D&D (2024) WotC On One D&D Playtest Survey Results: Nearly Everything Scored 80%+!

In a 40-minute video, WotC's Jeremy Crawford discussed the survey feedback to the 'Character Origins' playtest document. Over 40,000 engaged with the survey, and 39,000 completed it. I've summarised the content of the video below.

High Scorers

• The highest scoring thing with almost 90% was getting a first level feat in your background. This is an example of an experimental thing -- like advantage and disadvantage in the original 5E playtests.
• Almost everything also scored 80%+.

About The Scoring System

• 70% or higher is their passing grade. In the 70s is a thumbs up but tinkering need. 80% means the community wants exactly that and WotC treads carefully not to change it too much.
• In the 60s it's salvageable but it really needs reworking. Below 60% means that there's a good chance they'll drop it, and in the 40s or below it's gone. Nothing was in the 50s or below.

Low Scorers

Only 3 things dipped into the 60s --

• the d20 Test rule in the Rules Glossary (experimental, no surprise)
• the ardling
• the dragonborn

The next UA had a different version of the d20 Test rule, and they expect a very different score when those survey resuts come in.

It was surprising that the dragonborn scored lower than the ardling. The next UA will include new versions of both. The main complaints were:

• the dragonborn's breath weapon, and confusion between the relationship between that dragonborn and the one in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons.
• the ardling was trying to do too much (aasimar-like and beast-person).

The ardling does not replace the aasimar. The next version will have a clearer identity.

Everything else scored in the 70s or 80s.

Some more scores:

• new human 83%
• dwarf, orc, tiefling, elf tied at 80-81%
• gnome, halfling tied at 78%

Future installments of Unearthed Arcana

• The next one will have new ardling and dragonborn, a surprise 'guest', and a new cleric. It will be a shorter document than the previous ones, and the one after that is bigger again. Various class groups.
• Warrior group digs into something teased in a previous UA sidebar -- new weapon options for certain types of characters. Whole new ways to use weapons.
• New rules on managing your character's home base. A new subsystem. Create bases with NPCs connected with them, implementing downtime rules. They're calling it the "Bastion System".
• There will be a total of 48 subclasses in the playtest process.
• New encounter building rules, monster customization options.
• New versions of things which appear in the playtest after feedback.

Other Notes

• Playtests are a version of something with the assumption that if something isn't in the playtest, it's still in the game (eg eldritch blast has not been removed from the game). The mage Unearthed Arcana will feature that.
• Use an object and other actions are still as defined in the current Player's Handbook. The playtest material is stuff that has changed.
• Thief subclass's cunning action does not interact with use an object; this is intentional. Removed because the original version is a 'Mother may I?" mechanic - something that only works if the DM cooperates with you. In general mechanics which require DM permission are unsatisfying. The use an object action might go away, but that decision will be a made via the playtest process.
• The ranger's 1st-level features also relied too heavily on DM buy-in, also wild magic will be addressed.
• If you have a class feature you should be able to use it in the way you expect.
• If something is removed from the game, they will say so.
• Great Weapon Fighting and Sharpshooter were changed because the penalty to the attack roll was not big enough to justify the damage bonus, plus they want warrior classes to be able to rely on their class features (including new weapon options) for main damage output. They don't want any feats to feel mandatory to deal satisfying damage. Feats which are 'must haves' violate their design goals.
• Light Weapon property amped up by removing the bonus action requirement because requiring light weapon users to use their bonus action meant there were a lot of bad combinations with features and spells which require bonus actions. It felt like a tax on light weapon use.
• Class spell lists are still an open question. Focus on getting used to the three big spell lists. Feedback was that it would be nice to still have a class list to summarize what can be picked from the 'master lists'. For the bard that would be useful, for the cleric and wizard not necessary as they can choose from the whole divine or arcane list.

The playtest process will continue for a year.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Like I said in an earlier thread:


I maintain that the final draft is already written, and that these "survey results" are more about generating buzz and excitement than actually getting feedback.

Well, all you need to do is remember what the game looked like after these first couple of playtest packets and if the book in 2024 has nothing new that didn't originate here and this point in time... then you can say you were right and that their "final draft" was already written.

Of course... if the new books have all kinds of stuff that had gone through two, three, four iterations in the various playtest packets over the intervening 15 months... then we all know you're just being frosty right now. Let's see how the Ardlings look when the book gets produced in 2024 and we'll be able to see if they aren't using the playtest results for anything more than marketing. LOL.

 

[Minigiant]

so they would be in the same boat we were in back in the beginning days? Have you seen the 1st edition DMG/PH books? (see bold above).

Don't underestimate the group of all noobs, I bet they are having fun just like we did.

You are missing the main difference.
It's not 1975 and D&D isn't targeting just a small fandom who mostly think the same.

D&D is almost 50 years old, targets all demos, and has a lot more inspirations.
In 1975 your D&D could be coming from maybe ~6 mindsets. Roll the d6.
It's 2022, it's a crapshoot. You're rolling a d100. A lot of open ended assumptions don't work anymore.

You don't know their gaming experience, fantasy experiences, media experiences, etc.And D&D fandom exploded under 5e so it's even worse.

There are nothing but OSR videos on Youtube because because there are more gamers who don't understand the mentality of OSR than do.

 

[SkidAce]

You are missing the main difference.
It's not 1975 and D&D isn't targeting just a small fandom who mostly think the same.

D&D is almost 50 years old, targets all demos, and has a lot more inspirations.
In 1975 your D&D could be coming from maybe ~6 mindsets. Roll the d6.
It's 2022, it's a crapshoot. You're rolling a d100. A lot of open ended assumptions don't work anymore.

