# It feels so much like the D&D Next playtest did



## Charlaquin (Aug 21, 2022)

I don’t know how many of y’all participated in the D&D Next playtests, but I did, and the vibe around here since the 1D&D packet dropped feels to me just like the WotC forums did then (though maybe a little bit less edition-warry). And I love it. The energy and passion are palpable, and the debates are all so clearly coming from a place of love for the game and desire to help it become the best it can be, from all sides. I can tell we’re in for an incredible 18 (ish) months. Just wanted to express that. I love you all.


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## James Gasik (Aug 21, 2022)

I just hope that more of the exciting ideas make it to the end product this time. Very little of the stuff my group and I provided positive feedback for made it to 5e.  Which, maybe we were extreme outliers or something, but it really made us wonder...


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## payn (Aug 21, 2022)

Oh yeah, it’s all fun and games now. When the decisions are made tho…

I love y’all no matter what happens.


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## Haplo781 (Aug 21, 2022)

James Gasik said:


> I just hope that more of the exciting ideas make it to the end product this time. Very little of the stuff my group and I provided positive feedback for made it to 5e.  Which, maybe we were extreme outliers or something, but it really made us wonder...



All the good ideas were shouted down by grognards, who are now vastly outnumbered by new players.


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## payn (Aug 21, 2022)

Haplo781 said:


> All the good ideas were shouted down by grognards, who are now vastly outnumbered by new players.



That remains to be seen.


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## Ondath (Aug 21, 2022)

I was too young to really get into D&D Next's playtest (I only remember hearing about it every few months, if at all), so I'm really excited to be a part of it this time. I'm fully prepared to accept that I'll now be a part of the minority whose ideas will be shouted down by a new slew of players, but I'm still willing to offer my feedback to get the best game we possibly can.

And if the result isn't to my liking, well I'll always have other games.


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## payn (Aug 21, 2022)

Ondath said:


> I was too young to really get into D&D Next's playtest (I only remember hearing about it every few months, if at all), so I'm really excited to be a part of it this time. I'm fully prepared to accept that I'll now be a part of the minority whose ideas will be shouted down by a new slew of players, but I'm still willing to offer my feedback to get the best game we possibly can.
> 
> And if the result isn't to my liking, well I'll always have other games.



The internet is funny. Nobody is shouted down. Everything seems amplified but the real story is not what it seems. Stick around  be part of it.


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## Levistus's_Leviathan (Aug 21, 2022)

Haplo781 said:


> All the good ideas were shouted down by grognards, who are now vastly outnumbered by new players.



Go look at the D&D 5e subreddits. The good ideas are getting shouted down by a lot of new players, too. I'm wouldn't be surprised if many of these proposed changes (Crit rules, the new background system, feat changes) didn't make it to the published 2024 PHB, based on the discussions I've seen happen on multiple 5e-discussion sites.

But I have hope. I love most of this UA, hope that further documents excite me as much as this one, and wish that the community can accept the changes.


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## TheSword (Aug 21, 2022)

Those that speak don’t know, those that know don’t speak.

Its what goes in the survey that matters not what the same 10 people say on Forums.


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## FitzTheRuke (Aug 21, 2022)

As long as no one negative bot-spams the survey, I think we'll be okay. 

I have to admit, I'm pretty excited. This really _does_ seem to me like the first time we've got the real chance to make a newish edition that doesn't throw the baby out with the bathwater (which IMO, every edition shift has done). To be more clear, I mean every edition (or even partial edition like this one) has fixed some problems while breaking some really good things that were fine.

Which is something that REALLY happened with the D&D Next playtest. I love 5e, but it left out some great stuff from the playtest, and threw out some great stuff from 4e.

All I ask from 1D&D is that it makes some solid improvements without ruining anything. It doesn't need to be perfect, but a net gain would be nice. Personally, I think it looks good so far. I don't love everything in the playtest packet, but I don't think it'll all last (and there's nothing there that I can't live with). 

So far so good.


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## Charlaquin (Aug 21, 2022)

payn said:


> That remains to be seen.



Well I think WotC has seen it. What remains to be seen is where the new players’ preferences lean.


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## Levistus's_Leviathan (Aug 21, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> Well I think WotC has seen it. What remains to be seen is where the new players’ preferences lean.



I wonder how much they monitor/lurk on 5e forums/discussion sites and where they do it.


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## TerraDave (Aug 21, 2022)

AcererakTriple6 said:


> Go look at the D&D 5e subreddits. The good ideas are getting shouted down by a lot of new players, too. ....



The one things that turns "new players" into "grognards" is a new edition. 

But, they will accept some changes, just look at ENWorld. We have some of the crustiest grognards around! Yet we have, in the end, accepted one new edition after another.


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## Levistus's_Leviathan (Aug 21, 2022)

TerraDave said:


> The one things that turns "new players" into "grognards" is a new edition.
> 
> But, they will accept some changes, just look at ENWorld. We have some of the crustiest grognards around! Yet we have, in the end, accepted one new edition after another.



But this is the first "edition change" with such a large, young player base with modern social media. That makes it inherently more unstable than even past "edition wars", because there's more people involved, they're less accustomed to these kinds of changes in a game (because 5e has been the most stable edition in decades), and social media changes a ton of stuff. 

I may be wrong and they might end up accepting the new changes, but just recently I saw a post with about 6 thousand upvotes that was complaining about three things "changed" in this UA that were complete misreadings of the UA. 

Misinformation spreads a lot faster on social media (especially Reddit) than sites like ENWorld. Misinformation could kill this playtest if thousands of players respond negatively to the playtest because of an incorrect post on Reddit or Youtube that gained popularity.


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## Charlaquin (Aug 21, 2022)

AcererakTriple6 said:


> But this is the first "edition change" with such a large, young player base with modern social media. That makes it inherently more unstable than even past "edition wars", because there's more people involved, they're less accustomed to these kinds of changes in a game (because 5e has been the most stable edition in decades), and social media changes a ton of stuff.
> 
> I may be wrong and they might end up accepting the new changes, but just recently I saw a post with about 6 thousand upvotes that was complaining about three things "changed" in this UA that were complete misreadings of the UA.
> 
> Misinformation spreads a lot faster on social media (especially Reddit) than sites like ENWorld. Misinformation could kill this playtest if thousands of players respond negatively to the playtest because of an incorrect post on Reddit or Youtube that gained popularity.



What were the things they said changed?


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## Levistus's_Leviathan (Aug 21, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> What were the things they said changed?



1) Bards can always seduce dragons because Natural 20 means automatic success (ignoring the fact that a DM doesn't call for a d20 Test unless there's a chance of success)
2) Class-specific spells are gone 
3) A complete misunderstanding of critical hit changes


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## Charlaquin (Aug 21, 2022)

AcererakTriple6 said:


> 1) Bards can always seduce dragons because Natural 20 means automatic success (ignoring the fact that a DM doesn't call for a d20 Test unless there's a chance of success)



Ah. Out of context this comes across to me more as a hyperbolic expression of displeasure with the change than a misunderstanding. But if that’s a common sentiment among newer players I’m surprised! I would have expected a lot more to be happy with it. I’m not too bothered either way, the difference this change will make to my games will probably not even be noticeable.



AcererakTriple6 said:


> 2) Class-specific spells are gone



Oh, yeah, that’s a fairly understandable misreading given that you’d have to watch the video to know classes are probably going to have other ways of gaining spells. On the bright side, this misunderstanding is likely to be dispelled quickly. But hopefully WotC will learn from this that the context needs to go _in the packet_ not just in a video.


AcererakTriple6 said:


> 3) A complete misunderstanding of critical hit changes



Yeah, that makes sense as it’s the most clickbait-y change. I saw a thumbnail in my YouTube recommended feed with “One D&D” and “DMs can’t crit anymore?!” on it; if that kind of sensationalist stuff is someone’s source of information, they’re likely to badly misunderstand what the packet actually says. I am 100% certain the crit change is going to get shot down in the survey.


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## Levistus's_Leviathan (Aug 21, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> Ah. Out of context this comes across to me more as a hyperbolic expression of displeasure with the change than a misunderstanding. But if that’s a common sentiment among newer players I’m surprised! I would have expected a lot more to be happy with it. I’m not too bothered either way, the difference this change will make to my games will probably not even be noticeable.



That post had 6000 karma last I checked. So, at least 6,000 people "upvoted" it. That probably doesn't mean much, but it's still spreading misinformation that could cause people to answer the survey while not fully informed of what the change is for.


Charlaquin said:


> Oh, yeah, that’s a fairly understandable misreading given that you’d have to watch the video to know classes are probably going to have other ways of gaining spells. On the bright side, this misunderstanding is likely to be dispelled quickly. But hopefully WotC will learn from this that the context needs to go _in the packet_ not just in a video.



Yeah, but it also shows how a lot of D&D players will take a mechanic out of context without doing more research to learn why the change is being made and what it does. 

WotC definitely needs to be more transparent in future documents about what exactly is changing and what it does, or else there will be more problems like this for every playtest document that comes out.


Charlaquin said:


> Yeah, that makes sense as it’s the most clickbait-y change. I saw a thumbnail in my YouTube recommended feed with “One D&D” and “DMs can’t crit anymore?!” on it; if that kind of sensationalist stuff is someone’s source of information, they’re likely to badly misunderstand what the packet actually says. I am 100% certain the crit change is going to get shot down in the survey.



Yep. Which I find disappointing and confirms my suspicions that a lot of the major changes will be denied a proper chance because people didn't bother to playtest with them and were only told about the change through a clickbait video or post online.


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## ReshiIRE (Aug 21, 2022)

I'm not sure if I should provide any feedback as I do not plan to operate in the 5e space, and if I do it will probably be through Level Up 5e or as a player.

But it is going to be interesting to see how much things ultimately contrast between playtest and release. My understanding and everything I have read suggests DnD Next would a better game than the one ultimately released; while the feedback for Pathfinder 2e resulted in a *vastly* better game on release.

I _hope_ 5.5e cribs and learns from other rpgs like Level Up 5e and Pathfinder 2e and the playtest results in a stronger game.


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## Charlaquin (Aug 21, 2022)

ReshiIRE said:


> I'm not sure if I should provide any feedback as I do not plan to operate in the 5e space, and if I do it will probably be through Level Up 5e or as a player.
> 
> But it is going to be interesting to see how much things ultimately contrast between playtest and release. My understanding and everything I have read suggests DnD Next would a better game than the one ultimately released; while the feedback for Pathfinder 2e resulted in a *vastly* better game on release.
> 
> I _hope_ 5.5e cribs and learns from other rpgs like Level Up 5e and Pathfinder 2e and the playtest results in a stronger game.



