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

[Stalker0]

I understand you can't or won't see any other alternatives. Just be assured that just because you are convinced I am accusing them of lying does not mean I am. And just because you feel I must think they are lying does not mean I am accusing them of lying, and it certainly does not make it alright to claim so on this public forum.

There is absolutely zero reason to treat corporations as persons, and ascribe them human qualities.
And in fact, I wasn't talking about Crawford at all, I was talking about WotC and Hasbro as companies.

Life will hopefully teach you to separate conviction and belief from verifiable truth. Doubling down on accusations you cannot prove will lead you down a bad path, my friend. Now quit accusing me of lying (or that I claim Crawford is) or I'll report you, m'kay? Let's get back to discussing WotC and D&D!

With respect this answer is nonsense. Mistwell is right, you have repeatedly made statements as to WOTC ulterior motives with the playtest, Mistwell has countered with quotes from the lead designer themselves, and your counter has been “stop accusing me” not exactly a ringing counterpoint in a debate.

I get that corps do bad things, and wotc has had its share of bad corporate dealings the last few years. But right now we have one side with evidence and one side with pure speculation…and if people are going to side with speculation (just because) then productive debate is no longer possible, and therefore this thread serves no purpose other than who can shout their biased opinion louder than another

 

[Stalker0]

Treantmonk is right.

And this certainly does not apply only to spells.

If we wanted the new edition to make fundamental changes to classes and subclasses they should have done the same there. That is, not done a public playtest, and certainly not limit themselves to only changing stuff that gets a massive approval rating.

Like how wonky the six saves feel (even a level 20 character will have naughty word saves that make you feel like a level 1 character), how the unnecessary split between when subclasses start make it impossible to mix and match subclasses between classes, how high level play suffers from there only being one subclass choice and not two, and so on and so on...

By offering the playtest and binding themselves to its results, they have all but assured themselves that they can blame 5.5 not really fixing much on "that's what y'all wanted".

In the end the edition will have changed a myriad small details. This will not actually meaningfully improve the fundamentals of D&D 5. But it will certainly make it pleasingly (for WotC, that is) hard to stick with the 2014 edition.

Remember: the primary goal here wasn't to fix D&D. It was to rejuvenate sales.

That some player will be happy their barbarian can dish out 3 more damage, or whatever, is not evidence to the contrary.

In other words, very much like the approach taken with 3.5.

And more to the point, very unlike the approach taken in the years leading up to the 2014 release of 5E. An edition that really, truly, fundamentally improved the game of D&D.

I do agree that ultimately the game is not going to change much, probably less than 3.5 did. A 5.25e seems more appropriate here.

But the issue is in saying that’s a problem…because the amount of fixing 5e needs is really in the eye of the beholder. 5e is a good edition that has done well, it’s widely played, and most people seem to really like it. It has its flaws of course, but debates on enworld show that we as a group heavily debate what those flaws really are and how bad they are. And fixes can have costs, a solution can be worse than the problem depending on how it impacts other areas.

The one metric we can be sure of is…if 5.5 doesn’t sell well with principal feedback being “there’s not enough here to justify new books”…than your point is validated…because yes wotc is a company whose job it is to sell product. And if your new product isn’t better enough to the old one to justify the price…that’s a business failure. Until that time though…maybe a 5.25e is really all the main user base wants, and so a more fundamental overhaul would not be in the interest of 5es continuing success.

 

[Rabulias]

I have not read the entire thread so maybe someone already mentioned this, but keep in mind that if a portion of the writing for a book is done, and not going to change, it can be printed separately. They know the layout and how much space each chapter is allotted. They can print signatures ahead of time, and assemble them together when all are done. So WotC can finalize a single chapter in May, but the rest of the book(s) are printed, just waiting to be bound.

 

[Stalker0]

We're simply not going to agree on this. I look at 5e and see all the 4e mechanics buried into it. The skill system is lifted almost word for word from 4e. The class balancing was already done for 4e, and just recast in 5e. All they did was take 4e characters, take the most common powers, call them spells and poof, we have 5e. Two step recovery. Encounter vs daily powers. Simplifying effects and streamlining. They simply had to reword things, make sure that it was sufficiently obscured where things were coming from, and thus was created 5e.

This statement underestimates a few key notes:

1) that small changes can have big design impacts. Even if a 5e mechanic is similar to a 4e one, that doesn’t mean they play the same.

A short rest is 5 min in 4e, 1 hour in 5e…a change of two words. Yet that change has big impacts at some tables.

2) 5e was as much a UI improvement as it is a design one. Mechanically I respect the hell out of 4e in many ways…but the PhB reads like an accountants handbook. In a game that id more story than rules…how you present those rules matters a lot.

