D&D 5E 5E Playtesters: How Was It?

[Aribar]

The Fighter, Monk, and Sorcerer had a lot of interesting options that I felt were much more fun and well-designed than what we got. If you have the "081712 DnD Next Playtest Packet", I highly recommend giving it a read. The sorcerer's dragon origin had a unique mechanic where they got more draconic and stronger as they used spells and the fighter had maneuvers that felt alot more fun than what's in the PHB.

The actual dungeons that came with the story were kinda garbage I felt... Rolling 30+ dice for 16 some rats worth of attacks or whatever was in that one encounter was just silly.

 

[Li Shenron]

I didn't participate in the playtest period of 5E, before it was officially released. I'd love to hear from people who did participate though. What was it like?

I managed to run the game only a handful of times during the whole playtest period, so my opinion is kind of limited. I think I started with the 3rd or 4th packet. We always liked pretty much everything at the gaming table, but obviously we had a very limited view, we've seen only some of the classes in play and IIRC only up to level 3. I did try to follow the whole rules development process however and always sent some feedback.

Also, we did not play the provided playtest adventures. Instead we played old BECMI/3e adventures converted to 5e on the fly, because I wanted to see how easy/hard it was going to be to re-use books I already had.

Keeping up with the rules changes across different playtest packets wasn't easy. There were many pretty big changes... for example, expertise dice for skills was hard to get used to (it was ditched later on), and so were feats changing to much larger than in previous editions (this caused disappointment in our group, although it was purely theoretical because we didn't even get that far to use them in the game).

Overall I definitely like 5e and I really appreciated the open playtest. Perhaps the two main negative feelings during the playtest for me were (1) general hunch that my feedback was never taken into consideration (probably just because I must have always been in the minority), and (2) sense of many 'lost opportunities' when they introduced a brave and original idea only to withdraw it next packet because it was too brave and original.

 

[DaveDash]

How many monsters were in the play test? A wide selection that we see now, mostly lower level stuff, etc?

 

[Sacrosanct]

there were a lot of monsters. Especially when they included all those monsters from the various classic modules. I would say probably around 200 or so in total.

 

[Zardnaar]

I liked the 2nd packed and the final 2. The middle packets were rough and we stopped play testing them.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I miss the playtest paladin's "divine grace" ability. That had some sweet synergy with "gnome cunning".

 

[GX.Sigma]

The first public playtest was awesome. It was so "basic." You have an elf, a dwarf, and a cleric, and you're going into a nonsensical dungeon just because it's there.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Another issue that bothered many was how they didn't balance monster math during most of the playtest. At first, it was hard to get used to, but when I realized that they consciously made the decision to test "feel" rather than calibrate math throughout the playtest

Oh my, yes. As someone who has done a lot of my own design I completely understood why they were doing that. It is a waste of a lot of time and effort (which WotC is paying them for, btw) to refine all of the little mechanical details only to realize you have to throw out an entire system and start over, and all of that tweaking is now irrelevant.

But I had the hardest time trying to convince one of my best fellow gamers. His position was that you can't properly test it unless that math is right...he just didn't get it.

You had to be able to internalize, "buy" their claims, and follow instructions to properly playtest. Since what they were doing made sense to me and I could relate to it, and I knew the designers had a lot of cross-system RPG experience, I was able to be on-board (and I did feel like my input made a difference). For a lot of gamers it wasn't as easy to buy-in to what WotC was asking of us.

 

[Cristian Andreu]

I really enjoyed the playtest, and so did my players. I ran them through a modified version of the Tomb of Horrors (but with a small graveyard outside, where the characters would wake up if killed, while a bell started to crack every time it happened. Basically, some 1-UPs so they could last longer. Man did they wake up in dirt a lot).

I loved that they tried things around without fear of adding or removing elements, and I'm sure it helped to bring a lot of people back to the game gradually. It was a very good call on WotC's side.

 

[Ashrym]

I enjoyed the playtest and have my own favourite packets. A lot of it was more a value test on concepts to see what was preferred and not preferred plus feedback on mechanics. I can see some of my suggestions in the final product so I definitely feel listened to and part of a majority opinion.