I think PF2’s playtesting worked out better because its designers had a stronger design vision for the game than 5e’s did. Paizo knew what they were aiming to make, they knew what they needed feedback on, and they built the playtest to focus on those specific things. Whereas D&D Next was just wild experimentation trying to figure out what their audience wanted.

This time around, I get the impression that WotC knows what they want to make, and for the most part they’re just going to make that. But they also know what parts of it their audience is most likely to reject, and are prepared to cut them. But first they want to pitch those parts to the audience, just in case some of them do actually get accepted.


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## Aldarc (Aug 21, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> I don’t know how many of y’all participated in the D&D Next playtests, but I did, and the vibe around here since the 1D&D packet dropped feels to me just like the WotC forums did then (though maybe a little bit less edition-warry). And I love it. The energy and passion are palpable, and the debates are all so clearly coming from a place of love for the game and desire to help it become the best it can be, from all sides. I can tell we’re in for an incredible 18 (ish) months. Just wanted to express that. I love you all.



Just remember: this is NOT a new edition. _wink wink nudge nudge_


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## Li Shenron (Aug 21, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> I don’t know how many of y’all participated in the D&D Next playtests, but I did, and the vibe around here since the 1D&D packet dropped feels to me just like the WotC forums did then (though maybe a little bit less edition-warry). And I love it. The energy and passion are palpable, and the debates are all so clearly coming from a place of love for the game and desire to help it become the best it can be, from all sides. I can tell we’re in for an incredible 18 (ish) months. Just wanted to express that. I love you all.



I appreciate your optimism, but I don't feel that way...

I participated in D&D Next playtest, and that edition change came at a point where the gamerbase was severely fractured between those who liked and played 4e, and those who hated and stayed with 3.0/3.5/PF. D&D Next gave all the opportunity to heal the fracture, and I'd say it succeeded pretty well.

I really don't think we currently have a fractured gamebase, my general feeling is that 5e is as big as D&D has even been, then there's some successful fringe variants like LevelUp which I don't think they are played _instead_ of 5e but rather _together_ with it, I don't see a fracture at all. If anything, a fracture could happen _because_ of a 2024 revision that takes changes too far.

At the same time, I am sorry but I don't feel like the desire is to really help D&D be the best it can be... a lot of people never stops wanting to change the rules, as soon as 5e core books came out they immediately flooded forums with house rules to change default rules they haven't even tried to play, this is still going on today and will keep on going on even after the 2024 revision: you can be sure that the day after the revised books are released, the same people who seemed most excited by the changes will already complain about something and ask for more changes. A large part of the gamer base just has this side hobby of endless change for the sake of change, because it is a rewarding process by itself, but achieving a supposed perfection of the game is not their purpose, it would in fact mean the end of their true hobby.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> I don’t know how many of y’all participated in the D&D Next playtests, but I did, and the vibe around here since the 1D&D packet dropped feels to me just like the WotC forums did then (though maybe a little bit less edition-warry). And I love it. The energy and passion are palpable, and the debates are all so clearly coming from a place of love for the game and desire to help it become the best it can be, from all sides. I can tell we’re in for an incredible 18 (ish) months. Just wanted to express that. I love you all.



Agree totally but for me there's hope but also a lot of fear, because the Next playtest had tons of great stuff that got cut and a lot of this feels beautiful but vulnerable, and like a bunch of people who don't even get it are going to stomp all over it.

Hopefully not though.


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## HammerMan (Aug 21, 2022)

James Gasik said:


> I just hope that more of the exciting ideas make it to the end product this time. Very little of the stuff my group and I provided positive feedback for made it to 5e.  Which, maybe we were extreme outliers or something, but it really made us wonder...



This is my fear too.  And the martial classes and Sorcere (we feel) is worse off for the playtest feed back.


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## HammerMan (Aug 21, 2022)

Haplo781 said:


> All the good ideas were shouted down by grognards, who are now vastly outnumbered by new players.



But are those new players going to down load a playtest and fill out a survey?


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## HammerMan (Aug 21, 2022)

FitzTheRuke said:


> As long as no one negative bot-spams the survey, I think we'll be okay.



I am in a 2e face book group full of grognards who still play 2e (I still have a soft spot for it) and we never talk any WoTC or 5e stuff… until yesterday when someone brought up useing the playtest to try to “win back” the heart of D&D.  2 people before it got locked by admin were talking about starting a discord to make such a bot.  They didn’t even want to just get there voice heard one literally said “Sabotage it so WoTC will sell it to a real gaming group when this 6e fails”

I don’t have any clue if such a bit is possible.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

HammerMan said:


> But are those new players going to down load a playtest and fill out a survey?



That's a good question. Honestly I suspect the vast majority will not, because they feel they've done their bit by pivoting or downvoting on Reddit. If the survey is anything like previous ones the odds of them making it to the end are extremely low. I sincerely hope WotC are taking a more advisory sort of attitude to surveys here than they did with Next and the 70% approval nonsense. Also that they don't have a bunch of secret grogs who they're listening to ahead of everyone else.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

HammerMan said:


> I am in a 2e face book group full of grognards who still play 2e (I still have a soft spot for it) and we never talk any WoTC or 5e stuff… until yesterday when someone brought up useing the playtest to try to “win back” the heart of D&D.  2 people before it got locked by admin were talking about starting a discord to make such a bot.  They didn’t even want to just get there voice heard one literally said “Sabotage it so WoTC will sell it to a real gaming group when this 6e fails”
> 
> I don’t have any clue if such a bit is possible.



I don't know what system WotC uses for surveys but it is highly likely to have protection against that kind of automated ballot-stuffing. Plus it's highly unlikely they'd even have the technical competence and determination to implement such a thing.


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## HammerMan (Aug 21, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> That's a good question. Honestly I suspect the vast majority will not, because they feel they've done their bit by pivoting or downvoting on Reddit. If the survey is anything like previous ones the odds of them making it to the end are extremely low. I sincerely hope WotC are taking a more advisory sort of attitude to surveys here than they did with Next and the 70% approval nonsense. Also that they don't have a bunch of secret grogs who they're listening to ahead of everyone else.



My niece is one of those new players.  I know she won’t sit through a 3+ page survey as much as I wish she would.  But if they made a “sound” on tic tok to “stitch” she would make a dozen 1 minute response videos for them to see


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## Nickolaidas (Aug 21, 2022)

Li Shenron said:


> At the same time, I am sorry but I don't feel like the desire is to really help D&D be the best it can be... a lot of people never stops wanting to change the rules, as soon as 5e core books came out they immediately flooded forums with house rules to change default rules they haven't even tried to play, this is still going on today and will keep on going on even after the 2024 revision: you can be sure that the day after the revised books are released, the same people who seemed most excited by the changes will already complain about something and ask for more changes. A large part of the gamer base just has this side hobby of endless change for the sake of change, because it is a rewarding process by itself, but achieving a supposed perfection of the game is not their purpose, it would in fact mean the end of their true hobby.



Well, just because I'll be happy with what they did with A doesn't mean I approve B. An interesting concept however. People changing for the sake of changing it, and not due to improvement's sake. Anti-traditionists.

I think of house rules like Skyrim mods. At the end of the day, everyone wants the game tailored to their tastes. It's universally impossible for WotC to make a single edition whose vanilla rules will satisfy absolutely everyone. For example, if I was older when me and my big brother played BECMI, there's no way in hell we wouldn't houserule the save or die rolls, which old TSR books were giving out like candy.

I agree that the 5th edition seems to have helped bring back a lot of the people who were alienated by 4th (felt too video-gamey for my tastes, personally with all the  monster underlings who would die with a single attack). It gave me an impression it was like playing tabletop Diablo with the intention of making everything resolve ultra-fast. Now granted, I never played a single session in that edition, but that was the vibe I got.

I think the majority of people who had a problem with 5E were people who didn't like the rules one-upping the lore. And I share a lot of their criticism with them on that one (the orc/drow debate for example but lets not open that can of worms here), but I recently tried to give WotC another shot.

The only thing that bothered me on 5E's twilight were those changes which were all about adding options, bonuses and removing penalties. I get the logic, I get why they did that, but if WotC now is following a 'more options, no restrictions' policy, what does that mean for a setting like Dark Sun on 6E/D&D One? Will they have every race of the PHB available despite some of them being supposedly extinct on Athas? Will they touch upon the gritty themes the setting used to have or will they be considered too 'risky' on 6E/One D&D? I just don't want Dark Sun to end up being 'Forgotten Realms on a very, very hot summer' if they ever decide to make the damn book ... which I feel is just a matter of time, considering we currently have FR, Ravenloft, Eberron, MtG, Spelljammer, and at the end of the year, Dragonlance.


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## Yaarel (Aug 21, 2022)

James Gasik said:


> I just hope that more of the exciting ideas make it to the end product this time. Very little of the stuff my group and I provided positive feedback for made it to 5e.  Which, maybe we were extreme outliers or something, but it really made us wonder...



It seems inevitable that the end result will only improve incrementally. But perhaps designers that recognize useful innovations can make them variants that implement easily.


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## HammerMan (Aug 21, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I don't know what system WotC uses for surveys but it is highly likely to have protection against that kind of automated ballot-stuffing. Plus it's highly unlikely they'd even have the technical competence and determination to implement such a thing.



Right. Again I am an old out of touch guy who is typing on a phone that might as well be magic.  I have no idea what is and isn’t possible. The two talking sounded (to me an outsider) like tech guys though if that matters.


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## Yaarel (Aug 21, 2022)

The problem with innovation is - it is easy for a majority to disagree with a status quo, but difficult to propose an innovation that a majority agree with.

Compare psionics.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

HammerMan said:


> My niece is one of those new players.  I know she won’t sit through a 3+ page survey as much as I wish she would.  But if they made a “sound” on tic tok to “stitch” she would make a dozen 1 minute response videos for them to see



Yeah and I imagine they'll have people looking at social media, but that sort of thing is impossible to quantify so has limited value as mass feedback.

If I were them I might put out very short videos explaining each rules change and why it was being suggested and get people to react in the comments with specific emojis or phrases, which might kind of work there.


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## HammerMan (Aug 21, 2022)

Yaarel said:


> The problem with innovation is - it is easy for a majority to disagree with a status quo, but difficult to propose an innovation that a majority agree with.
> 
> Compare psionics.



Yeah. We don’t need 55% of people to say “yeah this is a problem we need fixed” we need 55+% people to AGREE with the fix. 

