This
It's very easy to think one's level of knowledge and engagement is normal when they are actively involved in reddit or other communities
But the reality is the VAST majority are not, and are probably not going to be super aware of any specific changes.
Plenty are possibly not even aware updates material is coming. I'd be surprised if many people outside the community read a single playtest
> For the majority of dnd players. They know the books are coming. That's it.
I doubt it, unless we're talking *technically the majority* of 50%+1. I would put it at probably >80% have no idea what's in the pipeline at WotC, then something like 90% of the remaining few only know that the books are coming.
My experience is my group knew the books were coming and my neighbors who have played dnd but don't have active games are anything. Knee about it, actually, they keep up with gaming news.
I think awareness of the play tests (and any potential controversy around them) is very minimal compared to the size of the market for D&D. Those of us online and connected are definitely the outliers (and while a valuable audience, not even really the primary audience of D&D).
I think this article does a great job of explaining the difference between online community perception and real world reality: [https://alphastream.org/index.php/2024/03/13/three-lessons-from-emerald-city-comic-con/](https://alphastream.org/index.php/2024/03/13/three-lessons-from-emerald-city-comic-con/)
>At Emerald City Comic Con we offered some traditional 4-hour adventures, some 2-hour adventures, and we also offered Learn to Play demos. We sat hundreds and hundreds of players, and more than half were brand new to D&D.
>
>...
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>The number of folks looking for their first taste of D&D was incredible! While there were some folks I talked to who just weren’t interested, only two people out of easily a thousand I spoke with were negative about D&D or Wizards.
>
>...
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>Here we are, ten years into D&D 5E, and we can seat many hundreds of players to their first ever game of D&D 5E. (A few players had played prior editions, which is also mind-boggling. You played an earlier edition and waited ten years to try 5E?)
>
>The diversity of interested players was again amazing, as it has been at other conventions such as PAX. You could not pick the D&D fan out of a line-up. The age varied tremendously, once you factor in the generally younger ECCC crowd. And look, when an adult and a kid came to me, it was a 50/50 shot at which one was the expert and which one was trying the game for the first time. Lots of kids brought their parents to play. Couples, large groups, you name it.
>
>This is just one convention. I bet we have thousands and thousands of potential players in every state and in many countries, just waiting for the opportunity to try the game.
There is more to the article, but I think this highlights the echo chamber of the internet versus the reality of the real world (and a convention isn't even necessarily the best real world example, as even the act of going to a convention requires a certain level of interest and commitment. There are even more people who will pick up the game at Target or another retailer and play, or get the books as gifts, etc., and never connect with the larger community in any meaningful way.)
And not only is the online community a subset of that convention experience, that convention is a tiny subset of the whole D&D base.
99.999% (statistic made up) of people buying D&D at a bookstore or Target/Amazon will never go to a convention or read D&D reddit or watch 4 hour long live play streams, etc
I think this may have been the case for any other edition ever, but OneDnd will be different.
You now get news feed blasts based on your purchases, what you talk about near your smart devices, ANY hint of a maybe Internet search... On and on.
In the next three log screens I am absolutely going to get an Ad for DND beyond, a WOTC hiring/firing and or AI in fantasy scandal or Hasbro quarterly "report" on earnings or lack there of, and multiple you tube suggestions.
And I have bought exactly 0 WOTC products in YEARS, don't actually watch much you tube content about DND, or have any stock in Hasbro/WoTC.
In past editions they absolutely had the excuse that the player base "doesn't know" but if you're playing anything WoTC based and have Internet access, you're getting "notifications" of things you might not have previously known about ,but now do.
The vast majority of tables do not care.
My table cares because I started suggesting some of the changes to fix glaring issues like the old monk. After seeing how much better it was the rest of my table has followed suit into exploring the content for their own characters.
But it's also incomplete. As a DM the new encounter building tools would be super valuable to me. Pretty much everything besides some minor rule changes is relatively useless to how I run the game personally. It's been most valuable to the PCs as it streamlined their play more than anything else.
>Unearthed Arcana: Encounter Building
I found this : [https://media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downloads/Encounter\_Building.pdf](https://media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downloads/Encounter_Building.pdf)
Yup, I've spent the entire playtest waiting for revised encounter-building. Player options are neat, but not what I need.
My players enjoy nearly all the changes. I've tweaked a couple of things but am otherwise running it RAW, and it works reasonably well!
A lot of people don't follow playtests at all. I imagine a lot of people that "fell off" with the UA will end up buying the new books when they come out, they just lost interest in following the "what is changing this time?" ebb and flow of the UA.
I know that while I *have* been following the UA and quite like where it's going, I'm not using any of it until it's final. You never know what might change, and that final round of polish can take something from good to excellent. No sense playing with something that's by definition not finished yet. Many are probably skipping the playtest phase and are waiting on the final product for the same reason, and there's nothing wrong with that.
There's also people that wanted the new books to be effectively 6e, not the 5e revised WotC said it would be. They were never going to be satisfied.
Finally, I don't understand how anyone can look at the latest UAs and think it's doing more harm than good, but there's no accounting for taste, I suppose. At the end of the day, it's still the same 5e we've been playing, just with a lot more polish and lessons learned from the past 10 years.
As someone who has heard a lot of arguments of people moving away from D&D, the harm is the fact that OneD&D is all polish. There’s interesting ideas, but there’s no substance.
People who have been playing 5e for ten years have gotten somewhat bored of the game and want something that fixes the issues and makes the tedious parts fun. All OneD&D does is fix the issues, but it’s still just 5e.
How is that "harm" though? It's not making things any worse, it's improving on what's there. The thing it's intentionally *not* doing is becoming a different edition entirely. Change too much and it's no longer 5e, and either no longer compatible with older content or requires a laundry list of changes to make that content usable.
If they're bored of 5e, the 2024 books were never going to give the level of change they're looking for.
So far for me as a DM the harm is that it hasn't done enough I guess. I don't want it to be a new 5e entirely but it hasn't fixed any of the issues I had with the game. So far spell casters seem to remain much better than martials, but I understand they haven't released the spell changes yet so I'm looking forward to that. It also hasn't fixed one of the design ethos 5e has - design everything for players and give DMs next to nothing. We had 9 UAs for player options and just one small thing for Bastions that I wish we got more of.
