Sarah Darkmagic's blog

Cleaning has never been my strong point and after I was diagnosed with ADHD, my issues with it made a lot more sense. A lot of the things folks tell you to do, like creating routines, magically remembering to do things, etc, are just…a lot harder if not nigh impossible. And what works for one person (even someone with ADHD) might not work well for another. We have a cleaner who comes in every other week but stuff was easily getting out of hand between visits from our cleaning fairy. All of this has been a hurdle to getting back to gaming. I decided to do something about it.

So…it’s only be two weeks…but I found something that at least makes sense at the moment for me and it’s been helping. Importantly, it reminds me so much of games, I just had to share my thoughts about that portion of it.

The framework I’ve been using is called The Organised Mum Method. The creator is in the UK and it’s full of hovering and hobs. She provides a few routines for folks to use to keep their home tidier with limited effort.

The Organized Mum Method

There are two “levels” of tasks that one does each day, Monday thru Friday. The level 1 tasks are things you do on each day and that list doesn’t change. The level 2 tasks change each day of the week with a slight twist. Monday thru Thursday are the same tasks for each day every week with Monday being Living Room, Tuesday being Bedrooms, etc. And then on Friday, it’s a Focus Day and it picks one area from an 8-week cycle.

For level 1 tasks, the idea is you do what you can in about 15 minutes. Since this level includes doing laundry, it definitely is not wall clock time but rather how much time it takes to do the active parts of the task. For level 2 tasks, you do 30 minutes of work, choosing the highest priority tasks first. So, can’t get to the dusting today? Do that first next week!

And the idea is that your week won’t become perfect within the first week but that the ongoing application of these little tasks will, over time, make your home cleaner.

I’ll be upfront, sometimes it over promises. Like the idea that your house will be clean in just 30 minutes a day (not including weekends). That time doesn’t include things that we are assumed to be doing, like dishes or laundry and the like. But that’s ok, it’s not important at the moment. I’m probably putting way too much thought into this but it reminded me of a board game or even D&D, on a few different levels.

The first similarity I see is the idea that you have certain actions to take each turn. Here the turns are days and you have two types of actions, the level 1 and level 2 ones. You are resource constrained in terms of those minutes, and so you pick the actions you can take, trying to get the best result with the resources you have left.

What I also am digging about it is that it’s a loose framework that’s primed for being extensible. Think D&D and our ability to use different methods for generating a character’s ability scores. Here each day has 2 types of tasks with the second group having a different meaning Monday thru Thursday than on Friday.

The other similarity I see, more for D&D than for some other types of games, is that it’s about incremental change rather than big flourish changes while also not getting such a large list that it becomes overwhelming. D&D has traditionally been about a bunch of smaller choices/actions leading to a larger outcome. This has the benefit of being less swingy (which isn’t for everyone). But the outcome is super clear and obvious and builds on itself over time.

If one uses the app, it will keep track of what you have and haven’t done, allow you to reschedule some tasks, customize each group of tasks, and congratulate you when you complete all of your tasks. It’s not quite gamified but still fairly nice.

If you think about games as finding ways to simplify and organize thoughts around a topic or genre and helps reproduce those experiences in a steady manner, it makes sense that a system that tries to simplify cleaning could feel comfortable to a gamer. If like me, you need to tame your house, you might want to give it a try.

Now that we’ve taken a look at the changes to the fantasy races (Part 1, Part 2), let’s look at the backgrounds. Clearly this is one of the biggest areas of change since the start of 5e. There are a number of facets to look at these changes and I’m likely going to miss a few of them.

One D&D

Context

First, let’s look at what a background looks like from the start of 5e. I will leave out the flavor text

You have spent your life in the service of a temple to a specific god or pantheon of gods. You act as an intermediary between the realm of the holy and the mortal world, performing sacred rites and offering sacrifices in order to conduct worshipers into the presence of the divine. You are not necessarily a cleric — performing sacred rites is not the same thing as channeling divine power.

Choose a god, a pantheon of gods, or some other quasi-divine being from among those listed in appendix B or those specified by your DM, and work with your DM to detail the nature of your religious service. Were you a lesser functionary in a temple, raised from childhood to assist the priests in the sacred rites? Or were you a high priest who suddenly experienced a call to serve your god in a different way? Perhaps you were the leader of a small cult outside of any established temple structure, or even an occult group that served a fiendish master that you now deny.

