New Playtest Survey going out

[The Choice]

Compared to the despicable survey we got for spells, this one felt a lot more complete. Still, it's obvious the designers have no clear way forward with this game as they are still stuck with the idea of designing for "feel".

I just hope that, like the game (which is thankfully still 2 years away, giving the R&D team plenty of time to turn this thing around), we get more substance in the next few surveys, questions that actually allow us to give feedback on their stated design goals.

 

[jsaving]

The cleric is mostly good, but an option for non-Vancian casting needs to exist.

In my version of the playtest rules, clerics don't do Vancian casting. They choose which spells to memorize but don't have to put them in specific slots, which basically makes them a 3e sorcerer with super-fast spell swapping. Unless there's an update that I missed at some point?

I definitely think the skill list needs to be trimmed and some like skills need to be combined. There is NO good reason for 13 different lore skills.

Lore skills are certainly looking like the new "+2/+2" skills at this point -- useless appendages that eat up rulebook space without adding any value. Certainly the game should never put somebody in a position where they have to give up another skill in order to take it. I'd be inclined to just give people training in one lore skill per point of their INT bonus, kind of like how older editions used to handle bonus languages, or maybe a general "lore" skill that signifies knowledge about everything (just as a classically educated college graduate would be expected to know a wide variety of things).

I did make a call for a Warlord class, since non-magical healing is great, and I hope they work on one.

I agree that the warlord is a nice idea but would like to see them enter 5e as a theme rather than a class. There's no need to fill in every box on the power/role grid and it'd be interesting to see how a fighter warlord would play vis-a-vis a rogue or wizard warlord, for example.