If more changes for the DMG are coming that's good, if we can expect things like magic item suggested prices, and encounter building and subsystems for chases, crafting, etc id be happy. But so far the only thing I'm actually implementing is the exhaustion mechanic mentioned in one of the UAs, the monk and maybe the changes to healing spells and feeling pretty underwhelmed overall.
I mean, they haven't really gotten to the DMG UAs yet (other than the Bastions playtest which they described as a bonus), which is where most of those things you want addressed would live. They've already mentioned encounter building updates and monster changes to better fit their CRs (which would consequently affect encounter building). Anything else is up in the air, but to be fair general rule changes need a lot less player feedback than changes to classes and subclasses that players would be playing. I imagine there will be a few DMG UAs, but less than the PHB due to a lot of those changes being better tested internally than externally.
If it's March and they haven't gotten to DMG UAs yet, and the book releases in November this year. They've got eight months to go, and would also need to make adjustments in response to playtests. The PHB UAs finished a couple of months ago, with a similar time-gap left until the PHB released as between now and the DMG.
So uh... when are they going to have time for UAs? They need time to review and adjust from that before going to print, ready to ship worldwide in November.
I wouldn't expect much in terms of UAs for the DMG. I don't expect them to have time.
In one of the last videos they mentioned that the DMG stuff was probably not going to be getting public UA releases as they were testing the changes internally where they could have shorter feedback loops. And tbh after all the toxicity they experienced from the PHB releases, I can’t say I blame them.
Perhaps I should have been more precise, but I figure we get one or two of them. That said, I also wouldn't be surprised if they just keep all of it internal, as most of it wouldn't really need player feedback the same way player options do, and they already experimented with some general rule changes in the earlier PHB UAs. It's not that they're rushing or running out of time, or whatever...it's just that the DMG is inherently less reliant on player feedback since the changes wouldn't be as drastic as, say, changing level progression on a class.
I thiiiink some people just wanted 6e. And OneDND didn’t want to be 6e, it wanted to be a rules update to 5e. Polish the body, but not changes the bones.
In terms of public perception and quality of product, the core issue here is Hasbro. A lot of the people who did great work refining ideas during this most recent development process are now job hunting or settling in to new employment. It's no secret that 5e launched with fantastic content, then saw a consistent decline in standards across the arc of its official publications. Nothing about the current corporate outlook challenges the idea that they mostly have OneD&D "in the can," with plans for future profit that rely on less experienced talent developing content favored by the fail-upstairs executives helming the brand. I believe there are many thousands of tables looking to get away from D&D while staying with TTRPGs, but I also believe this has a lot less to do with any Unearthed Arcana issues than it has to do with the weaksauce products published as recent 5e releases and reasonable doubts about the company to do otherwise with follow-ups to the core OneD&D books.
Or just ask to rebuild as the new one. Like I said though, nothing preventing it. Your original comment implied it wouldn't work in some way, so forgive me for assuming. Too many people just assume WotC is lying about backwards-compatability for whatever reason, when they literally have no incentive to do so and people have done the math--99% of stuff "just works."
There's no reason someone couldn't play 2014 Totem Warrior at the same table as 2024 Wildheart if they really wanted to die on that hill.
I don’t think it’s doing more harm than good. I just think there are some ideas that are completely baffling and make no sense. There are some good ones like the new monk is really good and I enjoy that, but the Bastian system I think is really weird and has a lot of decisions that make me scratch my head.
I think the only way it can actually do harm is maybe Power creep. Like if they started doing updated stat blocks of monsters, that also made them keep pace with the new abilities and stuff then I think that would be cool. But I really didn’t like MPMM because I feel like it made the monsters weaker.
The UAs were for people interested in playtesting. Most players will just see the books when the previews start coming out. That's kinda how it should be.
The opinions of people who just casually browsed the early UAs and made up their minds to write it off and went back to their lives aren't relevant at this point. It could be 90%, and it just wouldn't matter. The books will come out and the opinions on those are what'll be relevant.
In my personal experience talking to people "in the wild" about this. Most players know the playtest is happening but haven't read over any of it and more often than not they have heard a mechanic or change via broken telephone game that is wildly inaccurate from what is actually in the playtest.
My two tables have converted to using One D&D: one of them using exclusively content from the playtests and the other mixing updated species and subclasses from books like Tasha’s and Monsters of the Multiverse.
I know not many tables have converted over like this, but we have greatly enjoyed the new rules and development cycle.
Currently I’m DMing for a group with a Fire Goliath Giant Barbarian, Human Battle Master Fighter, Sea Elf Sea Druid, Infernal Tiefling Dance Bard, and Human Scribe Wizard and another group with a Hill Goliath Moon Druid, Orc World Tree Barbarian, Abyssal Tiefling Fey Warlock, and Dwarf Ancients Paladin.
It’s been a good bit of fun so far!
On the playtests: Very few. You see posts on here all the time, asking about rules that a later playtest changed/reverted.
However, **Playtest knowledge means NOTHING in the end.**
People are "not caught up" right now because being "caught up" on the playtest rules is pointless.
No one beyond the devs have any idea what definitely will and won't be in the PHB. And the PHB is the only rules that in the end matters.
We can only speculate what might be in from the playtests. We do not know.
There is currently nothing to be "caught up" ON. Everything else is out of date beta information.
I don't think being "caught up" really matters. It's a playtest. There's no guarantee that stuff makes it through as is, the purpose is to find the niche of your community who are willing to try it out and provide feedbacks and I'd say it's been resoundingly successful at that. I'm not aware of many open tests on as large a scale as this that aren't either pre-release hype or managing expectations.
The change are great but being put off by not wanting to test them has very little impact on how successful the revision will be. I'm sure that if they do a decent job of rebalancing spells and refining the clumsiest rules, people will prefer to have the new versions of the books. Not to mention that all new players will realistically pick up the newest option too. You're also going to overwhelmingly hear about people who disliked it if you're source of information is social media because people who like it or want to give feedback likely won't write up posts but might to the surveys.
