D&D (2024) What is your oppinion of 5.24 so far?

[Oofta]

we do not know how our votes of 1 to 5 translate into percentages, agreed, but there is more to it than just that.


only as far as how they arrive at their percentages is concerned


no, but that is irrelevant


that is not what I said, the misunderstanding is about what a vote of 3 or 4 means. The voter has an idea of what it represents, but since they do not know what WotC will do based on the number (iterate or abandon), there is no good way to communicate liking the new proposal over the existing one but to vote 5. Any other vote in hindsight is much more likely to lead to WotC to abandon it than improving it, so anyone voting 3 or 4 because they liked the direction but thought it needed some improvement screwed themselves over (I assume anyone voting 1 or 2 does not want the new direction).

So the only way to clearly communicate intent to WotC in a way they understand is by using 1 or 5.


see above

In order to have a misunderstanding there has to be some basis of understanding. We don't know what voting a 3 or 4 meant so claiming people "screwed themselves over" by doing so has no basis.

Maybe they looked at the comments more closely if you voted a 3 or 4. Maybe it spurred further internal testing or conversation. Maybe the numbers were weighted somehow. Maybe they ignored the comments if you voted 1 or 5 so you lost your chance to give any detailed meaningful feedback. Maybe they were effectively ignored. We have no clue.

Your conclusion that only a 1 or 5 mattered has no foundation. If you've fabricated an understanding of how they used the data out of suppositions and assumptions, that's not WotC's fault.

 

[mamba]

Your conclusion that only a 1 or 5 mattered has no foundation.

again, that is not my conclusion... my conclusion is that if you want to be certain that your vote is understood correctly (in favor of or against the proposal), you need to vote 1 or 5

 

[Oofta]

again, that is not my conclusion... my conclusion is that if you want to be certain that your vote is understood correctly (in favor of or against the proposal), you need to vote 1 or 5

You can conclude anything you want, there's simply no justification for your conclusion.

If it's a binary answer with the option to ignore just ask "bad, good, no opinion". They have a scale of 1 to 5 so the logical assumption is that there's a reason for it.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I'm curious, what are your top 3 problems you wish were addressed?

Sorry for the delayed response. I simply can't participate here as often as others.

For the most part, things that I want addressed were unlikely to ever be addressed in the first place with a point revision. I know that, but it doesn't fix the problems as I see them.

The biggest issue is deeply systemic. Long rests are extremely powerful, and the result of that is that short-rest dependent classes suck and people think the encounter system is broken. The trouble is that the biggest sticks to deter long resting -- time pressure, ambushes, or gritty realism recovery -- either put the game on rails or change the style of play. If the game isn't flexible enough to not be on rails and not be a hex crawl/dungeon crawl, then it's not a very good TTRPG. The game needs something to reward not long resting. But I really, really doubt they did that. They did partially address it by backing off how much some classes rely on short rests, but of course Warlock (AFAIK) got reverted to Pact Magic. So... yeah, probably not fixed.

Second foremost is higher level spells. I explained my problems with them well in this earlier thread.

Thirdly, is polymorph and summon effects. This looks like it was partially addressed, but my experience is still that without fixed stats or a fixed list of targets the results are going to continue to slow the game down a lot and be really unbalanced. I think they could address this issue more easily with an ally rating to compliment the CR that tells you the level of the creature as an ally. But from what we've seen a lot of these effects are unchanged from 5e, so I'm really expecting these changes to fail. I know people like that the work this way, but that doesn't mean it's possible to balance. If Animate Objects and Polymorph are unchanged I'm going to have to replace the naugahyde on the arms of this chair, because I just have a gut feeling they completely overlooked one or the other.

Fourth is mostly the DMing aspects. And I don't mean what everyone seems to endlessly complain about, which is to say, NOT the encounter system or monsters. I think the encounter system isn't really that bad. The presentation sucks and it needs to explain that YES you're fully supposed to use CR 19s against a 13th level party instead of relying on people to do the math, but it works well enough. I think the monster problem can be solved pretty easily with third party content if nothing else. No, the big DMG problem is, "How do I, as a DM, run a campaign that gets the PCs to want to solve their problems by going on adventures and quests that THEY invent the goals for." I think the DMG instructs you how on to run a game, but it doesn't teach you how to be a DM. I think the 1e DMG for all it's extensive and manifold flaws is a better work in this respect.

