D&D (2024) It feels so much like the D&D Next playtest did

[Yaarel]

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.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Agree with OP. I find this exciting.

 

[payn]

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.

 

[Asisreo]

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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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.

 

[Haplo781]

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.

 

[schneeland]

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)

 

[Parmandur]

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."

 

[Haplo781]

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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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).