D&D 5E Unearthed Arcana: Giants survey is up

[darjr]

D&D UA Survey 61 (Giant Options)

D&D UA Survey 61 (Giant Options).

survey.alchemer.com

The UA content and a thread about it can be found here

D&D 5E - New Unearthed Arcana Today: Giant Themed Class Options and Feats

A new Unearthed Arcana dropped today, focusing on giant-themed player options. "In today’s Unearthed Arcana, we explore character options related to the magic and majesty of giants. This playtest document presents the Path of the Giant barbarian subclass, the Circle of the Primeval druid...

www.enworld.org

 

[Parmandur]

I gave them good marks, called for Giant Sorcerers and Rune Artificers, praised the Feats and advocated for the Background bonus Feat system, and called for Large PC Races, like Ogres.

 

[kapars]

I praised the Barbarian and begged that it not be nerfed to irrelevance, said that the Druid sub-class needed a gooder dinosaur, flagged the Rune Wizard as not being all that Runic. The feats are OK but shouldn’t have level requirements if Fey Touched doesn’t. The Rune one and the Mighty one should be background feats. The latter Rune feat scales too strong. I asked (this is pitiful) that they put a green box sidebar saying Four Elements Monks get Elemental touched instead of Elemental Affinity in whatever the setting is. I concluded by asking for a feat / variant feature for turning hit dice into Ki and asked on a whim for a Swordmaster feat that allows half-swording, pommel strikes and doing that fast draw and strike samurai thing (maybe not in the same feat)

 

[Charlaquin]

That was fast. I can’t imagine many people have done more than a couple sessions of testing with those options since the article came out.

 

[Kurotowa]

That was fast. I can’t imagine many people have done more than a couple sessions of testing with those options since the article came out.

At this point it's rather clear that UA is primarily a marketing survey, not an open source playtest. The real playtests are done under far closer supervision so they can weed out the junk data better. That's why the survey asks "Do you want to play this?" and not "Do you think this is balanced?"

 

[overgeeked]

That was fast. I can’t imagine many people have done more than a couple sessions of testing with those options since the article came out.

Makes you wonder if they actually want / think anyone’s playtesting this stuff.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Makes you wonder if they actually want / think anyone’s playtesting this stuff.

I'm sure they already know the answer to that question by now. For the past year or so they've been asking "have you playtested this option" in all of the UA Surveys.

 

[Parmandur]

That was fast. I can’t imagine many people have done more than a couple sessions of testing with those options since the article came out.

It's always about 1-2 weeks to allow people to form a basic inpression.

At this point it's rather clear that UA is primarily a marketing survey, not an open source playtest. The real playtests are done under far closer supervision so they can weed out the junk data better. That's why the survey asks "Do you want to play this?" and not "Do you think this is balanced?"

They've been pretty clear about stating this for years, yup. UA was never about hard numbers playtesting, but about avoiding options that nobody really wanted (like happened with 3E and 4E supplements pretty frequently).

Makes you wonder if they actually want / think anyone’s playtesting this stuff.

These are impressions tests, not hard playtests. They have an internal utesting network to run the hard numbers.

 

[JEB]

Sidenote: It occurs to me that Wizards probably has a pretty strong idea by now of what editions their current players started with, and how those demographics have changed over time. They ask about it in pretty much every survey. Would be neat if they shared that information with us.

 

[overgeeked]

I'm sure they already know the answer to that question by now. For the past year or so they've been asking "have you playtested this option" in all of the UA Surveys.

...because everyone always tells the truth all the time in surveys?...or something.