#dnd5.5

Sometimes my weekly D&D games have background noise from the DM including their sibling yelling into a microphone on some FPS game chat in the background. We have now, multiple times, attributed this to a background NPC of our caravan who keeps loosing dice games and it's so fucking funny

From the other room: "God damnit I almost had him!"

Monk: "Damn, the halfling lost his bet again"

So, I've been somewhat hype about the new rules rework, since it has been 10 years, and curious how they'll tweak and rework things after so much time and feedback. They dropped their paladin overview yesterday, and I decided to jot down my thoughts and first impressions of the changes as I went. (Mechanics wise, the paladin has never been a favourite of mine, so I went in hoping they'd change my mind.)

Right off of the bat, I love the move of spell casting to 1st level. Spells as a paladin can often feel like just smite slots, so giving players a chance to feel out what spells they might like to use instead is a great move.

Not restricting fighting styles also a plus, and I'm glad to see the option to take cantrips is still there!

I also like the free smite to free up spells, but I wish there was some clarity on what you can smite on w all the fighting styles available. For instance, ranged smite?

Also, I've noticed changing smite to spell and restricting its use hasn't been popular, but I think if it allows them to excel in other ways it's a good change.

Find steed having a clear stat block is nice, although reserve full judgement until I see it. Free cast also nice.

I do find it weird to buff this aspect of the class, however, since mounted combat is so hard to actually pull off in DnD.

Auras all being tied together is nice and concise, and that seems to be the case with other abilities like vow enmity being part of an attack.

I love adding an extra feature to smite with the oath of devotion. The interaction is neat and just adds a new layer to a fairly straightforward/boring feature that is expected to be used often.

Incredibly disappointed, however, that they didn't continue this going into the other subclasses. This just seemed like an obvious design path to me.

Overall I'm pretty positive on the changes, however, I still don't it'll ever be a favourite class of mine

Had a dream about the new DnD 2024 Monster Manual.

Ther was a purple worm variant for the surface with little wings near the head. It could burst up out of the ground in its attack, then "hover". half submerged and vertical, then use it's Reaction to pivot and dive back down on anything it detected.