 

[mamba]

But now let’s say they come back with the same mechanics, but deflect attacks only reduces damage by half of what it does right now, or monk damage gets reduced somewhere else. The monk is not going to look as good in sastifaction

yes, but whether I reduce the monk by 20% or buff every monster by 20% is ultimately the same, fixing the monk is much less work (and better for compatibility) however

So if a class needs adjusting do that, do not change everything else to compensate for that instead

 

[Stalker0]

yes, but whether I reduce the monk by 20% or buff every monster by 20% is ultimately the same, fixing the monk is much less work (and better for compatibility) however

So if a class needs adjusting do that, do not change everything else to compensate for that instead

Mechanically it is the same…but gameplay it’s not. This is the part people frequently forget. It’s never about how strong a character is, it’s about how strong a class FEELS.

You can argue until your blue in the face that a fighter does just as much damage as a Paladin over time…but players don’t remember that the fighter did 10 damage a hit very consistently for the last 5 levels. But they will never forget the time the Paladin did a smite crit of over 200 damage killing the major dragon instantly.

Players like high explosive numbers. It doesn’t matter that I’m doing 10 damage but I’m killing monsters just as quickly as when I did 20 because of the math changes…to the player it feels like their damage was gimped. This is doubly true for the monk that had had such a long history of being underpowered. Every nerf will get major scrutiny, wit the worry of “well here we go again the monk sucks once more”

 

[CapnZapp]

With respect this answer is nonsense.

What probably is nonsense is restarting a discussion shut down by the moderators.

Since you quote nothing about D&D and WotC I won't engage. Return on topic and I might.

 

[Pauln6]

Mechanically it is the same…but gameplay it’s not. This is the part people frequently forget. It’s never about how strong a character is, it’s about how strong a class FEELS.

You can argue until your blue in the face that a fighter does just as much damage as a Paladin over time…but players don’t remember that the fighter did 10 damage a hit very consistently for the last 5 levels. But they will never forget the time the Paladin did a smite crit of over 200 damage killing the major dragon instantly.

Players like high explosive numbers. It doesn’t matter that I’m doing 10 damage but I’m killing monsters just as quickly as when I did 20 because of the math changes…to the player it feels like their damage was gimped. This is doubly true for the monk that had had such a long history of being underpowered. Every nerf will get major scrutiny, wit the worry of “well here we go again the monk sucks once more”

This is absolutely true in my experience. It doesn't matter that the goblins had 10hp and that both the fighter and the paladin killed one each, it matters that the fighter rolled 12 and the paladin rolled 40. It's the perception that matters, not the mathematics.

 

[CapnZapp]

I do agree that ultimately the game is not going to change much, probably less than 3.5 did. A 5.25e seems more appropriate here.

But the issue is in saying that’s a problem…because the amount of fixing 5e needs is really in the eye of the beholder.

Plenty of people defended 3.5E as well, both leading up to release and for at least a couple of years.

Took a while until the diehard arguments finally died down and people could see 3.5E for what it was:

An edition that WotC sold as something that would fix 3.0, but an edition that mostly shuffled around the bits on the surface while fixing nothing systemic underneath.

A major impact of these changes was that it no longer remained feasible to stick with 3.0. This impact is not felt on day one, so many people don't see it.

I saw it and I was annoyed and tired by it. For every change where the nuisance of having to relearn some specifics were trumped by genuine improvement, there was probably five where 3.5 mostly just switched it up with no fundamentally significant improvement.

But I bet WotC foresaw it and saw it as a huge benefit.

And I see a repeat here because there's not nearly enough discussion of the type where you go okay so now we have 70% approval of this thing here. Now let's analyze if we really should make the change, given how a hundred little changes will cumulatively make the compatibility claim feel very hollow indeed.

But hang on! Lets make all those little changes anyway, since we don't really want anyone to stick to 2014. We just don't want people being mad at us. We don't want them to feel forced to switch. We want them to want to switch.

So we make sure 2024 abilities are never worse often better than 2014, and we make sure the notion of staying with 2014 dies the death of a thousand needles by making an overwhelming amount of little tweaks.

We can always point to "this tweak gained 70% approval so you wanted it". After all, we made sure the conversation around changes never focused on "if we make this change we also don't make that change, so to keep down the total number of changes, which is essential to maintaining true compatibility"...

If they really did care about compatibility, they would incorporate the extra material from Tasha and similar books, and then actively tried to keep down the number of changes, and only made the absolute minimum number of changes needed to bring unplayable or unplayed elements up to par. Every change that just shuffles around bits and pieces, and every change that represents minor adjustments, are just not made. The more popular classes should probably be kept completely unchanged for "compatability" to have even a chance to mean "I really CAN gain an overview of all changes relevant to my character"

Note I'm not saying Crawford or anyone had this dialogue out in the open. But someone made sure the devs didn't worry about making a lot of little changes. Individually I'm sure nearly all of them can be justified one way or the other. But if you don't even have the conversation "let's set a goal of keeping 97% of 2014 completely intact and only make a change when it is really really needed"...

