a noticeably sub-par AC. I’m sure someone can come up with an edge case where this is a good idea, but I’m not seeing it.
14. Heavy Armor Master – Reducing bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage by your proficiency bonus seems pretty decent at low levels, but I feel like per-attack damage is likely to increase faster than your proficiency bonus, so this probably becomes less useful over time. Ultimately, this seems kind of weak for PCs – it would probably be much more useful for people dealing with a lot of mundane combat situations.
15. Inspiring Leader – A maximum of 14 temporary HP for 6 characters once per rest doesn’t feel that valuable. I’m sure there’ll be some analysis that shows it’s actually pretty decent, but it just doesn’t feel like it’s worth all that much. Maybe at 4th level it’s better when it’s being compared to characters with 2 2nd-level spells per long rest?
16. Keen Mind
    1. Giving proficiency seems much less useful than giving Expertise. And this isn’t repeatable, so it’s your one chance to pick up Expertise without multiclassing. Just give Expertise along with proficiency if you don’t have it already.
    2. Can take the Study Action as a bonus action – I suspect the utility of this feature will be very campaign-dependent. Overall, this seems like a good feat for characterization, but a poor choice for optimization, and that’s the sort of ugly choice I think feats have been forcing on players since 3rd edition.
17. Lightly Armored – This is one of the best 1st-level feats in 5.5 – arguably, one of the best feats overall in 5.5, at least if you belong to one of the classes that would benefit from it (Sorcerer for bloodlines that don’t give a natural AC at level 1, but mostly Wizards).
    1. So this is a 1st level feat that gives light armor, medium armor, and shield proficiencies. I have a hard time seeing how a Wizard or Sorcerer picks any other feat than this one at 1st level, since it lets you have a better AC than you’re going to get from class abilities and lets you de-prioritize Dexterity.
    2. Here’s the scenario: at level 1 you take this and spend 50 GP on Scale Armor (AC 14 + Dex bonus, max 2) and 10 GP on a shield (+2 AC); your starting attributes would be something like a 17 for spellcasting attribute, 14 for Con, 14 for Dex. This gets you an AC of 18. Compare that to Mage Armor:
       1. At 1st level Mage Armor is 13 + full Dex bonus, which maxes out at 16. So it starts out 2 points lower
       2. Mundane armor can scale with level – with a bit more gold you can move up to Half Plate for another point of AC. You can also get magic armor and shields, and while you’re probably the last in line in the party for these items you should eventually be able to get something. Meanwhile, Mage Armor doesn’t naturally scale with your level and can’t even be made to scale by using higher-level spell slots
       3. …and speaking of spell slots, Mage Armor requires you to use one at 1st level when you only have 2 for the day (well, 3 for the Wizard using Arcane Restoration via a short rest). The mundane armor is better in combat and leaves you with more magic in the tank.
       4. Also, while Mage Armor only requires an Action to get started (vs 5 minutes to don a suit of Medium armor), you can don a shield with a single action, and that’s a +2 to AC right there – most of the benefit of Mage Armor without using a spell slot. And your mundane armor can’t be dispelled
       5. Also also! Walking around in a big suit of armor removes one of the most obvious indications that you’re the sort of person who casts Fireball and therefore needs to be taken down ASAP
    3. BTW, other competitors for best 1st-level Feat:
       1. Lucky
       2. Magic Initiate (Shillelagh for any mental attribute!)
       3. Musician (It’s free Inspiration!)
18. Mage Slayer
19. Medium Armor Master – increasing the maximum dexterity bonus usable with medium armor is strictly worse than the Defense Fighting Style, since it works with any armor. Adding the 1-point attribute increase is the only thing that makes this competitive, and even then it seems iffy.
20. Mounted Combatant – I wonder how many campaigns are structured in a way that leads to enough mounted combat for this feat to be meaningful? 
