D&D (2024) D&D playtest feed back report, UA8

[Quickleaf]

Right so assuming 2014 wolf stats, the only thing I can imagine it’s lacking at higher level is multiattack, right? Its attack, HP, knockdown DC, saves, etc, should all scale as the Druid levels.

I believe so, yeah.

 

[Mistwell]

How am I reaching when they said they were reverting back major changes to better preserve cross comapability?

Because that's not the totality of what they said and they made other major changes clearly based on feedback?

Or when they said they cit the new wilderness exploration system? Like the very obvious design here is conservative, which is fine, but aim literally just pointing out what they said too lol

LOL they never said it was just a marketing ploy and not taking the feedback seriously in fact they said the opposite extensively and demonstrated such. You're basically calling them liars, with no evidence.

 

[Mistwell]

The general masses dont care about that.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I believe so, yeah.

So I am a bit at a loss as to why some folks seem to think that the UA8 Druid has to upgrade forms as they level just like the 2014 Druid does.

A wolf or panther will be worth using at level 13. Maybe not at level 20, but I’m not convinced that any beast will be worth using in a fight at that level, including the highest CR beasts. Unless they relax the Spellcasting restrictions by those levels.

Speaking of which, I hope the feedback on the UA leads to even less Spellcasting restriction in wildshape. The new Wildshape doesn’t need it to be balanced. Beast Spells being a level 18 feature is 1000% a legacy of 3.5 and nothing more, it is wholly irrational.

 

[Shardstone]

I have no idea what you're trying to say here.

You asked a question, I answered saying how people generally felt, you responded with good logic, and I responded saying that the general masses just mentioned don't care about that (for better or worse).

 

[Charlaquin]

It's around the 10:00 mark


"We are also doing tons of internal playtesting on the revised monsters.... along with the new encounter building approach.... You and I have chatted in previous videos that we might send out that new encounter building in an Unearthed Arcana... Right now we are focused on playtesting that internally instead..."

"What we have discovered is that just us iterating on it over and over and over again is bearing amazing fruit. What I can report is that what people are going to see in the revised DMG is a much streamlined encounter building system.... where you are able to figure out your budget for monsters.... and you spend that budget...the end...it's going to be that simple of a process. I'm looking forward to us sharing that with people later this year."

Basically, there's no plan that he's sharing to playtest monsters/encounter building externally. Maybe they'll do it, maybe they won't. Sounds a little like it won't be public until the DMG, but that's trying to read tea leaves. Up till now, though, yes it has been exclusively internal. That's the important bit - what's happening functionally.

The issue there is...

(a) With all the heavy design work done for the classes... it was being done in absence of external feedback on the other half of the game – the monsters/challenges/GM-facing stuff that the classes are built against. That's a huge problem, in my eyes.

(b) Secondarily, the context of this issue is that they (WotC) have a history of botching monsters/encounter building - so it's an area that needs attention, and many many D&D fans know it needs attention. We have Mike Shea, Teos Abadia, Shawn Merwin, Mike Mearls – all commenting about these issues, and publishing resources to address them.

You’ve got their process backwards. They’re not trying to present a functional encounter building system and then ask players for feedback on PC capabilities within the context of that system. They’re presenting PC options for player feedback first to find out what the player base will think looks fun in a vacuum (which is how most players assess PC options anyway), and then creating a functional encounter building system with those PC capabilities in mind. Let the players have whatever powers they think sound cool, then build the challenge around what they decided they want to be able to do.

 

[Quickleaf]

I've heard this "running out of time" claim many times over the past year. The lead designer literally just said in the very video for this thread that they intend to still be playtesting in May. How are we running out of time, and why do people keep claiming they know the due date for this stuff? We don't even have a firm commitment that all three books will be out this year. All we really know is PHB 2024. There does appear to be time to playtest DMG and MM material.

Right, I have no special insight.

I'm just thinking about similar UA leadtime to products that have come from WotC in the past, like the 2016 exploration UA which had a year or more leadtime prior to the November 2017 publication of XGtE. The question is about public/external playtesting. They definitely can do their own internal testing process, tighten that up, cut corners here or there to meet their deadline. External playtesting is different, and you can see that in the lead time required for past books where public UAs were released.

Basically, I'm using their own metrics from the recent past of this edition, to evaluate their timeline with the upcoming 2024 books. Obviously, there may be flaws in my assessment. For one example, maybe they've vastly improved / streamlined their external playtesting process since Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

Yes, and I replied about the exploration segment that I agree. It's the spells section I disagreed about, and while there is some overlap between the two, not really. New players should start with the game as written and then see what they like and remove stuff they don't like after they have tried it out. That's working as intended.

I replied to someone else about this, but I don't think it's all or nothing – it's not about excluding or including spells, it's about how to include that legacy content without disrupting/shutting down a potential avenue for enjoying the game. The changes in the Tiny Hut spell over the editions are a perfect microcosm of the bigger issue, as I mentioned upthread.

That seems like hyperbole backed by no evidence. The basic monster design is the same they're just adding more and varied abilities to those monsters it seems. The CR system will change but that has no real impact on PC design. I am not seeing the problem and I think you'd need to do a lot more to demonstrate it's a problem. It's not like we're starting from scratch here and suddenly monsters have no AC and use an entirely different basic mechanic for ordinary elements of combat.

Sure, I can dig in deeper... EDIT: Apologies for the length of my reply...

