One D&D Cleric and Species playtest survey is live.

[aco175]

So, I discovered something interesting. You can string any number of words together with hyphens in the “additional comments” boxes and they’ll all get counted as one word. I think if you were to use this to type a several-hundred-all-hyphenated-word-response you’d probably just get your response thrown out without it ever being read, but it might be useful if you’ve hit the 200-word limit and just need to squeeze an extra couple of words in there.

I sometimes wonder if this site needs a 200 word limit on some of the posts. I find myself skimming a lot on longer posts. It is a bit rude and a disservice to the poster, but come on man. At least some have a TLDR.

 

[Charlaquin]

Bypassing form validation on order to submit a longer entry does not guarantee that the database field it is probably getting written to won't simply limit the IMSERT to the number of characters the form tried to benforce. There is a good chance the excess goes away or even that it simply fails to store the entire text box depending on how the code is written to at re it when you click next

It’s not limited by characters though, it’s limited by words.

 

[tetrasodium]

It’s not limited by characters though, it’s limited by words.

That doesn't mean that there isn't a db field with a character limit. Web ui survey crunching & database administrators are often very different groups of folks

 

[Charlaquin]

That doesn't mean that there isn't a db field with a character limit. Web ui survey crunching & database administrators are often very different groups of folks

I guess so, but then wouldn’t some responses be at risk of getting cut off if a lot of their 200 words were long ones and/or they used a whole lot of punctuation?

 

[Oofta]

I sometimes wonder if this site needs a 200 word limit on some of the posts. I find myself skimming a lot on longer posts. It is a bit rude and a disservice to the poster, but come on man. At least some have a TLDR.

I-don't-know-why-you-would-say-that, long-posts-are-perfectly-fine. It's-not-like-people-ramble-on-and-on, we-have-important-things-to-say!

Really-wish-I-had-more-to-say-on-this-but-I-haven't-had-time-to-do-the-survey-yet.

 

[tetrasodium]

I guess so, but then wouldn’t some responses be at risk of getting cut off if a lot of their 200 words were long ones and/or they used a whole lot of punctuation?

Depends on how it's done. I don't know the limits on the form but lets say it's a nice round 250 words on the form for purpose of discussion. Imagine this process:

• Alice from the survey crunching research group tells their contact person Bob at their new client that survey responses shouldn't be more than about a page.
• Bob tells Cindy in webdev that they need a form with these questions from Dave's group but the survey team says to make sure no answers are more than about a page max.
• Cindy starts working on building a form after firing off a ticket to Eddie in serverOps or whatever saying that she needs a database named survey _xxx with the following fields.
  • Eddie's team kicks it back saying they need more info about the text fields they need to create
  • Cindy consults google to see that a page is about 250 words &fires it back saying no more than a page or 250 words.
  • Eddie's team sighs because they told Cindy they need a number of characters not words or pages. They too consult google & see that a page is about 1800 characters & that a word is usually considered 5 characters. They look at Cindy's ticket where it says "no more than A or B" so they set the limit to 1250 characters because you get that from 250*5
• Frank uses the eventual form to submit some stuff but is 75 words over, many of the first 250 words he used are more than 5 characters too so his average is already like 6 or 7 characters per word. He uses the validation defeat mentioned to add 75 more but only the first 15o words even get into the db so the rest never even had a chance.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

200 words is nowhere near the actual limit if they're using some MySQL-based db, the character limit is probably 65535 characters if it's a text column. But no one wants to read something that's 65535 characters long when there's so many other things to read.

 

[Lojaan]

I think "ancestry" will never be an option. The purpose of "species" or "subtype" and the like are to be purely * biological* descriptions. Seperate from background, culture, history etc... Ancestry has all that stuff very much mixed in so is not applicable.

Species was jarring when I first heard it but I'm used to it now. Subtype is pretty decent because it is clearly a game term.

 

[tetrasodium]

200 words is nowhere near the actual limit if they're using some MySQL-based db, the character limit is probably 65535 characters if it's a text column. But no one wants to read something that's 65535 characters long when there's so many other things to read.

That doesn't mean that nobody uses things like varchar(max). There are good reasons for doing so.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Does anoyne else think it is a bummer that the survey is open till Jan 20th...
I hoped to get a new packet earlier next year...

I suspect we will still get the next packet when we get the One D&D SRD.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I've said before Origins are the only term broad enough to cover stuff like Autognomes, Warforged, to other weirder things, things were biological terms don't make sense.