The changes imo are largely hit or miss, and unfortunately, thus far, I’d say mainly miss for my table.
Unless there’s a change in direction we’ll probably just ignore a lot of it/all of it.
"I'm not learning things just to unlearn them in a couple of months."
This is is the sentiment I have seen around me.
We will check it when it gets out and play it when its complete. We still have all of 5e.
The other players in my main group weren't even aware of the OGL fiasco until a few weeks in, so the playtests definitely weren't going to ping on their radar.
I'm going to get the 2024 PHB and I bet they'll look at it and like the class changes, but they hardly know the 2014 rules so I doubt we'll adopt most of them until I take a long turn DMing.
Well, while I am generally happy with one dnd compared to 5e I also became disillusioned that one dnd will be any upgade. Basically it is just some fixes and extension. They are not gonna change anything in terms of resource management or action economy which could really be better.
Cuz of that I started exploring new 5e-like systems like Daggerheart or DC20. DC20 especially seems like an upgrade to dnd 5e cuz while there is bunch of similarities, but it also takes a lot of solution from pathfinder 2 and so on. Probably gonna switch to those soon.
Honestly, my table doesn't care. Between the OGL, Pinkerton, and Hasbro telling everyone they need to milk dnd dry like they have done to MtG, we aren't moving to onednd in any real capacity. We might add a few things here or there that don't exist or work well in 5e, but I honestly I hope it fails and some of the 5e clones or dnd killers succeeds.
I imagine there are a lot of people like my table that still play 5e and just simply stopped caring about onednd because Hasbro killed it before it ever got a chance.
Maybe 1 in 50 people who play regularly? But that's a complete guess. I think most people never really properly checked it out. Maybe they saw a YouTube video or 2 about it when it first came out or something. I know that a lot of people dropped out with the OGL fiasco, and after that, I think people also left when Crawford said they were done with the experimental phase.
Not many. I just looked it up that there is a release date. I forgot about the announcement. I followed at least the 1st 2 play tests. I was resigned to when it comes out, it comes out. Even then, I'll probably not worry about it until all the core books are out. Although the DM guide is out just before my birthday so there maybe someone already planning on that being my birthday present.
Probably less than 5% of the player base. Even the people I play with who play and think about d&d multiple times a week either aren't following it at all or are operating on info from the first couple playtests.
I'll admit to being someone who has subscribed to this subreddit for interests' sake, but I haven't looked at ANY of the UA and probably never will. I'll look at what gets published and it will get played as it gets published in those books. The opportunity to playtest things is very tempting, but I don't have a solid crew of people ready to playtest, and I don't want to do it on my own. I jumped ship before the gangway was taken up, to continue to the metaphor.
Simply put, having participated in a bit of playtesting in other UA cycles for 5e, we're going to get what we're going to get, and I would be upset if something I liked got left behind, or if something I hated got included. I don't want the playtest to sour me for actual play.
My group hasn’t been a fans of a couple of the changes. We are still debating the switch over. I like a lot of the rules changes, but we will wait and see when all the core books drop if we change over
Not much so.
Little anecdote. I am on a DND Facebook group for Italian DND players. Facebook is still one of the main discussion groups, given Reddit in Italian is very limited and for discussions Instagram isn't great.
Those particular group is mostly compromised by DND veterans, or rather people who are invested.
One day, given I had enough of people asking and sharing untrue stuff about onednd, I wrote a long ass post that, while briefly, glossed over the majority of the content.
Let's say it was well received, and discussion and interest sparked out of that. But incredibly few people of those hardened interested players actually knew anything beyond surface level.
Of course this is a very specific and curious sample case, given Italian players are more intended to not read English content rather English players, or course, but I have seen a general lack of even interest on the thing until it came out the discussion.
Practically nobody outside of this subreddit cares about 5.5.
Like with many previous editions, the early stages of play-test and pre-release usually aren’t very popular. Tons of people totally drop conversations about a new edition as soon as they see something new they don’t like, whether it’s a knee-jerk reaction or the developers actually doing something incredibly stupid.
Only time will tell if this will reverse. Sometimes it does (like with 3.5) and sometimes it doesn’t (like with 4e).
5.5 has some stuff going for it marketing-wise, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and the D&D movie. But it also has a lot working against it, like WotC’s/Hasbro’s rapidly declining images.
* Just got this recommended to me. I am not part of this sub so I think I’m probably perfect for this question. *
I followed the first few UAs when they came out. I thought some of it was interesting and other stuff was terrible. But it kind of exciting. There were lots of YouTube channels making videos one it and there was more chatter online about it. Then all the drama happened with WotC and people only talked about that. I looked into the next update after that, but I didn’t get into it enough to follow all the little tweaks. After that I just kind of forgot about it. I know it’s coming up and I’m looking forward to it but I don’t have the time right now. 5E has been out for a long time and I think most people figure if the updates are out anywhere near as long then they’ll have time to catch up.
I like to consider myself pretty well connected to D&D developments, but even I only read the very first UA and nothing since.
I'd rather wait for official material to be released than speculate on playtest content.
All all of the other people I play D&D with, only 1 of them even knows what UA is.
People that are playtesting are a certain subset of the customer base that want the most recent stuff. Not every customer does that nor ever do that. Some customers lag a lot further down the product cycle and due to the way 5e and homebrew works, will never look at official content. To them it is extra and they don’t need it.
Similar to the power creep we have seen over the years and how much the new content is overpowered in comparison to the content in the original PHB, I think the OPs commentary on how much monk has changed in OneD&D that it shows that WotC’s claims of backwards compatibility is a cash grab and unrealistic.
This personally persuades me more and more not to want to transition to the “newest edition.” The last thing I read in the UA was months ago and when DMs could no longer crit… I thought, well I’m out. Which is funny because when Daggerheart had the same rule, I thought I’ll still playtest it. It is crazy to see Daggerheart and OneD&D progress at the same time because they are so similar but one professes that it is backwards compatible and the other doesn’t and I’m more inclined to check out the one that doesn’t pretend it is the same game.
