Wizards of the Coast recently debuted the newest version of Dungeons & Dragons, which has left a lot of players uncertain about their current characters. Dungeons & Dragons 5e 2024 Revision (D&D2024) has been presented as an update to the D&D people have been playing since 2014, but the new rules and smaller changes are significant enough to invalidate older content.
Even though we’ve received the new Player’s Handbook, there are a lot of options from the last ten years of sourcebooks that weren’t crossed over, with no indication of when, or if, it will be brought into line with the new vision for D&D. Most important in this question is which subclasses are going to be updated, and how long will it take. An intrepid squad of professional game designers, though, decided to take the question into their own hands and give us Subclasses Revivified.
Subclasses are the primary form of player-focused design for D&D. It’s how every Bard, Paladin, Wizard, etc are made to be truly different from one another, in design and play style. D&D5e had ten years worth of subclasses divided across its numerous classes, so it only makes sense that not all of them were going to be updated into the new book. The demand for people to see their subclass of choice updated would be immense.
Adam Hancock, the editor and project manager for Subclasses Revivified, explained the overwhelming response when putting out an open call for writers, “I think I got four times as many applicants as I had writer positions to fill.” In the end, it was fourteen designers spread across sixty-nine subclasses who were brought together to learn D&D2024‘s quirks and create something worth playing. Everyone on the project is an accomplished designer, all of whom have done a lot of work on DMsGuild, the Wizards of the Coast-sanctioned design space, including designing their own subclasses. Ashton Duncan, who designed the Paladins for the project, explained, “the team is full of bestsellers and ENNIE-winners.“
The designers who spoke to me for this article shared a lot about their design processes. There are about 2,000 words worth of minute design principles I learned about from the team on this project, far more than I feel I could summarize here. Sebastian Yūe, who redesigned several of the Wizard subclasses (including those originally from the Critical Role sourcebook), detailed one objective for the project, “Adam encouraged us to innovate and to take the opportunity to address pain points with existing subclasses.”
At every turn, Subclasses Revivified announces how much of a labor of love it is, as well as a design challenge. Part of the editing process involved assembling a design document filled with all of the minor changes D&D2024 introduced, while making sure these subclasses matched up to the new subclass design ideals. “I think I read the classes section of the 2024 Player’s Handbook dozens of times over the course of the project to learn all the new capitalizations, phrasings, and game terms,” Adam explained, also describing, “I slowly assembled an unofficial style guide that became my ‘bible’ for all things [D&D]2024.”
One universal constant from the team was the intention to continuously update the project. Most of this design work was done referencing the 2024 Player’s Handbook, which is only one of three essential books Wizards of the Coast expects players to eventually own. Adam says that Subclasses Revivified is being treated as a “living document” and that “writers can and have made changes to their subclasses and probably will continue to do so in light of new information. And anyone who has already bought the PDF can simply download the latest file version to see those changes.” Everyone I spoke to explained their readiness to make changes, but several expressed their confidence that their subclasses would stand up to scrutiny when the rest of the books were released.
To me, the project is the kind of beacon most people expect out of the D&D tradition for homebrewing, grabbing the game, and making it give you want you really want to play. Homebrew like this feels somewhat essential while we wait to see what Wizards is going to revise or not. Every writer that reached out had varying levels of concern regarding what Wizards would be picking and choosing for updates. Bee, brought on to give us some Bards, expressed his worries, saying “My greater concern is length of time. I wonder how many books WOTC will ask of 2024 DMs to purchase before they catch up to the last decade of materials… In any case, the investment of money and time is infeasible for many, so hopefully, this book remedies that.” There remains a lot of uncertainty about what will happen with D&D2024. This project, though, feels like exactly the kind of thing you’d want to see come from a game like this. A fresh, new example of people inventing their own fun in this little game of make-believe we play with shiny math rocks. Expressing a similar thought, Bee told me, “I feel like this is very much the kind of project the DM’s Guild was made for.”
Subclasses Revivified is available on DMsGuild. The main page for the book has a 40-page preview in case you want to browse before you buy. Also, in case you were wondering, my favorite subclass is the Arcane Archer, and I’d absolutely use the version they’ve given me here.
Published: Oct 21, 2024 11:17 am