This is what I feel happened with psi incident, it felt to me like most of the player base (new or old) wanted psionic classes. But no one agreed on a good way to do them.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

Yaarel said:


> The problem with innovation is - it is easy for a majority to disagree with a status quo, but difficult to propose an innovation that a majority agree with.
> 
> Compare psionics.



Quite right.

Virtually every caster class in 5E would have failed the 70% test if suggested as a new class.


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## HammerMan (Aug 21, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Yeah and I imagine they'll have people looking at social media, but that sort of thing is impossible to quantify so has limited value as mass feedback.
> 
> If I were them I might put out very short videos explaining each rules change and why it was being suggested and get people to react in the comments with specific emojis or phrases, which might kind of work there.



Yeah I don’t think you can automate a “what are people saying on Xxx” in a computer and what they say fitting on a graph is hard unless you pair it down to “positive negative”. But I still think it would be worth hearing the feed back.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

HammerMan said:


> Right. Again I am an old out of touch guy who is typing on a phone that might as well be magic.  I have no idea what is and isn’t possible. The two talking sounded (to me an outsider) like tech guys though if that matters.



Them being tech guys doesn't matter, because tech is so broad, and most people have narrow areas of actual competence, even if a lot of them are self-deluded about it. It's like, if they are competent scripters/coders and willing to do a ton of work and learn a bunch off stuff, could they technically come up with a way to automatically repeatedly fill in surveys? (Subject to whatever spam/flood protection WotC has).

Sure.

But if they're that competent and determined they also know that WotC could basically weed out everything they insert with Excel, let alone better tools. I could weed it out, and I'm only borderline a "tech guy".

And anything they do that's more aggressive than mere clumsy and likely slow ballot stuffing (which is painfully easy to detect) is risking civil or even criminal sanctions (esp. as the US has incredibly low thresholds for computer crime and utterly draconian punishments).


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## Alzrius (Aug 21, 2022)

Yaarel said:


> The problem with innovation is - it is easy for a majority to disagree with a status quo, but difficult to propose an innovation that a majority agree with.



I suspect I'm in a distinct minority here, but I can't help but wonder if part of the underlying issue is the idea that changes to the game are "improvements" as opposed to just being "changes."

I've been playing D&D for just shy of thirty years now, and from what I've seen, different editions are just that: different. Not better, not worse, just more in line with certain expectations and play-styles than others. 3E wasn't a "superior" game compared to 2E, 4E wasn't an "improvement" compared to 3E, 5E wasn't "better" than 4E, and One D&D won't be an "upgrade" to 5E.

Parsing it this way pushes divisiveness; I can understand wanting the game to better reflect your personal preferences and values, but that's not an indication that the new edition is necessarily an upgrade over how it used to be. It's just different.


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## Reynard (Aug 21, 2022)

I will be very surprised if any actual innovative changes on the scale of advantage/disadvantage are introduced, and even more so if they end up in the final result.


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## Yaarel (Aug 21, 2022)

Alzrius said:


> I suspect I'm in a distinct minority here, but I can't help but wonder if part of the underlying issue is the idea that changes to the game are "improvements" as opposed to just being "changes."
> 
> I've been playing D&D for just shy of thirty years now, and from what I've seen, different editions are just that: different. Not better, not worse, just more in line with certain expectations and play-styles than others. 3E wasn't a "superior" game compared to 2E, 4E wasn't an "improvement" compared to 3E, 5E wasn't "better" than 4E, and One D&D won't be an "upgrade" to 5E.
> 
> Parsing it this way pushes divisiveness; I can understand wanting the game to better reflect your personal preferences and values, but that's not an indication that the new edition is necessarily an upgrade over how it used to be. It's just different.



Each edition was a response to complaints about the previous edition. In that sense enough players viewed the changes as improvements.

However, some changes introduced new kind of difficulties, or ended something that in hindsight proved to be valuable.


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## Bill Zebub (Aug 21, 2022)

Agree with OP. I find this exciting.


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## payn (Aug 21, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> That's a good question. Honestly I suspect the vast majority will not, because they feel they've done their bit by pivoting or downvoting on Reddit. If the survey is anything like previous ones the odds of them making it to the end are extremely low. I sincerely hope WotC are taking a more advisory sort of attitude to surveys here than they did with Next and the 70% approval nonsense. Also that they don't have a bunch of *secret grogs *who they're listening to ahead of everyone else.



lol, thats going on my list of potential band names.


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## Asisreo (Aug 21, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> I don’t know how many of y’all participated in the D&D Next playtests, but I did, and the vibe around here since the 1D&D packet dropped feels to me just like the WotC forums did then (though maybe a little bit less edition-warry). And I love it. The energy and passion are palpable, and the debates are all so clearly coming from a place of love for the game and desire to help it become the best it can be, from all sides. I can tell we’re in for an incredible 18 (ish) months. Just wanted to express that. I love you all.



This forum is definitely my favorite for discussing D&D because, while it has hiccups, the discussion are fairly civil, diverse, and honest. 

I haven't visited the subreddit for dndnext in a minute but I tuned in to see what people were saying and wow is it exhausting. Every minor praise of the system is met with negative criticism with "Yeah, but I wish..." and every criticism is met with plain insults if not to the designers, then to the person inside the discussion. 

That's not here and it's very much relieving. I can feel passion without feeling like anything I say is being rated by people who _don't even play the game._


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

Asisreo said:


> I haven't visited the subreddit for dndnext in a minute but I tuned in to see what people were saying and wow is it exhausting. Every minor praise of the system is met with negative criticism with "Yeah, but I wish..." and every criticism is met with plain insults if not to the designers, then to the person inside the discussion.



It's definitely notable that the dndnext subreddit has gradually declined in quality as people there have got more and more knee-jerk-y. It feels like a lot of open-minded new players from 2014/15/16 are ghastly junior grogs now. I mean, not surprising, really, 3.XE had that happen in the same time period. Some people were new to D&D entirely in say, 2000, and knee-jerk grogs with attitudes by 2007. And with videogames, particularly MMOs, grogification can often take less than five years, so yeah.

A particularly common and unfortunate pattern I've seen is that someone posts misinformation/a misunderstanding, but does so in a very bossy and confident way (even though it is the confidence of the stupid), then it gets upvoted and positively commented on by, frankly, a bunch of baaaing sheep (sorry but I dunno how else to put that), then someone corrects the misunderstanding within minutes, and whilst the correction will get upvoted (often more_ purely_ upvoted than than the misinformation), the misinformation will have like 2k votes and the correction will be on like 600, and sometimes not even the top response because someone who was blathering on about something semi-relevant got more upvotes recently.


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## Haplo781 (Aug 21, 2022)

HammerMan said:


> I am in a 2e face book group full of grognards who still play 2e (I still have a soft spot for it) and we never talk any WoTC or 5e stuff… until yesterday when someone brought up useing the playtest to try to “win back” the heart of D&D.  2 people before it got locked by admin were talking about starting a discord to make such a bot.  They didn’t even want to just get there voice heard one literally said “Sabotage it so WoTC will sell it to a real gaming group when this 6e fails”
> 
> I don’t have any clue if such a bit is possible.



You need to have a Beyond account to participate, so there'd be a pretty major time sink registering however many accounts.


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## schneeland (Aug 21, 2022)

Going back to the OP's statement: in a way it's true, but for me personally, the main difference is that I found the original D&D Next play material interesting (I didn't really participate in the test, but read some of it afterwards), because the goal of 5e to be a new, shared home for the D&D community no matter what edition they played resonated with me, as did the early 5e books. Now with late 5e and the direction WotC has taken, it feels like the game is moving away from what I enjoy rather than towards it. So the excitement is rather dimmed, and I suppose that I am more likely to enter late stage grognardism for D&D in the same way it happened with Shadowrun after the 3e->4e transition.
(no reason to go sabotage the playtest surveys, though - there's clearly a lot of people enjoying 5e and 5.5e, so why not just let them have fun)


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## Parmandur (Aug 21, 2022)

AcererakTriple6 said:


> Go look at the D&D 5e subreddits. The good ideas are getting shouted down by a lot of new players, too. I'm wouldn't be surprised if many of these proposed changes (Crit rules, the new background system, feat changes) didn't make it to the published 2024 PHB, based on the discussions I've seen happen on multiple 5e-discussion sites.
> 
> But I have hope. I love most of this UA, hope that further documents excite me as much as this one, and wish that the community can accept the changes.



Take online discussion with a grain of salt Unearthed Arcana survey results often go completely against the "Discourse."


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## Haplo781 (Aug 21, 2022)

schneeland said:


> Going back to the OP's statement: in a way it's true, but for me personally, the main difference is that I found the original D&D Next play material interesting (I didn't really participate in the test, but read some of it afterwards), because the goal of 5e to be a new, shared home for the D&D community no matter what edition they played resonated with me, as did the early 5e books. Now with late 5e and the direction WotC has taken, it feels like the game is moving away from what I enjoy rather than towards it. So the excitement is rather dimmed, and I suppose that I am more likely to enter late stage grognardism for D&D in the same way it happened with Shadowrun after the 3e->4e transition.
> (no reason to go sabotage the playtest surveys, though - there's clearly a lot of people enjoying 5e and 5.5e, so why not just let them have fun)



Having come from 4e and been a big fan of it, I checked out some of the early playtest material and thought it was all right. Didn't touch S&D again until 2017 when I played an AL game. It was... OK I guess. Really got back into it late last year and immediately went back to 4e because 5e just clearly has all the same issues 4e was trying to address.

Currently frustrated with certain aspects of 4e and wishing more of it had made it into 5e. Went and looked over all the Next playtest packets and got really upset that so many great ideas were tossed out. Now hoping to shape 1DD to get some more of that 4e/Next magic back.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

Haplo781 said:


> You need to have a Beyond account to participate, so there'd be a pretty major time sink registering however many accounts.



We don't know if that'll be the case for the feedback.

The links they used previously for feedback didn't need any kind of login.

_If_ they're changing to an authenticated method though, i.e. by requiring a Beyond login, which _in fact_ means a Gmail or Apple account login (now, for new accounts), that's a pretty high bar. That alone would make this extremely challenging unless they screwed up the authentication somehow (there are ways, esp. if trying to integrate an existing survey system).


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## Parmandur (Aug 21, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> We don't know if that'll be the case for the feedback.
> 
> The links they used previously for feedback didn't need any kind of login.
> 
> _If_ they're changing to an authenticated method though, i.e. by requiring a Beyond login, which _in fact_ means a Gmail or Apple account login (now, for new accounts), that's a pretty high bar. That alone would make this extremely challenging unless they screwed up the authentication somehow (there are ways, esp. if trying to integrate an existing survey system).



A big reason they are probably doing this. They can also have demographic information tied to survey results, probably.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> A big reason they are probably doing this. They can also have demographic information tied to survey results, probably.