Skill Proficiencies: Insight, Religion
Languages: Two of your choice
Equipment: A holy symbol (a gift to you when you entered the priesthood), a prayer book or prayer wheel, 5 sticks of incense, vestments, a set of common clothes, and a pouch containing 15 gp
Feature: Shelter of the Faithful
As an acolyte, you command the respect of those who share your faith, and you can perform the religious ceremonies of your deity. You and your adventuring companions can expect to receive free healing and care at a temple, shrine, or other established presence of your faith, though you must provide any material components needed for spells. Those who share your religion will support you (but only you) at a modest lifestyle.

You might also have ties to a specific temple dedicated to your chosen deity or pantheon, and you have a residence there. This could be the temple where you used to serve, if you remain on good terms with it, or a temple where you have found a new home. While near your temple, you can call upon the priests for assistance, provided the assistance you ask for is not hazardous and you remain in good standing with your temple.

Now, let’s look at the background of the same name in Unearthed Arcana:

Ability Scores: +2 Wisdom, +1 Intelligence
Skill Proficiencies: Insight, Religion
Tool Proficiency: Calligrapher’s Supplies
Language: Celestial
Feat: Magic Initiate (Divine)

You devoted yourself to service in a temple, either nestled in a town or secluded in a sacred grove. There you performed hallowed rites in honor of a god or pantheon. You served under a priest and studied religion. Thanks to your priest’s instruction and your own devotion, you also learned how to channel a modicum of divine power in service to your place of worship and the people who prayed there.

Equipment

Book (Prayers)	Calligrapher’s Supplies
Holy Symbol	Parchment (10 sheets)
Robe	3 GP

From Feature to Feat

One of the biggest shifts is the move from feature to feat. Most of the features appear to have been intended to connect characters to the world, to give them networks of folks that they could tap into for help and assistance. When 5e was released, there was a huge push for factions to help provide connections as well.

An issue I could see with the features as often written is that they often required a Dungeon Master to make flesh out those networks. Even many adventures didn’t necessarily provide tie ins for them. They were ambiguous and unclear, which can work great depending on player and DM but can also be frustrating or unused.

By moving to a Feat, things are now more defined. In the case of the Acolyte, it also addresses an issue often remarked upon which is that they cannot perform any divine magic unless they happened to take a class that allowed it.

Previously, feats were an optional rule that allowed the player to forgo an ability score improvement to take on a feat. Now, instead of adding a background’s feature, one can add a first-level feat related to the background.

If you’re interested in the shift for backgrounds that exist in both the Players Handbook and Unearthed Arcana Playtest, here’s what the shift looks like.

Ability Scores

As mentioned in previous articles, another big change is that it’s now backgrounds that provide ability score bonuses instead of the character’s fantasy race. This makes a whole lot more sense to me. What you do and what you apply yourself to shapes what you are good at.

Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything has an explanation of why ability scores were originally tied to the fantasy races and why they gave alternate rules for apply ability score increases.

The Ability Score Increase trait in a race reflects an archetypal bit of excellence in the adventurers of this kind in D&D’s past. For example, if you’re a dwarf, your Constitution increases by 2, because dwarf heroes in D&D are often exceptionally tough. This increase doesn’t apply to every dwarf, just to dwarf adventurers, and it exists to reinforce an archetype. That reinforcement is appropriate if you want to lean into the archetype, but it’s unhelpful if your character doesn’t conform to the archetype.

Now that we are moving away from using ability scores to help define archetypes, how can the game help create that sort of story within the rules? We get an interesting look into that in terms of the languages.

Languages

One of the more subtle changes is in how languages get assigned. Before we get into how languages help define the setting and create archetypes, let’s look at how language assignment via backgrounds has changed over the years in 5e.

In the Players Handbook, fantasy race typically bestowed about 2 languages to the character and 7 out of 16 of the backgrounds would add 1 or 2 more languages.

In later books, it’s interesting to see how few backgrounds don’t add languages.

Unlike in the PHB where approximately half of the backgrounds provided languages, across the remaining books, we’re looking at 47 backgrounds that do versus 20 or 32 that do not. So the move to just standardize that the background will assign one language makes a lot of sense.

