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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6170523" data-attributes="member: 58197">It is impossible to catch all the problems the first time round. No edition has ever done it and no edition ever will. 3E had a huge open playtest and it still released with a bunch of problems. 5E will be the same.Certainly they could always gather more information from more open playtests. But there is a substantial cost to each iteration of the open playtest. They have to decide what questions they want answered in this playtest, what mechanics should go in and what should be kept out in order to avoid clouding the answers, and how to ask the questions in a way that will yield the desired information. The playtest documents have to be put together, edited, and formatted. The surveys have to be designed. And then the results must be processed and analyzed and summed up into some useful form. All that is a lot of work! So it's only worth doing it for big questions that will shape the direction of the design.For smaller balance-and-polish concerns, you need a much faster feedback cycle. You start to think wizards aren't doing enough damage with blasting spells. So you tweak spell damage upward. Now you need to find out if that was enough, or too much, or too little, or perhaps the real problem is a certain class of monsters with overly high Dexterity scores and you should be fixing that instead. There's a lot of back and forth here, far too much for the open playtest.I'm curious how you know that 5E is not attracting &quot;modern gamers&quot; (whatever that means) and that it's &quot;only pushed away&quot; 4E fans.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 6170523, member: 58197"] It is impossible to catch all the problems the first time round. No edition has ever done it and no edition ever will. 3E had a huge open playtest and it still released with a bunch of problems. 5E will be the same. Certainly they could always gather more information from more open playtests. But there is a substantial cost to each iteration of the open playtest. They have to decide what questions they want answered in this playtest, what mechanics should go in and what should be kept out in order to avoid clouding the answers, and how to ask the questions in a way that will yield the desired information. The playtest documents have to be put together, edited, and formatted. The surveys have to be designed. And then the results must be processed and analyzed and summed up into some useful form. All that is a lot of work! So it's only worth doing it for big questions that will shape the direction of the design. For smaller balance-and-polish concerns, you need a much faster feedback cycle. You start to think wizards aren't doing enough damage with blasting spells. So you tweak spell damage upward. Now you need to find out if that was enough, or too much, or too little, or perhaps the real problem is a certain class of monsters with overly high Dexterity scores and you should be fixing that instead. There's a lot of back and forth here, far too much for the open playtest. I'm curious how you know that 5E is not attracting "modern gamers" (whatever [i]that[/i] means) and that it's "only pushed away" 4E fans. [/QUOTE]

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