Same with systemic changes. By focusing the gamer mind on playtests, and what kewl new powerz you might get, you shift the attention away from the places where 5E remain really poor or wonky. The hand usage rules that feel very out of touch with how 5E generally is an invitingly simple game. The way WotC just don't care to make gold useful in games with little downtime. And things D&D never even tried to do right, such as making the rock-paper-scissors aspects of the different elements interesting.

The 3.5E designers weren't inept or stupid. Nor did they act with malicious intent. There don't have to be anyone lying, just making sure some things are discussed much more actively than others.

WotC as a whole did successfully market 3.5 as a fix when it clearly was never going to be one. It would take about ten years until 3E really was fixed (with 5E in 2014), and it only happened because WotC felt it had to actively encourage the truly constructive discussions about the fundamentals of the game engine to happen. These discussions are entirely absent from this playtest.

Everything I've read about 2024 suggests it will be the same game as 2014 while different enough in the details people find it easier to re-purchase all their books than trying to keep track of the differences.

This is WotC stalling for time. They just want to keep milking the cash cow.

 

[Stalker0]

Plenty of people defended 3.5E as well, both leading up to release and for at least a couple of years.

Took a while until the diehard arguments finally died down and people could see 3.5E for what it was:

An edition that WotC sold as something that would fix 3.0, but an edition that mostly shuffled around the bits on the surface while fixing nothing systemic underneath.

A major impact of these changes was that it no longer remained feasible to stick with 3.0. This impact is not felt on day one, so many people don't see it.

I saw it and I was annoyed and tired by it. For every change where the nuisance of having to relearn some specifics were trumped by genuine improvement, there was probably five where 3.5 mostly just switched it up with no fundamentally significant improvement.

But I bet WotC foresaw it and saw it as a huge benefit.

And I see a repeat here because there's not nearly enough discussion of the type where you go okay so now we have 70% approval of this thing here. Now let's analyze if we really should make the change, given how a hundred little changes will cumulatively make the compatibility claim feel very hollow indeed.

But hang on! Lets make all those little changes anyway, since we don't really want anyone to stick to 2014. We just don't want people being mad at us. We don't want them to feel forced to switch. We want them to want to switch.

So we make sure 2024 abilities are never worse often better than 2014, and we make sure the notion of staying with 2014 dies the death of a thousand needles by making an overwhelming amount of little tweaks.

We can always point to "this tweak gained 70% approval so you wanted it". After all, we made sure the conversation around changes never focused on "if we make this change we also don't make that change, so to keep down the total number of changes, which is essential to maintaining true compatibility"...

If they really did care about compatibility, they would incorporate the extra material from Tasha and similar books, and then actively tried to keep down the number of changes, and only made the absolute minimum number of changes needed to bring unplayable or unplayed elements up to par. Every change that just shuffles around bits and pieces, and every change that represents minor adjustments, are just not made. The more popular classes should probably be kept completely unchanged for "compatability" to have even a chance to mean "I really CAN gain an overview of all changes relevant to my character"

Note I'm not saying Crawford or anyone had this dialogue out in the open. But someone made sure the devs didn't worry about making a lot of little changes. Individually I'm sure nearly all of them can be justified one way or the other. But if you don't even have the conversation "let's set a goal of keeping 97% of 2014 completely intact and only make a change when it is really really needed"...

Same with systemic changes. By focusing the gamer mind on playtests, and what kewl new powerz you might get, you shift the attention away from the places where 5E remain really poor or wonky. The hand usage rules that feel very out of touch with how 5E generally is an invitingly simple game. The way WotC just don't care to make gold useful in games with little downtime. And things D&D never even tried to do right, such as making the rock-paper-scissors aspects of the different elements interesting.

The 3.5E designers weren't inept or stupid. Nor did they act with malicious intent. There don't have to be anyone lying, just making sure some things are discussed much more actively than others.

WotC as a whole did successfully market 3.5 as a fix when it clearly was never going to be one. It would take about ten years until 3E really was fixed (with 5E in 2014), and it only happened because WotC felt it had to actively encourage the truly constructive discussions about the fundamentals of the game engine to happen. These discussions are entirely absent from this playtest.

Everything I've read about 2024 suggests it will be the same game as 2014 while different enough in the details people find it easier to re-purchase all their books than trying to keep track of the differences.

This is WotC stalling for time. They just want to keep milking the cash cow.

3.5 was a major improvement to the game to me. Classes were better, monsters better designed, spells better, feats better, combat tactics better, magic items better. There wasn’t much that wasn’t changed or tweaked in 3.5.

now I do think in comparison 5.5e is looking much more like a 5.25e, the changes I’m seeing so far are much less than what 3.5 offered…though of course maybe the final product will have many more changes I wasn’t expecting.