21. Observant
22. Polearm Master
    1. Bonus action attack + reaction attack is already quite good. Adding a Strength increase probably makes this too good
23. Resilient – gaining a saving throw proficiency only seems good because everyone should be proficient in every save. The attribute on this is a bit of a trap – if you’re taking this to make a saving throw better, it’s probably tied to an attribute that isn’t very high, and the boost probably won’t make you significantly more competent. The saving throw bonus should probably just be moved to the Ability Score Improvement feat
24. Ritual Caster
    1. Tying the casting attribute to the attribute you increased makes sense – it makes the feat feel like a single thing, the result of hard work and training
    2. The ability to mix-and-match lists for which rituals you choose is nice, but…they’re 1st level. This feat is only available starting at 4th level. Choosing 1st level rituals at a point when full spellcasters are well into 2nd-level spells isn’t that bad, but there’s no upgrade path – whether you take this feat later in your career or early and just live with it, this becomes much less valuable over time. Like, I hope those 1st-level rituals are pretty awesome.
       1. That you can cast these spells with spell slots you have makes this feat more valuable to spellcasters – it’s about allowing casters to diversify their spell list, not about giving mundane characters broader options.
    3. Once per long rest, can cast a prepared ritual without the ritual casting time and without using a spell slot. This is great – if you have a high-level ritual you’d like to cast, this is a free spell slot of up to that level once per long rest. I don’t know what the highest-level ritual spell is – maybe Forbiddance at 6th level? Divination at 4th is probably better, since it’s 1 action as a non-ritual vs 10 minutes as a ritual, is useful in a wide variety of circumstances, and the material components aren’t too expensive. And then this feat is a free 4th-level spell per long rest. At lower levels, a Cleric could use Gentle Repose as a single action – meaning it’s useful in combat – to keep someone eligible for Revivify for up to 10 days, which means even if someone does die in combat and you can’t get to them or don’t have the spell slots, you can still bring them back via a 5th level Cleric rather than a 9th-level one.
25. Sentinel
    1. The benefits of this depend on your use of an Opportunity Attack – a melee attack that uses your reaction. That means this feat isn’t good for characters who think they’re likely to have other frequent uses for their reactions.
    2. This is pretty clearly meant to be a 4E-style marking feature: someone can’t just move away because of conventional opportunity attacks, can’t Disengage because of this, and can’t attack someone else because of this and a successful opportunity attack drops the target’s Speed to 0. Note that the expanded ability to make Opportunity Attacks is limited to enemies within 5 feet, which means this doesn’t particularly benefit reach weapons.
    3. This is…probably pretty decent as a feat. It gives you a capability you don’t have as a Fighting character but very much might want – as long as you weren’t doing anything better with your reactions.
26. Sharpshooter
    1. Ignore anything less than full cover. Ignore disadvantage when shooting while in melee. Ignore disadvantage from shooting at long range. I’m not really sure I’d say all these are about being a “sharpshooter” as such, but they’re all relevant to being good at ranged attacks and they’re all pretty good.
27. Shield Master
    1. Shield bash now doesn’t take your bonus action (even though it can only be used once per turn – I don’t know if that’s one attempt or one success), doesn’t do damage, and either pushes back or knocks down only if the opponent fails a Strength save. This apparently doesn’t have an enemy size restriction
    2. Turn half damage on Dex save to no damage on dex save by using your reaction.
    3. The shield bash feels broadly useful for a melee fighter, while the interpose shield ability seems awfully circumstantial. In terms of effect, well – it turns Fireball expected damage (assuming a 50% chance to save) from 21 to 14 points of damage. It’s the sort of ability that’s more useful if you’re very good at making Dexterity saves, which oddly makes it a better ability for a Ranger than a Fighter or Paladin…except if you’ve focused on Dexterity, the shield bash (whose save DC is based on Strength) is likely to suffer. I’d say this seems to be on the weak side. It’s still clearly better than the prior, 5E version.
28. Skulker
    1. Blindsight 10’ is pretty good, at least if you’re melee-focused
    2. Advantage on Dex (Stealth) checks made as part of the Hide action is more useful if the Hide action doesn’t require a full action, which benefits Rogues. That combined with no loss of hidden on a missed attack roll favors characters who really just want to hit on a single attack – again, Rogues. This is probably pretty good for them, but of very limited use for other characters.
