Wizards of the Coast has finished previewing its new, improved Dungeons and Dragons classes, and so far things are looking pretty strong. The 2024 Player’s Handbook now features some of fifth edition’s best supplementary subclasses, and many of the weaker character options have been overhauled. But until we have access to all of the new core rulebooks, it’s hard to tell if these upgrades will actually be good for the game. Power creep could, in its sneaky fashion, creep in.
Power creep is a common issue in ‘live’ games that receive regular updates. The term refers to the way that new content can outshine the old, destabilizing the balance of the game. It’s a cyclical thing, where adding buffs often leads to even more buffs in future – with older content being left in the dust.
A certain amount of power creep is inevitable in a game like D&D 5e, where new character options have been continuously released for the past decade. Peace Clerics and Chronurgy Wizards massively outshine many options in the 2014 Player’s Handbook, and it’s no surprise that many tables have banned the Silvery Barbs spell. However, compared to older editions of Dungeons and Dragons, power creep has remained fairly minimal.
The good news is that most of Wizards of the Coast’s proposed changes for the DnD classes seem to bear balance in mind. Stronger classes like the DnD Wizard have seen only minimal tweaks (though we won’t know the full extent of the changes until we see the revised list of spells). In contrast, most of the major changes were made to weaker options like the DnD Monk. Heck, the DnD Paladin even saw a slight nerf for balance’s sake.
The result (hopefully) will be a list of equally powerful class options. A world where every D&D class and subclass is worth playing sounds pretty good to us. But every hero needs a villain to make their story feel complete. And without challenging DnD monsters, all these buffs might not feel so satisfying.
Right now, we know very little about the revised version of the Monster Manual. Wizards of the Coast promises that it’ll feature more high-level monsters, and we know the broad Challenge Rating rules will be carried over to ensure that One DnD content remains backwards-compatible with existing fifth edition content. Despite this, Wizards has confirmed that existing monster stat blocks will get a re-design.
Challenge Rating has never been the most reliable way to balance encounters (and the designer who originally pushed for it in 5e has since critiqued it). This means that the balance of future D&D games will depend on the individual design of classes and monsters – the latter of which we know next to nothing about.
If we want to speculate about how monsters are changing, there is one example we can use (if you’re a player in my Curse of Strahd game, stop reading now). Strahd von Zarovich got an updated stat block in Vecna: Eve of Ruin, a recent campaign book that was designed with the new core rules in mind.
Strahd is still a CR15 monster, but his hit points and spellcasting abilities have been significantly reduced. In their place, he’s got much stronger melee attacks and better bonus actions.
Strahd’s action economy is much improved, and it’s good to see he can do more than nibble on players in melee range. But he can’t hit parties with a series of Fireballs any more, and that smaller HP pool is going to really suck (vampire pun intended).
Most DnD homebrew for Curse of Strahd massively buffs Strahd’s hit points so that he can survive battle as a solo enemy – one popular option even turns him into an epic, three-phase boss fight. Despite the stat block’s new bells and whistles, this doesn’t feel like a buff that can stand up to the new classes in the 2024 Player’s Handbook.
Still, this is just one stat block, not a confirmed trend. We’ve still got lots to learn about the upcoming Monster Manual, and full access to the new Player’s Handbook will tell us more about the state of the game. Keep your eyes peeled for our full thoughts on the new rules once we can share them. And if you can’t remember when all these new DnD books are coming out, head over to our DnD release schedule guide.
Source: Wargamer
