D&D 5E D&D Next playtest post mortem by Mike Mearls and Rodney Thompson. From seven years ago.

[Charlaquin]

Wow, so actually for most people the 5E product release schedule has bern blisteringy fast.

I mean, I see new (and by new I mean “have only played 5e”) players complain all the time that D&D has so many books!

 

[Staffan]

The forums are not necessarily representative of the larger audience. There definitely is a silent majority sometimes. A lot of times people would say something is terrible on forums, that came back with 95% approval on surveys. It was most useful to use forums when the forum views lined up with the survey data, where they could then ask forum people more about that aspect of the game. Also sometimes the thing people would complain about was more a sign something was going wrong in a broader issue, and not what they would specifically complain about. Like for example someone might complain about not hitting enough bad guys, but they'd find that was really a symptom of a cause of lack of sufficient movement for PCs.

I think there are two factors at play here.

One is that satisfied people are generally quiet. I work in customer service, and it's rather uncommon to get a call or an e-mail saying "Thank you for excellent work." When people get in touch with me, it's because something has gone wrong. Forums tend to be the same: a thread about something people like and that isn't controversial isn't going to get very many posts, whereas a thread on fighter complexity, well...

The other is a saying that people complaining are almost always right about something being wrong. They are rarely right about how to solve that problem. For example, say that you get a common complaint that martials, particularly fighters, have little to do outside combat, and that the players want more non-combat abilities in their class. But perhaps the better solution would be a more robust skill system, and changing social/exploration spells to interact more with the skill system instead (note: I'm not trying to put this up for a debate, just using it as an example that perhaps the solution is not what the user/player thinks it should be).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Is it a problem if a race/class is popular, with a high degree of satisfaction, but mechanically weaker than less popular options? Making the cool race/class more mechanically equal will result in it being even more popular and over-represented.

Yes and no.

Firstly, don't conflate "high degree of satisfaction" with "popular." They're very different things. Something can be extremely satisfying for the small slice of people who make use of it, while being almost totally ignored or avoided by everyone else. Conversely, something can be extremely popular but not very satisfying; consider a fair amount of fast food out there.

What we end up with is three variables: "popularity" (how common it is to see the option in use), "satisfaction" (how happy users are with their choice), and "strength" (how effective the option is in practice.) The ideal, of course, is to have average to high popularity, high satisfaction, and average strength. Humans (in both WoW and D&D), and blood elves (in WoW), are extremely high in popularity to the point that they crowd out other options, middling in terms of satisfaction, and low in terms of strength. That's not the absolute worst situation to be in (the worst would be sky-high popularity but rock-bottom satisfaction and imbalanced strength, whether dramatically too low or too high), but it isn't a good situation to be in.

You cannot prevent some options ending up being more popular than others; that will always happen. But, by making different options have similar strength, you allow players to make their choices based on what they like, rather than what they feel they must choose. That, in general, is a better state of affairs than one where players feel "forced" into doing something. When players make value-judgments rather than calculations, they will generally be happier and more likely to stay engaged.

Plus, increasing the power level of humans slightly (so they're "average" instead of "slightly weak," which it looks like 5.1e is going to do) isn't going to meaningfully affect the presence of other races. The gravitational pull of "play a human, aka the species all of us actually are" predominates over any other concerns, such that if a player is already willing to play some other option to begin with, it generally won't be because they wanted power. Doubly so because, as noted, it is only standard human that is weak; variant human is as strong as the strongest feats, which makes it strong indeed. Particularly if you're in a game where feats are otherwise inaccessible.

 

[Minigiant]

The other is a saying that people complaining are almost always right about something being wrong. They are rarely right about how to solve that problem. For example, say that you get a common complaint that martials, particularly fighters, have little to do outside combat, and that the players want more non-combat abilities in their class. But perhaps the better solution would be a more robust skill system, and changing social/exploration spells to interact more with the skill system instead (note: I'm not trying to put this up for a debate, just using it as an example that perhaps the solution is not what the user/player thinks it should be).

That's where I say the "don't stray too far" situation in design comes in. There are multiple ways to "fix" some of the "issues" in D&D. For example there are a half dozen or more was to improve martial noncombat satisfaction.. However if one of goals is not to move too far from what the audience expects, you'll avoid great options for "just good enough" ones. This is why you see fans of D&D clones and spinoff laud the "improvement" of their other game due to less baggage or see fans praise the late stage mechanics of many editions when the designers are experimenting in order to sell more books.

