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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ondath" data-source="post: 9092826" data-attributes="member: 7031770">As someone who's been checked out of the playtest for a while (so I don't really have any skin in the game), I've got to disagree. There are different ways of running a playtest, and the way you run it really determines the kind of reactions you'll get by predisposing the testers.For instance, they could offer a playtest with the entire set of new rules fleshed out, thus showing how a lot of the new changes interlock and synergise. Instead, they presented most of the changes piecemeal and asked people to supplement the missing rules with 5E. That will inevitably lead to a playtest experience where the rules that have been out for 10 years feel a lot of more fleshed out, compared to the stuff that's potentially in early iterations. It's not a fair competition for sweeping changes like power sources or a redesigned Warlock.They could also do playtesting at different stages of design. IIRC, D&D Next had early playtest stages that were only about the proficiency mechanic, or the skill/background rules, or some other core elements. Level Up A5E's playtest process started by asking people what they'd like to see for an advanced 5E, listing everything from stronghold rules to psionics. You can still present a vision that's brave enough to make some changes to the core rules without creating an environment where the reactionary tendencies of the player base (in the sense of preferring older, well-established mechanics) if you ask the right questions to the public, and ask that they trust your design vision for everything else.And the thing is, WotC did skirt around some rules in this playtest. For instance, I'm not a big fan of the "free feat with Background" rule, but the playtest survey for backgrounds did not provide me any opportunity to judge that specific rules change. What it did allow me to judge was whether these specific feats were good as free Level 1 feats. Lo and behold, the results of that survey showed that people were happy with feats at level 1. While it's likely that the majority of people do like that rule, I can't trust that survey because the question was loaded. So it's not like they couldn't design the playtest in a way that allowed radical departures to thrive. They just chose not to for most of them.So yeah, if all of these radical suggestions will get thrown under the bus just because the format they chose for the playtest requires an 80+% approval from the audience (who are likely to have a bias for keeping old rules), all of this playtest was for nothing. At this point, I can't really see the point of calling it a rules revision and not an errata.</blockquote>

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