WotC WotC Winter 2026 D&D Community Survey

[Lanefan]

Yes, it was very short

Reason I was curious is that I'm suspicious of any survey where the very first question is my age. As if that matters to anything.

 

[Tigris]

Reason I was curious is that I'm suspicious of any survey where the very first question is my age. As if that matters to anything.

Age matters a lot, depending on age people value your oppinion or not, because you are in the target audience or not.

 

[Clint_L]

Im not saying let the community design it. Im saying let the community PLAYTEST it and provide feedback. For 5e they released D&D Next as a playable game and fans gave feedback.

I'm a little confused by this comment. I was playtesting 5.5e for more than a year and they solicited tons of feedback from us. To give one specific example, they radically revamped the first iteration of monk after it was soundly rejected.

They were putting out a new unearthed arcana specifically for 5.5e very regularly as part of a public playtest, and the feedback surveys were extremely detailed and time consuming. They also got many thousands of replies to the surveys. As well, they did lengthy internal playtesting. Are you under the impression that 5.5e was not playtested?

 

[TheSword]

I was generally positive about the direction but asked for them to reaffirm a commitment to the Campaign Length Adventure product. That’s all I really want for the moment because that’s been questioned a bit.

 

[Scribe]

Reason I was curious is that I'm suspicious of any survey where the very first question is my age. As if that matters to anything.

It matters if they don't care to court a particular age group, demographic, whatever.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A lot of hot takes in this thread are 180 degrees from what I think..... Not surprising.

I suspect we offered similar thoughts.

 

[Stormonu]

All I can say is D&D is moving in a direction I do not care to follow once again. They lost me during 4E and are again losing me with 5.5.

Seems for one thing they care more about age than whether you play or not - the latter should have been the first question, followed up by WHICH version are you playing? Then WHY that version? I think age should be the least of their concerns, if at all.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Well, those bastion protections didn't stop me in my current campaign. Still, I can see your point. That doesn't mean it's "DM Hostile". After all, it's the DM's decision to add the system or not. You're really making a big exaggeration of a story that just tells me you would be fine in your campaign doing whatever you like.

What do you mean by "you would be fine in your campaign doing whatever you like"? There are two ways to read that sentence.

They don't have:

• deflect attacks
• fast movement
• plethora of offensive and defensive bonus actions
• stunning strikes
• force damage attacks
• wall and water walking

All of which can be accomplished with right spell selection, like Hold Person for Stunning Strike, Longstrider for Fast Movement, a whole rich bit of damage options that offset not having force damage - with right spell selection Dance Bard is effectively a Dragon Ball, character while Monk is Hayame no Ippo character.

 

[Marc17]

I'm pretty sure that the entire survey was mainly the first couple of questions, which they will hot box and only count the very top and very bottom results and compare against each other for an idea of people's opinions of them and their product (by demographic, which is age). Some intern might end up tabulating the comments in the text entry to see why scores ended up high or low. Perhaps.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Some intern might end up tabulating the comments in the text entry to see why scores ended up high or low. Perhaps.

That's also the kind of thing AI is very good at doing. If you've looked at an Amazon listing lately, you can see the "summarize all these comments" stuff in action and it's generally pretty accurate.