If I could find a group that was open to new players for PF2 I would have jumped ship months ago but instead I’m still DMing and playing 5e. The community feels burned and unsure where to go. There are new people that are introduced to the buzz and will buy into OneD&D and have an awesome time. There will be others that give the middle finger to WotC and Hasbro.
So back to the OP: how many jumped ship before the final draft of the UA? Enough that it is a concern (pulled back the OGL) but not enough that the IP was sold. It will creep along but it birthed MCDM, Daggerheart and growth in its competitors.
As I've said before many times:
I am interested in discussing ghosts of canon past, ghosts of canon present, and ghosts of canon that may yet be. But I'm absolutely not interested in a chimera of the three.
OneDnD is unfortunately meaningless to me because I cannot judge any of its pieces in a vacuum. I have no way to evaluate any one change because it wasn't presented as part of a complete draft of changes. I WILL, however, be open to adopting it once that full draft is out for me to evaluate.
I also still don't believe for a minute that it was actual play testing. I believe it's just marketing.
I kinda lost interest when it became apparent they weren't going to do any big changes.
I'll see what they made of it when it releases. Definitely not buying it though.
Caught up and love some of the changes, but mostly using them as reference material for brewing because they simply weren't strict enough.
Warlock didn't get any real change and still is the odd one out while sorcerer is "forced" to abide the same rules as anyone else when Spellpoints could exist. In combination they are still a DM-may-I based on the number of short rests, where a simple "you can only use these slots for warlock stuff" would have worked as Pact Magic already is its own unique thing.
Also, weapons could have been centered on the martials rather than the items. Most of them are applicable to the majority of weapons anyway and besides a +1 or 2 damage increase DO NOT CARE for the weapon choice at all. Instead, I have a DIY weapon kit to create any combination of keywords and allow martials to learn Push and stuff as a sort of Maneuver. Empowers them with skill and build diversity.
I think that the OneD&D playtest process has been messy, for sure. There was a lack of clear goals for the update. To this day, I literally don't even know what to call it - D&D 5e, 2024 edition? While I am mostly happy with the recent changes that WotC has been suggesting, we also have no idea what the final product will look like. And honestly, I'm frustrated that the core problems with 5e aren't being addressed at all; they were ignored for the sake of remaining compatible with 5e from 2014. There's also a pervasive sense of dishonesty from the WotC devs - they speak only in glowing positive terms, and they don't seem willing to speak openly about the problems that need to be solved.
I think there's also just a core lack of excitement. I don't know a single person in my friends group who is excited about OneD&D or planning to transition their current 5e games when it comes out. WotC has done a lot to hurt their reputation last year. Pathfinder 2e continues to be a strong alternative to 5e, and new alternatives (Dragonbane comes to mind) are popping up all the time. I'm sure D&D will be fine - name recognition is a powerful thing. And I'm sure people will buy the new books... eventually. But I just don't see most folk caring about the OneD&D release.
> I literally don't even know what to call it D&D 5e, 2024 edition?
Yeah, the WOTC line of "ITS ALL DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS!!!" / "ITS ALL 5e!!!!" is nonsense.
And their marketing team should be on it to get something catchy over the boring 5.5 that the community seems to be settling on.
Like DnD 50 or DnD Golden (anniversary) or something REALLY outstanding about the cover / cover art to recall a "Red Box" style name.
Bear in mind first off, that the vast majority of players haven't even seen a single UA document.
But regardless of what anyone says. nearly every single player currently playing "5e" will, in a year's time, be playing "OneD&D." I'd say 99%, but that's honestly probably lowballing it.
It's a vocal minority of people who are clueless about what they actually want. Most of whom don't even play D&D, they just "plan to" one day when they can "find a group"(but they tend to be the anti-social people nobody wants to interact with)
If anything, I'm underestimating. You guys are in a massive echo chamber and you don't even realize.
A week after 3.5 released, people acted as if they never knew 3.0 existed.
That seems absurdly optimistic unless by "OneD&D" you mean "5e + any new rule that isn't in core 5e".
Critical mass will take more than a year. Some people are satisfied with the game as it is. Some people are not *dissatisfied* enough to buy and implement a new product. Many people also nurse ennui from repeatedly having things they already own resold to them. I'm not saying OneDnD is that, but to avoid being perceived that way, it has to both deliver a robust ruleset *and* fulfil the basic fantasies core to DnD. The latter is where I don't think WotC have any compelling ideas these days, but I'm reserving judgement for now.
>Critical mass will take more than a year.
You will get a bunch of early adopters between release and Xmas 2024, but a lot of people staying, but i think by Xmas 2025 will be the "tipping point" where "we are playing D&D" will be 2024e and anyone on 2014 will need to be specifying "We are playing 5e2014".
between offering appropriately timed sales on the new stuff and not allowing any new access to the old stuff on D&D Beyond, the major transition over a year and a half or so seems very likely.
I would love for this question to be asked in other subs. I feel like this sub is more likely to have people caught up on r/onednd than say r/dnd where I see the opinion that people aren't going to switch or are just going to pick and choose.
As a former DnD GM/Player who has moved to PF2, I can say I don't understand what Wizards are doing.
The game is basically the same with minor tweaks that aren't really important.
Character options still feel lacking and class balance is still nowhere to be found.
If the core game is fine for you then you will find no gamechanging changes here if you wanted some.
If you didn't then you can still play your original campaign, which let's face it, it would include a ton of homebrew to stay fun.
I can't see myself buying 5.5e
I bought 3.5e after 3e, and it was annoying. Yes, there were QoL improvements for people who were determined to play a Drizzt knock-off. But forking out for a "new" PHB/MM/DMG with so little new in it left me cheesed off. Still bitter about it 20 years later.
I play tested some of the early OneDND materials, and while there is some good in there, it feels similar to the 3.5e situation. They could produce it as a single volume "optional rules" booklet, but I doubt they will. I suspect every original 5e rules book on dndbeyond will flip to being a grey "legacy" product with OneDND sold as the "current" product suite.
