D&D (2024) One D&D Survey Feedback: Weapon Mastery Spectacular; Warlock and Wizard Mixed Reactions

Jeremy Crawford discusses the results of the Packet 5 Survey:

• Weapon Mastery at 80% approval, and all options except for Flex scored similarly. Crawford says that Flex is mathematically one of the most powerful properties, but will need some attention because people didn't feel like it was. This feature is in the 2024 PHB for 6 Classes, guaranteed at this point.
• Barbarian scored well, particularly the individual features, average satisfaction of 80% for each feature. Beserker got 84% satisfaction, while the 2014 Beserker in the 2020 Big Class Survey got 29% satisfaction.
• Fighter received well, overall 75% satisfaction. Champion scored 54% in the Big Class Survey, but this new one got 74%.
• Sorcerer in the Big Class Survey got 60%, this UA Sorcerer got 72%. Lots of enthusiasm for the Metamagic revisions. Careful Spell got 92% satisfaction. Twin Spell was the exception, at 60%. Draconic Sorcerer got 73%, new Dragon Wings feature was not well received but will be fixed back to being on all the time by the return to 2014 Aubclass progression.
• Class specific Spell lists are back in UA 7 coming soon, the unified Spell lists are out.
• Warlock feedback reflected mixed feelings in the player base. Pact magic is coming back in next iteration. Next Warlock will be more like 2014, Mystic Arcanum will be a core feature, but will still see some adjustments based on feedback to allow for more frequent use of Spells. Eldritch Invocations were well received. Crawford felt it was a good test, because they learned what players felt. They found the idiosyncracy of the Warlock is exactly what people like about it, so theybare keeping it distinct. Next version will get even more Eldritch Invocation options.
• Wizard got a mixed reception. Biggest problem people had was wanting a Wizard specific Spell list, not a shared Arcane list that made the Wizard less distinct. Evoker well received.

 

[Nikosandros]

I hope that the generic spell lists are gone for good, I hated them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I hope that the generic spell lists are gone for good, I hated them.

It's the kind of thing that's appealing to designers, but no one in the room spent enough time thinking about how it would feel in actual play.

 

[Shardstone]

I'm upset and here's why.

I think that the new, experimental ideas shown in 1D&D created a healthier game in terms of being able to edit and design new stuff for it. Spell lists, standardized subclasses, and class groups made creating new spells, subclasses, and classes way easier. Furthermore, the focus on feats in character creation, the new character creation method, and the injection of feats over ASI's into class tables really showed you that D&D is meant to be customized to your taste, not your taste customized to D&D.

By reverting everything back, we're going straight into old-school 5E where designing new content, be it homebrew or third party, is hard and baroque. As a third party designer, I cannot stress how hard it is to make content that's perfectly balanced with WotC 5E (which itself is rarely balanced from a traditional viewpoint), and that makes it harder for customers OR just people overall to want to support third party or homebrew content.

Once again, 5E feels jank to me. Instead of streamlining characters and giving us more visible levers to manipulate the game, we're back to the intensive char creation process of before, filled with constant references all across the book, subclasses of wildly different qualities and powers, unintuitive class design that is hard to manipulate, add on to, or remove.

I understand this is the result of surveys, but I've never thought the game should be built off of surveys either. It helps for feedback, I agree, but using percentages to gauge joy (even with qualitative feedback) doesn't seem sound to me. I've taken graduate level research classes so, while I'm not a professional, this is not a wholly uninformed opinion.

First off, WotC hasn't ever really honored the surveys. We know that things like the old Elemental Sorcerers tested better than their Shadow Sorcerer, yet only SHadow Sorcerers made it into Xanathars. We know that Hexblade failed to reach a true 70% but Mearls had it put in the game anyway. We also know that their responses to surveys aren't to reitterate on content, but to cut content or to change it into something that already exists. For example, the Strixxhaven classes were turned into backgrounds, which while it works, ended up sacrificing a lot of what the subclasses could do.

But really, I just feel that 5E's conservative design ethos is strengthened by a conservative voice in the surveys, which is a voice that says don't change things too much, and if you do change it, it has to be perfect in the first draft or I'll never like the idea. This kind of design ethos is good for keeping a lucrative product afloat but fails to reach potentially new heights of both game design and commerce. After all, if they never expected 5E to blow up the way they did, then that means they could make a 6E and it still blow up and they have no idea how. There's little true understanding of the product because the product changes form at every table. As a result, surveying millions of different tables who play the game radically different can be good to identify problem points, but not to make solutions, and is def not a reason to hold back on innovative new designs.

Oh well. Is what it is. I'll miss you, 1D&D. You really did have some great ideas in there.

 

[OB1]

Happy to see the general direction of the sorcerer will be kept, I LOVED the changes to the class, same with Fighter and Barbarian. I didn't hate the new warlock, but not sad to see it go back to pact magic either, will be interesting to see the next iteration.

I'm really surprised that universal spell lists are out. Seemed very elegant and much easier to use from a player perspective.

And I think the lesson on Flex is clear, most 5e players don't care about the math making them 5% better, they want to do cool things in combat so they can stand out.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Looking more and more like 2024 is going to be glorified errata...

They said from the beginning that the end product would be usable with the 2014 material.

 

[Remathilis]

It's the kind of thing that's appealing to designers, but no one in the room spent enough time thinking about how it would feel in actual play.

Tales of the Valiant nervously sweating...

 

[Vaalingrade]

I'm happy warlock is back, but I'm especially happy that everyone turned on the stupid 'spectral wings' thing for sorcs with apparently zero prompting.

 

[Shardstone]

At some point the "Anti-Wizard" crowd is going to just have to accept the fact they are a minority. Most people just don't have the hard-on for wizard-hate (or the hard-on for Drizzt-hate) that a select group of other players always seem to have.

The wizard is one of my biggest classes but it takes up a huge amount of conceptual space, both narratively and mechanically. The fact that they get every non-divine spell, while the other classes get less spells, isn't a great decision in my mind. I think the wizard would be more interesting if it only learned one spell per level up instead of two, and if it had a list 2/3rd the size.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

I cannot believe he would fangirl over Flex again.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I just feel that 5E's conservative design ethos is strengthened by a conservative voice in the surveys, which is a voice that says don't change things too much, and if you do change it, it has to be perfect in the first draft or I'll never like the idea.

I suspect -- and we won't likely get a tell-all book that could tell us whether this is true for some years -- that WotC's very bad 2023 has made them more conservative than they otherwise would have been.

Yes, the splatbooks and adventures that came out since the OGL fiasco didn't show a big dip in sales, but those books sell a fraction of what the 2024 core books can be expected to sell, and having "oh, and they effectively shut down all of their much smaller competitors" in every article about the 50th anniversary next year would have definitely made a difference in sales.

So they tossed the OGL nonsense (and yes, I think the designers opposed what upper management was planning on doing all along, but just weren't listened to until it blew up in their faces) and are now eager to keep D&D players as happy as possible, which in the corporate world very often translates into not rocking the boat.