And why have 4 different sub-classes (those are the just the ones that you mentioned) all filling the same role? It just means to differentiate them, even on a subtle basis, inevitably means power creep, and power leap. Why would anyone buy a new subclass if an older one fills the same role, AND is just as powerful?
There are multiple classes and subclasses that can fill the same role because that adds depth to the game. If the only possible way to pick locks and disarm traps was to be a rogue, that would make the game as a whole quite boring indeed. So yes, there are multiple subclasses that can both fight on the front lines and cast spells.
And no, that's not what power creep is. The power level was already set back in 2017 by having the Bladesinger wizard, a spellcaster that can survive on the frontline and gets Cantrip Extra Attack. Adding more ways to do that is maintaining that existing power level, not creeping it.
If anything, the Banneret is a regression, because it's highly unlikely that whatever they give it will let it be on par with the Battlemaster's power, let alone that of the Eldritch Knight and Psi Warrior.
There are multiple classes and subclasses that can fill the same role because that adds depth to the game. If the only possible way to pick locks and disarm traps was to be a rogue, that would make the game as a whole quite boring indeed. So yes, there are multiple subclasses that can both fight on the front lines and cast spells.
And no, that's not what power creep is. The power level was already set back in 2017 by having the Bladesinger wizard, a spellcaster that can survive on the frontline and gets Cantrip Extra Attack. Adding more ways to do that is maintaining that existing power level, not creeping it.
If anything, the Banneret is a regression, because it's highly unlikely that whatever they give it will let it be on par with the Battlemaster's power, let alone that of the Eldritch Knight and Psi Warrior.
Building on the above, as is apparently obvious to anyone who has played 5e, class features and attributes are important. A Gish Bard is going to play very different from a Gish Wizard, which is different than a Gish Fighter, etc. They are not “filling the same role” - they are all different variations with their own place.
Saying they all fill the same role is about as nonsensical as complaining that stilettos, pumps, and platform shoes all exist. Yeah, they’re all high heels - they’re also different in their own way and people have different preferences.
I would be very happy with a fighter subclass that gains a monstrous flying pet that they can ride into combat, but not at the expense of retconning the PDK lore. I would have liked to have seen a faerun flavoured subclass that is true to established lore and traditionally has a flying mount... step forward the Griffon Cavalry riders of Waterdeep!
A game that is stripped down to a much smaller set of classes and subclasses is far easier for "casual" players to learn.
Counter argument on the casual players. Giving them a lot of options of classes and subclasses (and making them start directly at lvl 3 with a subclass) allows players to make a character that is more distinct, and thus interesting to play. By the simple fact that the different subclasses and their specific flavors will inspire the players.
If a player only have access to basic options, they will have a tendency to make generic characters. You say to a casual player that they can make a fighter, they'll usually make a basic and boring strength fighter with shield and board. It will be easy to make and play sure, but it will turn boring instantly.
But show them stuff that stands out like the Echo Knight, the Eldritch Knight or Mercer's Gunslinger, and they'll be more likely to be inspired to try to make a more interesting character.
I'm firmly on the camp of "the more flavorfull options the better", ESPECIALLY for casual and new players. We need to help them bolster up their creativity. It's supposed to be a roleplaying game after all, roleplay is ultimately more important than the game mechanics.
I would be very happy with a fighter subclass that gains a monstrous flying pet that they can ride into combat, but not at the expense of retconning the PDK lore. I would have liked to have seen a faerun flavoured subclass that is true to established lore and traditionally has a flying mount... step forward the Griffon Cavalry riders of Waterdeep!
I guess from my perspective, "PDK lore" boils down to repeatedly explaining the joke."Yes, we know the dragon was actually black, it's a whole thing, stop asking already." And if you have to explain a joke or reference over and over to newcomers then maybe it was never that good in the first place.
It's also kind of silly when you think about it. If Thauglor's scales hadn't been discolored, would they have gone with the Black Dragon Knights instead? And if they had, would new readers be even more confused? "Wait, I forgot, do they fight black dragons or work with them? Oh, neither, they just fought the one? Okay... do they at least get abilities that make them better at fighting dragons? ....Kinda sorta but not really? ...Huh."
