James Wyatt, the principal game designer and project lead designer of the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft book was already running games in Azeroth long before he took on the project. For him, the fun of bringing WoW to the table is not to ignore the flexibility of D&D but to embrace it.
"Part of the beauty of playing D&D in the world of Azeroth is that you can do things in D&D that you can't do in a digital game because the options haven't been programmed for you," he said in a recent presentation attended by PC Gamer.
On November 12, you'll be able to see how Wyatt and the other designers mixed the two RPGs by "paraphrasing" the MMO into the tabletop ruleset. But Wyatt and senior game designer Ben Petrisor gave us a peek into how their approach affects the classes you can play in D&D: WoW.
WoW's classes are thematically similar to D&D's, and that's part of what makes the collaboration so fitting. However, WoW's classes have to fit into restrictive roles, like a tank or a healer, that don't really exist in D&D, so the D&D: WoW designers decided to return to some of the class customization that was introduced with 2020's Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.
Paladins won't have to give up their usual kit when they invest in WoW's holy specialization, for example. Wyatt explained that a lot of the unique abilities and talents WoW classes have access to have been translated into options players can incorporate into their characters. A holy paladin in D&D: WoW will still smite their foes into piles of ashes but they'll also have stronger ways to heal their allies than they normally would.
The same goes for classes like wizard that can pick up the Fingers of Frost feat at level 4 to lean harder into mastering frost-based spells like a frost mage would in the MMO. Beast master rangers can see what it's like to have a pet with its own weapon mastery on top of your own, emulating the tight bond WoW hunters have with their companions. There are dozens of new subclasses, spells, and additions to the core D&D classes like these, each pulling directly from the most iconic parts of WoW.
"We really crammed as much of the impactful talents across each WoW class into this book," Petrisor said.
Not only can you play WoW's unique hero classes—death knight, demon hunter, and evoker—you can experiment with new classes that Blizzard hasn't touched: Everyone who misses the early days of WoW when shamans could stand on the frontlines as magical warriors can pick up the barbarian subclass in D&D: WoW and channel their rage into elemental storms. Even bard, a class that was only an April Fool's joke in WoW, is fully playable in D&D: WoW.
The goal, Petrisor said, was to pull the restraints off of D&D's classes so that everyone, no matter which game you're most familiar with, can try something new.
"Even if you're coming into this without a lot of familiarity to WoW-specific classes, and you kind of want to just hit the ol' reliable button you'll still have an expanded experience and new and fun stuff to play with," he said.
Petrisor explained how the limitations of publishing a single, physical book were really the biggest hurdle when it came to imagining all the ways the two worlds could collide. But just like Wyatt stressed in the first preview presentation I attended, Petrisor has plenty of other ideas that he'd love to work on if people want more.
"If there's an IP that has the space to cover another book this is definitely one of them," he said. "So, the real challenge was—for me at least—while designing things was to try to find everything that would appease the fans of the game while also being options that would be interesting to D&D players and try to cram as many of those into this book as possible."