29. Speedster
    1. +10 feet when not wearing heavy armor. 5E doesn’t feature a lot of fleeing from battle for either PCs or NPCs, so this is really only going to be meaningful for characters who want to maneuver around on the battlefield. This combined with the ability to ignore difficult terrain but only when using Dash cements this as only useful for characters who are going to really focus on trying to get around quickly – Rogues and Monks, basically.
    2. This is pretty circumstantial – it requires there to be a substantial number of battles that take place in locations large enough to maneuver around, and with some amount of difficult terrain.
30. Spell Sniper
    1. The ability score increase associated with this pretty clearly indicates the designers don’t think there are supposed to ever be spellcasters based on physical attributes.
    2. Other features are basically Sharpshooter but for spells. This will mostly be used for characters whose spell damage is more dependent on cantrips than on higher-level spells (i.e. Warlocks). For them it seems pretty good, and it probably retains decent utility for Sorcerers and Wizards. It would probably be a mistake for anyone else to take this.
31. War Caster
    1. Advantage on Constitution saves to maintain concentration
    2. Instead of an opportunity attack for moving out of your reach, can cast a single-target spell with a normal 1 Action casting time at the creature. This means you have to be up close and personal with enemies as well as the sort of target they’d want to move away from – either because you’re too threatening or too hard to hit compared to other targets. This wouldn’t apply to most casters – this mostly seems like something to be used by martial casters like Paladins, Rangers, and Eldritch Knight Fighters. This works well with the ability to perform Somatic components even when your hands are holding weapons and/or a shield. Frankly even a Paladin shouldn’t bother, since they can just try to get a conventional hit in and use that to smite if they’re going to be casting leveled spells.
    3. I’m not sure if this would be better to use cantrips (in which case you want an Eldritch Knight) or leveled spells. Honestly, it might be funny to hit people with something like a Charm Person when they try to get out of your reach…At any rate, cantrips get you free damage scaling., which is generally better performance than you’ll get out of a weapon attack.
32. Weapon Training
    1. Gaining proficiency with all martial weapons is much better than the old version, which only gave you proficiency with 4 of them. It still seems fairly weak – what’s a character going to do with a martial weapon proficiency if they don’t get it from their class? It doesn’t seem like they’d be a let to get much benefit form it.

Bard

1. I feel weird about grouping Bards in with other expert classes because they’re full spellcasters, on par with Wizards. Well, part of my problem is that there are full spellcasters for each class group except Warriors, but I’m also bothered because I think being a full spellcaster is likely to be much more mechanically significant than having Expertise in a few skills unless the game is substantially changed to make skill use a peer to at least low-level spellcasting.
   1. Also, Bards have spellcasting starting at 1st level, but only gain Expertise at 2nd. They feel more focused on spellcasting than on Expertise.
2. The discussion of being able to use legacy subclasses with a new class design (even if it’s only for playtest purposes) seem to impose a pretty low upper bound on the quality of feedback to be received from playtesting.
3. Providing default selections whenever a player would have to make a choice (of skill proficiencies or spells known, for example) is good for a number of reasons:
   1. Helps players generate their characters (though this is in tension with the idea of everyone custom-building their backgrounds from the Character Origins packet…)
   2. It causes the Bard to have Perform by default, meaning a player would have to make an affirmative choice to not have it. That makes a lot of sense to me.
4. Multiclassing rules directly in the class entry: well, it has the advantage of being specific instead of requiring players to try to apply general rules to specific classes. I’m not sure how well that would work in a whole Player’s Handbook, where I think I’d rather look at the general rules for multiclassing to see how they work.
   1. I note that multiclassing is still treated as an optional rule even though feats are being promoted to a standard rule. I’d rather it was the other way around, or that both of them were kept optional.
5. Bardic Inspiration gives a creature a Bardic Inspiration die to add as a bonus to a roll, in contrast to Inspiration which lets a creature re-roll a d20 Test. I think the overlap in terms is unnecessarily confusing, especially when the Musician feat allows the user to give characters Inspiration, and being a Bard lets a character hand out Bardic Inspiration, and a fair number of Bards are likely to take the Musician feat.