It's even more frustrating because many of the things they are fixing in 5e.24 -- like Paladin smite spam -- were clearly known issues by 2016 and they could have issued recommendations then. Like they're totally self-contained issues, and then they spent the two years they had on thoroughly not addressing systemic problems. Like they're trying to fix martial-caster disparity with weapon mastery, and (a) no, it doesn't, and (b) it's slowing the game down even more. Words cannot express how much I don't want to roll a saving throw vs topple again, while other masteries like nick should just be how the game works.

 

[FrogReaver]

You can conclude anything you want, there's simply no justification for your conclusion.

The conclusion isn’t about what Wotc does. It’s about what the responder can know. I’m with @mamba only those that vote 1 or 5 can be confident of what happens in response to those votes. The other options we simply cannot know as you rightfully point out. But thats precisely the point.

They needed a question about direction and about implementation IMO.

 

[Bacon Bits]

If they had balanced around 2-3 encounters of 6+ rounds each per day with a typical short rest between them I don’t think you’d see nearly as many complaints. And this could also have balanced out the long and short rest classes.

For harder solo encounter adventuring days make magic harder. Counterspelling enemies or spell resistance, etc.

The problem here is the knock-on effects from raising the overall difficulty of encounters this way. And with how variable damage is in D&D, that means you're very likely to have adventuring days where attrition is uneven from hard encounters. In effect, higher difficulty days mean you're going to do too much damage to some PCs and they will simply choose to long rest.

So, IMO, that was their logic during the 2014 playtest:

1. The 5 minute adventuring day is a problem
2. If PCs rested during the day, it wouldn't be a 5 minute problem
3. We need the PCs to short rest to recover
4. We can strongly encourage the PCs to short rest by giving classes abilities that recover on short rests

The first problem that they found:

1. Long rests are really good because they fix everything.
2. We keep having PCs take too much damage to justify only short resting
3. If combats were easier, then the damage variance in the game would be reduced in severity
4. Let's lowball encounter difficulty. Instead of 3-4, we'll double it to 6-8. Then we rename the encounter difficulty categories. Trivial is now called "easy." Easy is now called "medium." Medium is now called "hard." And hard is now called "Deadly." And the old deadly category is removed entirely.

Then, of course, they decided to nerf short rests by limiting how many hit dice you get back. This has the disastrous side effect that the one thing that long rests don't fix... is that you took a short rest. Thus, it's often still better to long rest because if you short rest then tomorrow you won't be at 100%. The only attrition built in to 5e is tied to short rests. Stupid.

The second problem was that they made 3 classes extremely reliant on short resting (Fighter, Monk, Warlock) and then made 8 classes (Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Paladin, Ranger, Sorcerer, WIzard) extremely reliant on taking long rests. They needed 3-4 more classes to be more reliant on short rests and 3-4 fewer classes to be reliant on long rests. Oh, and Rogue, barring some subclasses, is an outlier. It's not reliant on rests at all.

The fix is that instead of incessantly punishing long resting -- time pressure, ambushes, gritty recovery -- that the game needs to reward not long resting.

 

[mamba]

You can conclude anything you want, there's simply no justification for your conclusion.

If it's a binary answer with the option to ignore just ask "bad, good, no opinion". They have a scale of 1 to 5 so the logical assumption is that there's a reason for it.

doesn't make it a good reason, doesn't mean that it is working, but sure, there was some kind of idea behind it

 

[mellored]

The game needs something to reward not long resting. But I really, really doubt they did that

There is more reward for short resting than before. While there is less punishing for missing it for warlock and monks.

It's not a fundamental shift, but helps mitigate the issue.

If Animate Objects and Polymorph are unchanged I'm going to have to replace the naugahyde on the arms of this chair, because I just have a gut feeling they completely overlooked one or the other.

I imagine Animate Objects uses a template.

I'm don't think polymorph changed much, except to use temporary hit points.

The presentation sucks

They have hyped up the new presentation of the DMG, and how it will help new DMs better.

We'll have to wait and see how successful they where.

thoroughly not addressing systemic problems.

That would require a new edition.

And I don't know how you would make a D&D wizard without long rest recharge as a core mechanic.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

again, that is not my conclusion... my conclusion is that if you want to be certain that your vote is understood correctly (in favor of or against the proposal), you need to vote 1 or 5

This is baseless.
They could as well ignore your voting if you voted all 5 or all 1 as it might have shown that you did not differentiate your answers.
We just don't know.


And you base your conclusion on the presumption that you know better than WotC how to best poll their audience. Probably out of lack of understanding of how surveys/statistics work.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I'm don't think polymorph changed much, except to use temporary hit points.

I am not sure, but I think they mentioned a change somewhere (probably when talking about wild shape).
Polymorph has to change, because it is the only spell scaling with caster level, not spell level.