You don't know their gaming experience, fantasy experiences, media experiences, etc.And D&D fandom exploded under 5e so it's even worse.

There are nothing but OSR videos on Youtube because because there are more gamers who don't understand the mentality of OSR than do.

I hear your points, but dont feel I'm missing anything. I am aware of all the differences in generational players (i.e. more anime swordsmen tropes than knights in plate mail, etc.)

Was just trying to say that I dont feel that the way the 5e books are written are any harder (or easier) for a group of new players to learn, play, mess up, homebrew, argue, and play than they ever were.

YMMV.

 

[overgeeked]

I've played for forty plus years. Only one player has worried about perfection. I'm just not convinced it's true. Most players don't look at optimization stuff online.

I've played and run for almost 40 years. I played B/X, BECMI, AD&D, 4E, and now 5E. In that whole time I never had to worry about power gaming or optimization...until 5E. While running 5E, I've had about zero players who didn't obsess over optimization out of a cast of a few hundred.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I've played and run for almost 40 years. I played B/X, BECMI, AD&D, 4E, and now 5E. In that whole time I never had to worry about power gaming or optimization...until 5E. While running 5E, I've had about zero players who didn't obsess over optimization out of a cast of a few hundred.

And one of my players, who never played D&D before 5e came out and is still a teenager, cares absolutely nothing about optimization. In order to keep up in combat, the other party members always have to spend their first turns giving his characters buffs (Haste, Enlarge, Bardic Inspiration, etc). The other players care about optimization because they know my battles are often deadly, but I've never had any problems with it. They just like having powerful characters. There's nothing wrong with that.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Color me interested in the Bastion System concept. This sounds like something a DM could find just as useful (and fun to tinker with) as a player.

 

[Blue]

I maintain that the final draft is already written, and that these "survey results" are more about generating buzz and excitement than actually getting feedback. It's a great marketing strategy. (Much better than the "we fixed your game for you, you're welcome" approach they used back in 2008.)

Sure, marketing is absolutely a part of this. Paizo did it first before PF came out, WotC did it back with Next, and they are doing it now. That doesn't mean that they aren't actually testing things and looking for real feedback. Considering how quickly they yanked PC-only+weapon-only crits. Why put that in for a pure marketing? They are creating something that they have promised to be compatible or at least backwards compatible - they aren't up for making any real structural changes within that so that limits what feedback they need. But that doesn't mean that feedback is also a major part of this, just like marketing.

So meh, I'm not surprised that they announced a high-but-plausible result because that is going to generate the strongest favorable reaction.

I don't know if I'm reading this correctly. It is coming across (and this could be my reading) that that they would announce a high-but-plausable result regardless of what the actual result is. Am I misreading that? And I very well might be.

 

[Blue]

So was the attempt to make critical hits (something players are already confused by) both much more complicated while at the same time a fraction as important on the survey? I know it disappeared from the subsequent playtest, and I just can't imagine that it won over a majority of survey respondents.

It was the thing that made me question both the goals and the common sense of the design team, and not consider this process worth my time. I don't even particularly care about critical hits, I just think they should have a simpler rule whether its "max damage", "double all damage", no longer being a thing, or, barring any of those improvements, just keeping the same relatively simple formulation. But every time I thought about completing the survey I just thought "do I really want to spend 40 minutes writing thoughtful comments that will probably never get read anyway to people who thought that absurd of a rule change was worth an audition".

They have already said that in some of the playtests they will be trying different things to see how they work out. In programming and mathematics you sometime do things like that to see if there's another peak, perhaps taller, then the local maxima of the peak you are at. That's perfectly valid.

On the other hand, they primary way they get feedback is the survey. You have shown thoreugh your actions that 40 minutes of time (and likely a few more hours over other surveys) is not worth investing in the next 10ish years of gaming. If you find that over the next year you complain for more than a few hours, that time would have been better used in filling out surveys. Remember that the negative votes are the strongest - the first 60% of all of the votes that are positive are basically discarded just to get to the base "we don't want this" level. Yet every negative vote brings it down from perfect. Just 1 in 10 people saying negative will change something a whole category.

 

[Blue]

I've played and run for almost 40 years. I played B/X, BECMI, AD&D, 4E, and now 5E. In that whole time I never had to worry about power gaming or optimization...until 5E. While running 5E, I've had about zero players who didn't obsess over optimization out of a cast of a few hundred.

I notice you skipped 3.0 and 3.5 in that. They were a ridiculous hotbed of optimization. You could have characters in the teen levels that shouldn't even be on the same planet, much less the same battlefield. Both 4e and 5e have cut down on the possibilities of it a lot.

 

[Jaeger]

• new human 83%
• dwarf, orc, tiefling, elf tied at 80-81%
• gnome, halfling tied at 78%

I've always thought Gnome/Halfling should just be different names for the same thing.

Never saw the need to have two similar small races that could just be made into one.

I know from my own playgroup that some would just vote for anything that made their characters stronger

Something they do mention is that they look at feedback separately from people who just read the document, and people who actually took it to a table and tested it.

A good start, but...

And there are at least 10 players to every one DM. Players will always upvote power creep. So UAs with power creep and surveys asking what people think will get overwhelmingly positive response.

Literally a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Like "everyone gets a free feat at 1st level" has 90+% approval. Gee...imagine that. So shock. Much surprise.

The division that they should have made from the beginning is between results from Players vs. GM's, and weigh them equally.

The GM workload and ability to meaningfully challenge players should be important considerations.

Not segregating results this way cannot but help to skew results in favor of Player desires over the GM's that actually run the game.

No matter how many times WotC resets the clock, the weight of player survey responses as they are currently done will always drive the designers in the direction of feeling that they have to add moar powerz! Not less.