A game that is stripped down to a much smaller set of classes and subclasses is far easier for "casual" players to learn.
Counter argument on the casual players. Giving them a lot of options of classes and subclasses (and making them start directly at lvl 3 with a subclass) allows players to make a character that is more distinct, and thus interesting to play. By the simple fact that the different subclasses and their specific flavors will inspire the players.
...
I'm firmly on the camp of "the more flavorfull options the better", ESPECIALLY for casual and new players. We need to help them bolster up their creativity. It's supposed to be a roleplaying game after all, roleplay is ultimately more important than the game mechanics.
Not to mention - there IS a stripped down version of the game, it's called core. Nobody is forcing any playgroup to use every splat that comes out.
I'm firmly on the camp of "the more flavorfull options the better", ESPECIALLY for casual and new players. We need to help them bolster up their creativity. It's supposed to be a roleplaying game after all, roleplay is ultimately more important than the game mechanics.
Making a class 'favorfull' means that it's hard to use it for anything but the thing it's designed for. Most casual or new players come in with the attitude of "here's my character concept, what class should I play", not going trawling through a list of options, and that really means you should offer generic options that can easily be flavored to match a concept.
I'm firmly on the camp of "the more flavorfull options the better", ESPECIALLY for casual and new players. We need to help them bolster up their creativity. It's supposed to be a roleplaying game after all, roleplay is ultimately more important than the game mechanics.
A "casual player" typically means one that does not have a firm grasp on the rules. To introduce them to a vast plethora of options, AND starting them at level 3 , which makes game choices even more complicated, is a recipe for disaster. New players, and casual players., are overwhelmed with options. The KISS principle has been around forever, because it is true, and it works.
Trying to go over the nuances between a Hexblade, an EK, a Valour Bard, and a Bladesinger with such a player is a simply not going to work. So this new subclass just adds to the confusion for new/casual players.
Most subclasses will just give 2/3 abilities on top of the 3 already given by the base class. I never had a newbie have issues with that. There's the spell sorting issues for casters, of course, but this is an issue regardless of the experience level of the players.
The difference between helping a newbie handling 5 abilities instead of 3 has been completely irrelevant for me each time i had to do it. On the other hand, allowing them to choose amongst the variety of subclasses i give them access to has given me much more varied and interesting characters to DM for and players invested in the roleplay.
Might be tied to how one prefer to play the game, but i'm roleplay first and foremost with combat being an occasionnal event. As such i don't care one bit if i have to hold the hand of the players a bit more in combat than if i only gave them a choice between Champion or Brute for fighter. Because limiting them would have been sad.
A "casual player" typically means one that does not have a firm grasp on the rules. To introduce them to a vast plethora of options, AND starting them at level 3 , which makes game choices even more complicated, is a recipe for disaster. New players, and casual players., are overwhelmed with options. The KISS principle has been around forever, because it is true, and it works.
Trying to go over the nuances between a Hexblade, an EK, a Valour Bard, and a Bladesinger with such a player is a simply not going to work.
I mean, I wouldn't start a new player at level 3, but it's really not that hard. You just give them the top-level summary of the classes, they pick the one that sounds most interesting, and then you do it again with the subclasses.
And that assumes that they don't have a concept already. If they already know "I want to fight, and also do some magic", You can give them the top-level summary of Rangers, Paladins, Bladepact Warlocks, and also tell them about the classes that'll get to branch out into fighter/caster in a few sessions.
Unless you're just throwing them into the deep end, and leaving them to their own devices, it's just not that bad. I reckon I could, with prepped handouts, get an entire group of newbies through character generation in maybe half an hour. Adding subclasses to the mix wouldn't add much more time. (This excludes the "basic game mechanics" briefing.)
(Now, if I were running for a bunch of newbies, I'd probably start them with pregens for the first few sessions.)
So this new subclass just adds to the confusion for new/casual players.
Not in the context of fighter/casters, since it isn't one.
In the more general case, yes, slightly, because there's now five fighter subclasses to pick from instead of four. But for that player who says "I want to be a warrior who's also a diplomat" (or whatever; I don't remember what the banneret's deal is), you can say "I have just the thing for you".
