Just an Update and What to Expect

You guys know that I like to keep everyone informed so I wanted to drop a quick update as what is upcoming, based on the poll and what I've been working on...

Artificer 1.7 will be posted publicly Monday April 15th; you guys might see something sooner here on patreon. I've decided to do 1.7 before 2.0 for two reasons - (1) I wanted to get an update out, and 2.0 might take awhile, and (2) after thinking about it, I don't want to conflate the updates, maintenance, fixes, and new stuff with the possible design tweaks to structure.

What to expect: 1.7 will fold the Expanded Toolbox spells into the main document (some with minor tweaks). Additionally, with 1.7 I'm going to relax a bit on page compression - people that think it is too long have already moved on for the most part - this means I will add quite a few more DM/Player notes - things were I address RAI vs. RAW of some features like if you can use a set of Admantite Platemail to make your Mechplate, etc, and bringing in a few more upgrades for each specialization.

I am currently planning on updating the Expanded Toolbox at the same time to replace much of the playtest content in there that will be moving to the main document, but I cannot guarantee that part, as I'm fairly busy with my day job currently (which is not yet making D&D content for you all :p )

Psion v1.1 will launch shortly after. The reason for this is it is going to be a big update to a lot of core fundamentals, so I want to get this out relatively quickly. I think the v1.0 was a good start, but ultimately as I've parsed the feedback, there are considerable things that need to be addressed.

I am going to unbind the second Discipline from the subclass - this is a very big change with a lot of ramifications moving forward that I did not really want to do, but after the feedback it became just too clear that this is going to have to happen, so I want to rip that band-aid off now rather than try to deal with it later when there are more Disciplines in the mix.

I am also going to remove the Talents from the subclass entirely, and replace them with subclass features. In some cases, like the Awakened, the Talent will become the feature - Telepathic Openings is always good (though it will be tweaked/buffed slightly) no matter what your build or goal is, so that's fine. For Unleashed, it means something new is going to have to come in, as they are no longer guaranteed to have Enhacement, so their subclass feature will be replaced with a new feature called Rampage - it adds a d4 to their damage, but each turn they deal or take damage, that dice grows (d6, d8, etc) - growing more rapidly if they deal or take a critical hit; the goal is to capture a bit more of why the subclasses are called what they are, and how they impact your gameplay.

We just saw a new Warlord subclass, and we'll see that folded into the main document in time, but currently the Warlord is pretty stable and undergoing some longer term testing, so I don't have clear ETA on it's next version, but it is cooking and always open for feedback. We will see the new subclass slightly updated and folded into the next version of Warlord before the end of the month probably.

Other than that, expect to see things from the smaller poll that were voted on, as well as some new spells for improved magical dueling, some more dynamic options than just the tried and true counterspell.

Obviously Crafting is one of the stand out items from the new poll, but I do want to caution it is going to be awhile before the rules there are actionable. You guys here on patreon will start to see a trickle of stuff, but that is going to be a sizeable body of work, as my goal will be to make those rules applicable to different "tiers of DM effort" depending on how much emphasis the game wants to put on crafting, and how core to the "loot system" it will be. Currently crafting in D&D is pure "gold conversion" which is an okay system, but not particularly interesting or fun (in and of itself - getting the items are fun, but X gold per Y is not fun, imo), and has some issues where if the DM allows crafting following general rules, players can make something like Winged Boots which may change the game quite a bit easier than they can make a Ring of Protection (just for example).

I strongly considered making Crafting the next patreon goal, but decided against it just because I'm not super confident you will all like my crafting rules, so making it a goal seemed like over promising :D Will still have to think of a new patreon goal, though maybe we don't really need patreon goals... the level of support so far has been impressive without them, and I suppose the next few things I'm working on can count as all the patreon goals we would have blown right past on the way to 60 patrons - truly, I can't say thank you enough. It's not quite new job levels yet, but it's definitely something I am considering how to spend more time on given the level of demand for new content, and how much I enjoy working on stuff like this :)