I think the UA8 Barbarian's Level 9: Brutal Strike is a fair example. On the surface, it sounds like the kind of thing a player would love, building off of Reckless Attack to give more choices! Now you can deal 1d10 more damage, or push the target 15-feet and close the gap without provoking, or you can briefly reduce their speed by 15 feet. What's not to like?

I'll go through each of these three use cases of Brutal Strike and why they would benefit from playtesting specifically against the redesigned monsters...

Brutal Strike: Damage Example
I'm going off memory that dual weapon fighting in the UA is (paraphrasing), as it's not in UA8 and I don't want to dig through to find it... "when you engage in two-weapon fighting, you can make a bonus attack with your offhand weapon as part of the Attack action"

OK, what does this look like on a dual-wielding barbarian, multiclassed into Fighter for Action Surge, under the effects of a haste spell? Well, the bonus damage from Brutal Strike in that case would be 1d10+1d10 (dual weapon attacks) + 1d10+1d10 (Extra Attack with dual weapons) +1d10 (Haste extra attack) + 1d10+1d10 (Action Surge, dual weapon attacks) + 1d10+1d10 (Action Surge, Extra Attack with dual weapons) = +9d10 damage or 49.5 additional damage.

But what does the actual damage look like, not just the additional damage compared to 2014 Barbarian? Something like this...assuming no magic items... (1d8+5+1d10) x 5 + (1d6+5+1d10) x 4 = 75 + 56 = 131

Will that potential for greater damage than the 2014 barbarian affect how monsters facing 9th+ level PCs are designed? I don't know, I haven't playtested it andI haven't seen any redesigned monsters.

I'm not cherry-picking, literally finding the first things that I see from the current Unearthed Arcana and that spring up on Kobold Fight Club when I search for a CR 9 monster... ok... Abdominable Yeti has 137 hit points. So the 2024 barbarian with a (barbarian 9/fighter 2 build) and caster support reasonable at that level could potentially kill this monster in one round with slightly above average rolls or a magic weapon... something very unlikely for a 2014 Barbarian. Is that an issue? Maybe. Maybe not. It is a difference between 2014 and 2024 though.

Brutal Strike: Push 15-feet Example
What happens when a PC can regularly push 15 feet multiple times per turn? A 30 foot net push is completely within the realm of possibility, and as you can imagine from the extreme example above, you could get a lot more than that.

We've never seen that kind of consistent really big pushing in 5e, barring some exceptional build perhaps. What does that look like in play? Are there new sorts of "counters" we need to think about with monsters intended to play as mini-bosses or have a more enduring presence in dangerous terrain? For example, in 2014 monsters we hardly see any at all that say "reduce forced movement to this monster by X", in fact no immunity or resistance covers forced movement. There's also no saving throw involved, so Legendary Resistances won't save the Death Knight from that 500-foot drop. Does this use of Brutal Strike mean the designers need to consider implementing that in some cases? I don't know, maybe.

Brutal Strike: Hamstring Blow Example
What happens when a PC can regularly reduce a monster's Speed to 0? Does that make for fun and dynamic fights? Or does it contribute to the sense of "grind" by making the fight more static / "stand there and trade blows?" Yes, that question can be answered by playtesting with 2014 monsters.

However, what if there are certain skirmisher monster that we feel shouldn't be subject to this, or should be less subject to this speed reduction? The aforementioned quickling might be an example, or maybe there are other monsters we have planned in our adventure path where this would utterly neuter the intended design of the encounter. Again we have a question of are there new sorts of "counters" we need to think about? There's no resistances/immunities to speed reduction. There's no save, so Legendary Resistances don't apply. It seems to affect fliers like dragons, so now it looks like the barbarian can knock dragons out of the sky with a thrown weapon and then utterly lock them down, and the dragon has no recourse. Is that a fun dragon fight or do we need to playtest new dragon designs with counters to effects like Hamstring Blow?

Bonus Round - does more choice in-play lead to longer player turns, and if so, should that influence how monsters are redesigned?
EDIT: This is a further downstream concern, but the trend I see in the UA class redesigns is for more choices during play... I wonder if this means greater handling time on player turns, as even just a little bit can be compounded over a session. If that's the case, does part of the monster design imperative for 2024 become designing monsters to quicken monster turns compared to handling time of 2014 monsters? That's a much more complex question, and reaches far beyond the focus of looking at Brutal Strike, but it's one that really can only be answered by playtesting.

 

[Quickleaf]

You’ve got their process backwards. They’re not trying to present a functional encounter building system and then ask players for feedback on PC capabilities within the context of that system. They’re presenting PC options for player feedback first to find out what the player base will think looks fun in a vacuum (which is how most players assess PC options anyway), and then creating a functional encounter building system with those OC capabilities in mind. Let the players have whatever powers they think sound cool, then build the challenge around what they decided they want to be able to do.

Interesting, thanks for helping reframe it for me, Charlaquin! I still have reservations about doing it that way, but that definitely clears up their approach!

 

[Parmandur]

But we absolutely agree that they need detailed playtesting.

But that's not what UA is for: it's just about checking out ehat people like or don't like, not fine-tuning math. WotC can do thst on their own.

 

[Parmandur]

I am wondering about the timeline now. If the PHB is still being worked on in May, then I am not sure it can be available before September / October.

If the releases are staggered on top of that, then I don’t think they will be releasing all three core books this year (I assume PHB comes first, but even if it didn’t it would not be guaranteed)

May is about right for an August release, based on past books.