D&D 5E WotC Survey about PHB spells!

[overgeeked]

It kinda sounds like you would rather be playing with different people.

5E has all the players...the vast majority of whom, apparently, insist on playing in a style I abhor. Older editions and other games have all the flavor and style I want to play with as a DM...but the playerbase is minuscule and shrinking.

 

[Charlaquin]

5E has all the players...the vast majority of whom, apparently, insist on playing in a style I abhor.

I don’t know, the majority of people I have played with don’t play the way you were describing in the post I quoted. But, perhaps you were employing illustrative hyperbole. Whatever the case may be, you have my sympathy for being unable to find a play group who’s preferences are more aligned with yours. Can I safely assume you have tried looking for like-minded players and/or players for other games online?

 

[Quickleaf]

Tiny Hut is conspicuously absent from that list.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Tiny Hut is conspicuously absent from that list.

I got it. Not everyone gets every spell.

 

[HammerMan]

5E has all the players...the vast majority of whom, apparently, insist on playing in a style I abhor. Older editions and other games have all the flavor and style I want to play with as a DM...but the playerbase is minuscule and shrinking.

Yup, I find that each edition (except 3e) and even other RPG entirely have become harder to find (before covid, now I am just online)

 

[overgeeked]

I don’t know, the majority of people I have played with don’t play the way you were describing in the post I quoted. But, perhaps you were employing illustrative hyperbole.

I wish.

Whatever the case may be, you have my sympathy for being unable to find a play group who’s preferences are more aligned with yours.

Thanks.

Can I safely assume you have tried looking for like-minded players and/or players for other games online?

Yeah. I mostly play online. In the last year or two (pandemic time dilation) I've run 5E for a total of about 60 different players. All of them played in the manner I described. And that was after me being specific about not looking for that kind of game.

I got it. Not everyone gets every spell.

Same.

 

[squibbles]

Ain't nobody got time for that!

I do!

I have now taken the survey 8 times and catalogued every spell I was asked about. (I didn't answer any questions except #1 on surveys 2-8 because I wanted to avoid biasing their... convenience sample)

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.

I got it. Not everyone gets every spell.

The survey asks about every spell in the PHB, all 361 of them.

Each survey taker, though, "only" rates 180 spells in randomly selected alphabetical blocks of 10 (or 181 if your survey includes the 11 spell block with zone of truth).

...Which makes me sad. I thought I would discover the underlying secrets of the universe via this exercise. But, unfortunately, WotC isn't doing anything particularly clever. It's just a brute force Likert scale of everything, which they--incorrectly it seems--thought they could get a better response rate on by only giving respondents half of the PHB spells to rate.

My issue is what does satisfied mean in context of an OP spell? Should I rank an OP spell as “very dissatisfied” for being too powerful or “very satisfied” in that as a caster I would use such a spell often?

[...] I really hate the kludgy satisfied/unsatisfied axis that WotC do on all their surveys. It's just too broad-brush for any feedback to be meaningful. Is a spell overpowered, or underpowered, or does its casting time make it useless, or is it unthematic, or is it something more general about spells (line effects, for instance) that need to be looked at rather than the spell itself.

Just so lacking in detail as to be useless.

Since what WotC seems to want is the general community feeling about every spell, I don't think there's a significantly better way for them to construct their questions. They don't actually care why any individual dislikes this or that spell; the D&D community is inevitably fractious and disagreeable about all questions posed to it (nevermind that things like fireball are deliberately overtuned--because overpowered things can be fun). WotC are just trying to identify what spells they need to take action on. From their point of view, a 1-6 yea/nay is the most helpful thing we can give them.

 

[Stalker0]

Since what WotC seems to want is the general community feeling about every spell, I don't think there's a significantly better way for them to construct their questions. They don't actually care why any individual dislikes this or that spell; the D&D community is inevitably fractious and disagreeable about all questions posed to it (nevermind that things like fireball are deliberately overtuned--because overpowered things can be fun). WotC are just trying to identify what spells they need to take action on. From their point of view, a 1-6 yea/nay is the most helpful thing we can give them.

I agree with this to a point. I do believe that giving people the ability to write out how they feel the way they do about each spell is overkill. Can you imagine reading through those thousands (probably 10s of thousands) of comments? There are analytics software that could help you comb through it, but its quite the exercise.

That said, I absolutely think the answers could be redesigned for better clarity of purpose. Here's just one example:

The first 3 responses to a spell could be "power ranking" (how strong is the spell for its level)

• Just fine
• Underpowered
• Overpowered

Then the next two could be "clarity" (as written, is the spell easy to understand and use?)

• Good
• Poor

And if you wanted to, you could have a section on "flavor", is the spell interesting and fun?

• Good
• Poor

Now this is not perfect of course, but immediately I could draw several conclusions from the answers given to me. With the current poll, all WOTC can technically suss out is "certain spells aren't working"....maybe that's what they want, and will do UAs or something on the ones that stick out the most. But it seems a wasted oppurtunity since your going through so many spells not to at least draw a few clear conclusions on why people like or dislike certain spells.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The Conjure line of spells were left out (although you can add them back in as some of your optional 5 spells) and I wonder if that signifies something about how they plane on handling summoning in 5.5e PHB, in other words replacing the Conjure Spells with the Summoning Spells in Tasha's and Fizban's?

I hope not. The freedom of those spells allows for some wild stuff.

The game is better for having both.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The majority of spells are a fancy name attached to these variables: range, damage, damage type, cost. The vast majority of spells only shuffle damage dice (a little more; a little less), damage type, cost (slots), and maybe a non-standard rider effect. The only difference between most of them is who rolls. Attack or save. Just make cantrips the baseline and slots the extra damage, range, damage types, and riders. You could condense the majority of spells in the PHB into one cantrip with a short list of damage types and riders. Categorize those by spell slot and you're done. Upcast the cantrip to a leveled spell slot and pick something (extra damage, damage type, rider effect, etc) from that level's list. There's really no need for a dozen different spell entries for different levels of "shoot fire at a target or targets".

In combat, most casters only ever blast anyway. Very few do anything else. You occasionally get someone trying something interesting, only for them to be berated for being "sub-optimal". In my experience.

My experience is the polar opposite. Most players I have to deal with are obsessive optimizers and power gamers. If it's not the absolute perfect, bestest spell for its level, then it sucks and anyone who picks it is stupid. That's an almost direct quote, btw.

Most of my players couldn't build a character or pick a spell on their own if they tried. If it's not something they can copy and paste from charop forum or jot down from a charop YouTuber, they're utterly lost. Somehow they've internalized the BS of "either you're perfect or you suck".

In case it helps to have hope for future groups, every sign I have observed online and in person indicates the power gamers are a very small minority.

I know I haven’t really had any at my table, including running D&D at The library for kids, and playing in AL.