I think the whole "too many class/subclass options" argument goes back to the two styles of character creation: creating a character from a concept, or playing one that is generated and seeing what you can do with it. I have a feeling that a lot of the "old school" gamers (that is, those that enjoy the earlier editions of DnD more than the newer ones) are more on the generated side of things. They like the challenge of role playing within confines that were external to themselves; rolling for stats, forcing paladins to be LG, "fighters don't do magic", etc. There is definitely something to be said about this style of play. It's fun to see what you can do with what is given to you; how well you can improv the character. The "game", as it were, is to play through a campaign despite the challenge of those external constraints.
However, I also get the feeling that most newer players and those that enjoy 5e more enjoy coming to it with a concept in mind and seeing what fits, then creating that. Their character is one of the protagonists of their shared story. The "game", for them, is merely the system of rules that dictates how the story unfolds where the external limits are further away and simply limit the kinds of actions you can take more global scale, rather than dictating those actions in minutia. The good news is that "old school" DnD isn't going anywhere, and you can easily homebrew 5e to limit choice or even just come to that consensus with your players and the only "homebrew" you have to do is the mentality of how you approach your characters and their actions.
We have confirmation of the leaks - Nerd Immersion did an interview with WotC's Makenzie de Armas at GenCon this past weekend that covered quite a bit about the new FR books, but she specifically talked about the PDK -> Banneret changes at length (starting at 9:47):
Transcript for those who prefer to read:
Ted: "There's a lot to cover {in HoFR} but one thing I wanted to specifically call out because it was different from the Unearthed Arcana as I saw on the screen, was Banneret from Purple Dragon Knight."
Makenzie: "Yes - The Banneret is what came out of the Unearthed Arcana process. So the UA, what we released was an experiment with the Purple Dragon Knight; we have the version of the PDK that was released in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, and we decided with UA being this public playtesting process, we wanted to experiment... we wanted to se what it would be like if we delivered on a more dragon-focused PDK, and so that's what we did with that UA article. And like with all UA articles we got feedback, and there were things that people really liked about the subclass, but there were also things that people didn't really like. And that's fair, that's why it was an experiment, that's why we wanted to try it. And so we took that feedback, and we kinda reshaped it... we also took what the Banneret / the PDK used to be in SCAG and sort of compared that to the UA version, we looked at them, we kind of merged them together, we took the things that people really enjoyed about the PDK UA subclass, which ended up being a lot of the ally support, the rallying aspects, the ability to uh, you know, communicate and rally your fellow players and be a kind of support-based fighter... so we took those elements that people really liked from that UA subclass, mixed it with some of the things that had come before with the one in SCAG, and now we have the new Banneret, which we think speaks to a lot of the things people really liked in the UA, but that also fixes and addresses the issues that people didn't like about the UA."
Ted: {after praising the team for taking feedback.} "So what it sounds like is what we're gonna get is gonna be a pretty big change, so if you were to do a side-by-side comparison, you're gonna see big shifts to where we land in the final product."
Makenzie: "Yeah - if you compare them side by side you're gonna see a big shift, but if you also compare like the PDK from the SCAG, the UA, and the one that comes out in HoF, you'll see the shared DNA between all three of them, and that's the beauty of the UA process sort of showing its hand - yeah, we have all this public data and this playtesting and this feedback, and we can marry it all together into something that really speak to things that a lot of people love."
Nothing surprising here - the dragon aspects of the UA clearly bombed in the survey while the Marshal/Warlord aspects scored well. I'm certainly glad that if they were going to take that more generic general tactician concept and make that the focus of the subclass, that they landed on the more setting-agnostic "Banneret" title for it. giving them the freedom to then say that most PDKs happen to be Bannerets mechanically, and potentially revisit the dragonriding fighter later on. If nothing else, I can appreciate that the folks who wanted Banneret to be more of a Marshal prevailed democratically and got what they wanted.
A game that is stripped down to a much smaller set of classes and subclasses is far easier for "casual" players to learn.
Counter argument on the casual players. Giving them a lot of options of classes and subclasses (and making them start directly at lvl 3 with a subclass) allows players to make a character that is more distinct, and thus interesting to play. By the simple fact that the different subclasses and their specific flavors will inspire the players.
