5E | Geekscape

Wizards of the Coast has been releasing new content for 5 edition Dungeons & Dragons left and right the last few months. The biggest changes I’ve been happy to see were the changes and additions to the various classes you can play in 5th edition. These tweaks for existing classes help to balance some classes, and add more options for merging your character’s backstory with their playstyle.

Take, for instance, the new Divine Domains for Clerics. The original information in the Player’s Handbook includes seven different Divine Domains (Life, Light, Tempest, Nature, Trickery, and War), with accompanying gods and ideals. Each domain gives the cleric spells and abilities related to the domain, and helps shape the background and story of the character, as well as their holy symbol. For instance, a Cleric in the Tempest domain may be associated with Zeus, and would have the ability to cast spells associated with the weather, and use Channel Divinity to deal maximum damage with a storm spell instead of rolling.

The Unearthed Arcana, released November 21st, announced three additional domains for clerics to choose from – Forge, Grave, and Protection.

The Forge Domain gives players skills and spells associated with smithing (like searing smite, wall of fire, elemental weapon), and clerics can use their ability to Channel Divinity to create simple items starting at level 2. A Forge Cleric also gets increased AC (armor class) and resistance to damage and fire damage at higher levels, making it a great option for a tank.

The Grave Domain is reminiscent of necromancy. Clerics in the Grave domain have spells that allow them to raise the dead, deal necrotic damage and detect the dead.They also have the ability to cast spare the dying as a bonus action at first level, and turn a critical hit by an enemy into a normal hit (once per rest), preventing your party from taking as much damage.

Protection Domain gives clerics spells that allow them to increase party defenses with shield spells, and giving enemies disadvantage on attack rolls. At 6th level, you also gain the ability to heal yourself when you heal an ally. Protection Clerics have the ability to be deal out a lot of damage, and help the party block damage and resist damage. This would be great for a small group, who might be squishy or not have a dedicated healer.

Ten domains seem like a lot of choice to have when creating a character, however, considering how diverse some pantheons can be, the wide variety of choice when creating a cleric and deciding their religious path gives the player more tailored options.

For details on all three new domains, click here.

What do you think of these additions to the Cleric class? Are there too many options to choose from? Let us know in the comments below!

For the longest time it was fairly difficult to recommend an edition for newer players when it came to Dungeons and Dragons; there is simply something to complain about in all of them. The earliest second editions are notorious for their steep learning curve, third has power balancing issues, and fourth edition is better known as “Stuff To Complain About: The Game”. They all have two major issues in common: character creation needs an experienced player sitting beside you to explain it, and the books do very little to prepare the player for actual play. Fourth editions “player guides” are almost entirely filled with cards either detailing magic items or the classes abilities (“Power Cards”), leaving a tiny blurb at the back of the book telling players how to actually play the game. It’s no wonder your typical 4E session is fight after fight with a word or two of plot inbetween; far from Gary Gygax’s original vision of swords and sorcery.

Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition is Wizards of the Coast’s apology to the hobby at large, cutting out almost everything that convoluted the game and reworking it from the ground up. Power Cards are gone, magic items no longer litter the streets, and the setting itself has been toned back from a time of magical superheroes to a more appropriate swords and sorcery styled setting full of adventure and mystery. In general, many new rules and mechanics exist that give players many non-combat opportunities to further the story, where before most players just resorted to extreme violence. The pivotal new tool for roleplaying and combat is the concept of Advantage/Disadvantage, which benifits characters in situations where it’s very likely the character shall succeed/fail miserably. In either case two twenty sided dice are rolled instead of one, and either the higher or lower result is taken depending on the situation; flanking most notably provides advantage rather than an attack modifier now. It’s the ever present equalizer.

5E feels more like Gygax's original vision than any edition we've played thus far. — 5E feels more like Gygax’s original vision than any edition we’ve played thus far.