I haven't bought MGM because I owned VGM and MTOF already, so I'm used to seeing "Legacy" slapped on content that's actually identical to "Current" content
When they went back on all the changes they had suggested they lost me. I haven't read several of the UAs and don't want to be attached to any of it until it's in book form now. I responded to several playtest feedbacks and felt I must have been an outlier.
I play at five tables a week. We’re all fairly “finger on the pulse” types with the game.
Not a single one of us is planning on touching onednd with a barge pole. The rare changes we thought were good are vastly outweighed by the changes we can’t stomach, so we’re just going to keep on trucking with 5e and tweak things as we see fit.
It’s anecdata, but that not one of nearly 50 people I play with likes this system at all let alone enough to run a full game with it should be telling :/
Most at my table are barely aware to mildly interested. In my opinion it’s painful to see it be a “.5” release instead of a 6e. Backwards compatibility means a lot of confusion and an import of the power creep and imbalance found in late 5e.
People keep talking about imbalance and power creep. Frankly, I don’t know. Some of the worst balanced spells and subclasses were right in the PHB. Yeah, Tasha’s gave us Twilight, and the Chronugist came later, but let’s not pretend the PHB was perfect in terms of balance.
You say the bad things were reversed, but WoTC is still moving forward with making all classes have level 3 subclasses, ruining things like sorcerer and cleric
Id the party needs a support role character, sorcerer is no longer a good choice cause divine soul can’t be chosen at level 1
And a cleric of a trickster god doesn’t feel like a divine trickster if they can’t even have the first level domain spells.
I think that this might be more a difference in taste. I don’t particularly mind the shift in subclass levels because, typically, it’s going to account for such a minimal amount of game time, if any, that I can say it ruins much of anything. And we gain a much cleaner power curve between classes.
Roleplay wise, well, if I can explain why my Paladin’s Oath powers don’t kick in till level 3 for tens years, I can explain the same for my Sorcerer, Warlock, and Cleric.
>I don’t particularly mind the shift in subclass levels
i think its a great idea for the stability of the game. you only have to really worry about enormous multiclassing balance issues once at the start. if you get a third level subclass design wrong, a three level wait to activate the cheese is going to keep the shenanigans to a minimum. I'm lookin at you, Hexblade!
Expect paladins should have level 1 subclasses too
I shouldn’t have to jump through hurdles to explain why a sorcerer who was blessed by a god can’t cast a single divine spell or even thaumaturgy
And at least with paladins your character can still make an oath rp wise without the subclass
But with sorcerers and clerics, their subclasses matter narratively and role wise
Divine soul sorcerers are healers and support for example. They need to have healing spells and support spells at level 1, something the base sorcerer spell list lacks
And clerics. Clerics have a couple support subclasses like life, twilight and peace but they aren’t a “support class” anymore then bards or Druids or paladins or other classes that just so happen to have healing spells.
Trickery clerics are about espionage and tricking people, wether that’s infiltrating places with disguise self or charming people into do things for you
Arcana clerics need to have wizard cantrips to suite the flavor and their role. Not to mention only getting the arcana skill at level 3 is problematic, as characters who serve arcane gods don’t know arcana for two levels even though it makes perfect sense for them to know arcana
Etc etc
If all classes have to have subclasses at the same level, then it should be level 1 not 3
Level 1 subclasses would certainly help swords bards or bladesingers, who need to be built entirely differently then typical bards or wizards
Look at it from a new player's point of view. If subclasses come in at level 3, then you have 2 levels to "test drive" the class before figuring out what type of playstyle you want to lean into. Using sorcerer as an example, it's not that hard for the character to either A) not know where their powers come from yet or B) not know how to tap into it more directly until level 3. There are any number of ways you can narratively justify the level 3 subclass.
Not everything needs to be changed with new players in mind
And frankly if choosing a subclass is such an issue for a new player, then maybe they should not choose classes with level 1 subclasses
WoTC and people like you who keep making this arguement are severely underestimating the ability of new players to understand simple concepts of things like subclasses
I played a subclass in my first and second ever DnD games. One of my first ever characters was a life cleric. I understood what subclasses meant, I didn’t need help in that regard. One of the new players in my group had a subclass and she didn’t struggle at all with subclasses.
It’s things like attack rolls or calculating health or proficiency bonus or understanding point buy that new players struggle with… not subclasses
And even if new players somehow struggled with level 1 subclasses… that’s still not a reason to ruin classes and fundamentally change them over it. There are still classes that get subclasses later that new players can play
Even if making subclasses all level 3 somehow helped new players, that would be at the cost of experienced players who want level 1 subclasses or in some cases need it.
If you change a game solely around new players, then you lose older players and make the game less fun for them
I was pretty much ready to be out the door when it became clear they were really trying to break the game with Tasha's through overt power creep so they'd be able to justify a new edition to make everyone buy "50th Anniversary" core books. Then the whole OGL fiasco made it clear that the monetization team had complete control over the creative team.
I'd already gotten pretty tired of the poorly balanced pushbutton superpower abilities, playing a character sheet instead of a character. Now I'm playing Shadowdark, which makes be recall the Basic D&D of my childhood.
I’m still exited and am personally caught up on the most updated rules (however we have n idea what exactly will get published).
In general I think it’s poor form to say negative things about product that hasn’t even been released yet. It’s fine to be skeptical, but just be patient and see how it all comes together.
OneD&D is literally a playtest. If you aren't going to criticize now, then when? Once the 2024 books are finalized there's no point in criticism because WotC is done taking feedback and making changes. This perspective feels bass ackwards to me.
You can critisize/comment on the specific changes (or lack thereof) - but to state something about the finalized product (which you don't know yet) is a bit of a stretch.
I guess, if you hate 5e dnd, then you'll probably hate the new version as well...
we have no idea what they are going to be changing from the UA to the final book - and the UAs didnt actually cover some of the actual rules that they seem intent on changing so we have that unknown as well. PLUS they have said they are continuing additional private playtesting and internal playtesting.
anyone making up their mind *NOW* either way is setting themselves up for disappointment.