The subtle thing is how they provide which language the background will assign.

From this list, we have a bunch of world building, right? The strategies of goblinoid generals are widely studied by soldiers and are so revered that soldiers learn the Goblin language to study them. Elvish is key for recording and studying lore, whether in the form of books or ways of entertaining the masses. So much of the knowledge used by guards or stone masons is tied to the Dwarves and thus folks with those pursuits learn Dwarvish. This world building ties the different groups to trades or roles.

In addition to the language from the background, players get to choose one language from the standard list and provide their own reason for why their character knows it.

Skill and Tool Proficiencies

While all backgrounds in the PHB provided skill proficiencies, tool proficiencies were not universal. In the UA playlets, a core component for the background is adding a tool proficiency. This overall feels more like a tweak to make it easier to custom build backgrounds rather than a major change.

Likewise, while there are some changes in the skill proficiencies, most of them remain the same. Here’s a comparison of the backgrounds that are in the PHB and UA.

As you can see, very few of the skill proficiencies have changed. The ones that have are interesting. Artisans get “Investigation” instead of “Insight.” I like this because “Investigation” seems to be a rare trait and a lot of art is about experimentation and discovery.

The Sailor moves from “Athletics” to “Acrobatics” which is a good way to further distinguish sailors from soldiers.

Finally, the Urchin has “Sleight of Hand” move to “Insight.” The background talks about how they only resort to theft when nothing else has worked to get what they need, so having both Thieves’ Tools and Sleight of Hand was probably a bit too much.

Overall Thoughts

I went right into the details when discussing the backgrounds, in part because it was the easier part to discuss. Overall, backgrounds were given a bit of a promotion. There is a solid core that remains from the earlier version in that skill proficiencies largely stay the same, some of the equipment was shifted around, in part to give every one a tool proficiency, and while languages were expanded a bit, they were there in many backgrounds already.

The move of ability scores to background helps the game sidestep some of the issues around them being tied to fantasy race which helps the game feel lighter to me. I get that Tasha’s said to ignore it if it didn’t fit your concept anyway but not having to do the work of ignoring is much easier. And moving from the features that I always struggled to use at the table to a feat helps give it that oomph that makes me want to pick or create a background.

And that’s something we should talk about here, there are 3 ways proposed to use backgrounds:

• Use a prebuilt background
• Choose a prebuilt background and alter it
• Create your own background

It’s an extensible system to provide something for just about everyone.

Speaking of extensible, these suggested changes point to the flexibility of the 5e system. Using an older version that applies the ability scores? Either forgo the ability score increases from the older fantasy race or the ones from the background. But you can use bits from each.

What will be interesting is going forward, what gets the plain moniker of “Orc,” the original Player’s Handbook version or whatever comes from the play test.

So, let’s continue checking out what’s in the Arcana Unearthed regarding fantasy races. In Part 1, we looked at the more traditional classes of Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Human. This time we’ll take a look at Dragonborn, Gnome, Orc, and Tiefling as well as the brand new race of Ardling.

One D&D

Dragonborn

Key Changes:

• It was too much info to include in this chart but one of the key changes is that the breath weapon follows just one template, cone, instead of being a line or a cone depending on “Draconic Ancestry.”
• Another change to the breath weapon is around damage. In the PHB, the damage is 2d6 damage on a failed saving throw and half that on a successful saving throw, versus 1d10 + character level on a failed and half of a successful. This change makes the damage swingier since it’s just one die and lowers the max damage, at least at first level. Instead of scaling by adding another die at 6th, 11th, and 16th, you gain an extra point of damage for each level. This simplifies what one needs to remember and makes the breath weapon fierce through level progression.
  

  Level	PHB Average	PHB Max	UA Average	UA Max
  1	7	12	6.5	11
  2	7	12	7.5	12
  3	7	12	8.5	13
  4	7	12	9.5	14
  5	7	12	10.5	15
  6	10.5	18	11.5	16

• An additional change to the breath weapon is how many times it can be used/when it recharges. Under the PHB rules, it wouldn’t be available again until after the next short or long rest. This could push players to want to take short rests more often. Under the UA rules, one can use it up to a proficiency bonus number of times and all expended uses are regained after a Long Rest.
• Another change has to do with draconic. Most races don’t get a language as part of the fantasy race anymore but Dragonborn automatically know draconic, even if they haven’t been around anyone who speaks it. It’s an instinct, which is pretty cool especially since, at least according the PHB, it’s the language of magic.

