 Surprise, motha- Howdy, how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and did you think they were gonna make another UA so soon? I didn't, and so I scheduled out my vacation to last until the end of the year, but I guess it's time to leave the sun in the sand to get back to a new November unearthed Arkana. This week is not a new bevy of subclasses for us to dissect and no doubt make the developers feel sad about themselves, but it is instead a conceptual piece offering up the idea of swapping out skills and abilities that each class provides you, and instead gaining new features based off of what you got rid of. It also updates a lot of the class features that are already presented in the game to either give them a neat additional gimmick, or just buff them based off of what wizards probably believed were logical failures in the class's natural flow. As always, I want to get right into it, so without of the way, let's be g- Hello, and welcome, little boy, and or girl, and or any other identification you find yourself comfortable with. Have you heard about a little old Kickstarter called Out of the Box Encounters for 5th Edition? You have! Well, get ready to hear it again as NerdArky, in association with Davy Chappy, this is still my channel, presents Out of the Box Encounters for 5th Edition. Your one-stop book for any and all things, and counter based in the realm of D&D. Now, the Kickstarter technically completed its run with absolute flying colors, and has more books ordered than you could shake a stick at. Take that, trees. But if you didn't have a chance to get in on all the action, you still have a chance to with late pledges. Just click the link down below and prepare for the adventure of your lifetime. And while you're waiting for that, enjoy Out of the Box Encounters for 5th Edition, made for Nerds by Nerds. So, this new UA seems to work as a developer's get-out-of-jail-free card, patching some of the holes that the classes have while also adding new things to pave the way towards progress. Among all the 12 classes, there is a gobsmacking 43 new things split up into two types, enhancements and replacements. Enhancements add on to a feature that already exists, while replacements swap out those features completely for new ones. Now, I won't lie, I don't have time to go over ALL of this, so hopefully you can assimilate my opinion well enough to use in arguments against all your friends once you finish this video. Firstly, everybody gets a new buff to ability score improvements, in that you can swap out a skill that you have for a skill that your class would give you, but you just didn't choose it for its level. And it's a nice gimmick that definitely helps those who got locked into skills that ended up being useless, or maybe they missed the chance to pick up a skill that they feel they've needed but didn't pick up a character creation. But going into the first actual class, the Barbarian gets two choices that are both replacements, either getting more proficiencies that are both doubled, or letting you pounce on enemies that end their turn close to you. The proficiency feature seems really useful because it only costs you your Danger Sense, and let's be honest, Danger Sense is not the most useful ability in the Barb's kit. But the pounce feature seems pretty lackluster. You lose your bonus 10 feet of movement to instead sometimes move up to 15 feet, but it's at the cost of your reaction? It's not exactly a great incentive. The Bard gets three enhancements in the form of more spells, the ability to buff the damage or the healing of your ally's spells, and a perk called Spell Versatility, which involves swapping out any one spell or cantrip once during a long rest, which is absolutely amazing. One of the major limiting factors of Bards, which we never talk about for some reason, is that Bards are totally locked into whatever spells they have until they level up. And even then, it's only one spell, so you better not have a hard time picking new ones. But now, even if it is limited to only one spell per long rest, that increases the Bard's flexibility to astronomical levels. You now have access to your entire spell list all the time as long as you can prepare for it. The Cleric gets new spells and cantrip versatility, which is like spell versatility, but it only affects cantrips because Clerics can already swap literally any and all of their spells on a long rest. They can turn their divine strikes and potent spellcasting into radiant damage instead of whatever lane damage it was before, and they also get a new channel divinity feature that expends a channel divinity to give you one first level spell slot. Yay. The Druid gets new spells and cantrip versatility and an enhancement to Wild Shape that lets you forgo turning into the mighty and wise Capybara, and instead cast the fine familiar spell without material components because suck it, wizards! But your creature is always a fey and it doesn't stick around for very long, so it's a mixed bag on whether to use it or not. The fighter gets access to new fighting styles, such as being able to effectively attack invisible creatures, being able to reduce damage aimed at allies, getting better at throwing weapons, getting so good at punching people that it does the same amount of damage as if you had stabbed them with a sword, and a uniquely fighter fighting style that gives you a weakened Battlemaster maneuver, even if you don't go Battlemaster. You can also swap out maneuvers on a long rest, and you get a whole bunch of new maneuvers that are just too numerous to read off here. It really seems like fighters are just getting new quality of life insurance, which isn't a bad thing since it means that fighters can start to take on roles the other classes would just have a tough time mimicking. The monk effectively gets an expanded list of monk weapons, it punches people as a bonus action whenever it uses key, and it gets new ways that it can use its key, letting you ignore long range penalties and heal a little bit in addition to the normal choices. It's just another small update, adding quality of life and a couple drops of progress onto an otherwise perfectly content class. The paladin gets new spells, the same new channeled divinity powers the cleric, access to new fighting styles, and the new chance to cherry pick two cleric cantrips and add them to your paladin spell list. Of all the classes so far, this one has the best improvements because it means that paladins finally have cantrips now. It's happened, they aren't stuck to pretending that those spell slots are just shells in a smiting shotgun, this is