I hope so. It could make the surveys less annoying to do if they could retain information historically as being from a specific account. Though it does open them up to some data protection stuff if they do that. They're probably fine if they keep it securely and only keep it until 2024.


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## Scribe (Aug 21, 2022)

Haplo781 said:


> All the good ideas were shouted down by grognards, who are now vastly outnumbered by new players.



Leading to the most popular edition of the game, which sees continued growth 8 years after release?


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## Aldarc (Aug 21, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Agree totally but for me there's hope but also a lot of fear, because the Next playtest had tons of great stuff that got cut and a lot of this feels beautiful but vulnerable, and like a bunch of people who don't even get it are going to stomp all over it.
> 
> Hopefully not though.



My worry is that some of the materials in the playtest will be shouted down before they are properly playtested, in particular things like the auto-success/fail crits, monsters don't crit, etc. I'm worried about gut reactions that aren't that focused on the aims of the changes. 



Scribe said:


> Leading to the most popular edition of the game, which sees continued growth 8 years after release?



Because as we all know correlation is the same as causation, right?


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## Parmandur (Aug 21, 2022)

Aldarc said:


> My worry is that some of the materials in the playtest will be shouted down before they are properly playtested, in particular things like the auto-success/fail crits, monsters don't crit, etc. I'm worried about gut reactions that aren't that focused on the aims of the changes.
> 
> 
> Because as we all know correlation is the same as causation, right?



Well, the auto crit/fail is already a super common houserule, as they say, including crucially hiw Matt Mercer runs his game on Critical Role. Dollars to donuts most people taking the survey not only approve the change, but express confusion because they thought that's how it works already.


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## Scribe (Aug 21, 2022)

Aldarc said:


> Because as we all know correlation is the same as causation, right?



Nope, but if 'everything good' was shouted down, and its already crazy successful, am I to accept that everything shouted down was actually good, or perhaps there are reasons it wasnt included?


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## FitzTheRuke (Aug 21, 2022)

Alzrius said:


> I suspect I'm in a distinct minority here, but I can't help but wonder if part of the underlying issue is the idea that changes to the game are "improvements" as opposed to just being "changes."
> 
> I've been playing D&D for just shy of thirty years now, and from what I've seen, different editions are just that: different. Not better, not worse, just more in line with certain expectations and play-styles than others. 3E wasn't a "superior" game compared to 2E, 4E wasn't an "improvement" compared to 3E, 5E wasn't "better" than 4E, and One D&D won't be an "upgrade" to 5E.
> 
> Parsing it this way pushes divisiveness; I can understand wanting the game to better reflect your personal preferences and values, but that's not an indication that the new edition is necessarily an upgrade over how it used to be. It's just different.




While I don't think the overall thrust of what you're saying here is wrong (there is certainly good things about every edition, and each are _someone_'s favourite.) Every edition has had some things about them that nearly _everyone_ (from the original designers to the players & DMs) find just don't _quite_ work as intended. 

The trouble is, every time they iterate editions, they try a bunch of new stuff that fixes some of those issues and creates new ones. 

Again, I don't think it's possible to create something that's "perfect" (in particular because what that would look like is different in each player's eyes) - but the thing that I like about the _potential_ of 1D&D (obviously it could all go wrong) - is that this is the first time (or at least _feels_ like it) that the designers appear (to me) to (mostly) only be trying to fix things that are generally seen as not-quite-right and as much as possible make improvements only. 

YMMV and time will tell, obviously.


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## Parmandur (Aug 21, 2022)

FitzTheRuke said:


> Again, I don't think it's possible to create something that's "perfect" (in particular because what that would look like is different in each player's eyes) - but the thing that I like about the _potential_ of 1D&D (obviously it could all go wrong) - is that this is the first time (or at least _feels_ like it) that the designers appear (to me) to (mostly) only be trying to fix things that are generally seen as not-quite-right and as much as possible make improvements only.
> 
> YMMV and time will tell, obviously.



I think this is a big part of why they are being coy about being "beyond editions," because they are going for modest changes only.


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## FitzTheRuke (Aug 21, 2022)

schneeland said:


> Going back to the OP's statement: in a way it's true, but for me personally, the main difference is that I found the original D&D Next play material interesting (I didn't really participate in the test, but read some of it afterwards), because the goal of 5e to be a new, shared home for the D&D community no matter what edition they played resonated with me, as did the early 5e books. Now with late 5e and the direction WotC has taken, *it feels like the game is moving away from what I enjoy rather than towards it*. So the excitement is rather dimmed, and I suppose that I am more likely to enter late stage grognardism for D&D in the same way it happened with Shadowrun after the 3e->4I'e transition.
> (no reason to go sabotage the playtest surveys, though - there's clearly a lot of people enjoying 5e and 5.5e, so why not just let them have fun)



I have trouble understanding the bolded bit. First, because it really seems to me to be far to early to know what it will be like, and second because I don't see how any of the changes can change the way that anyone plays, but I admit that I generally like most of the changes so I might be seeing things through rose-coloured-darkvision.

I'm honestly very curious and don't plan to argue with you. Can you elaborate in what makes you feel that way?


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## Aldarc (Aug 21, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> Well, the auto crit/fail is already a super common houserule, as they say, including crucially hiw Matt Mercer runs his game on Critical Role. Dollars to donuts most people taking the survey not only approve the change, but express confusion because they thought that's how it works already.



Sure, but there is also a lot of pushback in these threads about this. Also, I have in mind things like spells not critical hitting. I suspect that many wizards and spellcaster players will pitch a fit about that regardless of whether that would make a better overall game. 



Scribe said:


> Nope, but if 'everything good' was shouted down, and its already crazy successful, am I to accept that everything shouted down was actually good, or perhaps there are reasons it wasnt included?



It seems like a pretty easy dodge as you can just point to anything changed and say that the change is good because 5e is successful. I don't think that pointing to 5e's success as a defense of every single change is necessarily a strong argument. It's basically a repackaged ad populum argument, and the reasons for why that sort of argumentation is crap has already been discussed elsewhere.


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## Parmandur (Aug 21, 2022)

Aldarc said:


> Sure, but there is also a lot of pushback in these threads about this. Also, I have in mind things like spells not critical hitting. I suspect that many wizards and spellcaster players will pitch a fit about that regardless of whether that would make a better overall game.



Hard to say based off of our chatter here. I've seen UA totally bomb in discussions here, but them get published unchanged because WotC says the reception in surveys was overwhelmingly positive (the new Hobgoblins and Kobolds, for example), while also seeing people get excited and happy here and the survey results were bad and the option never made it to print (Strixhaven Subclasses, recently). It's not exactly a reverse correlation, but I wouldn't put much stock in what we say here. I'm just using this discussion to form my own survey response, not assuming the discourse reflects the final results.


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## Scribe (Aug 21, 2022)

Aldarc said:


> It seems like a pretty easy dodge as you can just point to anything changed and say that the change is good because 5e is successful. I don't think that pointing to 5e's success as a defense of every single change is necessarily a strong argument. It's basically a repackaged ad populum argument, and the reasons for why that sort of argumentation is crap has already been discussed elsewhere.



There are many many many things I dont like about 5e, so please dont misunderstand me as thinking all things 5e are good.

All I'm saying, is that 'everything good' was shouted down, I find it far more likely that there is debate about those things being good, than 'everything good' was removed due to 'grogs'.


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## darjr (Aug 21, 2022)

I am excited as well. And I have advice.

If you want a chance to influence this otside the survey then playtest it and post concise bits about specific things. Play notes or livestreams are cool but just a ton of stuff to go through, but I bet they try.

Concise informed comments about specific things you found in actual live play testing are gold.

Show it to people that would have in interest in spreading the word.

Do not bombard the creators social media.

Good luck everyone!


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## darjr (Aug 21, 2022)

Oh and if you can’t play a session then use the materials and post about that. Make characters. Use old and new content. Build an encounter meant for these new rules in mind. Exercise these new rules in the other ways players interact with them.


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## darjr (Aug 21, 2022)

Oh and if you can contrast and compare with your prior play.


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## FitzTheRuke (Aug 21, 2022)

Scribe said:


> Nope, but if 'everything good' was shouted down, and its already crazy successful, am I to accept that everything shouted down was actually good, or perhaps there are reasons it wasnt included?



It's probably a stretch to say "everything good" was shouted down, but there were definitely some things that would have likely been better (the sorcerer comes to mind).

You are absolutely right that often people can be victims of "be careful what you wish for". 

For example, if it were entirely up to me, I'd make big sweeping changes (I'd make 6e for sure) to fix everything that I think could be better. Would it be a better game? IDK, but I am SURE that I would create the very problem I've been discussing here: I'd throw some babies out with the bathwater and create unforeseen new problems that would need to be fixed 5 years in. In other words, I'd be wrong to do so. 

Tweaking a few issues that many people agree (is it most people? IDK) are not great but leaving the bulk of 5e alone seems like a smarter bet to me. And it looks like the designers have that planned.


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## Parmandur (Aug 21, 2022)

FitzTheRuke said:


> It's probably a stretch to say "everything good" was shouted down, but there were definitely some things that would have likely been better (the sorcerer comes to mind).
> 
> You are absolutely right that often people can be victims of "be careful what you wish for".
> 
> ...



However it turns out, 1D&D will at least be the most considered version of D&D so far.


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## Micah Sweet (Aug 21, 2022)

Haplo781 said:


> All the good ideas were shouted down by grognards, who are now vastly outnumbered by new players.



You seem to be operating under the assumption that new ideas are inherently better than old ones.


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## Haplo781 (Aug 21, 2022)

Micah Sweet said:


> You seem to be operating under the assumption that new ideas are inherently better than old ones.



You seem to be attacking a straw man.


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## Micah Sweet (Aug 21, 2022)

Nickolaidas said:


> Well, just because I'll be happy with what they did with A doesn't mean I approve B. An interesting concept however. People changing for the sake of changing it, and not due to improvement's sake. Anti-traditionists.
> 
> I think of house rules like Skyrim mods. At the end of the day, everyone wants the game tailored to their tastes. It's universally impossible for WotC to make a single edition whose vanilla rules will satisfy absolutely everyone. For example, if I was older when me and my big brother played BECMI, there's no way in hell we wouldn't houserule the save or die rolls, which old TSR books were giving out like candy.
> 
> ...



I'm in favor of everyone just moving on to third party stuff if they decide WotC isn't for them.  I did, and it's the happiest I've ever been with 5e.