Gnome

Gnomish Lineage

Forest Gnome

Rock Gnome

Key Changes

• For the base fantasy race, the key difference is the removal of the limitation on advantage for Wisdom, Intelligence, and Charisma-based saving throws.
• For the Forest Gnome, the key difference is moving from a special and unlimited trait of “Speak with Small Beasts” to the generally defined “Speak with Animals” and limiting its use without using spell slots to proficiency bonus (reset after Long Rest). This feels like it clears up misunderstandings between players and DMs and should be easier to track with a digital tracker.
• For the Rock gnome, a key difference is the move away from adding additional proficiency bonus for certain types of skill checks to getting 2 cantrips. This helps solidify the hint of magic they have.
• Also for the Rock gnome, we have a restructuring of how their tinker ability works. Instead of taking an hour and working with tools, a Rock gnome can take 10 minutes and use some magic to create a tiny clockwork device that can do one of the Prestidigitation effects. The type of creation is not predefined, but examples are given. Again, adds a bit of magic to Gnomes and streamlines the creations.

Orc

Key Changes

Not surprisingly (as this race was released much later), there is only one change to this race and that’s the removal of the ability score changes.

Tiefling

Fiendish Legacies

Unearthed Arcana adds 2 more legacies in addition to changes to the Infernal legacy as detailed in the above table. Here’s the version in UA.

Key Changes

• Tieflings can now be size Small or Medium.
• The big change is the move from just one legacy, Infernal, to three of them, Abyssal, Chthonic, and Infernal. Hellish resistance which is resistance to fire damage and has moved to the infernal legacy and that legacy’s cantrip changes (but its spells remain the same). The two new legacies also get a type of resistance, a cantrip, and 2 spells.

Ardling

Brand new to this Unearthed Arcana is the Ardling. It’s a celestial race of the Upper Planes and also has 3 lineages, making it a good counter point to the tiefling. An interesting element here is that each Ardling has a head that resembles an animal, “typically one with virtuous associations.” It can also temporarily fly up to its speed, although if it ends its move in the air, it will fall.

The design seems to be a great way to provide a high degree of flexibility of appearance while having common mechanics.

Thoughts so Far

I don’t find these particular changes to be all that dramatic and are similar to changes that have already happened in 5e over time. One of the difficulties with a game like Dungeons & Dragons is that not everything can be known about the game upfront. It’s a living game where the designers and the players will continue to evolve it over time, and thus, it can be nice to go back and refresh things.

If they keep some fantasy races having lineages, legacies, ancestries, and such, and have others that are just the base fantasy race, that could be an interesting way to balance the desires of some players for more complexity and choices while keeping some more focused with fewer choices.

I also like the move from sub races to lineages, legacies, and ancestries, although I haven’t been great about keeping the terminology consistent in these posts.

The move towards creating terms for various parts of the game, like the move to “D20 Test.” These provide a common vocabulary and can streamline rule writing. There have been movements towards that before and away as well as they try to find the right balance in terms of technical writing and prose with its ability to inspire.

Dungeons & Dragons Japan

To put some of these changes in context, it’s important to highlight that Dungeons & Dragons is expanding officially to Japan this year. They are looking to foster and grow a “truly global D&D community.” Looking at the assumptions made without intention become even more important in that move.

I’ve been seeing a lot about the new Unearthed Arcana and the associated announcement of One D&D and want to explore what changes are being made.

One D&D

My understanding of what they are trying to do with the fantasy races is make sure that any crunch associated with each race is something that a member of that race would have even if they were raised by a different race and/or outside of the culture typically associated with that fantasy race.

