i was a fan of 4th edition, i like mike mearls and i liked the show he used to do on twitch and youtube, 'the mike mearls happy hour' where he would basically work on subclasses for 5th that would sort of correspond to stuff that would come out later in unearthed arcana playtest stuff and maybe even get published in books, later
theres been some movement to cancel mike mearls and he hasnt posted any official content as like, dnd news or similar for more than a year and so the mike mearls happy hour show ended back then, suddenly, the way these things go... mearls taking a much quieter role in the company where he doesnt post on twitter and youtube every week, just a much more opaque approach, an the happy hour show mostly just disappeared off of youtube and twitch and i think it just has become like very hard to find
so i wanted to write about what i liked about the show before it sort of disappears entirely because its format is kinda cool. back when he did this show it was a very clear like insight into how the design process works at wizards, but he would run you through the actual process of writing a subclass as he would do it, explaining all the design decisions that are most appropriate to make at each step
like heres an episode of mike mearls happy hour where - tbh its the only episode i can find - i cant https://m.twitch.tv/videos/233726631 find this show anymore but it is a killer show and it has these many good qualities... anyway referring to this vide to keep a clear vision of what that show was actually like but if that episode is also removed youll have to take my word for it
so... i think every episode he would implore you to read the rules -- if youre rewriting the rule for a thing, look up that rule, dont go off your memory of what that rule was. the show encourages the viewer to think of themselves not as players or dungeon masters but as rules designers for d&d... as generally exemplized in this practice of reading the rule youre augmenting
... i think i remember him saying that... part of the point of the 'happy hour' show was to create sort of an institutional memory of ...what this design process was (at wizards at that point in time) and how its done and why, but the other thingg is doing it on twitch ... makes it much more transparent and much more like a performance, seems like the most public way to make d&d content where you publish extremely rough ideas immediately as they come to you... but really does bring you into the room with the process, as he does it (this is much more like being a dungeon master than being a rules designer)
sometimes mearls would do that, sort of improvising the subclass during the stream... but i dont have those ones to refer to, theres only one episode i could find, so...
alright, in this one, he recaps about the giant soul sorcerer, a subclass he had been developing on stream the previous week, which was later available in unearthed arcana as playtest content.
then, in the main body of this episode, he talks about a new subclass that he's started work on offscreen - the order domain cleric, which was (much later) published in tashas cauldron of everything. I have played the unearthed arcana version of this subclass which i think is largely unchanged in tashas. the order domain cleric gets a power where, when you the cleric cast a spell on an ally, you can cause them to make a weapon attack as a reaction. this is a great effect on rogues because 5e lets them sneak attack an extra time on your turn, ok on fighters because they at least are good at weapon attacks, but its bad on wizards imo... which is bad because you want to use it when youre healing and a wizard might more often need healing than these others. compare with the healing cleric who simply heals more, for example.
but i was drawn to this power because i like the idea of commanding the ally to attack ... mearls calls this the 'get em' ability, and this is otherwise a hard thing to do in 5e so its nice that its included in this subclass and eventually made it into print. but it does suck to use it on the wizard. anyway the order cleric you can sort of think of as a 'get em' cleric
anyway... mearls makes good on his promise to review the context within which he's placing this new rule. he talks about what is a cleric domain for this edition... like subclasses are basically feat chains, but the cleric's order also corresponds to the spheres of magic that clerics had access to in earlier editions, that served to make clerics of different deities distinct from each other...
but its not exactly a mapping to specific deities instead... theyre trying to have a system where each deity might have clerics of diffrent orders and each order has a wide range of deities it could apply to
so the original idea for the order cleric is a sort of 'civilization' cleric for a specific deity in mearls' homebrew game, but generalising outward, hes tries to make a cleric for any sort of god of law and order... for even hobgoblin clerics of maglubiyet and so forth. broadly applicable.
- reviews the basic powers that the cleric has, talks about what is a channel divinity, compares some existing subclasses, talking about balance, talking about success and failure,
anyway it was a dense resource, there are a lot of dnd youtubes but mike mearls show was unique among dnd youtubes in these respects, the things you were seeing developed might make it into the game for everyone, showing not just how to make a thing the wizards way but going into exacting detail of why hed make it this particular way
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