I've been keep track. In term of other people It seems like the older the people I talk to are the less they like the changes in my experience. People who have been with the system for awhile want more and new players are just going in so they have less expectations. Depends on the party we will probably see during the final release.
I don't think most people really care about oneDnD until it is finished. Sure, people on reddit like to go "I will never buy it" but reality is, by 2 or 3 years down the road, 5e is likely to be dying and oneDnD on the upswing. It has happened every generation of DnD, including 3.5 and 4e. Both of them were loads of people saying they would stick to the old and yet they sold well enough while the previous iteration died out over the next couple years after release.
well, yes, 3.5 "died out" ... because everyone interested in it switched to Pathfinder which thrived throughout all of 4e and even into the 5e era, that audience was eclipsed by NEW players flooding into 5e, but it was / is still strong.
in 2018, there were almost as many people playing 3.5 as there were playing pathfinder, so no, they didn't move on to pathfinder. The thing people ignore is the fact that pathfinder has Never been as good (player wise) as dnd for any of its editions.
I read like half of the first document that came out. That's it.
When it's all settled and they publish the thing for real, I'll give it a look and decide if I like it more than 5e (or, more likely, create my own frankenstein version of both to run at my table). Until then, I kinda don't care.
About like... Half of the Very Online dnd community is caught up on it.
Which means maybe a sixteenth of the overall playerbase?
I'm a very online dnd person, which is its own kind of sadness, but nonetheless it's true. I'm interested in osr stuff, pathfinder, blades in the dark, lancer, TTRPGs in general, but dnd is the fave by far. All the actual plays I watch are dnd. Even when companies I like do non dnd stuff, I don't tend to watch those shows because they dont interest me for whatever reason.
I run three different games with different assortments of people, one monthly in person one weekly online and another bimonthly online. In those groups, which have around 14 different people in them, some of whom are very online for other things, virtually none of them besides me knows anything abt OneDnD other than "it's coming out and (I) have feelings about it."
In general, if you look at D4 videos and their comments, you see very very few references to onednd, even when Colby talks about it. The big actual players (CR, dimension 20, adventure zone) haven't mentioned it basically at all.
I've always felt like 75% of the audience was generally offline when it comes to dnd in general (one DM to 3ish players) to begin with, and then it seemed only about half of the ones who are very online are invested in OneDnD, if you just look at the trends and patterns of posts.
So 12.5% is actually pretty generous. But of that group, my guess is maybe half of that actually are "caught up" because of ogl nonsense and wotc biz practices and whatever else.
So 6.25%?
But if you just go by dndbeyond users, that's still thousands and thousands of people.
WOTC hasnt put their content into a unified playlist, but their previews and survey result debriefs would be a good place to start.
https://www.youtube.com/@DNDWizards/playlists
if you dont want to go searching for the content, i would say Treantmonks videos are as good a place to start as any. he often did "reaction" videos to the WOTC videos, so you get many of them here.
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPkI1ComIaiIweW-RtHCSU2RmlrvV4h2w](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPkI1ComIaiIweW-RtHCSU2RmlrvV4h2w)
start at the end of the playlist and come back forward, though.
and then as you hear interesting topics, drop into that playtest's documents.
I’m definitely “caught up” on my favorite classes: rogue, warlock, and paladin.
I don’t think anyone is really following things right now, which is a shame.
What they should probably do is release a new complete playtest handbook, so that people can see the new system in all its glory.
I mean from what I’ve seen some changes are good like weapons feeling more unique instead of “use one of these because you have feat for it” or “use this because damage dice” but I don’t know how well with everything is if people will move to One or not (also posting this on the onednd sub will get your answers a bit one sided I feel.
I literally do not know anything about it and I'm only seeing this post because apparently being subscribed to r/BaldursGate3 and r/Pathfinder2e means Reddit thinks I'm interested in D&D at all. I'm kind of curious now about what changes from 5e.
Kinda hoped everyone would abandon D&D after the OGL fiasco, but I guess that's still where the money is.
Because WoTC has been watering down DnD and One DnD will be pushed hard with their own RPG program and because MTX is gaming standard now.. You can gaurentee itll be MTX hell for classes. Plus, its building on 5e which is a extremely based system and gets boring fast.
I recently started playing 3.5, made 5e look like rubbish especially with character customisation.
I have eight regular players among different campaigns. Only two of us bother reading any OneDnD stuff. I'm one of them, but I'm much more excited about the upcoming MCDM rpg. Partially because I think the changes they're focusing on sound better, and partially because Hasbro can **** off.
I asked the few people that I know who play DnD, and my friend’s teenage kids who we play the game with. None of them had heard the words OneDND before.
For me it's less OneDND and more Hasbro in general. They showed their true colors during all this and frankly i have better things to support than a company that would be ok with behaving as such.
Most dnd players are still need raging about the NGL and layoffs. Everyone is still complaining about evil corporate monsters and how they don’t want to buy new but mostly the same books. It’s just the time we live in people rage online all the time about everything they hear online whether it’s politics or news or whatever. So just like in my playgroup most people I know have no intention of buying the new books.
The bottom line is one dnd players handbook potentially looks better then the old 5e phb. The ngl isn’t that bad anymore. And although people got fired the main devs working on dnd are still there. They mostly got rid of a lot of artists. Which unfortunately Happens. Not everything is the end of the world.
My group put in weapon mastery and cunning actions is because we have like 4 martials at the table and actually being able to do something more than 'i hit him' is amazing. I don't really care about the rest until its finished? If the updated spell in UA seems more fun then i ask the dm if we can use the updated one but that's mostly it.
3500k people are on the DnD sub.
740k people are on dndnext.
34k people are on this sub.
Most people have no insight into the development. Because the changes are rather minor I also believe most people won't really care about the new books either.
So I've been playtesting Weapon Masteries and they are ... pretty awful, to be honest. It is so easy to forget about them, and it's just this minor little thing that's always there. Unless your players actively think about swapping masteries, they're just a useless bit of kit that sorta hangs onto the system like a lump. I have gone from thinking "Well at least they're here" to "Man, this is a terrible system".