This lets them do a few things:

• Under the theme of One D&D, a halfling in Forgotten Realms shares the overwhelming majority if not all of the same traits as a halfling in Eberron or Dark Sun. It’s less to remember as one shifts between settings, which is potentially even easier now with The Radiant Citadel and Spelljammer.
• It moves further away from some of the problematic elements of fantasy races, the ones that felt more like eugenics and racist/sexist psuedoscience than objective descriptions of fantasy races. Applying ability score changes based on fantasy race often reminded me of the attempts to measure skull shapes and the like between real world human races.
• Allows for so much more variation in characters and makes one’s background at least as important, if not more so, to character creation. The delineation appears to be if it’s something innate, it’s in the fantasy race description, and if it’s something that one learns, it’s based on your background, what you did and the culture you were around. This incorporates the reality that there is often more differences within a group than the differences between groups.
• With character race no longer defining ability scores, multi-race characters can be simplified. Just decide which parent race’s traits most defines you instead of trying to create full fantasy races for each pairing. We no longer have to pick between half elves being reviled or great at diplomacy and we can sidestep the traditional history connected to half orcs.

A few more things I noticed as I compared the Players Handbook version of each fantasy race with the Unearthed Arcana one:

• Not sure if because it’s not important in this round, but they removed the age of maturity in the switch from “Age” to “Life Span.” This could make sense as age of maturity is a cultural thing; not something innate.
• They also removed weight from “Size.” There can just be so much variation within each group, including weight never made much sense to me.
• They simplified speed. Instead of being tied to size, the base rate is 30 feet for all characters in this document. Now this could be a change that was actually made in one of the books after the Players Handbook, I haven’t kept up with the minutia of each book.

With all that, let’s look at what the changes actually entail. For this article, we’ll look at the key fantasy races of Dwarf, Halfling, Elf, and Human. We’ll look at Dragonborn, Gnome, Orc, and Tiefling in the next article.

Dwarf

Key changes for Dwarves:

• The new version of the race has a couple of items that feel like they could be part of background/culture such as Forge Wise (which gives a tool proficiency) and Stonecunning (now the granting of tremorsense), but the description of Forge Wise lays the groundwork for it being innate. In this case, the character’s divine creator gifted the Dwarf race “an uncanny affinity for working with stone or metal.” Thus a narrative justification for it being innate and making a statement about the nature of dwarves.
• There are no separate classifications of Dwarf such as Hill and Mountain as in the Players Handbook. This could signify a go forward change or it could be that they want more time to figure out what makes those sub races key. The reason I say that is both Mountain Dwarf abilities are tied to things that should likely be part of culture/background (a strength ability score increase and the armor training) and one of the two items for Hill Dwarf was incorporated into the main race description (with the other being the ability score bump).
• May just be me, but Tremorsense is way cooler than a history check as something iconic to a Dwarf. It helps with the “dwarfiest dwarf” goal.

Elf

Subraces

Drow

High Elf

Wood Elf

Key Changes:

• Most of the changes to the base fantasy race are to remove things that belong in backgrounds now and to restructure some details (such as moving “magic cannot put you to sleep” from “Fey Ancestry” to “Trance”
• The key changes are in the lineages, streamlining them so each lineage gets a minor trait and a first level cantrip and then spells at 3rd and 5th level.

Halfling

Key Changes

• As with the Dwarves, the subraces of halfling have been removed and one of the traits of one of the subraces became part of the main fantasy race, in this case “Naturally Stealthy” from the “Lightfoot” sub race.
• Here is the first use in this document of a new term, “d20 Test.” This term defines certain d20 die rolls where inspiration points and luck may be used.

Human

Key Changes

• Giving an average life span for humans of 80 years is interesting. It keeps the maximum lifespan a mystery which could be nice for some characters (in our real world, we have humans who live past 110 years for instance). It also counteracts a lot of the assumptions about the world where folks want to apply a medieval life span of something like 40 years.
• I believe the ability to pick a different size than medium has been around for a bit now but again, makes total sense to include as we have real life humans who are under 4 feet tall. I’m wondering if this is part of the reason for the change to a base speed of 30 for most fantasy races, rather than having it based on size.
• Adding a link to inspiration as part of a human trait might signal trying to incorporate it more in the game. It’s been a while but I feel like inspiration was often seen as a bolt on system that folks might or might not use.
• Adding the two variant traits to the base race is really nice because it signifies more clearly the versatility and skillfulness of humans, rather than just bumping ability scores which might not have much if any affect, at least for early levels.

Thoughts so Far

I’m enjoying this restructuring of the core fantasy races and the intentionality around separating what is innate about a character versus what is more about life experience. I like that the non-human races all have a bit of magic to them. This should also help the races seem more distinct.