If a player only have access to basic options, they will have a tendency to make generic characters. You say to a casual player that they can make a fighter, they'll usually make a basic and boring strength fighter with shield and board. It will be easy to make and play sure, but it will turn boring instantly.
But show them stuff that stands out like the Echo Knight, the Eldritch Knight or Mercer's Gunslinger, and they'll be more likely to be inspired to try to make a more interesting character.
I'm firmly on the camp of "the more flavorfull options the better", ESPECIALLY for casual and new players. We need to help them bolster up their creativity. It's supposed to be a roleplaying game after all, roleplay is ultimately more important than the game mechanics.
A "casual player" typically means one that does not have a firm grasp on the rules. To introduce them to a vast plethora of options, AND starting them at level 3 , which makes game choices even more complicated, is a recipe for disaster. New players, and casual players., are overwhelmed with options. The KISS principle has been around forever, because it is true, and it works.
Trying to go over the nuances between a Hexblade, an EK, a Valour Bard, and a Bladesinger with such a player is a simply not going to work. So this new subclass just adds to the confusion for new/casual players.
Thankfully, there are some really simple subclasses for those casual players. If they don't have a firm grasp on the rules, the DM, or the group as a whole, can suggest those to the new/casual player. For example, I'd steer any player who isn't well versed in the rules away from a warlock because there are so many moving parts with the class. To differentiate between a Bladesinger and an Eldritch Knight, the question to ask is do they want to be a warrior with some spells, or a wizard with some ability to fight?
Another interview with Makenzie. This one confirms our earlier suspicions that even though they reverted the dragon pet from the PDK, they kept the lore change to associate them with Amethyst Dragons (4:29).
I can't help but feel that this is the worst of both worlds. Those who enjoyed the martial pet class and the stronger mechanical tie between the faction's name and abilities lost out, and those who wanted the lore to stay the same (that they were just tactical knights with an uncommon name) didn't get what they wanted either.
The one bright spot I can see is that if this change sticks, we can still get a true "Purple Dragon Knight" subclass that actually has something to do with purple dragons later on, maybe as elite members of the order, while the rank and file are made up of Bannerets.
Okay, that's weird. Not sure why they're so fixated on trying to make amethyst dragons a part of the lore now. It's the heraldry for an order, they're allowed some poetic license when picking the color. I'm not particularly invested in seeing the "true" version of the lore in the book, but it is odd to see a shift like this.
Okay, that's weird. Not sure why they're so fixated on trying to make amethyst dragons a part of the lore now. It's the heraldry for an order, they're allowed some poetic license when picking the color. I'm not particularly invested in seeing the "true" version of the lore in the book, but it is odd to see a shift like this.
Purple Dragons (and other non-'standard' dragon colors) showed up in Dragon Magazine as early as 1e Not sure if they also showed up for 1e, but gem dragons, incl amethyst showed up in a 2e supplement. AFAIK, Purple Dragon Knights did not show up until 3e
So no, gem dragons were not made to make the purple dragon knights fit.
So no, gem dragons were not made to make the purple dragon knights fit.
That isn't what Ace said at all
Quote: "Not sure why they're so fixated on trying to make amethyst dragons a part of the lore now. " Even if I misunderstood what said other poster said otherwise, they already have been part of the lore, going back several iterations (editions).
So no, gem dragons were not made to make the purple dragon knights fit.
That isn't what Ace said at all
Quote: "Not sure why they're so fixated on trying to make amethyst dragons a part of the lore now. " Even if I misunderstood what said other poster said otherwise, they already have been part of the lore, going back several iterations (editions).
Pretty sure they were referring to the lore for Purple Dragon Knights specifically.
Yes, I'm not sure why they're specifically feeling they must tie amethyst dragons to the lore of the Purple Dragon Knights. I'm well aware there's been more than the core 10 metallic and chromatic dragons for a long time.
Okay, that's weird. Not sure why they're so fixated on trying to make amethyst dragons a part of the lore now. It's the heraldry for an order, they're allowed some poetic license when picking the color. I'm not particularly invested in seeing the "true" version of the lore in the book, but it is odd to see a shift like this.
