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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 8843882" data-attributes="member: 20323">Well, that's not what I heard.Starting at 3:00 (verbatim, emphasis mine) "Some groups prefer not to use feats, which is one of the reasons why we're very carefully threading this needle of: Alright, you get this free one. So we're not going to require you to engage with the feat system repeatedly unless you really want to. But we also want to give you that taste, so that you can then make an informed decision about whether you later engage with feats."In the recent <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kLAwL9yAtA" target="_blank">video</a>, Jeremy Crawford describes the "background feat at 1st level" being wildly popular in their survey and that it scored the highest (almost 90% satisfaction) of their first One D&D Unearthed Arcana playtest survey. (As I note below, this may be flawed)He explains that anything scoring this high is very likely to see further development in the actual game. It's hard to not view this in light of something Jeremy said back in 2018: that a majority of D&D players don't use feats.  [MEDIA=twitter]969020122177331200[/MEDIA]As [USER=11365]@Alphastream[/USER] said very well, this may be a flawed premise because there was no question asking "do you want bonus feats at 1st level?" (besides writing in your own comment in the text field at the end, which I did). There's a trend with these surveys to narrow the field of questioning to rating very specific features/feats/spells/races without asking the bigger question: do we even want this?So, that "~90% satisfaction with background feats at 1st level" might be true – there certainly are a lot more players who are younger than me getting into D&D, and maybe they really connect with the power fantasy implied by a bonus background feat – but until they actually ask that question, we don't really know.Honestly, I wish I'd been saving these surveys to look back at, but I just haven't had the wherewithal. I want to believe that there's nothing but the best intentions behind this playtest – to improve the design and player experience. However, if WotC have a marketing objective of, say, getting players to use the feat system more (based on their internal data showing that most players aren't using feats), then steering the conversation by selectively presenting survey questions so as not to undermine WotC's premise (you want more feats) is an effective way to do that.</blockquote>

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