I think this is symptomatic of the larger problem that this new edition was pretty much only made to make money.

Gygax died in 2008, Arneson died in 2009, I don’t know how many of their cohort have gotten cancer or heart attacks or other stuff that generally get listed as “natural causes” on a coroner’s report. We are slowly losing that first generation of gamers who had to argue at length whether players should be allowed to read the rules, whether players should choose their character’s race and class, and whether they should roll their own dice.

I personally think it’s three things.

1. D&D is fucking old. Like, people who grew up on OD&D are dead now. It’s had a lot of time to accrue clooge and gunk as the genre of D&D shifted from 1st Person Wargame to Dungeon Crawler to Epic Fantasy to Heroic Fantasy to whatever 5e is, and this means a lot of different monsters to serve these different genres being carried forward into future editions because Gen X gets weird when the things they grew up with get changed or disappear.
2. D&D has always fundamentally been about going out into the world, seeing weird things, and killing them. There’s only so many times you can kill zombies before you get bored of zombies. Also, a number of monsters have gimmicks that get old fast, like rust monsters eating your weapons as you hit them and gelatinous oozes being nearly invisible. The only counter to that is more monsters.
3. Different monsters serve different purposes, even when they fill the same niche. For example, goblins and kobolds both are tiny little mooks that attack in large numbers and are inherently evil so we don’t have to feel bad about slaughtering entire families of them, but one is more likely to ambush you with ranged fire and Explosives while the other is likely to set up traps for you to wander into. Very different styles of play. Orcs and hobgoblins are both basically people, but while orcs allow you to hold up a mirror to the party by being essentially normal people but ugly, hobgoblins lead tactically complex multi-pronged attacks and are make very good scheming bad guys. Also, not every monster belongs everywhere. Imagine finding a stone golem in the middle of the feywild, or a treant in a dungeon. Attempting to make a monster for literally every situation is how AD&D ended up with the Monstrous Compendium’s fifteen volumes and appendices, so in reality the Monster Manual is an exercise in restraint.

I think I will need to get a group together to play before I can answer that question well, but characters start at muggle weight right after character creation. They probably will move into iron weight pretty fast and stay there for a while.

Basically standard fantasy medieval but with iron age political turmoil. Every few decades some noble family gets annihilated by a dragon or giant, so there’s always new abandoned dungeons and strongholds to be rediscovered.

I feel like I should have provided context in my original post, but I more wanted vibes. I’m making a rpg with 5 classes, and I am dead set on the only spellcasting class being the Wizard. So, the clericish class has to have some other role. Settled on something closer to a Bard as the main thing, where you can make an Inspiration pool of d6s that your party can scoop up dice from to add to their attack rolls and skill checks. Most of the obvious stuff that would normally belong to clerics, druids, warlocks, and paladins is all bolted to the sides and corners of the alignment chart. I’m looking for how to flesh out the meat of the class, the core stuff that everyone gets.

If you’re curious, these are the 5 classes:

• Fighter: A mix of Fighter, Barbarian, and historically accurate knight stuff
• Apostle: Depending on your alignment and choices, either a Cleric, a Druid, a Paladin, a Warlock, or some mix of all four
• Ranger: In addition to normal ranger stuff, this is also the Spy class.
• Xia: Cultivation genre stuff like shattering bones with your guitar, riding your flying sentient sword, and summoning demonic spirits to fight your enemies. Also, punching real good.
• Wizard: You have a big ass spellbook which you copy spell scrolls from, and if you do really well you can start forging magic artifacts in your wizard tower.

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