   1. I also note that Bardic Inspiration dice are handed out as a reaction, which clearly isn’t enough time for any sort of a performance. I like the idea of bards inspiring people with their performances, but this seems like a mechanic without any real thought to what it looks like in-character – I mean, the bard might not even be in a position to give someone finger guns and say “You got this, buddy”. I’d much rather just give all bards Musician and then leave them to have their 1st-level feat choice to be more differentiated.
6. Bard spellcasting – I wish we could back down from Bards being full spellcasters – I think putting them on the same schedule of spell level gains as Wizards and the like makes those other casters feel less special. I don’t think the spell school limitations are enough to make up for that, though it’s good to explicitly have them because it makes it easier to see what future spells and spell effects are open to bards, though I have no idea why Transmutation is one of the spell schools they have available – it doesn’t seem to match the theme of Bards as I understand them.
   1. Prepared spells – This is probably easier for new players, but it’s once again a buff not just to spellcasters (who haven’t needed any since 3.0), but to bards in particular (who certainly didn’t need any buffs over other spellcasters in 5E)
7. Expertise – this would be more meaningful if the main player-facing book gave concrete examples of what specific skills and tools accomplish at specific DCs. It would also help if DC tiers weren’t 5 points apart, since Expertise won’t make that big a difference until 13th level – at 2nd level when this is gained it’s only worth a 2-point difference, and it’s hard to feel the value of this feature on anything other than opposed rolls like Perception and Stealth, or Deception and Insight. What can Performance do at various DCs, or Persuasion, or a musical instrument proficiency?
   1. Part of the reason expertise doesn’t feel like much of a class feature: compare how much space is dedicated to Expertise in the class write-ups. Now compare how much space the Ranger’s relatively limited spellcasting takes up, both in the spellcasting description and in the table of class features. That presentation sure makes it seem like the game cares more about spellcasting than about expertise, or about being good at skills in general. 

Ranger

1. Rangers in general – rangers are originally supposed to be about surviving, exploring, and traveling through the wilderness. As long as 5E doesn’t care about those activities – and it hasn’t so far – any Ranger class will be pointless at best.
2. Favored Enemy – finally an implementation that doesn’t amount to game mechanical bonuses for racism. But this ignores so many of the usual rules for a spell, I wonder why it’s even treated as a spell – just make it a non-magical class feature.
3. Spellcasting – so Rangers get this at 1st level now. And they get cantrips, which means they have an unlimited amount of magic. That’s kind of odd to me – like, a Ranger can just decide one day that they’re going to prepare Produce Flame and then they don’t have to worry about firebuilding skills (or ammunition for close-range attacks). Also, they can have Goodberry as a 1st level spell, so there’s no need to think about foraging for food for the party – once again, magic makes mundane skill pointless.
4. Roving – giving rangers Climbing and Swimming speeds is the first change made to the ranger that makes them feel more like skilled wilderness travelers. On the other hand, all it does is make them move a bit faster – it doesn’t give them an improved chance of success when attempting to swim or climb is difficult. That’s a larger issue with Swim and Climb speeds, though.
5. Tireless – the temporary HP seems pretty minor – it’s essentially 1 free HD of healing per short rest. Good if you’re taking those all the time. Reducing exhaustion by 1 level every short rest – and in particular without food or water – defeats a large part of the value of exhaustion as a mechanic. It would be better if this didn’t work if the character had suffered exhaustion due to deprivation.
   1. It’s pretty strange to see a short rest-based mechanic given the way the rest of the the edition is trying to move away from abilities that refresh on a short rest. It almost feels like this got copied out of another source without being updated to the new design philosophy.
6. Nature’s Veil – another magical ability, this time relying on 5E’s second-favorite innovation: the completely unexamined concept of “spirits”.
7. Hunter
   1. Hunter’s Prey was pretty bad before and it still feels bad now – an additional 1d8 damage once per turn against a creature which is already wounded is both not very mechanically significant and not very useful for hunting small prey. I’d think this would be better handled by something like sneak attack.
