D&D 5E Final playtest packet due in mid September.

[Jester David]

They have a closed playtest for fine-tuning. Each release for the open playtest has significant overhead; just sifting through all the responses has got to be a major chore. Trying to get information on a million fiddly balance details via open playtest would be next to impossible.

Internal playtests miss things. They miss a lot.
The changes between 3.0 and 3.5 or Classic 4e and Essentials highlight how hard it is to catch all the problems the first time round. Especially when you're designing as you go.

There are lots of middle ground approaches between the small friends and family playtest and the full open beta.
They could move away from the surveys and tap the community, using forums to gather feedback and appointing trusted forum folk to read through and point out important threads or problems that keep coming up.
Or they could keep using the surveys but put the feedback through a tag cloud to check for patterns or anomalies. Or just tap interns to skim the documents.
They could expand the friends and family playtest, opening it up a little more.

Regardless, one of the stated goals of the edition was to unite the fanbase and make a game that has multiple playstyles. But the playtest focused on an old school/ Basic D&D type game. While WotC seems happy with the results of that, they've done nothing to attract modern gamers, and have only pushed away 4e fans.
If we don't see a playtest of the modules then many fans might just spend the next year finding new games and forgetting about D&D or WotC might release a tactical module that doesn't satisfy the needs or playstyle of that community.

 

[Warbringer]

I think Advanced D&D is at least a year behind. We will have Basic and Core in some combination for Gen Con and Hoilday Season next year, concept releasing starting next summer via Online subscription along the lines "try this in your game" then some form on thematic release series (mini books? A $19.95) for we rules, monsters, advanced ideas...

I think in that timeframe we also get an advanced tactical module, notat release.

All IMHO of course....

 

[Gundark]

I am the editor of the Tome Show - there is no announced timeline on that show. Unless Morrus has some insider information, I think it's just a mis-speak.

Beat me to the punch

 

[Ratskinner]

There is certain methodological problem with doing surveys o so long as you get mostly positive results. Let me ilustrate.

<snip illustration>

Disclaimer: I dropped form the surveys after third playtest not liking what I see. So I basically ilustruate the problem as well.

IIRC, I believe we've been told that playtester numbers actually increased through the first round or two (my memory fails after that and I couldn't find the link). Additionally, I really don't think that ENworld posters are actually very representative of the broader D&D audience. While its very seductive to think that a large forum site is representative, its really subject to quite steep selection bias. So even if something happens quite broadly here, it may have no relationship to what's going on in a the D&D audience as a whole. Of course, the playtest distribution methods are subject to their own biases as well! But I don't have any information on what steps (if any) Wizards or any research consultants they hired, took to account for that bias.

 

[Ratskinner]

Regardless, one of the stated goals of the edition was to unite the fanbase and make a game that has multiple playstyles. But the playtest focused on an old school/ Basic D&D type game.

The OSR folks I play with would strenuously disagree. Of course, I disagree with them. In any case, I don't think any strong partisans of any edition are particularly overjoyed with 5e. (For D&D, I like it well enough so far.)

On the other hand. Almost everyone I've talked with in person about the playtest materials has given them a solid "meh, I like this part". Whether that is enough for 5e to succeed....I dunno. For most games, I'd say no, but D&D exerts a strong gravitational pull (or repulsion) across the gaming community. So maybe being a system that a large swath of D&Ders could tolerate but not love could be enough to start getting people back together. I would again emphasize that those of us who post on message boards, and have such strong passions about rpgs and D&D in particular are not especially representative of the gaming public at large, who seem much more system-agnostic. And who knows, maybe the modules will even let you play it in a way that you will love.

 

[Dausuul]

Internal playtests miss things. They miss a lot.
The changes between 3.0 and 3.5 or Classic 4e and Essentials highlight how hard it is to catch all the problems the first time round. Especially when you're designing as you go.

It is impossible to catch all the problems the first time round. No edition has ever done it and no edition ever will. 3E had a huge open playtest and it still released with a bunch of problems. 5E will be the same.

Certainly they could always gather more information from more open playtests. But there is a substantial cost to each iteration of the open playtest. They have to decide what questions they want answered in this playtest, what mechanics should go in and what should be kept out in order to avoid clouding the answers, and how to ask the questions in a way that will yield the desired information. The playtest documents have to be put together, edited, and formatted. The surveys have to be designed. And then the results must be processed and analyzed and summed up into some useful form. All that is a lot of work! So it's only worth doing it for big questions that will shape the direction of the design.

For smaller balance-and-polish concerns, you need a much faster feedback cycle. You start to think wizards aren't doing enough damage with blasting spells. So you tweak spell damage upward. Now you need to find out if that was enough, or too much, or too little, or perhaps the real problem is a certain class of monsters with overly high Dexterity scores and you should be fixing that instead. There's a lot of back and forth here, far too much for the open playtest.

Regardless, one of the stated goals of the edition was to unite the fanbase and make a game that has multiple playstyles. But the playtest focused on an old school/ Basic D&D type game. While WotC seems happy with the results of that, they've done nothing to attract modern gamers, and have only pushed away 4e fans.
If we don't see a playtest of the modules then many fans might just spend the next year finding new games and forgetting about D&D or WotC might release a tactical module that doesn't satisfy the needs or playstyle of that community.

I'm curious how you know that 5E is not attracting "modern gamers" (whatever that means) and that it's "only pushed away" 4E fans.

 

[Ratskinner]

I think Advanced D&D is at least a year behind. We will have Basic and Core in some combination for Gen Con and Hoilday Season next year, concept releasing starting next summer via Online subscription along the lines "try this in your game" then some form on thematic release series (mini books? A $19.95) for we rules, monsters, advanced ideas...

I think in that timeframe we also get an advanced tactical module, notat release.

All IMHO of course....

I can't say I'd be terribly surprised. It would be a big shift (or miss) of goals for them, since I seem to recall "play like any edition, out of the box" was something they wanted pretty badly. I have no idea what effect that would have on the playerbase.

 

[jodyjohnson]

It is impossible to catch all the problems the first time round. ... 3E had a huge open playtest

???

I suppose you could consider 3.0 a huge open playtest of 3.5. Roughly.


I think the main issue is a lot of the "problems" are actually playstyle preferences. So far usually each edition has focused primarily on a certain playstyle preference.

 

[Ratskinner]

I think the main issue is a lot of the "problems" are actually playstyle preferences. So far usually each edition has focused primarily on a certain playstyle preference.

hmm...I agree with you for the recent editions. Especially as awareness of playstyles has grown, and people seem much more adherent to the rules as written nowadays. I mean, nowadays we talk of playstyle difference, when back in the day it was just "That guy is a jerk."

The earlier editions were (just by nature of being first-of-a-kind, IMO) rather jumbles of things-that-would-later-become-elements-of-playstyle. Even when AD&D thought it was shooting for something, it often missed. Not to mention the trainwreck of unclear, overlapping, and diverse mechanics. Yet somehow it is still beloved by so many.

::shrug:: People, go figure.

 

[Dausuul]

???

I suppose you could consider 3.0 a huge open playtest of 3.5. Roughly.

And if you did consider it so... did that playtest catch all the problems?