D&D (2024) It feels so much like the D&D Next playtest did

[Corinnguard]

I'm in favor of everyone just moving on to third party stuff if they decide WotC isn't for them. I did, and it's the happiest I've ever been with 5e.

My suggestion would be to find someone who is really good at homebrewing stuff for 5e. Check out GM Binder for it's 5e homebrews.

 

[Scribe]

For example, if it were entirely up to me, I'd make big sweeping changes (I'd make 6e for sure) to fix everything that I think could be better. Would it be a better game? IDK, but I am SURE that I would create the very problem I've been discussing here: I'd throw some babies out with the bathwater and create unforeseen new problems that would need to be fixed 5 years in. In other words, I'd be wrong to do so.

Tweaking a few issues that many people agree (is it most people? IDK) are not great but leaving the bulk of 5e alone seems like a smarter bet to me. And it looks like the designers have that planned.

Absolutely agreed.

Could I make the game better for me with 6e? Sure. Would I risk it if I was in Wizards position? Heck no.

 

[Sacrosanct]

All the good ideas were shouted down by grognards, who are now vastly outnumbered by new players.

Both claims in this statement are false, based only on your own biases and guesses. I.e., what you may think is a good idea is hardly objective truth.

So unless you have some sort of evidence that shows it's the "grognards" who "shouted down" all of the good ideas, and have evidence that grognards somehow outnumbered everyone else and no longer do, I'm pretty sure your comment is false. I think it's pretty obvious that "grognards" have always been in the minority post WotC era as a ratio of the player base.

Look. WotC is a business. The only thing they care about is getting the largest number of players as possible. This is not catering to grognards. It just isn't. The math doesn't hash out. Just like the meteoric rise of 5e isn't due to all the grognards coming back into the game. A whole lot of people who like 5e and came to the game never played TSR era edition games, and certainly aren't grognards.

With this new revision, WoTC is once again going to make a decision based on what will expand the game and maximize profits according to the data they have. And make no mistake, WoTC has a lot more access to player demographics and preferences than you or I do, unless you have some special access to all of their survey results.

No, what I think is much more likely is people thinking their preference is in the majority when it's not, and when their preference isn't put into the game, they want to blame someone else. That's how your comment reads to me.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Both claims in this statement are false, based only on your own biases and guesses. I.e., what you may think is a good idea is hardly objective truth.

So unless you have some sort of evidence that shows it's the "grognards" who "shouted down" all of the good ideas, and have evidence that grognards somehow outnumbered everyone else and no longer do, I'm pretty sure your comment is false. I think it's pretty obvious that "grognards" have always been in the minority post WotC era as a ratio of the player base.

Look. WotC is a business. The only thing they care about is getting the largest number of players as possible. This is not catering to grognards. It just isn't. The math doesn't hash out. Just like the meteoric rise of 5e isn't due to all the grognards coming back into the game. A whole lot of people who like 5e and came to the game never played TSR era edition games, and certainly aren't grognards.

With this new revision, WoTC is once again going to make a decision based on what will expand the game and maximize profits according to the data they have. And make no mistake, WoTC has a lot more access to player demographics and preferences than you or I do, unless you have some special access to all of their survey results.

No, what I think is much more likely is people thinking their preference is in the majority when it's not, and when their preference isn't put into the game, they want to blame someone else. That's how your comment reads to me.

While your post is pretty clearly correct, I'm not sure there's much point in stomping on someone's statement of feeling just because it's not fact. (It's just unkind, really).

I usually try to see through statements like that to what the poster is actually saying (which seems likely to me to be something along the lines of "I liked some stuff from the NEXT playtest that didn't make it into 5e". Which is a pretty fair thing to say.

Sure, they could have said that and it would have been better, but a lot of people just don't talk that way. At least not when their bristles are up.

 

[James Gasik]

I guess it comes down to questions like, "who hated the playtest Sorcerer?" (as an example). What group of playtesters took the surveys and consistently led WotC to create the PHB Sorcerer?

It couldn't be new players, because WotC had made sure new people would have a hard time jumping into 4e after taking down all the online content and the free character build, could it?

Was it disgruntled 4e players, wanting to make the new game fail out of spite? Seems unlikely to me, since they'd want more of what they liked in 4e to survive.

Was it 3e players, who were either perfectly happy playing 3e or had moved onto Pathfinder? If they were happy, why would they?

Was it OD&D players, who wouldn't have cared either way, having stuck to their preferred game for over a decade?

Honestly, none of these seem likely to me. But WotC's goal was to get the expatriates and the people who complained loudest about 4e back into the fold, so these are the people who get the blame, rightly or wrongly, until the (never going to happen) day when WotC releases their playtest data.

Unless you're one of those people who puts the blame at WotC's feet themselves, wondering if the whole playtest was an exercise to retain hype for a game that's final shape was already far along in development...

 

[Sacrosanct]

While your post is pretty clearly correct, I'm not sure there's much point in stomping on someone's statement of feeling just because it's not fact. (It's just unkind, really).

As a grognard myself who they blamed for ruining the game, I think maybe this statement should have been more directed at them, who did the actual insulting and blaming, rather than the person pointing out the flaw in their argument. Frankly, I'm getting pretty tired of always hearing that argument come up ("5e would have been better if the grognards didn't ruin it for the rest of us, who are actually the important demographic.")

