D&D (2024) WotC On One D&D Playtest Survey Results: Nearly Everything Scored 80%+!

In a 40-minute video, WotC's Jeremy Crawford discussed the survey feedback to the 'Character Origins' playtest document. Over 40,000 engaged with the survey, and 39,000 completed it. I've summarised the content of the video below.

High Scorers

• The highest scoring thing with almost 90% was getting a first level feat in your background. This is an example of an experimental thing -- like advantage and disadvantage in the original 5E playtests.
• Almost everything also scored 80%+.

About The Scoring System

• 70% or higher is their passing grade. In the 70s is a thumbs up but tinkering need. 80% means the community wants exactly that and WotC treads carefully not to change it too much.
• In the 60s it's salvageable but it really needs reworking. Below 60% means that there's a good chance they'll drop it, and in the 40s or below it's gone. Nothing was in the 50s or below.

Low Scorers

Only 3 things dipped into the 60s --

• the d20 Test rule in the Rules Glossary (experimental, no surprise)
• the ardling
• the dragonborn

The next UA had a different version of the d20 Test rule, and they expect a very different score when those survey resuts come in.

It was surprising that the dragonborn scored lower than the ardling. The next UA will include new versions of both. The main complaints were:

• the dragonborn's breath weapon, and confusion between the relationship between that dragonborn and the one in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons.
• the ardling was trying to do too much (aasimar-like and beast-person).

The ardling does not replace the aasimar. The next version will have a clearer identity.

Everything else scored in the 70s or 80s.

Some more scores:

• new human 83%
• dwarf, orc, tiefling, elf tied at 80-81%
• gnome, halfling tied at 78%

Future installments of Unearthed Arcana

• The next one will have new ardling and dragonborn, a surprise 'guest', and a new cleric. It will be a shorter document than the previous ones, and the one after that is bigger again. Various class groups.
• Warrior group digs into something teased in a previous UA sidebar -- new weapon options for certain types of characters. Whole new ways to use weapons.
• New rules on managing your character's home base. A new subsystem. Create bases with NPCs connected with them, implementing downtime rules. They're calling it the "Bastion System".
• There will be a total of 48 subclasses in the playtest process.
• New encounter building rules, monster customization options.
• New versions of things which appear in the playtest after feedback.

Other Notes

• Playtests are a version of something with the assumption that if something isn't in the playtest, it's still in the game (eg eldritch blast has not been removed from the game). The mage Unearthed Arcana will feature that.
• Use an object and other actions are still as defined in the current Player's Handbook. The playtest material is stuff that has changed.
• Thief subclass's cunning action does not interact with use an object; this is intentional. Removed because the original version is a 'Mother may I?" mechanic - something that only works if the DM cooperates with you. In general mechanics which require DM permission are unsatisfying. The use an object action might go away, but that decision will be a made via the playtest process.
• The ranger's 1st-level features also relied too heavily on DM buy-in, also wild magic will be addressed.
• If you have a class feature you should be able to use it in the way you expect.
• If something is removed from the game, they will say so.
• Great Weapon Fighting and Sharpshooter were changed because the penalty to the attack roll was not big enough to justify the damage bonus, plus they want warrior classes to be able to rely on their class features (including new weapon options) for main damage output. They don't want any feats to feel mandatory to deal satisfying damage. Feats which are 'must haves' violate their design goals.
• Light Weapon property amped up by removing the bonus action requirement because requiring light weapon users to use their bonus action meant there were a lot of bad combinations with features and spells which require bonus actions. It felt like a tax on light weapon use.
• Class spell lists are still an open question. Focus on getting used to the three big spell lists. Feedback was that it would be nice to still have a class list to summarize what can be picked from the 'master lists'. For the bard that would be useful, for the cleric and wizard not necessary as they can choose from the whole divine or arcane list.

The playtest process will continue for a year.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Having entirely new editions every 5 to 10 years is bad for the game.

if this were true 5e would have bombed, it came out after 3e 3.5 4e pathfinder... so everyone had done the 5 to 10 year switch and 5e was amazing and sold like they had $100 bills hidden in the books.

I want to postulate that the reason D&D is #1 is because not in spite of it's changes.

 

[FrogReaver]

The problem isn't that weather forecasting is inaccurate; it is, on the macro scale, indeed incredibly accurate. Sometimes accurate out to weeks in advance, rarely off by more than a few degrees, etc.

The problem is that the very specific singular thing people REALLY REALLY want to know--"will the weather be inclement during this specific time frame in this specific urban location?"--is an extremely difficult question to answer. It depends on a host of variables which are very difficult to directly observe, especially in real time, conditions which change rapidly and often without warning, and which frequently covers (from a meteorological perspective) extremely slim tracts of land, perhaps even as small as a single street or park. That kind of prediction is still spotty at best, but of course that's the thing people want to know the most and always have. "Will I need my umbrella if I take a walk now?" You can tell a whole city if they should expect rain everywhere, but telling a single neighborhood to expect intermittent light showers for a couple hours is extraordinarily difficult.

This causes laypeople to think weather prediction is garbage, because for their lived everyday experience, yes, it is an extremely rough measure. (The fact that the percentage chance of precipitation you hear on weather reports may actually be any of the following (with made-up numbers):
A) Under conditions resembling the (predicted) conditions of the day in question, 40% experienced some level of precipitation, thus there is an 40% chance that precipitation will occur
B) Under conditions resembling the (predicted) conditions of the day in question, the forecaster is 80% certain that precipitation will occur, but only cover 50% of the area under analysis, thus there is a 40% chance that any given randomly-chosen area will experience precipitation.
C) There is a precipitation source (e.g. cloud front) moving toward the area, which will apply 100% coverage of precipitation, but the forecaster is only 40% certain that the source will reach the destination in the prediction period, thus there is a 40% chance that precipitation will occur.

