D&D (2024) Playtest 6 Survey is Open

[the Jester]

But it was kinda. It's the lowest DPS of any fighting class and for most of its abilities drain out of the same common pool of resources meaning if you use the cool defense abilities, you lose offense capacity and vice versa.

Meaningful choices are good.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don’t think we can reasonably glean anything about the emotional state of the designers from the content of UA6. What we can glean is… well, exactly what they told us in the companion videos. Unified subclass progression, spell preparation correlating 1:1 with spell slots, generalized wild shape templates, and epic boon feats at 20th level all came in at under 80% satisfaction, and so are not being developed further. Weapon mastery and several of the changes class features did meet that benchmark, and are being explored further.

Yeah, people here on the boards seem to put a lot more emphasis on what they think the designers are actually feeling or what rules they care about than I think any of the designers actually do.

Something doesn't make it into the next packet and people here on EN World lose their ever-loving shite... whereas the folks over at WotC just shrug their shoulders and go "All right, what's next?"

 

[Kobold Stew]

Packet 6 does not glow with calm confidence.

Honestly, I couldn't disagree more. It was the strongest package to date, with unexpected innovations and clever tightenings of many issues. Was it perfect? Of course not, and I regret that they felt they needed to backpedal on some of their previous strong innovations. But overall? Strongest offering we've seen so far.

 

[Parmandur]

Honestly, I couldn't disagree more. It was the strongest package to date, with unexpected innovations and clever tightenings of many issues. Was it perfect? Of course not, and I regret that they felt they needed to backpedal on some of their previous strong innovations. But overall? Strongest offering we've seen so far.

It seems to me that it was their first serious "we might just publish this as-is" offering.

 

[Charlaquin]

We all need to also remember that we are all each just one vote in a pile of like 40,000. Which means our individual opinions, votes, and ideas we type into the comments sections are barely a blip in the entire process. So none of us should in any way be demoralized OR get our hopes up from anything that appears in these packets. Our feelings are virtually meaningless.

These packets should be treated as curiosities. Nothing more. Participate in them if for no other reason than it might make you feel good to get your feelings down on paper (the same reason why all of us spend hundreds of thousands of words typing in threads after threads after threads here on EN World when they serve no actual purpose)... but know that you are merely the smallest cog in an otherwise huge playtest machine and if you disappeared it would have almost no practical effect.

Once you can do that and just forget about all of this meaningless hoo-haa until the books finally get released next summer and you can see what they actually look like... the happier you are ultimately going to be. Because then you'll be able to just take the books or leave them as-is, and have no residual sadness or anger over the things that did or did not make it from the previous 18 months.

This is like saying it doesn’t matter if you vote, because one individual vote has negligible impact. Setting aside the fact that elections have in fact been won and lost by single votes, it’s only technically correct to say that your individual vote doesn’t make a difference. Sure, no single vote has significant impact (except when it does), but collectively, votes matter, and you as an individual must vote in order to contribute to that collective.

Sure, understand that just because you said “very satisfied,” doesn’t mean the rest of the community agrees with you. But don’t let that stop you from contributing what you can to the process. For all you know, there could be a significant bloc of respondents who feel the same way you do, but are held back because they all assume their individual responses won’t matter.

 

[the Jester]

And that's the problem. Playing a monk (or warlock) requires the following metagame knowledge:

1. I will get the opportunity to take a short rest multiple times during the adventure.
2. The breaks will come frequently enough that I can gauge my resource pool and how close I am to a refill.
3. Said rests will come when I need them to.

No it doesn't. That's a pretty ridiculous claim. At least in the games I run and play in, you can't count on a short rest conveniently arriving when you want it. Sometimes you have to work to make it happen. And that's good! That means the pcs have to use their noggins, have to strategize and plan and work to take advantage of the environment or set up conditions to allow for a rest. Might be as simple as "We close the door behind us and rest in a sealed room" or "I cast rope trick", or it might require backing off, retreating to a safe space a mile outside the dungeon, setting up an alarm spell and some quick hunter's traps, and concealing the whole thing with brush. Short rests aren't always easy, or even possible, to take, but - when a group has this issue, do the pcs actually do anything to try to get one, or just assume they can camp in a busy hallway?

Sorry, the short rest issue is one that is starting to trigger my rants.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Mathematically, it's the same sort of resource pool as Paladins. As long as adequate Ahort Rests are available, and given a normal Adventure Day (which WotC isnmaking any changes to, which makes sense to me based on my experience), then the Monk is just fine.

Math is immediately trumped by quality of play experience and satisfaction thereof.

And they have recognized multiple times in multiple ways that short rest classes are unsatisfying for a large number of players, because the resources run low too quickly.

They gave monk a 1 minute short rest feature to help with this, and fixed the cost of elemental abilities in the elements monk, and made subclasses give more bang for the use of a particular discipline feature, and/or turn a feature at-will eventually. All of this is to make it so folks don’t feel the need to horde points, and don’t run out as often.

Sometimes the math only works out in theory.

 

[Parmandur]

Math is immediately trumped by quality of play experience and satisfaction thereof.

And they have recognized multiple times in multiple ways that short rest classes are unsatisfying for a large number of players, because the resources run low too quickly.

They gave monk a 1 minute short rest feature to help with this, and fixed the cost of elemental abilities in the elements monk, and made subclasses give more bang for the use of a particular discipline feature, and/or turn a feature at-will eventually. All of this is to make it so folks don’t feel the need to horde points, and don’t run out as often.

Sometimes the math only works out in theory.

And sometimes it works in practice. WotC has made some ameliorations of issues that can come up with Short Rests, but clearly they don't view the adventure day system itself as an issue itself...which matches my experience.

 

[tetrasodium]

Honestly, I couldn't disagree more. It was the strongest package to date, with unexpected innovations and clever tightenings of many issues. Was it perfect? Of course not, and I regret that they felt they needed to backpedal on some of their previous strong innovations. But overall? Strongest offering we've seen so far.

It also backed off from actual change seen in prior packets. Second verse same as the first is hardly an enticing reason to repurchase the first

 

[Remathilis]

No it doesn't. That's a pretty ridiculous claim. At least in the games I run and play in, you can't count on a short rest conveniently arriving when you want it. Sometimes you have to work to make it happen. And that's good! That means the pcs have to use their noggins, have to strategize and plan and work to take advantage of the environment or set up conditions to allow for a rest. Might be as simple as "We close the door behind us and rest in a sealed room" or "I cast rope trick", or it might require backing off, retreating to a safe space a mile outside the dungeon, setting up an alarm spell and some quick hunter's traps, and concealing the whole thing with brush. Short rests aren't always easy, or even possible, to take, but - when a group has this issue, do the pcs actually do anything to try to get one, or just assume they can camp in a busy hallway?

Sorry, the short rest issue is one that is starting to trigger my rants.

And if none of those options are available, your PC is gimped. The wizard still has a days worth of slots available. The warlock does not. The barbarian wakes up and knows he has three rages before he's out of juice, the monk wakes up and he might have 4, 8, 12, or 16 ki points before the adventure is done. If the adventure doesn't allow for resting (a prison escape, a demon summoning at midnight, or the dungeon is filled with poison gas) then you have significantly less power than your long rest classes.

As a player, I have to ration my abilities under the assumption I won't get another rest. As a DM, I have to adapt my adventures to give my players those rests even if the adventure would not normally allow Lunch Hours. Both are disruptive and forced by metagame concerns involving power budgets. They have the chance to make SR an optional boost rather than a needed component, but I guess they prefer keeping monk low tier and warlock a munchkin-multiclass.