Ruin Explorer
Legend
Oh I agree there. I don't think they're throwing away the results generally. I do think this is a rather ill-advised process for their stated goals, such as they are. It made a degree of sense when 5E was initially being designed, but we're no longer looking at an apology edition desperate to win people back, but rather an extremely successful and even culturally relevant game, but they seem to doing this process essentially on the same basis as the apology edition, and with, I suspect, much of the same audience as the apology edition (rather than a broader audience more reflective of who actually plays D&D now).
I was thinking about this a bit whilst making tea though - I think cost is a major issue. D&D, despite being successful, doesn't seem to have attracted funding within WotC to the degree that it might have, whereas the VTT apparently has. I think with more money, you wouldn't do a reactive process like this, which relies entirely on an extremely tiny subset of customers essentially doing you a favour, rather you'd be investing in more proactive and wide-ranging research about your product and customers. It's notable that videogames have done this (and D&D is more successful than most videogames). Even back in the early '00s for example, Bungie did a ton of research about who played Halo and how, and why, and what they enjoyed, and further they even did stuff like bringing people in and having diverse people play through the levels they'd designed - everyone from kids to grandmas, to try and find issues with flow, with confusing bits, and so on. I can't help but think this laid the groundwork for the success of Halo 2 and 3 and their sequels particularly.
Whereas I very much doubt that 2024's rules, even the general rules, have been run past a bunch of players in a WotC-monitored environment in the same way. I'm sure they've had some internal playtesting - but as Bungie found out, that's very different - most of the major issues they were finding were one their actual playtesters and QA and people had missed, because those people were essentially "pros" and just automatically accounted for certain issues.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting WotC adopt and identical methodology or something, just talking about like, how you can do more, if you've got money, and you want to find out about issues with your game, it's not even that expensive.
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