ALL of these mean something different from what most people think "chance of rain" means, which they interpret in the casual, ordinary-people sense of "this is the chance that, if I were to go outside today, rain would fall on me." The second case, for example, could be as high as 100% "chance of rain" in the casual sense if the person wanting the report is expecting to travel around the area in question quite a bit.

Snow is the worst when it’s rain turning to snow or snow turning to rain. They always under or over forecast the snow.

 

[Oofta]

I guess I am not explaining myself well so I wil try again.

If the 5E adventures used the CR and encounter rules in their design, they assume specific values regarding CR and EL by definition. If the 2024 revision of the game changes those CR and EL values then, by definition, the adventures written for 2014 are no long "compatible" with the 2024 rules. If, on the other hand, the adventures weren't designed with the 2014 rules, it proves that those rules were never worthwhile to begin with so revisions of those rules are irrelevant and unnecessary.

Long story short: you can't have it both ways. Either CR and EL is a real, meaningful thing that must be revised along with everything else -- thereby making the earlier adventures incompatible -- or CR and EL was always arbitrary and unreliable, in which case a revision of CR is completely unnecessary and irrelevant and its best dropped entirely.

That is to say that a system that doesn't do what it's design intent is to do, is useless. Either fix it or eliminate it.

In my experience you have to adjust encounters for every group no matter what. That's been true in every edition of the game. D&D is not a board game with limited options and constraints for everyone, every group I have ever run for can handle different levels of challenge. The best any encounter guideline can do is get you in the ballpark, it will always be up to the DM to adjust as needed. A guideline that works for everyone out of the box is impossible.

The guidelines can be improved, but will never be perfect. There's no reason to throw it out because it's imperfect, it just means that it should be improved. I'd probably also include advice on how to adjust, when and why.

 

[Maxperson]

if this were true 5e would have bombed, it came out after 3e 3.5 4e pathfinder... so everyone had done the 5 to 10 year switch and 5e was amazing and sold like they had $100 bills hidden in the books.

I want to postulate that the reason D&D is #1 is because not in spite of it's changes.

That's possible, but shows like Big Bang Theory and Stranger Things, as well as Critical Role helped bring D&D into the main stream. I'd argue that had a bigger impact on D&D swelling the way it did than the edition itself. 3e might have done as well or even better than 5e has if it had been the edition to benefit from those things. I'm not saying that it would have for sure, but rather that we can't attribute the changes that 5e made as the reason.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Who said I, or anyone else in that sub-thread, was dismissing 3P products out of hand? I have literally hundreds of 3P products for 5E, between print and digital, and integrated many of their rules into my games, sometimes in place of the official option. If an official take on, say, non-Medium PCs wasn't to my liking, I could just use one of the alternative approaches. In the meantime, such rules' existence would benefit others who do rely on official options. Seems like a win-win to me.

It's why I tried to make sure I said further up in the post "(general) you"... trying to get across that I wasn't referring to you @JEB specifically... but just anyone out there for whom the statements might have been applicable. My apologies if you didn't notice it or I wasn't clear.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Ew, do they claw? They really are sad.

(I make it a rule to not interact with dogs smaller than my cats.)

We built them to burrow after badgers, so they need to claw.

We then decided they need to live indoors and never, ever expend energy, so they're now nervous bundles of daemonic energy.

 

[FrogReaver]

That's possible, but shows like Big Bang Theory and Stranger Things, as well as Critical Role helped bring D&D into the main stream. I'd argue that had a bigger impact on D&D swelling the way it did than the edition itself. 3e might have done as well or even better than 5e has if it had been the edition to benefit from those things. I'm not saying that it would have for sure, but rather that we can't attribute the changes that 5e made as the reason.

Actual causal effects are hard to determine. So we can probably not ever be sure.

Looking at a graph of PHB sales vs stranger things and big bang theory d&d episodes on the timeline would probably be quite revealing. I don’t know that we have that though.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

That's possible, but shows like Big Bang Theory and Stranger Things, as well as Critical Role helped bring D&D into the main stream. I'd argue that had a bigger impact on D&D swelling the way it did than the edition itself.

okay but what about the editions before that?

3e might have done as well or even better than 5e has if it had been the edition to benefit from those things.

yes I argue this all the time 2e, 4e, 3e, OD&D would have jumped up with all of the hype... but again the entire thing stood strong as number one for 30ish year even though it changed all the time

I'm not saying that it would have for sure, but rather that we can't attribute the changes that 5e made as the reason.

right there with you... but again that boom is really the last 5 years and I think Covid it actually helped the game too, or some mix of all of them.

However my guess is what has KEPT D&D #1 since day 1 is becuse it updates and changes.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

now nervous bundles of daemonic energy.

that is totally my Stitch

 

[DEFCON 1]

If enough people believe the 2024 books will be able to be used with and alongside any number of previously published books with little to no issue and that they will be "backwards compatible"...

...then WotC can say their 2024 books are "backwards compatible" and not be the lying heathens a bunch of you want to paint them as.

Just because your 'definition' doesn't match other people's 'definition' of "backwards compatible"... doesn't mean your 'definition' is actually correct. And in fact... based on how I see a bunch of people throw around terms like "broken"-- a term that has so many 'definitions' at this point amongst the EN World populace it might as well not even exist because it's lost all meaning-- I personally don't believe ANY of your 'definitions' for any of these words, and I don't think WotC should either. And thankfully, they don't seem to.