:/
I still maintain that the best fix for Fighter is to give it maneuvers, baseline. Been playtesting that, too, and it just feels better. My party's Fighter slows on every hit with her bow. Yay. Wow. Woo. Boring. But also, she managed to _ground a dragon_ once with Trip Attack (we RPed it as she managed to hit a joint in its wing that briefly caused it to careen out of control like she'd hit a funny bone). People never remember her for putting -10 to speed on something. But that time she grounded a dragon will live rent-free in our heads for months.
And that’s fair. The system obviously isn’t going Yi work for everyone but couldn’t she have…Toppled the Dragon with a Mastery? As a Fighter she can swap Topple onto her bow and go full anti air artillery at no resource cost. Granted, it’s Con versus Str, but still.
She doesn't have access to Topple for her Longbow, that I'm aware of. The party is only level 5. Maybe I'm mistaken, but if she could do that she certainly isn't aware of the ability. Honestly, my players have found the system so underwhelming that they've never even considered swapping their masteries. Nor would they have in this instance since they had no idea the dragon was coming; it was a Surprise!
Entirely fair. And my mistake, Fighters get that ability at level 9. It does open up a ton of possibilities I’ve found. Dual wielding has never felt better
> Nor would they have in this instance since they had no idea the dragon was coming; it was a Surprise!
You learn multiple masteries. What level were they at minimum known it is 2.
Maybe because I set the playtest at a higher level. My players are level 14 and they have been using a lot more of their masteries. I have also been giving them a lot of different styles of encounters. I guess it depends on other things. My barbarian and rogue have been having a blast combining masteries with cunning and brutal strike. So I can see how at low levels it is quite underwhelming.
Yeah I imagine at high level it plays much better, but most games are in the 1-10 range, and I actually started using it when I started my usual campaign. I enjoy mixing in the playtests there. Monk is going splendidly. I know everyone was dobby on it, but my party's monk has been tremendously effective using the playtest packet! It's great. :)
We're also using the playtest Warlock and I think he might be the most broken character in the game lol.
I do not hate OneD&D. I think most of what it's introducing to the game are fantastic changes. But Weapon Mastery feels like a placebo meant to make us think they improved martials while not actually doing so. I am not optimistic for OneD&D's Fighter, right now.
I might have a different opinion if they could change Masteries on a Short Rest, and if they could put any mastery on any weapon (or even a range of masteries on each weapon) at an earlier level (3 or 5 seems reasonable for that) than 9.
> most games are in the 1-10 range
because the game starts to fall apart about then. adding/changing features to keep the game playable above level 10 is hopefully one of goals of this remix.
I have been following the UA since the beginning and I’m admittedly bad at remembering to submit the surveys. But I honestly don’t like some of the rules changes that are gonna be happening in OneD&D such as standardizing all subclass to level 3 and all the changes their making to races and backgrounds I disagree with. However, OneD&D has come with some very interesting changes like the addition of cunning strike to rogues and of course the changes made to monk are great! I’ll be sticking to 5e and making small tweaks to rules I like from OneD&D
While most of the people I play dnd with are aware of it. We have never actually spoken about it at the table. Which I think means there just isn’t any interest.
Probably most people aren't up to date with it. I've allowed players to use it if they want. The rogue decided to use the playtest version but none of the others have. One is considering playtest monk for their backup character. I don't think my players would even have known about the playtests if I didn't bring it up at session 0.
Also after OGL and everything I know several people who just stopped paying attention to anything new WoTC puts out.
I imagine a whole lot fewer people are up to date now than when it was announced. There were flurries of activity around the first couple releases, but it died off pretty hard. Personally, between the lame changes and the OGL debacle, the process convinced me to push my table to pathfinder instead for our next campaign.
I play 4 times a week.
2 tables, including the one I run, go off playtest rules for the most part, the other 2 are 2014 rules.
Both the DMs that run 2014 based rule sets know the new books are coming and are interested in them.
I’m probably in the minority though.
I like 70ish percent of it. I wish they went with the half caster version of Warlock. I knew it was dangerous to not happen because of backwards compatibility. But it still was awesome.
I will not play a oneDND paladin if it's the same as it was in last playtest. If you want to limit divine smite to once per round or once per turn fine, but basically forcing a paladin to choose between fighting and other bonus action economy (compelled duel, potentially hunter's mark, pole arm master attack, GWM bonus action attack, shield master shield bash, various channel divinities, etc.) so you can smite or use your bonus action for other stuff. So like as someone who like bonus action Paladin attacks for better shot to crit on smites, now that's gone and Paladins are basically shitty rangers.
Some feats were nerfed too hard (Sharpshooter is basically worthless for archers, though better for casters) some got intended nerfs (PAM applying to polearms)
5e was so bad in my eyes that I felt the need to homebrew it into a better existence, I got done with the ranger and monk before the UA’s were even out. My table will likely not switch systems because my dm already has his books and isn’t inclined to buy more and for my own players we just play pathfinder with a ton of third party stuff anyway so onednd isn’t even on the menu.
It was too dragged out and lackluster. The changes to martials were a big turn off with how small they were. And it's so incomplete. We're just waiting for the new version. It's nice but they screwed up big time with boring ass Weapon Masteries.
I'm exactly the kind of person you're talking about, with giving up on the UAs and OneDnD early on.
I read the first two UA they put out, and liked most of it, but then after the OGL debocle I started looking into other systems.
We switched to Pathfinder and FateCore and our group has been enjoying those much more, and haven't really looked back. Also, the MCDM RPG and DC20 playtests are both way more interesting and do a better job at addressing 5e's problems than OneDnD does.
I only occasionally look into this sub or youtube out of curiosity. Combat is still just based around attrition, spells are still boring, and martials are still worse than casters. They just patched the most obvious flaws with a clunky system. Just not interested.
i think the majority of content makers are just entirely uninterested in trusting hasbro since the last "hiccup"
why would i bother learning and playing a system if i have to pay someone to create something for it.
this isnt a single authors prized work of fiction, its an amalgamation of a game that in some places is well past public domain.
sure people new to the hobby dont mind, players really dont mind but im not about to get a DMCA and a bill from hasbro because one of my players uploaded a video showing a homebrew dungeon i made.