great. The ranger gets, whoa, holy shorts, that's a lot of new stuff. Okay, the ranger gets new spells, spell versatility, the new fighting styles, a druid version of the paladins take two cantrips from another class thing, a replacement for natural explorer that lets you periodically choose from a list of features that give you better skill options, better movement options, or temporary hit points. It gets a replacement to favorite enemy called favored foe that does away with the racial profiling entirely and gives you the hunter's mark spell for free to be used in amount of time, equal to your wisdom modifier because these arrows are rated E for everyone. Hold up, we're still not done. You get a new druid spell casting focus, a replacement to prime evil awareness called primal awareness that gives new spells over time, a replacement to hide in plain sight that just makes you turn invisible for some reason, I don't know, I guess grass is secretive, and a new weird ranger companion enhancement that gives you more weird choices for beast companions that I will not be reading here because no thank you. There, I did it. Now, is it just me or did wizards have a very particular class in mind during the inception of this UA article? Still, the changes in buffs presented here are pretty nice, so I'm not complaining. Moving on! The rogue gets not but a new cunning action feature that gives free advantage if they're standing still. No. No thank you. I will not be giving my rogue a chance to get advantage at a rate that is easier than even the flanking variant rules. No thank you. Not today, Satan. I will not be doing that. The sorcerer gets new spells, spell versatility, which I want to say again is fantastic because it is by and large the biggest complaint that people have about the sorcerer. New innate abilities that you can spend your sorcery points on to activate right out of the gate, and new metamagic options that let you sometimes ignore cover on spells, re-roll missed hits, and let you finally change the damage types of spells, a thing that people have been wanting the sorcerer to do for years. This is another quality of life improvement, this time doing some very minor things that lead to big size of relief for future sorcerer players. The warlock gets spell versatility, new spells, a new packed boon choice in the packed of the talisman, which basically acts as a limited bless spell to whoever's wearing it, and new warlock invocations because every time there is even a mention of class updates, the warlock gets at least two new invocations. Once again, they are too numerous to read through, but the overall gist is that the warlock was pretty fine beforehand, but it's just now doing better at being pretty fine. And finally, the wizard gets cantrip versatility, four new spells, and a slap on the wrist for even showing up here, and acting like it deserved more than the abundance that it already had. I do think it's funny though that the spell versatility features on all of the other classes essentially just flipped the wizard from the most flexible into the least flexible class in the game, since now everybody but the wizard has free access to all of their spells all of the time, but the wizard has to putts around with whatever happens to be in their blue book of magic. So overall, most of these are just quality of life improvements so that wizards can edit out minor mistakes that they overlooked during the initial creation phase of D&D, which is fantastic because most of these changes serve to rebalance the classes to be closer to each other in skill and get rid of much derided problems such as sorcerers being stuck with their spells or paladins not having anything to do once they ran out of them. But I will say that I think wizards stumbled upon a beautiful new system, but from the looks of it, they aren't capitalizing on it because they don't seem to know what they have. If I can go on a little tirade about the replacement mechanic to swap out one feature for another, I would say this. This cannot just be a theory-crafting article like the Three Pillars UA or whatever that February 2018 nonsense was. This is the way to revitalize the fifth edition class system. Not a secret, or at least it shouldn't be, that wizards totally box themselves in a pretty airtight sealed corner when they came out with the simple to understand, easy to master class subclass system. You just pick a class, you get all of its features, and then you pick a subclass and get all of its features. It was great, but you could practically see the struggle as our good old devs try to helplessly to push the envelope on classes that unfortunately had a large amount of static abilities that just would not budge. But with this replacement idea, we have a chance to do the class system what Morden Canons did for the tiefling, allowing this explosion in choice that unlocks untold possibilities for people, especially the people who have been reaming 5e for its over-simplicity so that they get more out of the class system that's never been thought possible. You don't need a whole new class, you don't even need a whole new archetype, you just need to make a bunch of optional replacement features, swap out one feature for another, and call it a day, and that will be enough for some people. But here's why it needs to be an official book, and it can't just live in the annals of an unearthed arcana. Both Adventurer's League and a lot of Stickler DMs, like myself, naturally get very jumpy at the idea of completely modifying a class, or even semi-modifying it, based off of weird homebrew or playtest material that wasn't deemed important enough to get its own release. An unearthed arcana is just official fanfiction, so it doesn't really help soothe our worries. We stand at a precipice where wizards can pull in board players, 5e naysayers, and further excite its continued player base just as long as they don't let this replacement thing go to the wayside, and they work to expand it in the very near future. I truly, truly believe this. All in all, these features presented are amazing to see, the enhancements fix a lot of problems on the class list, and replacing skills is just a fantastic concept that, in my completely uninformed and unqualified opinion, must exist in the near future if the waning longevity of 5e is to be extended. But that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, don't tempt fate by saying that something is over because God is real and he hates all of you, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can bribe all the D&D officials to push this article into the mainstream. But yeah, Davy out.