Quote from Comrade_Jenkens >>

Frustrating to see the druid subclass not make it.

I suspect that the runecrafter didn't make it as a lot of people said it should be an artificer subclass. And WotC would rather scrap the concept entirely than give the artificer support.

I could see runes being spread to all classes via feats, in a sense they way feats can bring all classes maneuvers or magic adeptness(?), but lacking a core class owning runes.  

I sort of rather have runes spread to all classes that way, I think.

I want to say this is sort of what happened with the Dragonlance origins and feats too, but I'm trying to remember what the shift was there, or maybe I'm thinking of Strixhaven.

I’m excited for the “Path of the Giants” Barbarian…and quite saddened by the omission of the Rune Wizard.

Rune Magic was an aspect of Giants that I thought would be neat to explore as a character (respect to the Rune Knight Fighter, of course). That the subclass even found a way to expand the concept of runes to a multitude of other creature / culture types was a bonus to flexibility.

I know that there was an outpouring of indignation that the subclass was not given to Artificers; which I fear detracted from the overall development.

Perhaps another time.

I guess we will see if people are willing to buy books with a focus on lore.  While there are a few player options, it seems mostly a lore book.

Definitely feels like player options have slowed to a trickle lately.

Part of it is probably because 1D&D PC classes are still in development and they don't want to release something that wouldn't work well with those. Another may be that they intentionally want the current version to feel a little stale by the time the 1D&D books drop. I know for our group at least we're relying more and more on homebrew content to keep things feeling fresh.

I don't think it's just about polling unless the wizard and druid polled extremely poorly for some reason, which seems unlikely. I think if this was 2021, the feedback would have just been used to adjust those subclasses and they still would have been released.

Quote from Tilda_Wildbramble >>

I guess we will see if people are willing to buy books with a focus on lore.  While there are a few player options, it seems mostly a lore book.

It's teaser text is essentially the same as Fizban's -1 subclass.  Fizban's was a very popular book IIRC, of course it was also a "dragon book" which may have more draw than a "giant book."  I've generally neglected giants in my games, but after some of the UA and some of the discussion Bigby's production has generated I could see myself maybe taking this book and revisiting Storm King's Thunder or at least do a Giant cycle in a campaign.  Using Fizban's as a template, yes there is lore, but most of the book is a bit of player options and then a lot in terms of magic items, some magic, a large bestiary, lair maps, and how to take the lore to create compelling dragon personalities and adventure hooks.  I think it's smart design, and I'm interested in seeing how it turns out.

Quote from Tony1Adobe >>

 

I know that there was an outpouring of indignation that the subclass was not given to Artificers; which I fear detracted from the overall development.

I don't think that would stop it.  I think it's been stated before that the reason why Artifcers get neglect in 5e is because they're not a PHB class, and new content has to be playable with the core three books, which lacks the Artificer.  This also doesn't bode well for the Artificer after the 2024 refresh since it's still not slated to be a core class.

Quote from MidnightPlat >>

Quote from Tilda_Wildbramble >>

I guess we will see if people are willing to buy books with a focus on lore.  While there are a few player options, it seems mostly a lore book.

 

It's teaser text is essentially the same as Fizban's -1 subclass.  Fizban's was a very popular book IIRC, of course it was also a "dragon book" which may have more draw than a "giant book."  I've generally neglected giants in my games, but after some of the UA and some of the discussion Bigby's production has generated I could see myself maybe taking this book and revisiting Storm King's Thunder or at least do a Giant cycle in a campaign.  Using Fizban's as a template, yes there is lore, but most of the book is a bit of player options and then a lot in terms of magic items, some magic, a large bestiary, lair maps, and how to take the lore to create compelling dragon personalities and adventure hooks.  I think it's smart design, and I'm interested in seeing how it turns out.

 

 Fizban's has Dragonborn with 3 subraces, 2 subclasses, 3 Feats, and 7 Spells.  

Bigby's has 1 Subclass, 8 Feats, and 2 Backgrounds.

There is more of a difference than just the 1 subclass. Not saying that I am not interested in the new book, because I am very interested, but it does have less player options than previous source books. 

I figured the Runecrafter wizard was out when they included two feats in the "multiverse" UA that took features from that subclass. I'm disappointed that that the Druid circle didn't make it, though usually when that happens it's because it was not well received in surveys and playtests. The nice thing with a tabletop game, is that we can just use the UA (and the homebrew features from DDB aid in that) when that kind of thing happens. 

My real interest in this book is not the character options, though. It's the monsters and lore/story bits. 

I'm vaguely curious how they'd handle lore for giants given that they want to be setting agnostic and don't want to imply that anyone is good or evil because doing so will offend someone somewhere.

If a giant casts a fireball spell, is it the same size (volume, diameter) and damage as the one cast by a humanoid wizard or is it scaled appropriately to the height/size of the caster?

For game mechanics reasons it the same for everyone.