Characters now choose a background at character creation that sums up the general life experiences they have under their belt. With this experience comes a general idea of their personality as well as their backgrounds feature ability; a special rule that normally makes exploration or social niceties easier somehow. The nobleman paladin commands respect worthy of his title while the party’s rogue is a deadbeat charleton that fancies forging fake aliases to soak up his debts. This system often blends with Advantage and Disadvantage to create interesting scenarios such as: the Human Monk is a sailor at heart and spent most of his life at sea, he would have no problem keeping on his feet during a storm and would roll with advantage. The dwarf on the other hand hates water and everything that lives within it, rolling with disadvantage when the storm hits.

Character creation has been tidied up into a manageable step by step process that can be understood by players new and old alike. In past editions it was hard to pick a race because they all looked so interesting and powerful… except the basic humans. The earliest editions balanced the whole game around humans being “standard” and thus penalized the other races in their potential, this was written out edition by edition until the other races were just so much better that nobody wanted to be human. Let’s face it why be a weak ol’ humie when you could be Gnarmtar the Ogre House-Juggler. Humans now are gifted with naturally good statistics (+1 in all of em’) but no special rules OR you can go with the statistically weaker variant but get a tasty feat to play with. Either way 5E boasts a good lineup of stock player races.

The classes have also been scaled back into a traditional array of classes from Fighters, Monks, and Rogues; with thankfully no mention of 4th Edition’s contributions such as the Spellblade; who teleported around and hit you with his sword magic. Every class now features role playing abilities, such as the rangers terrain bonuses being switched out for travelling bonuses, and at higher levels monks can be understood by any creature that knows a language no matter what language they are speaking. It all comes back to the games rules being fleshed out to allow for richer storytelling, something the game has needed for years! Even monsters now have rules for pure roleplaying purposes now with lairs that influence the world in subtle ways around it.

Monsters are now uniformly angrier and less loaded with hitpoints and more loaded with stabby slicey bits. A fight that has been going well may quickly cascade into a series of botched rolls and knee-bites that can bring a party to its knees; players can’t just go on murder cruise-control anymore. I threw a trio of what were effectively great white sharks at the party and the party had a great ego about them until they realized that jumping into the water to fight them would be utter suicide from how hard they hit (even while shrunk by a spell one jumped out and nearly killed the rogue!)

On the other side of the table the game is nothing but fun to run as a GM. The Dungeon Master’s Guide is a beautifully written resource that does a perfect job sparking the imagination while teaching you how to run a game of 5E with a table or section for every situation. These sections of sage advice provide plenty of fuel for both the game and the game’s world and generally makes you worry less about making up rules regarding minutia. The DMG contains a section detailing areas of peculiar conditions such as areas of wild magic; places where every spell makes you roll for weird stuff going on like your hair turning greenish orange for a day. After one session in such a place the wild magic sorcerer went from wanting wild magic to always happen to being afraid it might happen.

The cosmology of DnD is extremely confusing: existence as we know it is called the material plane and from there is an ongoing matryoshka doll of different planes of existence that potentially go on forever. The description of the inner planes is the most poetic, describing the Plane of Water as an vast tropical ocean between the extremes of an icy abyss and a gigantic silt bog darted with various islands covered in ancient shipwrecks. A full read through the DMG arms you with not only the way to run 5E but the knowledge is just plain useful for any roleplaying game you attempt.

All in all I can’t stress enough how much I love this edition over any other I have played, and I’ve played most of them while owning the books for all of them. I’ve defaulted to advising new players to start with fifth, and generally hold it as a success. It’s been engineered to be accessible to new players, with the basic rules available on the website for free. Your local hobby shop more probably than not is holding a weekly DnD Encounters game designed to introduce new players to the system through an official story-line; As of writing it’s Elemental Evil (Which by the way is also a nifty book) that presents four different cults of elemental maniacs to fight with friends.

I give this edition five out of five giant sharks!

Tag: 5E

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