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## Corinnguard (Aug 21, 2022)

Micah Sweet said:


> I'm in favor of everyone just moving on to third party stuff if they decide WotC isn't for them.  I did, and it's the happiest I've ever been with 5e.



My suggestion would be to find someone who is really good at homebrewing stuff for 5e.   Check out GM Binder for it's 5e homebrews.


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## Scribe (Aug 21, 2022)

FitzTheRuke said:


> For example, if it were entirely up to me, I'd make big sweeping changes (I'd make 6e for sure) to fix everything that I think could be better. Would it be a better game? IDK, but I am SURE that I would create the very problem I've been discussing here: I'd throw some babies out with the bathwater and create unforeseen new problems that would need to be fixed 5 years in. In other words, I'd be wrong to do so.
> 
> Tweaking a few issues that many people agree (is it most people? IDK) are not great but leaving the bulk of 5e alone seems like a smarter bet to me. And it looks like the designers have that planned.



Absolutely agreed.

Could I make the game better for me with 6e? Sure. Would I risk it if I was in Wizards position? Heck no.


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## Sacrosanct (Aug 21, 2022)

Haplo781 said:


> All the good ideas were shouted down by grognards, who are now vastly outnumbered by new players.



Both claims in this statement are false, based only on your own biases and guesses.  I.e., what you may think is a good idea is hardly objective truth.

So unless you have some sort of evidence that shows it's the "grognards" who "shouted down" all of the good ideas, and have evidence that grognards somehow outnumbered everyone else and no longer do, I'm pretty sure your comment is false.  I think it's pretty obvious that "grognards" have always been in the minority post WotC era as a ratio of the player base.

Look.  WotC is a business.  The only thing they care about is getting the largest number of players as possible.  This is not catering to grognards.  It just isn't. The math doesn't hash out.  Just like the meteoric rise of 5e isn't due to all the grognards coming back into the game.  A whole lot of people who like 5e and came to the game never played TSR era edition games, and certainly aren't grognards.

With this new revision, WoTC is once again going to make a decision based on what will expand the game and maximize profits according to the data they have.  And make no mistake, WoTC has a lot more access to player demographics and preferences than you or I do, unless you have some special access to all of their survey results.  

No, what I think is much more likely is people _thinking _their preference is in the majority when it's not, and when their preference isn't put into the game, they want to blame someone else.  That's how your comment reads to me.


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## FitzTheRuke (Aug 21, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> Both claims in this statement are false, based only on your own biases and guesses.  I.e., what you may think is a good idea is hardly objective truth.
> 
> So unless you have some sort of evidence that shows it's the "grognards" who "shouted down" all of the good ideas, and have evidence that grognards somehow outnumbered everyone else and no longer do, I'm pretty sure your comment is false.  I think it's pretty obvious that "grognards" have always been in the minority post WotC era as a ratio of the player base.
> 
> ...



While your post is pretty clearly correct, I'm not sure there's much point in stomping on someone's statement of _feeling_ just because it's not _fact_. (It's just unkind, really).

I usually try to see through statements like that to what the poster is _actually saying_ (which seems likely to me to be something along the lines of "I liked some stuff from the NEXT playtest that didn't make it into 5e". Which is a pretty fair thing to say.

Sure, they could have said _that_ and it would have been _better_, but a lot of people just don't talk that way. At least not when their bristles are up.


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## James Gasik (Aug 21, 2022)

I guess it comes down to questions like, "who hated the playtest Sorcerer?" (as an example).  What group of playtesters took the surveys and consistently led WotC to create the PHB Sorcerer?

It couldn't be new players, because WotC had made sure new people would have a hard time jumping into 4e after taking down all the online content and the free character build, could it?

Was it disgruntled 4e players, wanting to make the new game fail out of spite?  Seems unlikely to me, since they'd want more of what they liked in 4e to survive.

Was it 3e players, who were either perfectly happy playing 3e or had moved onto Pathfinder?  If they were happy, why would they?

Was it OD&D players, who wouldn't have cared either way, having stuck to their preferred game for over a decade?

Honestly, none of these seem likely to me.  But WotC's goal was to get the expatriates and the people who complained loudest about 4e back into the fold, so these are the people who get the blame, rightly or wrongly, until the (never going to happen) day when WotC releases their playtest data.

Unless you're one of those people who puts the blame at WotC's feet themselves, wondering if the whole playtest was an exercise to retain hype for a game that's final shape was already far along in development...


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## Sacrosanct (Aug 21, 2022)

FitzTheRuke said:


> While your post is pretty clearly correct, I'm not sure there's much point in stomping on someone's statement of _feeling_ just because it's not _fact_. (It's just unkind, really).



As a grognard myself who they blamed for ruining the game, I think maybe this statement should have been more directed at them, who did the actual insulting and blaming, rather than the person pointing out the flaw in their argument.  Frankly, I'm getting pretty tired of always hearing that argument come up ("5e would have been better if the grognards didn't ruin it for the rest of us, who are actually the important demographic.")

"Grognards ruined the game for us!"
"No, they actually didn't."
"Don't be unkind to the person insulting other gamers by correcting them."


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

James Gasik said:


> I guess it comes down to questions like, "who hated the playtest Sorcerer?" (as an example). What group of playtesters took the surveys and consistently led WotC to create the PHB Sorcerer?



It is an interesting question. We can only guess, but my guess I think I'm fairly confident on. Response online to the playtest Sorcerer was more positive than to several other less-changed playtest classes, and whilst it could be misleading, I really doubt it's that misleading. So I think we have our culprits.

The "special thanks" group of playtesters.

So not any of the people in the open playtest, but the somewhat strange group of mostly-grogs, including a lot of avowed OSR players who indeed kept playing OSR games after 5E came out. These were people essentially hand-picked by Mike Mearls (to the point where he engaged in some very bad decision-making about one of them later), and a lot of them were people who essentially didn't even want 5E. That doesn't make their advice worthless, but it colours the hell out of it.

There were a bunch of other strange changes after the final open playtest, which seemed to be either completely unconnected to or fly in the face of what people had been (openly) saying about the playtest. Not least the much-discussed change from 3-4 to 6-8 encounters/day (and easier ones) as the default. That was a terrible match for both 3E and 4E, so it's unlikely to be veterans of those. Even in 1E/2E, days with 6-8 encounters would strongly be the exception not the norm. Only in dungeon-crawling OD&D and OSR games is that more normal. But I'm still unconvinced it was those.

So I'm guessing the "special thanks" group influenced a whole flurry of last minute changes. I definitely don't think WotC had already shaped 5E and was rubber-stamping it, because 5E, whilst a cool game, is in many ways a mess, and really seemed very unfinished - the 5E DMG is the most unfinished-seeming core D&D book I've seen from any edition, and not by a small margin.


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## Charlaquin (Aug 21, 2022)

James Gasik said:


> I guess it comes down to questions like, "who hated the playtest Sorcerer?" (as an example).  What group of playtesters took the surveys and consistently led WotC to create the PHB Sorcerer?



 I don’t think anybody did. Of course my experience was limited to forums which we know are not representative (though I think the WotC forums at the time were probably _more_ representative than most forums today). But I remember the general response being something along the lines of “this is a really cool class, but it doesn’t really feel like a sorcerer. I’d like it if this class got added later as its own  new thing instead of replacing the sorcerer in the PHB.” People were a lot more willing to let go of cool new ideas because of the promise of modularity that was never really fulfilled. In fact, I remember sentiments of “I love this idea, but it feels better suited to a modular add-on than the core rules” not just about the sorcerer, but about all kinds of things. Many of us were trying to find the most broadly accessible version of the core rules, under the impression that anything with more niche appeal would have another shot later, as a modular addition. What fools we were.


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## Charlaquin (Aug 21, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> It is an interesting question. We can only guess, but my guess I think I'm fairly confident on. Response online to the playtest Sorcerer was more positive than to several other less-changed playtest classes, and whilst it could be misleading, I really doubt it's that misleading. So I think we have our culprits.
> 
> The "special thanks" group of playtesters.
> 
> ...



Oh, absolutely! Some of the changes from the final playtest packet to the PHB were truly out of nowhere. Some things that had been consistent throughout the playtest (for example, race giving a +1, subrace giving a different +1, and class giving a third +1. Races granting a die size upgrade to damage with their traditional weapon types. Some stuff in the armor table, etc) were just suddenly different in the PHB for no clear reason.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 21, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> Oh, absolutely! Some of the changes from the final playtest packet to the PHB were truly out of nowhere. Some things that had been consistent throughout the playtest (for example, race giving a +1, subrace giving a different +1, and class giving a third +1. Races granting a die size upgrade to damage with their traditional weapon types. Some stuff in the armor table, etc) were just suddenly different in the PHB for no clear reason.



Oh yeah that was all pretty sexy. I'm pretty mad that dumped all that, especially as a lot of that stuff, like weapon die sizes and the three sources of stats, basically got _solely_ a positive response. And then suddenly we have something that looks like an attempt to compromise with a vastly more old-fashioned design? Hmmmm.


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## Levistus's_Leviathan (Aug 21, 2022)

Scribe said:


> Nope, but if 'everything good' was shouted down, and its already crazy successful, am I to accept that everything shouted down was actually good, or perhaps there are reasons it wasnt included?



Or the game could have been even more popular if those changes weren't shouted down. 

We don't know one way or the other. "What ifs" are pointless questions.


----------



## Levistus's_Leviathan (Aug 21, 2022)

Nickolaidas said:


> what does that mean for a setting like Dark Sun on 6E/D&D One?



Well, they restricted race options for Theros and Ravnica and background options for Strixhaven. It's certainly in the realm of possibility for them to at least restrict race options in Dark Sun. I don't know about classes, though.


----------



## Tales and Chronicles (Aug 21, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Oh yeah that was all pretty sexy. I'm pretty mad that dumped all that, especially as a lot of that stuff, like weapon die sizes and the three sources of stats, basically got _solely_ a positive response. And then suddenly we have something that looks like an attempt to compromise with a vastly more old-fashioned design? Hmmmm.



I guess its also no coincidence that the ''OSR consultants'' they asked for feedback were some of the nastiest of that crowd. Asking the opinion is all well and good if you go at it with an open mind, but if you specifically go with OSR influencers known for shooting down any ideas that werent theirs, its a pretty dumb idea. 

They could have gone with Jennell Jacquay (sp?), they could have asked any super prolific authors from the diversity empowering the OSR, but no, they went with...the RPGPundit and Zak S.


----------



## MoonSong (Aug 22, 2022)

HammerMan said:


> This is my fear too.  And the martial classes and Sorcere (we feel) is worse off for the playtest feed back.



Playtest feedback was positive for sorcerer. It just happened the designers were hellbent on getting rid of it and wasted their time attempting to do so.


