Second 5th Edition Survey! Plus Results of the First Survey: The Ranger Gets Some Attention!

A new survey is up on the official D&D website. It looks like its covering the classes not in the last survey and the recent Eberron material. WotC also reports on what was learned from the last survey. "For our second survey, we’re focused on the final six classes in the game and the Eberron material that we rolled out in last month’s Unearthed Arcana. If you haven’t looked at that article and want to provide feedback, read it over and come back to the survey later. Even if you don’t have a chance to use the Eberron material in your game, your reactions to it are helpful. You can also skip over the Eberron questions if you don’t want to give feedback on that material."

Here's the overall feedback from the first survey:

"So, what did we learn from our last survey? Let’s take a look at some trends:

To start with, there are a lot of you. We had more people respond to this survey than any of our playtest surveys. A lot of people are into D&D these days!

There are a lot of new players and DMs out there. Welcome to D&D!

You are playing the game in droves. Only about 10 percent of you have read the books without yet playing.

Your campaigns are just getting started. Most of you are playing at 6th level and below.

You love the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and we’re overjoyed to be able to write that. The overall assessment was incredibly positive, surpassing our results from the playtest by a significant margin."
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The ranger, in particular, is getting some focus:

"To start with, a majority of players and Dungeon Masters are happy with the ranger overall. The game as a whole is grading well, so we don’t want to make a huge, sudden change to that class. But taking a deeper dive into the ranger, we can see that favored enemy and the beast master archetype received the lowest ratings. Our next step is to take a closer look at why that is.

We’ll start with an internal assessment mixed with feedback from our closed circle of testers. From there, we’ll work up some options and present them to you, most likely in the Unearthed Arcana column. That process allows us to determine if the track we’re on answers your concerns with the class.

The critical step is making sure that any changes we make genuinely improve the class. Remember, plenty of people are happy with the ranger, so any changes need to cover a number of options:

People who like the ranger as it is can simply keep playing their current characters.

People who don’t like the ranger should feel as though the new options allow them to play the ranger they want to create.

The new options are exactly that—new choices for ranger players to select from, as opposed to a rewrite of the Player’s Handbook.

DMs should always feel that they can take or leave the new options, just like any other material in the game beyond the Basic Rules."
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Hop on over here to take the new survey!

 

[vongarr]

The "blue-collar" thing strikes me as a very thin reed on which to hang the artificer's hat (though a good spoon to mix metaphors with). First of all, blue-collar versus white-collar is a question of background, not class. Second, a PC wizard is no ivory-tower philosopher. They're out there in the muck, slogging through dungeons and battling monsters right alongside the fighters and rogues, and that continues far up the level range. In 3E, a high-level wizard could scry'n'die everything, then retreat to his or her extraplanar fortress for tea and crumpets. That doesn't work in 5E--you just don't have the spell slots, and some of the key spells are much less reliable. There ain't no greater teleport in 5E. Even if you manage to pull off a scry'n'die attack, you better be prepared to camp out at the target location afterward. More likely, you'll have to infiltrate the enemy stronghold on foot like anyone else. NPC wizards may sit in their towers watching the stars, but PC wizards are hard-bitten mercenaries, explorers, and tomb robbers.

So, what's that leave? Trapfinding and lockpicking, which in 5E mostly comes down to "Expertise in thieves' tools." That's hardly a basis for picking a whole class full of features (Sneak Attack, Evasion, Uncanny Dodge, et cetera, et cetera) that don't match the artificer at all.

The best approach IMO would be to go through the class spell lists and see whose spells best approximate what artificers do. Then make a heavily modified version of that class for the artificer... that is, if the artificer simply can't be made into its own class.

When you say background, I reckon you mean it in the sense of 5e and it's associated backgrounds? Not in the real world sense?

If that is the case, then I would agree. Blue collar can be a function of background, but it is certainly also a function of class. Applying modern concepts to fantastical or historical concepts is often a fools enterprise, so I'm not going to try and say a Paladin is white collar while a Rogue is blue. At the end of the day they are both crawling through mud and guts. The distinction is one of approach and of motivation.

I'm ultimately arguing a series of finer and finer points that all have to do with "feels" and I would contend that looking at what the original Artificer had in 3.5, and if you were to apply these concepts to a 5e class, it would be relatively clear that these share more with a Rogue than a Wizard.

 

[vongarr]

Aesthetic isn't a great basis for a class in 5e. Any one class fits multiple aesthetics. I can be a "blue collar" wizard quite easily, even at high levels. I can be a "blue collar warlock" or a "blue collar shadow monk" or "blue collar paladin," too. Aesthetic isn't a matter of class, it's a matter of role-playing. There's no class feature one can point at and say "this is a working-class mechanic." "Feel" isn't something a class feature can give you.

Every single class feature has a feel.