 

[codo]

I think "ancestry" will never be an option. The purpose of "species" or "subtype" and the like are to be purely * biological* descriptions. Seperate from background, culture, history etc... Ancestry has all that stuff very much mixed in so is not applicable.

Species was jarring when I first heard it but I'm used to it now. Subtype is pretty decent because it is clearly a game term.

I think all three are fine. Like you said the important part is that they are all biological not cultural descriptions.

I still think species is the best choice because it is much more clearly defined and less confusing. Even if someone has never played D&D or any RPGs at all, if you tell them, "My character is species __." they will understand what you are talking about, because species is a common real word term. "My kind or subtype is __." is a lot more vague and confusing. Kind and subtype are less well defined and use a more specific in-game definition.

Bottom line if you have common real world word, that works for describing game elements, you should use it, instead of defining new in-game jargon.

 

[Yaarel]

I've said before Origins are the only term broad enough to cover stuff like Autognomes, Warforged, to other weirder things, things were biological terms don't make sense.

If reallife scientists would describe new lifeforms that are nonbiological, they would use the term "species".

Fantasy lifeforms − Constructs like Warforged and Autognomes, Elementals like Genasi, and Undead like Reborn − can graft into the reallife taxonomy as new noncellular "kingdoms" of life.

Ultimately, "species" means a "kind" and applies to the species of any clade of the taxonomy.

 

[codo]

If reallife scientists would describe new lifeforms that are nonbiological, they would use the term "species".

Fantasy lifeforms − Constructs like Warforged and Autognomes, Elementals like Genasi, and Undead like Reborn − can graft into the reallife taxonomy as new noncellular "kingdoms" of life.

Ultimately, "species" means a "kind" and applies to the species of any clade of the taxonomy.

In science fiction it is completely normal to refer to carbon-based species, silicone based species, or even energy based species. The default terminology is alien species. In the real world we haven't found any aliens yet, but when scientists are talking about the potential, they use alien species. When NASA was talking about water on Mars and the potential for life, potential alien species was the phrase they use.

 

[Shiroiken]

Species was jarring when I first heard it but I'm used to it now. Subtype is pretty decent because it is clearly a game term.

Still hate Species, but if they're not going to use Lineage or Ancestry, I suppose it's probably the best choice. It's still inaccurate and comes off too much as sci-fi for my taste.

Subtype is terrible because it skips over the Creature Type. Since Humanoid is no longer the default, you'd have to use the full Creature Type/Subtype to replace Race. Not only is that a mouthful, but I was already sick of "subclass" and subrace" instead of Archetype and Ethnicity because WotC can't/won't be creative.

 

[Yaarel]

Still hate Species, but if they're not going to use Lineage or Ancestry, I suppose it's probably the best choice. It's still inaccurate and comes off too much as sci-fi for my taste.

Subtype is terrible because it skips over the Creature Type. Since Humanoid is no longer the default, you'd have to use the full Creature Type/Subtype to replace Race. Not only is that a mouthful, but I was already sick of "subclass" and subrace" instead of Archetype and Ethnicity because WotC can't/won't be creative.

It they went with the nomenclature of "type", I would prefer:

Type ← Race
Supertype ← Creature Type

(And I would prefer the Planar Origins group separately from the Creature Type.)

 

[Clint_L]

Whatever term they land on will be fine - we'll all get used to it quickly and forget that there was a huge argument. If this is the biggest controversy to dog OneD&D, then WotC are in good shape.

 

[Kinematics]

I went with Kind as my first choice. Not as, "What is your Kind?" — using the term as an explicit designator — but as in, "What kind of creature are you?" A simple, natural, inoffensive question because it's used as an adjective, not a noun.

I still think Species is the worst possible choice in a fantasy system.

 

[Baba]

I’m a bit annoyed that I have to log in to answer the survey, and that there is nothing about privacy in the FAQ. I like Wizards and their product, want them to succeed, and would like to spend my time giving them feedback for free, and they are just about the only company I am willing to do that for. But I don’t want to help them build a profile on me.

I wonder if this survey is even legal to distribute to eu citizens? It’s not anonymous (since you have to log in), it collects personal data (in the broad sense of the GDPR), and it doesn’t provide any information about how that personal data is procesed, like storage period and purposes of processing.

Edit: I started the survey now, and I see they refer to the general Wizards terms of use and Privacy Policy, so it’s probably legal. Still annoying, though.

The original d&d next surveys were anonymous, I think?

 

[Hriston]

5th Ed. already has a term for the parenthetical descriptor after a creature's type. It's called a "tag" not a "subtype". I still chose it as my second choice because I prefer it to species.