----------



## Greg K (Aug 22, 2022)

With regards to the Sorcerer in the Next playtest, I didn't give positive feedback as I didn't like the subclasses, but I also do not particularly care for the 5e approach either (given the subclasses).


----------



## darjr (Aug 22, 2022)

I think I’m going back, back to near the beginning. Back to where the world broke.


----------



## MoonSong (Aug 22, 2022)

James Gasik said:


> I guess it comes down to questions like, "who hated the playtest Sorcerer?" (as an example). What group of playtesters took the surveys and consistently led WotC to create the PHB Sorcerer?



It wasn't that the playtest sorcerer was hated, but rather the base demanded spellpoints for wizards which back then were stuck with traditional vancian. The designers took a step back, gave neovancian to wizards and then they thought sorcerer wouldn't matter anymore and just by having a good wizard class they could call it a day and self-congratulate.They were so sure of themselves that even renamed wizard to mage because nobody would even want anything else. Then playtest feedback showed that no, not having sorcerer and warlock as their own classes wouldn't fly, but by then it was too late to playtest sorcerer and warlock and these classes had to be cobbled together at the eleventh hour with minimal private playtesting.


----------



## Charlaquin (Aug 22, 2022)

MoonSong said:


> It wasn't that the playtest sorcerer was hated, but rather the base demanded spellpoints for wizards which back then were stuck with traditional vancian. The designers took a step back, gave neovancian to wizards and then they thought sorcerer wouldn't matter anymore and just by having a good wizard class they could call it a day and self-congratulate.They were so sure of themselves that even renamed wizard to mage because nobody would even want anything else. Then playtest feedback showed that no, not having sorcerer and warlock as their own classes wouldn't fly, but by then it was too late to playtest sorcerer and warlock and these classes had to be cobbled together at the eleventh hour with minimal private playtesting.



This is not a very accurate summary. The warlock and the sorcerer that everyone likes showed up pretty early on in the playtest, and the Warlock in the PHB is really, really similar to the playtest Warlock. You can also see a lot of the PHB sorcerer’s DNA in the playtest sorcerer, but it lost its Gish elements and the concept of gaining more benefits as their Willpower (basically sorcery points) ran out. Which were the elements people pointed to as being cool, but not feeling very Sorcerer-like. And, yes, there was a brief period during the playtest where they experimented with the idea of having a Mage base class with Wizard, Sorcerer, and Warlock (and Psion) as subclasses, but that was very quickly shot down.


----------



## Haplo781 (Aug 22, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> As a grognard myself who they blamed for ruining the game, I think maybe this statement should have been more directed at them, who did the actual insulting and blaming, rather than the person pointing out the flaw in their argument.  Frankly, I'm getting pretty tired of always hearing that argument come up ("5e would have been better if the grognards didn't ruin it for the rest of us, who are actually the important demographic.")
> 
> "Grognards ruined the game for us!"
> "No, they actually didn't."
> "Don't be unkind to the person insulting other gamers by correcting them."



You sure are taking this personally. Maybe you should sit down, have a cup of tea, and come back when you're feeling a little bit less cranky.


----------



## Dannyalcatraz (Aug 22, 2022)

Haplo781 said:


> You sure are taking this personally. Maybe you should sit down, have a cup of tea, and come back when you're feeling a little bit less cranky.



*Mod Note:*

Perhaps you should have listened to the _other _mod using _other _red text in the _other _thread…for the _same_ issue.  You’ve earned a vacation. Come back when you can follow the rule about not making things personal.


----------



## Parmandur (Aug 22, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> Response online to the playtest Sorcerer was more positive than to several other less-changed playtest classes, and whilst it could be misleading, I really doubt it's that misleading.



I recall it being said that the surveys were telling WotC that forum discourse was close to the opposite of what their survey reception said. I really wouldn't trust any discussion in limited forum circles to reflect what WotC got in surveys. They got 7 figure response rates in the surveyea, and even dndnext today on Reddit is a fraction of that. Surely the number of people actively posting here at any time is a miniscule fraction, miniscule enough that wild swings from broader survey results would be expected.


----------



## Rikka66 (Aug 22, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> It's definitely notable that the dndnext subreddit has gradually declined in quality as people there have got more and more knee-jerk-y. It feels like a lot of open-minded new players from 2014/15/16 are ghastly junior grogs now. I mean, not surprising, really, 3.XE had that happen in the same time period. Some people were new to D&D entirely in say, 2000, and knee-jerk grogs with attitudes by 2007. And with videogames, particularly MMOs, grogification can often take less than five years, so yeah.
> 
> A particularly common and unfortunate pattern I've seen is that someone posts misinformation/a misunderstanding, but does so in a very bossy and confident way (even though it is the confidence of the stupid), then it gets upvoted and positively commented on by, frankly, a bunch of baaaing sheep (sorry but I dunno how else to put that), then someone corrects the misunderstanding within minutes, and whilst the correction will get upvoted (often more_ purely_ upvoted than than the misinformation), the misinformation will have like 2k votes and the correction will be on like 600, and sometimes not even the top response because someone who was blathering on about something semi-relevant got more upvotes recently.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Aug 22, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> I recall it being said that the surveys were telling WotC that forum discourse was close to the opposite of what their survey reception said.



I don't recall that being said by WotC, I recall that being a common claim by people who never sourced it. If you can find a source, I'll be very impressed, but otherwise, sorry, I don't believe it, because it's too convenient as thing they "could" have said.

I think there was a _specific_ survey (Mystic, maybe?) they said that about, but that's not the same thing as "surveys", let alone the main Next surveys.


Parmandur said:


> They got 7 figure response rates in the surveyea



Source?


Parmandur said:


> Surely the number of people actively posting here at any time is a miniscule fraction, miniscule enough that wild swings from broader survey results would be expected.



That's not necessarily the case. It's actually quite likely that this place is fairly representative of the people who actually take the time to fill in the surveys.

In any case, I don't for one second believe the last-minute changes to 5E from the last public playtest were survey-driven, because what they changed them to wasn't even stuff the surveys were asking about, and there's absolutely no possibility that "write in" answers caused those changes, because it would need like 100% of the people doing write-ins to be super-secret squirrels who don't post on the internet, just secretly answer extremely long and complex surveys and happen to write in the exact same stuff.


----------



## Reynard (Aug 22, 2022)

Corinnguard said:


> My suggestion would be to find someone who is really good at homebrewing stuff for 5e.   Check out GM Binder for it's 5e homebrews.



That's the same thing with worse editing.


----------



## Corinnguard (Aug 22, 2022)

Reynard said:


> That's the same thing with worse editing.



Not always. It all depends on the author of the PDF on GM Binder.


----------



## Sacrosanct (Aug 22, 2022)

Rikka66 said:


>



I was thinking about this yesterday.  Well, a slight variation anyways.  I was thinking, "Ah, now the 5e fans who came on board with 5e will start the same posts about betrayal and abandonment that 4e fans made when 5e came out, that 3e fans made when 4e came out, and what AD&D fans made in the early days on forums when 3e came out.  

Some things are assured lol.


----------



## HammerMan (Aug 22, 2022)

MoonSong said:


> Playtest feedback was positive for sorcerer. It just happened the designers were hellbent on getting rid of it and wasted their time attempting to do so.



Do we know this? Did the survey data ever get made public and I miss it?!?


----------



## Charlaquin (Aug 22, 2022)

HammerMan said:


> Do we know this? Did the survey data ever get made public and I miss it?!?



No. We have no idea what the survey feedback was like, we just know what people were saying online. The impression I got was of a largely positive reaction, but a feeling that it didn’t feel like a sorcerer. Whether or not that impression was aligned with the general survey response, only WotC knows.


----------



## Sacrosanct (Aug 22, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> No. We have no idea what the survey feedback was like, we just know what people were saying online. The impression I got was of a largely positive reaction, but a feeling that it didn’t feel like a sorcerer. Whether or not that impression was aligned with the general survey response, only WotC knows.



I remember a big divide as well.  Sorcerer is one of those classes where it appears there are at least two large groups that think what the sorcerer should be, and those are two completely different things.  I imagine the survey results were all over the place.

Whatever happens, the only thing I'm certain of, is that one of the large groups will be unhappy.


----------



## Charlaquin (Aug 22, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> I remember a big divide as well.  Sorcerer is one of those classes where it appears there are at least two large groups that think what the sorcerer should be, and those are two completely different things.  I imagine the survey results were all over the place.
> 
> Whatever happens, the only thing I'm certain of, is that one of the large groups will be unhappy.



The sorcerer is uniquely tricky because it’s defined almost entirely by how it contrasts the wizard. Wizards gain magic through careful study, sorcerers are born magical. Wizards have access to a lot of spells and have to prepare a subset of them, sorcerers have access to fewer spells but can cast them “spontaneously.” Further complicating this is the fact that “spontaneous casting” started out as pretty particular to 3e and how its casting system worked. So, translating that flexibility to 5e, with its casting system being more flexible at base is a particular challenge.


----------



## FitzTheRuke (Aug 22, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> As a grognard myself who they blamed for ruining the game, I think maybe this statement should have been more directed at them, who did the actual insulting and blaming, rather than the person pointing out the flaw in their argument.  Frankly, I'm getting pretty tired of always hearing that argument come up ("5e would have been better if the grognards didn't ruin it for the rest of us, who are actually the important demographic.")
> 
> "Grognards ruined the game for us!"
> "No, they actually didn't."
> "Don't be unkind to the person insulting other gamers by correcting them."



You self-identify as a grognard? That seems like a strange thing to do to me. Seems easier/healthier to assume that someone _isn't_ talking about you, rather than that they are, when they use that word.

But of course, you are perfectly within your rights to be tired of whatever arguments you like. I was more attempting to give friendly advice on how not to keep the vicious cycle of hate rolling. It wasn't my intention to shift any blame. It's everyone's responsibility to have civil discourse, myself included.

(I _do_ think it's interesting to note that you feel that your previous response boils down to "no they didn't". It's good to know that that was your intent, because it's not at all how the post came off to me).

EDIT to add: Oh, and my response to you should not have been read as "don't be unkind to the insulting guy" - I meant it more as "Protect yourself from being insulted" (I mean this post that way too!) along with a bit of "Why can't we all just get along?" Sorry if that was unclear.


----------



## UngeheuerLich (Aug 22, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> I was thinking about this yesterday.  Well, a slight variation anyways.  I was thinking, "Ah, now the 5e fans who came on board with 5e will start the same posts about betrayal and abandonment that 4e fans made when 5e came out, that 3e fans made when 4e came out, and what AD&D fans made in the early days on forums when 3e came out.
> 
> Some things are assured lol.




