Thursday, November 13, 2008

D&D Fun: Player's Handbook 2 Speculations

It is still a ways off, but while hanging out with some fellow geeks, we got onto the topic of the next player's handbook. Several of the classes and races were excluded from the first one and we were wondering what was going to go into PHB2. This will be the third form of this post, the first being speculation found on forums, the second being a condensed version of that, and the third being whatever follows.

First, lets start with classes. Personally, I am expecting two divine classes, two arcane, and the addition of four primal. This would balance out the first four power sources: Martial, Divine, Arcane, and Primal, giving them all four classes each(or six for arcane, if you include swordmage and artificer), or as I have come to think of it, enough for a supplement book. Beyond that, you could get into the argument of what roles they will make the new classes, but I have a chart for my own personal use and am not going into it any further. At least not here. I believe that the next PHBs will have the other power sources, named in the first PHB as Ki (monks), Psionic (psions), Elemental, and Shadow.

Currently there are two classes available for playtest on the D&D website that are not expressly mentioned to be in a different book. Those classes are Barbarian (primal) and Bard (arcane), while Druid (almost certianly primal)and Invoker ( expected to be divine and is an entirely new class), have been announced for playtest in December. Other classes that have been mentioned are sorcerer (expected to be arcane), shaman, warden (both expected to be primal), and avenger (expected to be divine).

Races seem to be all figured out, given the clues. Five new races: Gnomes, Half-Orcs, Shifters, Goliaths, and Devas (the 4e name for Aasimar, which are the angelic equivalent of Tieflings), although some of them do not really count as new, hainvg been in the monster manual. While looking around for information about them it seems that they are considered to be as good as confirmed. To be honest though, none of the new races really interest me all that much, Devas are cool, but the new name is kinda lame... especially since they changed it because "aasimar" made them think of the word "ass" too much, from what I understand anyway. But now I cant help but think that if I ever make one, I'll end up RPing him as a 'fabulous' Deva...

Moving on though, since the races in the PHB2 don't really interest me, I am looking forward to the Monster Manual 2, to see what new playable monster races it has... But since that is still a ways away, its nice to know that December's Manual of the Planes is supposed to have a new monstrous race entry.

This guy has a compilation of all the information that has been released about many of the books, so definitely something to watch.

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