If you look at the One D&D playtest so far you see the lessons learned.

They only gave us the origins section of the playtest and a sample of level 1 content. This allows them to throw in big changes in a way everyone can digest and quickly give a reaction of Yes or No to the experiment ideas.

 

[Plaguescarred]

I was an Alpla Playtester under NDA with WoTC during 4th Edition and transitioned to D&D Next and then continued during 5E. I find these post mortem videos of D&D Next R&D interesting and revealing as WoTC are not reporting to us during playtesting but rather the other way around.

I hope they also do such post-mortem for 1D&D...

 

[DEFCON 1]

So, no growth in HP, no growth in damage, no growth in AC, no growth in features, no growth in skills...

It sounds like you want people to play 1st level characters from the word "go" until the campaign ends. What's the point of that?

Huh. So when I said "I think that if every PC had hit points within a range of like 20 to 35"... you read this not as referring to hit points, but rather referring to hit points, damage, AC, features, and skills. Interesting. I wonder what other posts I have made in the past that apparently had more buried in them than the actual words I used.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Huh. So when I said "I think that if every PC had hit points within a range of like 20 to 35"... you read this not as referring to hit points, but rather referring to hit points, damage, AC, features, and skills. Interesting. I wonder what other posts I have made in the past that apparently had more buried in them than the actual words I used.

I assumed, given you did not mention anything else, that you didn't want to add any growth not present in 5e currently. Which, yes, means essentially no growth (3, perhaps 4 points at most) in AC and a bunch of other things besides.

The designers specifically and explicitly said that HP and damage growth were intended to be one of the only forms of statistical growth in 5e. If you remove that, what is left? Skills. Perhaps features (though, frankly, unless you have spellcasting, most of those features suck.) That's about it. Hence why I said what I said.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I assumed, given you did not mention anything else, that you didn't want to add any growth not present in 5e currently. Which, yes, means essentially no growth (3, perhaps 4 points at most) in AC and a bunch of other things besides.

The designers specifically and explicitly said that HP and damage growth were intended to be one of the only forms of statistical growth in 5e. If you remove that, what is left? Skills. Perhaps features (though, frankly, unless you have spellcasting, most of those features suck.) That's about it. Hence why I said what I said.

Nope, it was merely the growth of hit points that I was talking about.

Mostly everyone seems to say that monster damage in the MM just don't hit hard enough (and that was true in both 4E and 5E). And thus having massive HP counts just make combats longer... especially when coupled with all the healing features and spells that can appear during a fight. Cut down everyone's HP and dangerous enemies become more dangerous, and you don't have to dedicate as many features/sources to healing because you aren't needing to replenish nearly as many total HP across the party after every fight. And in addition... the hit point range between classes at high levels can be so disparate, any one monster could be a juggernaut of death against certain PCs and a complete pushover to other ones. So how can you hope to balance the threats in any of these combats when you never know which PC is going to engage with the monster first?

If every PC has a lower and narrower band of hit points... you can look at any creature and their average damage for each attack and know at a glance "this one will need to hit probably four times against any PC to knock them out" and "that one can one-shot any and all of the PCs with a solid damage roll". And that's when armor class and higher defenses and the like come more into play.

This might not sit well with some players, but it's not like WotC's changing the rules to match my preferences anyway. So in the end it doesn't matter.

 

[J-H]

I have considered copying 2e(?) and cutting HP growth to 1/2 speed after 10th level in my next campaign. 1st level goblins may still hit an 18th level character, but it's going to take a LOT of hits from those goblins to do meaningful damage.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Their data showed that the Wizard's spells were seen as a party resource in nonombat situations.

However once the game was published, many non-spellcaster players realized that the group was always point to the caster's character sheet for resources and options in noncombat situations but never theirs.

I think this is the best phrased way I have seen teh caster/non caster break down... but I think it is a little overblown... sometimes the rogue has expertise in a skill and the bard gives them inspiration and the cleric guidance then it feels like a team effort... just you know with 2 spell casters still involved.

And I think that more or less lines up with another thing they mentioned: Playtesters had to constantly relearn the system dueto the big changes. So it is likely that the 100% combat 0% Noncombat classes like fighter and barbarian got playtested long enough in any single form to realize how little they brought in noncombat. There is the other point that every class had noncombat features in the August playtest but didn't in the September one. Which matches to something they also said, the packets were so big that paytesters were zoomed in on the actual changes because it was so big.