From what I see here, it is rather people who don't like 5e anyway, or at least since tasha came out who are annyoed by the changes...


----------



## Sacrosanct (Aug 22, 2022)

FitzTheRuke said:


> You self-identify as a grognard? That seems like a strange thing to do to me.



Why is that?  Grognards have been defined to include pretty much all older gamers who are fans of early TSR games.  Of which I am one.  Just because others insist on using it as a pejorative against others, doesn't mean it actually is one.   Your post is reading like someone would never willingly admit to being one, reaffirming that it's a bad thing to be one.  I don't know if that's your intent, but if so, it sort of reinforces my point.

As an aside, I don't think I'm a huge fan of the idea that the offended is in the wrong for being offended (including "why would you be one of _those _people?"), rather than the person doing the offending generalizations.


----------



## billd91 (Aug 22, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> Why is that?  Grognards have been defined to include pretty much all older gamers who are fans of early TSR games.  Of which I am one.  Just because others insist on using it as a pejorative against others, doesn't mean it actually is one.   Your post is reading like someone would never willingly admit to being one, reaffirming that it's a bad thing to be one.  I don't know if that's your intent, but if so, it sort of reinforces my point.



Yeah, I encountered grognard as a self-applied label indicating that the player had been around the block a few times and was kind of joking about their age in the hobby. I only really started to see people using it as a pejorative term during the 3e days.


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## Parmandur (Aug 22, 2022)

billd91 said:


> Yeah, I encountered grognard as a self-applied label indicating that the player had been around the block a few times and was kind of joking about their age in the hobby. I only really started to see people using it as a pejorative term during the 3e days.



I'm certainly no Grognard, but yeah, it was a badge of respect and honor in the Nepoleanic army which is what the OG Wargamers were referencing when they would grouse about new fangled trends in the hobby. It was always a self-deprecating joke.


----------



## payn (Aug 22, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> I'm certainly no Grognard, but yeah, it was a badge of respect and honor in the Nepoleanic army which is what the OG Wargamers were referencing when they would grouse about new fangled trends in the hobby. It was always a self-deprecating joke.



These self-deprecating jokes always have a tendency to become a weapon by folks who want to generalize.


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## Bill Zebub (Aug 22, 2022)

I’ve decided that it’s too complicated figuring out what I’m going to like, and what I won’t, and certainly it’s too much trouble to reserve judgment until I try it, so I’m going to simplify my life by hating everything about 5e, but also hating all the changes they make for 5.5.


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## Alzrius (Aug 22, 2022)

billd91 said:


> Yeah, I encountered grognard as a self-applied label indicating that the player had been around the block a few times and was kind of joking about their age in the hobby. I only really started to see people using it as a pejorative term during the 3e days.



I've seen it used both ways, though I prefer the former (since I, myself, am a grognard).

I just wish I knew how to properly pronounce the damn word. Is it "grog-nard" or "gron-yard"?


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 22, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> It was always a self-deprecating joke.



No it wasn't.

It was being used as both an insult and a self-identification all the way back into the 1990s, so don't give me that. The self-identification wasn't always self-deprecating either. Sometimes it was used to assert that they "knew better".


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## Parmandur (Aug 22, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> No it wasn't.
> 
> It was being used as both an insult and a self-identification all the way back into the 1990s, so don't give me that. The self-identification wasn't always self-deprecating either. Sometimes it was used to assert that they "knew better".



That's my understanding of how the term began in the 70's, from Grognards.


----------



## CleverNickName (Aug 22, 2022)

(Re: Title of the thread)

Huh.  I was just commenting in another thread about how this feels more like an extra-noisy _Unearthed Arcana_.

Isn't *every *_Unearthed Arcana _technically a "playtest"?  With a survey and everything?  This one has extra bells and whistles, but it doesn't feel all that different to me.  (Maybe I'm doing it wrong, though.)


----------



## Alzrius (Aug 22, 2022)

Rikka66 said:


>


----------



## payn (Aug 22, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> No it wasn't.
> 
> It was being used as both an insult and a self-identification all the way back into the 1990s, so don't give me that. The self-identification wasn't always self-deprecating either. Sometimes it was used to assert that they "knew better".



This seems to be the D&D interpretation.


Parmandur said:


> That's my understanding of how the term began in the 70's, from Grognards.



This seems to be the wargamer interpretation.


----------



## Ruin Explorer (Aug 22, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> That's my understanding of how the term began in the 70's, from Grognards.



I have the same understanding. But you said "It was always..." and my point is by even the 1990s that had changed, in RPGs (probably not in wargames). Which to me conflicts with "always" - rather I'd say "It started as X".


----------



## darjr (Aug 22, 2022)

CleverNickName said:


> (Re: Title of the thread)
> 
> Huh.  I was just commenting in another thread about how this feels more like an extra-noisy _Unearthed Arcana _and not a whole "playtest" thing.
> 
> Isn't *every *_Unearthed Arcana _technically a "playtest"?  With a survey and everything?  This one has extra bells and whistles, but it doesn't feel all that different to me.  (Maybe I'm doing it wrong, though.)



Yes. Always have been. Don’t let people convince you otherwise.

Edit:
They are all fully viable playtests. Always have been. Real tests that do cause changes.


----------



## Parmandur (Aug 22, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I have the same understanding. But you said "It was always..." and my point is by even the 1990s that had changed, in RPGs (probably not in wargames). Which to me conflicts with "always" - rather I'd say "It started as X".



Touché


----------



## Sabathius42 (Aug 22, 2022)

HammerMan said:


> But are those new players going to down load a playtest and fill out a survey?



Remember when psionics we're being okay tested and the psi die carient of classes was released? It gave psionics a niche mechanic different than the base PH classes. At the end of the day the psi die=psionics mechanic was dropped because "people dont want to learn new things".

Do you think the people that wanted to keep things simple were more likely to be new players or old ones?


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## Parmandur (Aug 22, 2022)

Sabathius42 said:


> Remember when psionics we're being okay tested and the psi die carient of classes was released? It gave psionics a niche mechanic different than the base PH classes. At the end of the day the psi die=psionics mechanic was dropped because "people dont want to learn new things".
> 
> Do you think the people that wanted to keep things simple were more likely to be new players or old ones?



Both.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 22, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> Both.



I'd concur with both. I don't think "not wanting to learn new things" is a legitimate objection to an optional system/class/race (like, don't use it then), but it's absolutely something both new and old players might express.


----------



## Parmandur (Aug 22, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I'd concur with both. I don't think "not wanting to learn new things" is a legitimate objection to an optional system/class/race (like, don't use it then), but it's absolutely something both new and old players might express.



I don't think it's a fair characterization of the high bar for justifying major new subsystems that WotC found among the playerbase, but it's not any sort of age based POV.


----------



## FitzTheRuke (Aug 22, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> Why is that?  Grognards have been defined to include pretty much all older gamers who are fans of early TSR games.  Of which I am one.  Just because others insist on using it as a pejorative against others, doesn't mean it actually is one.   Your post is reading like someone would never willingly admit to being one, reaffirming that it's a bad thing to be one.  I don't know if that's your intent, but if so, it sort of reinforces my point.
> 
> As an aside, I don't think I'm a huge fan of the idea that the offended is in the wrong for being offended (including "why would you be one of _those _people?"), rather than the person doing the offending generalizations.




No, you're right. I've only ever heard it used in a way that suggested that the word's very meaning was not speaking of old-school gamers, but _intolerant, gatekeepering_ old-school gamers. I had no idea that anyone thought of it as referring only to the former. (Earlier, it struck me as if someone spoke badly of a "neck-beard" and I got offended because I have a beard, so therefore they must be talking about me!)

 I stand corrected! You are a grognard! And that is okay! Good even!

I wouldn't say that I ever think that the offended is wrong for being offended! Not at all! No - it's that, while being offended, if you lash out at those who offended you (or worse, innocent bystanders) than how are you better than the first guy? (I am not saying that _you did this_, only that I felt you were in danger of coming close to it, hence my original comment.)

At any rate, as I said in the post that started this exchange - you were certainly right. (And now that I have more context for your feelings on the subject, likely  justified).


----------



## darjr (Aug 22, 2022)

darjr said:


> Yes. Always have been. Don’t let people convince you otherwise.
> 
> Edit:
> They are all fully viable playtests. Always have been. Real tests that do cause changes.



Ok I think I originally said the opposite of what I meant with how I quoted the previous message.

I think there is a real culture of play testing at WotC D&D that was instilled since the beginning of 5e. 

I think this playtest has more at stake, it seems too.


----------



## MoonSong (Aug 22, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> This is not a very accurate summary. The warlock and the sorcerer that everyone likes showed up pretty early on in the playtest, and the Warlock in the PHB is really, really similar to the playtest Warlock. You can also see a lot of the PHB sorcerer’s DNA in the playtest sorcerer, but it lost its Gish elements and the concept of gaining more benefits as their Willpower (basically sorcery points) ran out. Which were the elements people pointed to as being cool, but not feeling very Sorcerer-like. And, yes, there was a brief period during the playtest where they experimented with the idea of having a Mage base class with Wizard, Sorcerer, and Warlock (and Psion) as subclasses, but that was very quickly shot down.



Mearls teased a single Magic-User class as soon as they took warlock and sorcerer off the playtest. 






						Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (This Week in D&D)
					






					web.archive.org
				






> There is a chance that, based on your feedback, we might introduce an overall class category called magic-user that features wizard, sorcerer, and other options as choices beneath it. The nice thing about this approach is that we can create rules and flavor text that refer to magic-users as a group and that also allow individual campaigns to map that to the general category of character.




It wasn't a brief period, it was the intention all along. They kept moving forward until feedback late in the playtest forced them to backtrack.


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## Mind of tempest (Aug 22, 2022)

MoonSong said:


> Mearls teased a single Magic-User class as soon as they took warlock and sorcerer off the playtest.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



that sound in hindsight nuts


----------



## Charlaquin (Aug 22, 2022)

MoonSong said:


> Mearls teased a single Magic-User class as soon as they took warlock and sorcerer off the playtest.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



It’s possible I’m misremembering how long Mage as a parent class to Wizard went on in the playtest; I’ll double check my old files when I get home. But moreover, this article confirms exactly what I’ve been saying happened to the sorcerer.



	
		After looking at feedback on the sorcerer, I would not be surprised if we renamed the class, tweaked its flavor a bit, and brought a true warrior/mage class to the core of the game. A lot of people like the sorcerer, but a number of people commented that it made translating existing sorcerer characters difficult. Since our goal is to make conversion as easy as possible, that's a powerful argument for treating the concept we presented as a new class.
		
