D&D 5E (2014) WotC Survey about PHB spells!

[Charlaquin]

Wow, that was a long one. I started out tracking which spells I was getting, but it was taking way too long that way. They were alphabetical though and I started from C and got through W, though I don’t think it was every PHB spell in that range.

 

[darjr]

OK I’m seeing others getting long lists but it isn’t all spells.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I went through the first two sections, ranking the PHB spells and then checking off whether I had ever cast the spells they gave me as either a Player or DM. It then asked me if I wanted to rate any other spells and I said 'No'. It then gave me a fill-in box to write what I wanted, which allowed me to tell them exactly why Barkskin sucks as a spell because the fluff of it does not match how the mechanics work.

Which is really all I wanted to do with the survey in the first place.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I rated a lot of spells and even got to add some and then say if I was a DM and what percentage of the last year I spent DMing (that'd be 98% - i have literally played ONE session as a player of 5E) but when it asked me my age I was at 58% done but then said I was 50 and it jumped to 99% and it was done.

Being unable to say WHY I was satisfied or dissatisfied with specific spells was frustrating - but then again, as with most of these surveys I think my opinion is not very important - being an old dude who accepts but is not satisfied with some basic changes to the game (for example, I said I was VERY dissatisfied with every single damage dealing cantrip)

Unfortunately, expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction without being able to say why is rather par for the course of 5e. It comes across rather as that any of these public-facing things is meant purely as a data-aggregation tool (e.g. "what things do people feel strongly about"), and then they draw on a much smaller, possibly pre-selected, group to investigate why people might feel certain ways.

Which is...rather unfortunate since it has a pretty high risk of ignoring some issues or suppressing some forms of feedback. E.g. what happens if 20% of players are unhappy with cantrips as you are, but the pre-selected feedback group is only unhappy with them for reasons that most of those 20% of players don't care about or even oppose? (E.g. I imagine plenty of old-school players like yourself find that this makes the game too spellcasting-focused, and thus they're opposed to the very existence of damage cantrips, whereas the feedback group might be feeling that certain cantrips are too powerful or too weak or whatever.)

 

[Stormonu]

Yeah, it seems to be about 50-75 spells; probably ones they're unsure of what the community thinks (for example, the classic Magic Missile and Fireball weren't on the list) or believe they may have an issue with due to redundancy (Delayed Blast Fireball), similarity (Lightning Bolt), power (Disintegrate) or whether folks are actually using them in the game (Detect Magic, Identify).

Good news is at the end they let you quibble about 5 spells of your choice, so if it wasn't included, you can bring it up.

I think this is a "first pass" to hone in on what spells they need to bother looking at in the first place; WHY they aren't working will be the next step.

 

[Ibrandul]

I thoughtfully answered the first few pages of spells, diligently looking up any spells I was rusty on, then realized I just didn't want to do this anymore.

So I just clicked "next" a lot without rating anything, to see what was coming up. It asked me to rate twenty pages' worth of spells! And then it asked "Would you like to rate any more spells?" to which the answer was clearly NO. Who knows how much longer the survey would have lasted if I'd clicked "Yes."

Unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of 5e PHB spells, one of the following will happen to you if you take this survey: 1) you'll click "Don't know" a whole lot; 2) you'll provide ratings, but most of your answers won't be meaningful because you won't have ready-to-mind opinions about the spells you're rating; 3) you'll bail, like I did; or 4) you will spend a very long time looking up the spells you're less familiar with.

The spells were also ordered aphabetically, starting with "A." Was this the case for everyone? From a survey design perspective, it seems trivially obvious to point out that the pages ought to have some randomness to them—say, starting people out at different letters of the alphabet—or your answers are going to be very skewed (most people will give more thought to page 1 than to page 10, and they're likely to rate page 10 spells lower, too).

 

[Siriak]

Yeah, it seems to be about 50-75 spells; probably ones they're unsure of what the community thinks (for example, the classic Magic Missile and Fireball weren't on the list) or believe they may have an issue with due to redundancy (Delayed Blast Fireball), similarity (Lightning Bolt), power (Disintegrate) or whether folks are actually using them in the game (Detect Magic, Identify).

Good news is at the end they let you quibble about 5 spells of your choice, so if it wasn't included, you can bring it up.

I think this is a "first pass" to hone in on what spells they need to bother looking at in the first place; WHY they aren't working will be the next step.

Magic Missile was on my list. Identify and Lightning Bolt were not.

It seems to me that they would do about 10 spells and then skip ahead to another group of 10 or so spells. Each group of spells was in alphabetical order.

I wonder if their goal is to cover all the spells, but realizing few people would take the time to rate every spell in the PHB, they opted to chunk them out to respondents in order to cover everything? Perhaps there will be more surveys once the data is aggregated and specific spells start to show extreme positive or negative reasults.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I'd get rid of probably half of the spells, they are very rarely--if ever--used in any game I play in or witness... Use the space in the book for better things.

 

[Siriak]

when it asked me my age I was at 58% done but then said I was 50 and it jumped to 99% and it was done.

I am 54 and the same thing happened to me. 50% to 99%. The only question they asked me after that was my gender. I can't imagine what they could have asked after that point in the survey that would have been impacted by how old I am.

 

[Stormonu]

I'd get rid of probably half of the spells, they are very rarely--if ever--used in any game I play in or witness... Use the space in the book for better things.

I'm of two minds - I'll happily (and have!) buy books of pre-made spells, but it might be worth it in the PHB to significantly distill down the list to archtypical base spells and somehow excise the "like this spell with X extra step/ability/rider". Give some more space to a flesh-out skill system or other options in other areas of the PHB (like polearms? ). I mean, Savage Worlds covered a lot of ground for magic/psionics/superpowers without a spell list that takes up 1/3 of the book.