"Grognards ruined the game for us!"
"No, they actually didn't."
"Don't be unkind to the person insulting other gamers by correcting them."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I guess it comes down to questions like, "who hated the playtest Sorcerer?" (as an example). What group of playtesters took the surveys and consistently led WotC to create the PHB Sorcerer?

It is an interesting question. We can only guess, but my guess I think I'm fairly confident on. Response online to the playtest Sorcerer was more positive than to several other less-changed playtest classes, and whilst it could be misleading, I really doubt it's that misleading. So I think we have our culprits.

The "special thanks" group of playtesters.

So not any of the people in the open playtest, but the somewhat strange group of mostly-grogs, including a lot of avowed OSR players who indeed kept playing OSR games after 5E came out. These were people essentially hand-picked by Mike Mearls (to the point where he engaged in some very bad decision-making about one of them later), and a lot of them were people who essentially didn't even want 5E. That doesn't make their advice worthless, but it colours the hell out of it.

There were a bunch of other strange changes after the final open playtest, which seemed to be either completely unconnected to or fly in the face of what people had been (openly) saying about the playtest. Not least the much-discussed change from 3-4 to 6-8 encounters/day (and easier ones) as the default. That was a terrible match for both 3E and 4E, so it's unlikely to be veterans of those. Even in 1E/2E, days with 6-8 encounters would strongly be the exception not the norm. Only in dungeon-crawling OD&D and OSR games is that more normal. But I'm still unconvinced it was those.

So I'm guessing the "special thanks" group influenced a whole flurry of last minute changes. I definitely don't think WotC had already shaped 5E and was rubber-stamping it, because 5E, whilst a cool game, is in many ways a mess, and really seemed very unfinished - the 5E DMG is the most unfinished-seeming core D&D book I've seen from any edition, and not by a small margin.

 

[Charlaquin]

I guess it comes down to questions like, "who hated the playtest Sorcerer?" (as an example). What group of playtesters took the surveys and consistently led WotC to create the PHB Sorcerer?

I don’t think anybody did. Of course my experience was limited to forums which we know are not representative (though I think the WotC forums at the time were probably more representative than most forums today). But I remember the general response being something along the lines of “this is a really cool class, but it doesn’t really feel like a sorcerer. I’d like it if this class got added later as its own new thing instead of replacing the sorcerer in the PHB.” People were a lot more willing to let go of cool new ideas because of the promise of modularity that was never really fulfilled. In fact, I remember sentiments of “I love this idea, but it feels better suited to a modular add-on than the core rules” not just about the sorcerer, but about all kinds of things. Many of us were trying to find the most broadly accessible version of the core rules, under the impression that anything with more niche appeal would have another shot later, as a modular addition. What fools we were.

 

[Charlaquin]

It is an interesting question. We can only guess, but my guess I think I'm fairly confident on. Response online to the playtest Sorcerer was more positive than to several other less-changed playtest classes, and whilst it could be misleading, I really doubt it's that misleading. So I think we have our culprits.

The "special thanks" group of playtesters.

So not any of the people in the open playtest, but the somewhat strange group of mostly-grogs, including a lot of avowed OSR players who indeed kept playing OSR games after 5E came out. These were people essentially hand-picked by Mike Mearls (to the point where he engaged in some very bad decision-making about one of them later), and a lot of them were people who essentially didn't even want 5E. That doesn't make their advice worthless, but it colours the hell out of it.

There were a bunch of other strange changes after the final open playtest, which seemed to be either completely unconnected to or fly in the face of what people had been (openly) saying about the playtest. Not least the much-discussed change from 3-4 to 6-8 encounters/day (and easier ones) as the default. That was a terrible match for both 3E and 4E, so it's unlikely to be veterans of those. Even in 1E/2E, days with 6-8 encounters would strongly be the exception not the norm. Only in dungeon-crawling OD&D and OSR games is that more normal. But I'm still unconvinced it was those.

So I'm guessing the "special thanks" group influenced a whole flurry of last minute changes. I definitely don't think WotC had already shaped 5E and was rubber-stamping it, because 5E, whilst a cool game, is in many ways a mess, and really seemed very unfinished - the 5E DMG is the most unfinished-seeming core D&D book I've seen from any edition, and not by a small margin.

Oh, absolutely! Some of the changes from the final playtest packet to the PHB were truly out of nowhere. Some things that had been consistent throughout the playtest (for example, race giving a +1, subrace giving a different +1, and class giving a third +1. Races granting a die size upgrade to damage with their traditional weapon types. Some stuff in the armor table, etc) were just suddenly different in the PHB for no clear reason.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Oh, absolutely! Some of the changes from the final playtest packet to the PHB were truly out of nowhere. Some things that had been consistent throughout the playtest (for example, race giving a +1, subrace giving a different +1, and class giving a third +1. Races granting a die size upgrade to damage with their traditional weapon types. Some stuff in the armor table, etc) were just suddenly different in the PHB for no clear reason.

Oh yeah that was all pretty sexy. I'm pretty mad that dumped all that, especially as a lot of that stuff, like weapon die sizes and the three sources of stats, basically got solely a positive response. And then suddenly we have something that looks like an attempt to compromise with a vastly more old-fashioned design? Hmmmm.