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Super late to this video, but I've treated passive perception as either a reactionary thing (who saw the thing run past the corridor?), or to notice things not explicitly hidden (a tuft of paper in the dead man's hand; faint, circular drag marks indicating this chair is moved often). Things hidden on purpose still need an active check, and I need something more than just, "I look for the secret door." I'll adjust the DC based based on how descriptive/engaged the PC is. If the PCs are stuck, I'll eat some time and give them a clue (you feel a very slight breeze from this wall). This doesn't work for every situation, but I try to keep in these guidelines.

Disagree with a few ratings: Cleave - 2 Stars: Very hard to meet the conditions to activate it, but when you do it, is good. Graze - 4 Stars: Mathematically amazing, and you can do some interesting combos with. Sap - 1 Star: Useless in many cases and underwhelming in the others. Vex - 5 Stars: OP free advantage. Outshines a few class abilities and feats.

I identified that dwarf as gay. No mystery there lol

I love this idea. And way to create such an incredibly memorable moment for your paladin

There are obviously weapons like Flametongue but can you get a +1 longsword of force? Or do you have to rely on spells and class features to give your weapons damage types outside BPS?

Mealy attacks

great... gender neutral demons. save us elon

I miss monsters having treasure in their statblock. I was surprised when my character killed a dragon and there was no treasure.

so far so good, i like the changes!

Do you use "NPC" oddly. You kept calling every humanoid opponent an NPC. To me an NPC is someone interacted with socially, not just a humanoid in the monster manual.

very happy to see the succubus and incubus be made formidable. It only took 50 years. 😂

It would be more complicated, but vulnerability being double damage has made me nervous to homebrew into existing monsters. I would probably be more okay with either "the monster takes extra damage equal to half the damage dealt" or if you are okay with more granularity "the monster takes 1 extra damage for every 5 dealt"

I really hope they reverse course on the damage upgrades to NPC's using weapons that PC's can use. The Knight's Heavy Crossbow inexplicably dealing 2x the damage Heavy Crossbow in the PC's hand is bothersome; it's going to result in people asking why the ultra dangerous crossbow they picked up from the body of the Knight doesn't work nearly as well in their own hands, and there's no real explanation for why.

Thanks for doing this! I really like the boosts to damage, adding hit points instead of worrying about (or forgetting) common damage resistance damage, the addition of vulnerabilities, and the inclusion of gear on the NPCs. All of this makes for a better time and saves me work as a DM. :)

Ew. Run away from wotc Nazis

I like the use of the term physical resistance to indicate resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. But as someone with all the monster cards (which I frequently use), I'm disinclined to switch to a new MM, especially since I already tweak monsters.

I think the change from resistance to nonmagical weapons to the damage type itself was because DMs felt they were disincentivized from using tougher creatures against parties without magic items. Afterall, it might seem unfair from either the DM or player side to throw a werewolf at a low level party when it can dish out damage, run fast enough to prevent them from running away, AND couldn't take damage except from the caster(s), knowing full well this type of creature's weakness to silver. Especially out in the forest, far away from civilization.

Man I'm so excited to see the MM when it comes out! Thanks for what could be "sneak peak" for what's to come. The analysis was well written and thought out. 😊

Why do they give the crappiest spell to monsters, spells you would never pick for combat. My cult fanatics have both guiding bolt and inflict wounds. I use the cleric spells I would pick for my cleric. Just tell you whos spells they have access too and give you a number of slots. Not a bunch of useless spells.

🥳🫂👍🏿 You’re always finding ways to get the inside scoop - quite the detective

The changes are great! They hit that line you mentioned with complexity to give "life" to monsters and not making it overly complicated. I personally never liked magic weapon so I am glad they removed it.

You forgot cult fanatic became cleric with spiritual weapon which replaced its second attack

I really wish we would have seen some monsters during play test. It was hard to gauge changes without the new version of bad guys available. Giving us the game 5 months before the monsters seems pretty ridiculous to me.

But i have to say.. Being DMing 5e since launch, and 3.5 before it. And i still believe a mix of DR and Resistance, specially if they are different, give enemies, specially Elites/Boss enemies a more dynamic fight where players may choose lesser damaging spells, in order to make sure that they deal a good damage. I also homebrewed Resistance and Vulnerabilities to Conditions, and certain conditions players can inflict, through spells or features, end up making again, players think more of what to do. DO the monk keep spending Ki Points against something with advantage against Stuns, or they start trying to seek enemies weakness. On this i also changed how i plan my adventures, always trying to leave hints for the players to discover some of the enemies characteristics beforehand.

Even after your video (great, that goes without saying), I still feel like WotC gives all pre-established monsters and little room to creativity. I understand they're a business and they want us to buy their manuals and supplements and enter into the setting, but I feel it could give some more levers for players to use them.

This is hilarious. The game is literally limitless. If me and my friends decide that goblins get to attack twice in a turn or that that rogue person gets to do her special move whenever she wants, then we can do that.😂😂 imagine getting a book from someone that says otherwise and you are like "well rules are rules!"

Looking sharp my friend! This is a good look for you. And having the cat on your lap is great DM presence. Having studied these changes do you think you understand the underlying theory of why they are the way they are? In other words, have you reversed engineered the monster creation formula? Do you think the equation of (PC) x (Number of PCs) = CR(X) has been balanced?

