Back in December, I posted about a fan-made 5e rulebook for the Warcraft setting: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/warcraft-supplement-for-d-d-5e/12585
I recently learned that there is another one: https://www.reddit.com/r/wc5e/
I haven’t played either of them yet, but I actually like this one better. It’s smaller in scope — just races and classes — and stays closer to vanilla 5e, keeping the spell slot mechanic and mostly reusing existing spells with only a few homebrew ones. It really feels more like an an attempt to make Azeroth available as a viable D&D campaign setting than an attempt to replicate WoW’s mechanics in heavily modified 5e.
I’m having my first game with this system tomorrow — a one-shot adventure for three level 8 characters. I’ll post my impressions here when I return.
Wuggens are already better, with the human form being the secondary form rather than primary, and less encouragement to constantly change.
Gnomes are a bit overloaded in traits but nothing too terrible.
Tauren appear as 7 1/2 feet tall
Inhales BOI
But to be frank literally everyone outside hardcore tauren RP circles seems to get that wrong (It’s 9-10ft, game models are actually midgets shrunk just for gameplay purposes, same with worgen and a few other ‘big’ races).
The tauren traits are solid though, although bow prof is a bit weird. The race actually uses guns more than bows to be honest. As a DM I’d just change that to firearms.
Classes are probably on the strong side but I couldn’t say without playtesting each and every one of them to an extent. In fact across the board the races and classes here are significantly more heroic than usual DnD races and classes. Any DMs looking to use this stuff as their game basis may want to turn things up a notch to make a suitable challenge rather than a cake walk even at lv1.
Overall however I do prefer this one, as you say it doesn’t change anything about the game itself, rather serving as a Warcraft based expansion to 5e. I could see myself using this someday.
Also I have noticed some hilarious possibilities in the rules: Death Knights could make a gun their rune weapon (Personally I’d scratch this since using a melee weapon seems to be required for the whole life draining stuff) . Death Knight’s also use CHA for a stat… personally I’d have made it WIS or something. A charismatic DK is… odd.
How so? Paladins using Charisma has been a staple for decades, and it makes sense why. They’re (usually) the face of goodness, the hand of law and a leader that inspires others. To do those things you need to be able to diffuse situations with the agitated, the paranoid, the scared or even the evil and rouse depleted hearts and minds. You don’t do that with CHA as your dump stat.
By contrast I wouldn’t expect a walking corpse to have an easy time doing the same thing. Death Knights will follow other Death Knights but they’re less likely to be trusted amongst the living in a typical DnD party composition.
That said, an argument could be made that CHA is also reflective of conviction and motivation, as illustrated by other aspects of the Paladin class and Sorcerers. It’s just not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of that stat.
They say 7-9 feet later in the text. There’s also the problem that with their size, you’d expect tauren to be Large creatures, but Large PCs don’t work in D&D, so they have to be classified as Medium. The old Warcraft RPG had tauren as Large in the first edition, but changed them to Medium in the second.
That’s true. But generally that’s what the powerful build trait is for, to let characters act as if they were large without actually being large (Which has all kinds of problems).
I’ve always thought of large as being at least 12ft or higher myself.
With how size-categories and reach and all the other(Weapon dice changing for one, DMG p278) things work in 5e, having a playable race in anything other than medium would bring forth a world of headache. And likely everything would be incredibly out of balance.
Naturally. That’s why NPC Minotaur are ‘Large’ but the actual playable race is ‘Medium’, despite them being the same height. And the PC Minotaur have Powerful Build to still give the impression of being large, without occupying more space and having longer reach.