	


Exactly as I said. People liked the sorcerer, but didn’t like it _as the sorcerer_. They felt it was a cool design on its own, but was too different from previous iterations of the sorcerer and should be spun off into its own arcane gish class. But, as we all know, that never ended up happening.


----------



## Charlaquin (Aug 22, 2022)

Mind of tempest said:


> that sound in hindsight nuts



You’ve got to remember, they were promising a sort of build-your-own edition, where tables would be able to pick and choose rules modules to make the game feel the way they wanted it to. In that context, feedback like “this new sorcerer seems cool, but it’ll be too hard to port my 3.5 sorcerer to” made sense. Also, focusing on nailing the core 4 races and classes made sense, because in theory those would be the universal mechanics, whereas the rest would ostensibly be optional plug-ins.


----------



## MoonSong (Aug 22, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> It’s possible I’m misremembering how long Mage as a parent class to Wizard went on in the playtest; I’ll double check my old files when I get home. But moreover, this article confirms exactly what I’ve been saying happened to the sorcerer.



In the actual playtest documents, it lasted a short time -If I remember well, two packages-, but the design work seems to have emerged very early on. As early as the third package. 

The problem wasn't so much as the reception to the sorcerer, as the reception to the wizard floundering. In the hands of a good optimizer, and in the right context, pure vancian casting is powerful, but not very desirable. And at the time the premise was -one casting system, one class- with wizard getting stuck with pure vancian. Once the spellpoint using sorcerer emerged, people started demanding their wizard be allowed to use spellpoints too and their satisfaction with the wizard plummeted. This meant designers went all hands on deck with the wizard and put sorcerer in the back burner instead of iterating on the design to get to a compromise.


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## Charlaquin (Aug 23, 2022)

MoonSong said:


> In the actual playtest documents, it lasted a short time -If I remember well, two packages-, but the design work seems to have emerged very early on. As early as the third package.



Sure, but the design didn’t last long because nobody liked it. (Actually I think I was kinda into it at the time, because I was on the modularity hype train and I thought having the core 4 as the base classes with the other classes being subclasses of the core 4 was a good idea. Under the assumption that subclasses would be a great deal more mechanically significant than they ended up being. It’s probably for the best that I was in the minority on that).


MoonSong said:


> The problem wasn't so much as the reception to the sorcerer, as the reception to the wizard floundering. In the hands of a good optimizer, and in the right context, pure vancian casting is powerful, but not very desirable. And at the time the premise was -one casting system, one class- with wizard getting stuck with pure vancian. Once the spellpoint using sorcerer emerged, people started demanding their wizard be allowed to use spellpoints too and their satisfaction with the wizard plummeted. This meant designers went all hands on deck with the wizard and put sorcerer in the back burner instead of iterating on the design to get to a compromise.



This reads like speculation on your part. What the article _says_ is that the reception to the sorcerer and warlock was generally positive, but that feedback indicated that people wanted a unified casting system instead of each caster class having its own, and that people said the sorcerer would be difficult to convert existing characters to. You can actually see how that feedback directly lead to the sorcerer and warlock we ended up getting in the PHB. The warlock is fundamentally almost the same, with “patron favors” changed to a special kind of spell slot to tie in with the unified casting system. And the 5e draconic sorcerer does have some of the same abilities as the playtest sorcerer. What changed is that the sorcerer uses the unified casting system with sorcery points as a bonus instead of being the only way they cast, the subclass abilities being always-on instead of turning on as you sorcery point pool depletes, and worse weapon proficiencies. That all seems like direct responses to what the article says the feedback was.

Did the overall satisfaction with the Wizard drop when the sorcerer and warlock showed up? Yes. Is that why they decided to refocus on the core 4? Probably, at least in part. Was the satisfaction drop because wizard fans got jealous of the other class’ casting systems? Maybe; it at least seems like reasonable speculation. Is any of the above the reason the sorcerer changed the way it did? I don’t know, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to me.


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## MoonSong (Aug 23, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> Sure, but the design didn’t last long because nobody liked it. (Actually I think I was kinda into it at the time, because I was on the modularity hype train and I thought having the core 4 as the base classes with the other classes being subclasses of the core 4 was a good idea. Under the assumption that subclasses would be a great deal more mechanically significant than they ended up being. It’s probably for the best that I was in the minority on that).
> 
> This reads like speculation on your part. What the article _says_ is that the reception to the sorcerer and warlock was generally positive, but that feedback indicated that people wanted a unified casting system instead of each caster class having its own, and that people said the sorcerer would be difficult to convert existing characters to. You can actually see how that feedback directly lead to the sorcerer and warlock we ended up getting in the PHB. The warlock is fundamentally almost the same, with “patron favors” changed to a special kind of spell slot to tie in with the unified casting system. And the 5e draconic sorcerer does have some of the same abilities as the playtest sorcerer. What changed is that the sorcerer uses the unified casting system with sorcery points as a bonus instead of being the only way they cast, the subclass abilities being always-on instead of turning on as you sorcery point pool depletes, and worse weapon proficiencies. That all seems like direct responses to what the article says the feedback was.
> 
> Did the overall satisfaction with the Wizard drop when the sorcerer and warlock showed up? Yes. Is that why they decided to refocus on the core 4? Probably, at least in part. Was the satisfaction drop because wizard fans got jealous of the other class’ casting systems? Maybe; it at least seems like reasonable speculation. Is any of the above the reason the sorcerer changed the way it did? I don’t know, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to me.



Mearls said basically that in a different article. Something like "We will retire warlcok and sorcerer until we get wizard well". I've closed wayback machine already, and I don't feel like browsing the L&L archive again, I'll look for it tomorrow.


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## Charlaquin (Aug 23, 2022)

MoonSong said:


> Mearls said basically that in a different article. Something like "We will retire warlcok and sorcerer until we get wizard well". I've closed wayback machine already, and I don't feel like browsing the L&L archive again, I'll look for it tomorrow.



I mean, he said it in the article you linked. I don’t think that means their work on the Wizard was what resulted in the changes to the sorcerer from the playtest though.


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## FitzTheRuke (Aug 23, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> Sure, but the design didn’t last long because nobody liked it. (Actually I think I was kinda into it at the time, because I was on the modularity hype train and I thought having the core 4 as the base classes with the other classes being subclasses of the core 4 was a good idea. Under the assumption that subclasses would be a great deal more mechanically significant than they ended up being. It’s probably for the best that I was in the minority on that).



I liked it too, but it would have necessitated Subclasses to be a much bigger thing than they became. (Which I still think would have been good for the game, but we can't know for sure).


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## TerraDave (Aug 23, 2022)

I am such a grognard. But neck-beard, those are fighting words!

Wait, what was this thread about again?


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## Charlaquin (Aug 23, 2022)

FitzTheRuke said:


> I liked it too, but it would have necessitated Subclasses to be a much bigger thing than they became. (Which I still think would have been good for the game, but we can't know for sure).



Yeah, I mean in theory I think having the core 4 as the base classes (which would be a bit broader than classes are in 5e), other classes as subclasses (which would be akin to classes in 5e), and maybe a third, smaller choice like kits filling in the role subclasses do in 5e would be a great design. But 5e went in a different direction. Such is life.


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## Aldarc (Aug 23, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> Yeah, I mean in theory I think having the core 4 as the base classes (which would be a bit broader than classes are in 5e), other classes as subclasses (which would be akin to classes in 5e), and maybe a third, smaller choice like kits filling in the role subclasses do in 5e would be a great design. But 5e went in a different direction. Such is life.



But it would be a great opportunity for a 3rd party publisher.


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## Ruin Explorer (Aug 23, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> Yeah, I mean in theory I think having the core 4 as the base classes (which would be a bit broader than classes are in 5e), other classes as subclasses (which would be akin to classes in 5e), and maybe a third, smaller choice like kits filling in the role subclasses do in 5e would be a great design. But 5e went in a different direction. Such is life.



I don't think that approach would have had the popularity 5E has had. I think part of what makes D&D accessible and popular is the relative immediacy and specificity of the classes. If anything the delay of subclasses to L3 is a mistake in 5E, as even most new players know what subclass they want from L1 onwards.

I mean, I think would probably have worked better mechanically, and likely ended up hewing closer to 4E's roles, but I don't think it would have been as popular.


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## Charlaquin (Aug 23, 2022)

Ruin Explorer said:


> I don't think that approach would have had the popularity 5E has had. I think part of what makes D&D accessible and popular is the relative immediacy and specificity of the classes. If anything the delay of subclasses to L3 is a mistake in 5E, as even most new players know what subclass they want from L1 onwards.
> 
> I mean, I think would probably have worked better mechanically, and likely ended up hewing closer to 4E's roles, but I don't think it would have been as popular.



You’re probably right. But I’ll take better-working mechanics over popularity any day.


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## Bill Zebub (Aug 24, 2022)

Charlaquin said:


> You’re probably right. But I’ll take better-working mechanics over popularity any day.




I dunno, I kind of like how D&D has had such a huge resurgence. It’s easier to find new players. I’m skeptical we would have as much excellent 3rd party content if D&D were still as (un)popular as it was in 2014. And I suspect other games have benefitted from spillover. 

Is that due to the class structure? I don’t know. Probably not. But I wouldn’t knock popularity.


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## Charlaquin (Aug 24, 2022)

Bill Zebub said:


> I dunno, I kind of like how D&D has had such a huge resurgence. It’s easier to find new players. I’m skeptical we would have as much excellent 3rd party content if D&D were still as (un)popular as it was in 2014. And I suspect other games have benefitted from spillover.
> 
> Is that due to the class structure? I don’t know. Probably not. But I wouldn’t knock popularity.



I’m not knocking popularity, it’s just a lower priority for me than quality. Give me CJ the X over Mr. Beast, every time.


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## MonsterEnvy (Aug 24, 2022)

HammerMan said:


> But are those new players going to down load a playtest and fill out a survey?



As long as they see the survey they should fill it out. Like I bet if Critical Roll advertised the Playtest nearly half the audience would fill out the survey.


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## MonsterEnvy (Aug 24, 2022)

edit nah I am Making it too personal.


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## MonsterEnvy (Aug 24, 2022)

Sabathius42 said:


> Remember when psionics we're being okay tested and the psi die carient of classes was released? It gave psionics a niche mechanic different than the base PH classes. At the end of the day the psi die=psionics mechanic was dropped because "people dont want to learn new things".
> 
> Do you think the people that wanted to keep things simple were more likely to be new players or old ones?



I am still sad about the Psi Die going away. I thought it and the feats and mechanics connected to it were really cool.


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