Awful changes, obliterates athletics and any shove based builds

Yes chase scenes aren’t fun in D&D

This mf so starved for views he's making outragebait about a five year old video

I think the consistency of Graze is being underappreciated. I think on a Fighter that doesn't have a reliable way to get Advantage, it means you are guaranteed to deal 8 damage a round after level 5. And that's much better than dealing no damage. Plus it forces a spellcaster to always make Concentration saves.

I've always thought it's better if a flame tongue can't be turned off and requires a custom sheath.

Completely wrong about graze

I have done away with a lot of die rolls. If the player declares they run their hand across the underside of the desk when the drawer is open they automatically find whatever was hidden there, in this example the Potion of Vitality. If they don't declare specific actions they might get a roll. To be quite technical Perception is general awareness, Investigation is figuring things out. So finding and disabling a trap SHOULD require 3 rolls. Perception to find it, Investigation to figure out how to bypass/disable and Tools to actually disable it.

This is definitely my preferred style of delivering magic weapon or item mechanics to players. I can’t stand having to go above game to explain them like a video game tutorial.

I want to ask for some clarification on the Nick property with 2-weapon: the Nick mastery states "You can make this Extra Attack only once per turn". So with my shortsword i can make a first attack that imposes the Vex property to have advantage on my next attack, then as part of it's light property i can make a second attack using my dagger with the Nick mastery as part of that same action instead of as a bonus action, and add my damage bonus to both attacks. If i have Extra Attack then i can attack again with my shortsword, applying Vex, and because of the light property i can now have to attack using my Bonus Action with my dagger, because the Nick property was expended in the first turn of actions. And if I had 3 attacks on my turn I wouldn't be able to use my dagger at all on the third attack because i used the Nick single-turn limit, and i used my bonus action in the previous attack. I think people are forgetting that Nick can only apply to the action once on the players turn of combat, regardless of their number of attacks. Is this right or am i missing it?

There's no such thing as "ethically sourced AI models" whatsoever. All AI models are based on stolen information scraped from the internet, and almost always done without knowledge or consent by the people who created the information that the AI is trained on.

My half orc Life Cleric is hilarious front liner doing random stuff and casting Bless sometimes and having wrong spells prepared while eating shrooms and getting diagnosed with Shrooms 😂

What about Blooming Blade and push? Sounds like an awesome combination.

Graze is definitely good at lower levels, but can be switched out later. If a fighter has an attack mod of 4-5, and a Goblin only had 7 hp on average, the Gobbo is dying in two turns. Even if the dice are against the fighter. Also might work against spellcasters, forcing concentration saves every turn.

I like your content, but you lost me on the ranking methodology. Comments themselves were good.

A nice follow up video would be about how to tie the history of the creation of magic items to their powers and the discovery of all this by the characters

Sounds like they see the thestrals

I've played around with a few different ways of doing some of this in my games; although it's a little easier without messing with any rules-as-written because I typically play Pathfinder, in which identify isn't an automatic 'learn-info' button, but a large bonus to your skill check to identify the item's properties (the spell that just gives you the answers is a 6th level one, so, usually fairly late-game stuff). This means that you can treat the identification stuff pretty much the same way you do things like Sense Motive (which I think is renamed to 'Insight' in 5e?) checks; giving the players full, partial, obscure, misleading, or even false information depending on their roll and the DC of the object (also, in PF, each object can only be attempted once a day). This all meshes quite well with a more in-universe descriptive and 'hint' based style like you talked about; and I recommend at least running this 'nerf' by your group as a way to add a little mystery back into Honestly, I often recommend that if you have problems with the balance of several certain spells or mechanics (identify, remove poison/disease/curse, and dispel magic especially) being able to too easily bypass obstacles with no real cost; check out the PF versions and see if they might work for you (which they might not of course, depending on how you and your party play) to save you some time on having to rework too much yourself. Other than that; I've mostly done things with homebrew items and/or systems (my main campaign I ran for a few years was a high-ish level, very high-magic, high-power one, so most magic items weren't _supposed_ to be 'special' or 'rare' at for them; and I was very generous with money and magic items in general; and when I want them to be more special, I would usually do it through either putting it in an encounter/situation with a lot of cool spectacle and memorable moments, and/or homebrewing an item to do cool things that specifically fit one of the party); but I do generally find that creating a good sense of 'mystery' and 'wonder' around magic is, after the first few levels, _really_ hard in the default settings and systems, and while a lot of these things can help you improve it, you're probably always going to feel that it's never quite enough. The fact of the matter is that the magic systems of D&D and PF are just _not_ designed to support narrative and atmospheric stuff very much; they have touches here and there, left over from the older editions, but mostly in a couple out-of-place quirks of flavor-text and restrictions that most classes and builds can just bypass anyway, it's all almost _exclusively_ built for gameplay. Magic is too ubiquitous in these worlds for any sense of rarity (without _extreme_ levels of curation by the DM and heavy restrictions on the players), has such little and such confusingly arbitrary (and often contradictory) flavor that there's not much to build on for any real sense of atmosphere; and it doesn't make enough logical or cohesive sense, and is far too random a kitchen-sink-amalgamation-of-tropes, for it to be used effectively for plot or puzzle purposes most of the time. If you want to get around any of those, it's going to take a _lot_ of extra work and you're probably going to have to be pretty restrictive on allowing/disallowing certain things; to the point where you're often better off just switching to another system and setting entirely if you want it to be a major theme in your games.

That sounds like fun! 😁

Duuuuuude! I love it!

🥳🫂👍🏿 I love the life cleric ❤

How does this work when combined with the identify spell?

i like graze on fighter because you get push and topple anyway so you can just graze when you miss