I just wish that if they were going to stick to their guns with the lore, they had done so with the crunch too. (Maybe they already commissioned all the art and it was too late, in which case why even put it in the UA?)
But per Fizban's, I can see several personality traits of amethyst dragons that fit the Knights:
"Noble Obligation. My superior experience, intellect, and insight give me a duty to mediate disputes when I can. (Good)"|
"Responsibility. Having knowledge and power gives one a responsibility to those who have less of either. (Lawful)"
"I am a sworn protector against the depredations of the Far Realm, and I will root out its corruption wherever it may arise."
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It's not a "fact" that they were axed at all, as many others have corrected you on.
There are multiple classes and subclasses that can fill the same role because that adds depth to the game. If the only possible way to pick locks and disarm traps was to be a rogue, that would make the game as a whole quite boring indeed. So yes, there are multiple subclasses that can both fight on the front lines and cast spells.
And no, that's not what power creep is. The power level was already set back in 2017 by having the Bladesinger wizard, a spellcaster that can survive on the frontline and gets Cantrip Extra Attack. Adding more ways to do that is maintaining that existing power level, not creeping it.
If anything, the Banneret is a regression, because it's highly unlikely that whatever they give it will let it be on par with the Battlemaster's power, let alone that of the Eldritch Knight and Psi Warrior.
Building on the above, as is apparently obvious to anyone who has played 5e, class features and attributes are important. A Gish Bard is going to play very different from a Gish Wizard, which is different than a Gish Fighter, etc. They are not “filling the same role” - they are all different variations with their own place.
Saying they all fill the same role is about as nonsensical as complaining that stilettos, pumps, and platform shoes all exist. Yeah, they’re all high heels - they’re also different in their own way and people have different preferences.
I would be very happy with a fighter subclass that gains a monstrous flying pet that they can ride into combat, but not at the expense of retconning the PDK lore. I would have liked to have seen a faerun flavoured subclass that is true to established lore and traditionally has a flying mount... step forward the Griffon Cavalry riders of Waterdeep!
Counter argument on the casual players. Giving them a lot of options of classes and subclasses (and making them start directly at lvl 3 with a subclass) allows players to make a character that is more distinct, and thus interesting to play. By the simple fact that the different subclasses and their specific flavors will inspire the players.
If a player only have access to basic options, they will have a tendency to make generic characters. You say to a casual player that they can make a fighter, they'll usually make a basic and boring strength fighter with shield and board. It will be easy to make and play sure, but it will turn boring instantly.
But show them stuff that stands out like the Echo Knight, the Eldritch Knight or Mercer's Gunslinger, and they'll be more likely to be inspired to try to make a more interesting character.
I'm firmly on the camp of "the more flavorfull options the better", ESPECIALLY for casual and new players. We need to help them bolster up their creativity. It's supposed to be a roleplaying game after all, roleplay is ultimately more important than the game mechanics.
I guess from my perspective, "PDK lore" boils down to repeatedly explaining the joke."Yes, we know the dragon was actually black, it's a whole thing, stop asking already." And if you have to explain a joke or reference over and over to newcomers then maybe it was never that good in the first place.
It's also kind of silly when you think about it. If Thauglor's scales hadn't been discolored, would they have gone with the Black Dragon Knights instead? And if they had, would new readers be even more confused? "Wait, I forgot, do they fight black dragons or work with them? Oh, neither, they just fought the one? Okay... do they at least get abilities that make them better at fighting dragons? ....Kinda sorta but not really? ...Huh."
Not to mention - there IS a stripped down version of the game, it's called core. Nobody is forcing any playgroup to use every splat that comes out.
Making a class 'favorfull' means that it's hard to use it for anything but the thing it's designed for. Most casual or new players come in with the attitude of "here's my character concept, what class should I play", not going trawling through a list of options, and that really means you should offer generic options that can easily be flavored to match a concept.
Most subclasses will just give 2/3 abilities on top of the 3 already given by the base class. I never had a newbie have issues with that. There's the spell sorting issues for casters, of course, but this is an issue regardless of the experience level of the players.
