What Tasha’s Cauldron should have been

Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything made 5e so miserable that it caused me to go from dreading a new edition to longing for it.

TCE’s stuff is good so we wanna use it, but it’s an overlay on the game; it’s a diff rather than what would’ve been better: present the complete new post-diff versions of the classes (including the new spell lists, which XGE also diffed so we’re juggling three books), but have the new subclasses, so the PHB would still be useful if you wanna play the old subclasses (which are eminently compatible and still good/balanced, except for sorcerer which sucks compared to the new one).

Uh, that paragraph came out a li’l bit garbled but here is what I mean that Tasha’s should have had:

• New versions of the base classes—exaxtly how they are in Tasha’s, but presented complete instead of as a diff.
• Spell lists that combine PHB and TCE, minus the old deprecated conjuration spells (although they are more fun since they have more summons).
• The new subclasses from Tasha’s, they’re good as they are (maybe not the emoji bard)
• Anything else from TCE they could fit in there. We love the sidekicks (although it’s weird that they work so differently, like, Cinube in #boatmode is diegetically a witch (a.k.a. warlock with a blood moth patron) but she uses the prodigy rules symbolically, which is often jarring (since prodigies can heal and they need to wait for longrest for slots) so they need to be in there.

And then keep the PHB for stuff like equipment lists, travel rules, and the old subclasses. Things you look at separately, not as an overlay.

Also, release the diff as part of the OGL and as part of the basic rules. That way, people who needs the diff (I would’ve wanted to read it in diff form at least once, because I know the old rules well) could have it.

TCE is not open source yet. When I say that that sucks (which I will, here: it sucks) it’s not out of entitlement but because 5e’s open source nature is it’s biggest strength. There are very few open source games out there with this amount of gamist crunch depth.

In WotC’s defense, I would’ve made TCE the same way they did do it. All of this shoulda-coulda-woulda is in hindsight, after living with the book for two years, and almost immediately going from loving it to resenting it.