   2. Hunter’s Lore – This is actually decent and thematic and arguably a reason to keep Hunter’s Mark magical.
   3. Multi-attack doesn’t have much to offer for melee-focused characters. It’s also kind of a weird concept for a Hunter, since it involves an area attack on their surroundings – like they’ve ended up in the middle of an area potentially full of targets. But really it feels more like the hunter is the one being hunted.
   4. Superior Hunter’s Defense doesn’t seem like an ability that’s useful in actual hunting (which means I don’t see how the character would come by the ability), since it requires the character to be fighting a group of enemies

Rogue

1. I’m nonplussed by the suggestion rogues take Acrobatics but not Athletics, because I keep forgetting that people generally don’t have to roll to climb things (bearing in mind that Climb Walls was classically a Thief/Rogue skill). I’d personally prefer this was handled by creating very low Climb DCs, ones that very poor climbers (aka weak characters without Athletics proficiency) might not be able to pass, and allow someone beating a climb DC by some fixed amount to treat the climb as not being difficult terrain – but none of this is an issue with the playtest changes.
2. I see it’s no longer possible to take Expertise in Thieves’ Tools, or in other tool proficiencies
3. Evasion has moved back to 9th level, 2nd archetype feature to 6th. Other subclass features moved up from 13th to 10th, and 17th to 14th.
4. Blindsense replaced by Subtle Strikes. This turns the rogue into more of a team player, since it gives them free advantage when supporting party members in melee with an enemy (note that the Rogue would qualify for Sneak Attack either way)
5. Thief
   1. Fast Hands – didn’t this used to have Use Object as an option? If it was removed, you need to say why (at least in playtest documents) so people understand both that it’s an intentional change and the rationale; otherwise you’ll get a bunch of noise in the feedback about a design choice that’s likely to be treated as an error or a whim.
   2. Second-Story Work
      1. This seems like one of the issues of class-defining abilities not coming online until an archetype is selected, around levels 2-3 for many classes. That’s OK, but I think it requires some explicit discussion of prior levels as being apprentice levels, and perhaps a wider discussion of that concept and why it’s included (to allow player to get used to the game and how the class works, for example)
      2. I notice that a Climb speed never obviates the need for an Athletics check, so it’s possible to end up with a surface Conan could theoretically climb faster than other folks – except they make the Athletics check to climb it and he doesn’t.
      3. The ability to use Dexterity rather than Strength for jumps is thoroughly unimpressive. At 3rd level this is at best a +4 difference, but at least this makes some (minor) difference in how much distance you can actually jump
   3. Supreme Sneak now allows you to move at full speed, but doesn’t work if you’re wearing medium or heavy armor – in effect, discouraging players from multiclassing in a way that tends to dilute the archetype
   4. Use Magic Device.
      1. I like the new version, especially compared to the old one. The ability to bypass class restrictions tended to hurt niche protection, and the ability to bypass alignment restrictions felt like…I don’t know, an ability to tinker on a metaphysical level? That could be a valid character ability, but doesn’t feel right for a Thief.
      2. The ability to attune to more magic items is straight out a power boost assuming characters have access to enough magic items
      3. The ability to avoid using charges 1 time in 6 feels pretty minor – it won’t come up very often, and items tend to regain some charges each day. It’s also worth noting that “charges” have wildly different values in some items – for a Wand of Magic Missiles, a charge is worth 1 spell level; for a Luck Blade or a Ring of Wishes, a charge is worth 1 Wish spell. I’d probably want this to trigger more often, at least for some items – maybe 50% of the time if the item regains charges on its own, but still 1 time in 6 if the item doesn’t regain charges, like the various wish-granting items
      4. The ability to use scrolls is good, though I don’t see why there would ever be scrolls of cantrips – at-will casting makes those pretty redundant. The ability to use higher-level scrolls via an Arcana roll using Intelligence as your spellcasting attribute is interesting, especially when you end up using spells usually not available to Intelligence-based casters. This does create an incentive to take Expertise with Arcana, but your last Expertise pick is at 6th level and I don’t see anything about being able to retrain Expertise decisions or skill proficiency choices.