The difference between helping a newbie handling 5 abilities instead of 3 has been completely irrelevant for me each time i had to do it. On the other hand, allowing them to choose amongst the variety of subclasses i give them access to has given me much more varied and interesting characters to DM for and players invested in the roleplay.
Might be tied to how one prefer to play the game, but i'm roleplay first and foremost with combat being an occasionnal event. As such i don't care one bit if i have to hold the hand of the players a bit more in combat than if i only gave them a choice between Champion or Brute for fighter. Because limiting them would have been sad.
I mean, I wouldn't start a new player at level 3, but it's really not that hard. You just give them the top-level summary of the classes, they pick the one that sounds most interesting, and then you do it again with the subclasses.
And that assumes that they don't have a concept already. If they already know "I want to fight, and also do some magic", You can give them the top-level summary of Rangers, Paladins, Bladepact Warlocks, and also tell them about the classes that'll get to branch out into fighter/caster in a few sessions.
Unless you're just throwing them into the deep end, and leaving them to their own devices, it's just not that bad. I reckon I could, with prepped handouts, get an entire group of newbies through character generation in maybe half an hour. Adding subclasses to the mix wouldn't add much more time. (This excludes the "basic game mechanics" briefing.)
(Now, if I were running for a bunch of newbies, I'd probably start them with pregens for the first few sessions.)
Not in the context of fighter/casters, since it isn't one.
In the more general case, yes, slightly, because there's now five fighter subclasses to pick from instead of four. But for that player who says "I want to be a warrior who's also a diplomat" (or whatever; I don't remember what the banneret's deal is), you can say "I have just the thing for you".
I think the whole "too many class/subclass options" argument goes back to the two styles of character creation: creating a character from a concept, or playing one that is generated and seeing what you can do with it. I have a feeling that a lot of the "old school" gamers (that is, those that enjoy the earlier editions of DnD more than the newer ones) are more on the generated side of things. They like the challenge of role playing within confines that were external to themselves; rolling for stats, forcing paladins to be LG, "fighters don't do magic", etc. There is definitely something to be said about this style of play. It's fun to see what you can do with what is given to you; how well you can improv the character. The "game", as it were, is to play through a campaign despite the challenge of those external constraints.
However, I also get the feeling that most newer players and those that enjoy 5e more enjoy coming to it with a concept in mind and seeing what fits, then creating that. Their character is one of the protagonists of their shared story. The "game", for them, is merely the system of rules that dictates how the story unfolds where the external limits are further away and simply limit the kinds of actions you can take more global scale, rather than dictating those actions in minutia. The good news is that "old school" DnD isn't going anywhere, and you can easily homebrew 5e to limit choice or even just come to that consensus with your players and the only "homebrew" you have to do is the mentality of how you approach your characters and their actions.
We have confirmation of the leaks - Nerd Immersion did an interview with WotC's Makenzie de Armas at GenCon this past weekend that covered quite a bit about the new FR books, but she specifically talked about the PDK -> Banneret changes at length (starting at 9:47):
Transcript for those who prefer to read:
Ted: "There's a lot to cover {in HoFR} but one thing I wanted to specifically call out because it was different from the Unearthed Arcana as I saw on the screen, was Banneret from Purple Dragon Knight."
Makenzie: "Yes - The Banneret is what came out of the Unearthed Arcana process. So the UA, what we released was an experiment with the Purple Dragon Knight; we have the version of the PDK that was released in the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, and we decided with UA being this public playtesting process, we wanted to experiment... we wanted to se what it would be like if we delivered on a more dragon-focused PDK, and so that's what we did with that UA article. And like with all UA articles we got feedback, and there were things that people really liked about the subclass, but there were also things that people didn't really like. And that's fair, that's why it was an experiment, that's why we wanted to try it. And so we took that feedback, and we kinda reshaped it... we also took what the Banneret / the PDK used to be in SCAG and sort of compared that to the UA version, we looked at them, we kind of merged them together, we took the things that people really enjoyed about the PDK UA subclass, which ended up being a lot of the ally support, the rallying aspects, the ability to uh, you know, communicate and rally your fellow players and be a kind of support-based fighter... so we took those elements that people really liked from that UA subclass, mixed it with some of the things that had come before with the one in SCAG, and now we have the new Banneret, which we think speaks to a lot of the things people really liked in the UA, but that also fixes and addresses the issues that people didn't like about the UA."