I also get why they can’t just get rid of races entirely. They were core to the start of D&D and are something that most players are expecting when they play.

Warning: There will be some minor spoilers for the adventure, Stormwreck Isle, in this blog post.

I recently purchased the new Starter Set, Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, from Target. I have a bit of a soft spot for starter sets and I was interested to see how things have changed from the first 5e starter set, Mines of Phandelver.

My son has been asking to start doing his own YouTube videos so I convinced him to do an unboxing of Dragons of Stormwreck Isle with me.

Over the past few years, I've really felt that the adventures have become more inclusive and intentional, at least when it comes to gender. I know at the beginning of 5e, I used to be keep count of how often named characters were mentioned and which pronouns were used in the text, and, well, I decided to check this adventure using that methodology.

Before we dive into the results, I'd like to define my approach. I only counted characters that were named. So I didn't capture references to a certain type of dragon, the harpy, or to a character's unnamed lover.

Additionally, I'm struggling a little on how to talk about pronouns versus gender. I did a quick search on myconids and saw them referred to as gender neutral and no pronouns were really used for them. I captured when she/her vs he/him were used. I didn't notice any uses of 'they' about named characters but I may have missed something. There are some characters where nothing more than a name is given and they are listed as unknown.

I also did not look at any of the information within the appendices.

I want to stress this is something I put together in about two hours, so it's not scientifically rigorous. :)

Frequency of Names Mentioned

First thing I'd like to look at is just how often characters' names appear in the adventure. Each time a character's name was mentioned, I put a little tick and added it up in the end to create the following chart.

Number of Mentions vs. Character Name - Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

The counts show two primary NPCs, Runara (she/her) and Sparkrender (he/him) with Tarak (he/him) and Aidron (he/him) as secondary NPCs. There is then a fairly large cast of additional characters with about 47 named NPCs in total.

What's interesting here, is that Sparkrender has more mentions than Runara and overall the mentions of male NPCs is a bit higher than those of female NPCs.

Number of Pages Where Names Are Mentioned

However, one of the things I noticed as I read through is that often the character needed to be named repeatedly on a page in order to reduce confusion. This is partly due to the NPCs being in spaces together where they can interact. So when we look at the number of pages that each character is mentioned on, it looks a bit different.

Number of Pages vs. Character Name - Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

One character, Runara, is mentioned consistently throughout the adventure. Sparkrender and Aidron are still near the top of the list, but we see additional characters come through as well, ones that often didn't have their name repeated for clarity.

Overall Comparison by Pronouns

The next check is to see how many named characters are in each pronoun designation.

Numbers by Pronoun Designation - Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

Here number of characters using he/him (13) is a bit more the number of characters using she/her (10). We also have 16 characters, Myconids, whose group doesn't have genders and 8 characters where no pronouns were used and are marked as unknown.

While the number of overall mentions is much higher for characters with he/him pronouns, the number of pages is much closer (47 vs 45).

Comparison to Mines of Phandelver

Next, I wanted to compare this to what I saw in Mines of Phandelver.

Gender in Mines of Phandelver and Dragons of Stormwreck Isle

Here we're just looking at the number of named characters grouped by gender/pronoun groups. In Mines, we had 27 named male characters, 9 female, and 7 unknown whereas in Dragons we have 13 male, 10 female, 8 unknown, and 16 with no gender. This definitely explains why I felt the adventure was more balanced when it came to gender.

Qualitative Remarks

The numbers are definitely exciting to me but there were a few more qualitative things I noticed in reading through the adventure.

One of the characters has a former lover mentioned. We don't get a name and gender pronouns are never used, giving space for the Dungeon Master to add a non-heterosexual relationship to the adventure. In fact, I only remember reading two defined relationships, one that is heterosexual and this one. I'm a bit torn overall on this one, but it seems clear that the ambiguity was intentionally there.

The myconids and the lack of gender pronouns in that section was very interesting. I knew before reading this adventure that they had gone that direction but it was interesting to see it here.

I loved that detail given that Tarak (male) is the botanist and the best cook of the lot and that Varnoth (female) is a retired soldier who is well-known.

I'm sure I could go into more, but I don't want to give away too many spoilers. I hope to write up my thoughts on the adventure itself in a separate post.