Ted: {after praising the team for taking feedback.} "So what it sounds like is what we're gonna get is gonna be a pretty big change, so if you were to do a side-by-side comparison, you're gonna see big shifts to where we land in the final product."
Makenzie: "Yeah - if you compare them side by side you're gonna see a big shift, but if you also compare like the PDK from the SCAG, the UA, and the one that comes out in HoF, you'll see the shared DNA between all three of them, and that's the beauty of the UA process sort of showing its hand - yeah, we have all this public data and this playtesting and this feedback, and we can marry it all together into something that really speak to things that a lot of people love."
Nothing surprising here - the dragon aspects of the UA clearly bombed in the survey while the Marshal/Warlord aspects scored well. I'm certainly glad that if they were going to take that more
genericgeneral tactician concept and make that the focus of the subclass, that they landed on the more setting-agnostic "Banneret" title for it. giving them the freedom to then say that most PDKs happen to be Bannerets mechanically, and potentially revisit the dragonriding fighter later on. If nothing else, I can appreciate that the folks who wanted Banneret to be more of a Marshal prevailed democratically and got what they wanted.Thankfully, there are some really simple subclasses for those casual players. If they don't have a firm grasp on the rules, the DM, or the group as a whole, can suggest those to the new/casual player. For example, I'd steer any player who isn't well versed in the rules away from a warlock because there are so many moving parts with the class. To differentiate between a Bladesinger and an Eldritch Knight, the question to ask is do they want to be a warrior with some spells, or a wizard with some ability to fight?
Another interview with Makenzie. This one confirms our earlier suspicions that even though they reverted the dragon pet from the PDK, they kept the lore change to associate them with Amethyst Dragons (4:29).
I can't help but feel that this is the worst of both worlds. Those who enjoyed the martial pet class and the stronger mechanical tie between the faction's name and abilities lost out, and those who wanted the lore to stay the same (that they were just tactical knights with an uncommon name) didn't get what they wanted either.
The one bright spot I can see is that if this change sticks, we can still get a true "Purple Dragon Knight" subclass that actually has something to do with purple dragons later on, maybe as elite members of the order, while the rank and file are made up of Bannerets.
Okay, that's weird. Not sure why they're so fixated on trying to make amethyst dragons a part of the lore now. It's the heraldry for an order, they're allowed some poetic license when picking the color. I'm not particularly invested in seeing the "true" version of the lore in the book, but it is odd to see a shift like this.
Maybe a small adventure in the Faerun DM book is about the order ? Maybe ?
Purple Dragons (and other non-'standard' dragon colors) showed up in Dragon Magazine as early as 1e Not sure if they also showed up for 1e, but gem dragons, incl amethyst showed up in a 2e supplement. AFAIK, Purple Dragon Knights did not show up until 3e
So no, gem dragons were not made to make the purple dragon knights fit.
That isn't what Ace said at all
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Quote: "Not sure why they're so fixated on trying to make amethyst dragons a part of the lore now. " Even if I misunderstood what said other poster said otherwise, they already have been part of the lore, going back several iterations (editions).
Pretty sure they were referring to the lore for Purple Dragon Knights specifically.
pronouns: he/she/they
Yes, I'm not sure why they're specifically feeling they must tie amethyst dragons to the lore of the Purple Dragon Knights. I'm well aware there's been more than the core 10 metallic and chromatic dragons for a long time.
I just wish that if they were going to stick to their guns with the lore, they had done so with the crunch too. (Maybe they already commissioned all the art and it was too late, in which case why even put it in the UA?)
But per Fizban's, I can see several personality traits of amethyst dragons that fit the Knights:
"Noble Obligation. My superior experience, intellect, and insight give me a duty to mediate disputes when I can. (Good)"|
"Responsibility. Having knowledge and power gives one a responsibility to those who have less of either. (Lawful)"
"I am a sworn protector against the depredations of the Far Realm, and I will root out its corruption wherever it may arise."