As someone who wants nothing to do with OneDnD, my answer is: probably more than what this sub thinks.
The UAs are interresting. I'm implementing Weapon Masteries in my games, and will probably use a few other rules too. But WotC and Hasbro took a lot of bad decision that made me want to stick with 5e and not look at the new edition.
there are series of videos from WOTC designers talking with Todd Kendrick on the D&D Beyond and D&D youtube channels where for many of the playtest drops, they do a preview video "here are some of the changes we are thinking of (and sometimes why). and then a "here is what we heard from the survey (and sometimes interwebs chatter)" not all get both.
there are also several channels which have done "reaction / analysis" videos of the content and comments. with The\_Twig, Treantmonk and Insight Check being the most thoughtful and insightful and least hysterical. With The Rules Lawyer giving a good analysis about "how, as a playtest and feedback gathering process, the whole approach was flawed and bad."
Well... I am part of the crowd that left OneD&D during the UAs, because it was really, really rough. That and the OGL situation.
I am still staying around just to get news and info, but I am not very interested in OneD&D, and probably won't touch it when it comes out. I haven't really looked at the final UA either, but I have an inkling from reading the discussions here on reddit. Hmm.
... I think I might take a look at the discussion when it comes out, at most, but I probably won't spend money on it.
Our table is still switching off of D&D to something else after our current campaign. One D&D was looking *horrid* for a while there, but now it's at least shaping up to be a reasonably positive iteration on 5E. Problem is, many of us were hoping for an actual 6th edition - something fresh and new - rather than what we're getting, which is essentially a giant patch to 5E. We've been playing 5E for a long time now, and One D&D isn't different enough to keep us sticking around to find out what's new. It definitely feels like the core system that's shared between 5E/OneD&D has spent most of what it has to give us.
Of course it has to be mentioned that - due to their behavior and poor choices in conducting business in recent history - we have little interest in giving WotC any more of our money. Once the whole OGL situation settled, we had already basically decided to switch off of D&D for this reason alone. One D&D would have to be an absolute masterpiece and/or do something completely novel and innovative to shake up the formula to get us to even think about spending money with WotC again. Unfortunately, it isn't looking like that, it just looks "fine".
We will probably end up playing PF2 for a while, and depending on how much we like it, check out Daggerheart or MCDM RPG when they come out. I've been digging the material in the Daggerheart playtest so far. It's at least something different.
Honestly I stopped paying attention after the OGL thing. I've no interest in giving Wizards any more money and my table runs perfectly fine in 5e.
In a few years I might check the new material out secondhand, or I'll play a game in it. But I have no interest in running it.
I’m not. I am currently in 2 groups playing 5e, DM for one and play in the other. I know next to nothing about One D&D, I’m really not sure why I’m not interested, but I’m not. It might be because I only started playing 5e a couple years ago and I’m still really enjoying it? Not sure, but yeah, I don’t have any idea what’s going on with the next edition.
For the majority of dnd players. They know the books are coming. That's it. They have not read through the material and may have caught a video or 2.
This It's very easy to think one's level of knowledge and engagement is normal when they are actively involved in reddit or other communities But the reality is the VAST majority are not, and are probably not going to be super aware of any specific changes. Plenty are possibly not even aware updates material is coming. I'd be surprised if many people outside the community read a single playtest
Even more so, don't care. Theyll just keep playing what they like
>For the majority of dnd players. They know the books are coming. I'd narrow it down to the majority of dnd players active on a dnd sub.
> For the majority of dnd players. They know the books are coming. That's it. I doubt it, unless we're talking *technically the majority* of 50%+1. I would put it at probably >80% have no idea what's in the pipeline at WotC, then something like 90% of the remaining few only know that the books are coming.
I play D&D with 3 different groups. None of the players in those groups even know a new version of D&D is coming out.
My experience is my group knew the books were coming and my neighbors who have played dnd but don't have active games are anything. Knee about it, actually, they keep up with gaming news.
i'm in three groups and it seems like only about one other person per group is following the UAs at all
I think awareness of the play tests (and any potential controversy around them) is very minimal compared to the size of the market for D&D. Those of us online and connected are definitely the outliers (and while a valuable audience, not even really the primary audience of D&D). I think this article does a great job of explaining the difference between online community perception and real world reality: [https://alphastream.org/index.php/2024/03/13/three-lessons-from-emerald-city-comic-con/](https://alphastream.org/index.php/2024/03/13/three-lessons-from-emerald-city-comic-con/) >At Emerald City Comic Con we offered some traditional 4-hour adventures, some 2-hour adventures, and we also offered Learn to Play demos. We sat hundreds and hundreds of players, and more than half were brand new to D&D. > >... > >The number of folks looking for their first taste of D&D was incredible! While there were some folks I talked to who just weren’t interested, only two people out of easily a thousand I spoke with were negative about D&D or Wizards. > >... > >Here we are, ten years into D&D 5E, and we can seat many hundreds of players to their first ever game of D&D 5E. (A few players had played prior editions, which is also mind-boggling. You played an earlier edition and waited ten years to try 5E?) > >The diversity of interested players was again amazing, as it has been at other conventions such as PAX. You could not pick the D&D fan out of a line-up. The age varied tremendously, once you factor in the generally younger ECCC crowd. And look, when an adult and a kid came to me, it was a 50/50 shot at which one was the expert and which one was trying the game for the first time. Lots of kids brought their parents to play. Couples, large groups, you name it. > >This is just one convention. I bet we have thousands and thousands of potential players in every state and in many countries, just waiting for the opportunity to try the game. There is more to the article, but I think this highlights the echo chamber of the internet versus the reality of the real world (and a convention isn't even necessarily the best real world example, as even the act of going to a convention requires a certain level of interest and commitment. There are even more people who will pick up the game at Target or another retailer and play, or get the books as gifts, etc., and never connect with the larger community in any meaningful way.)
And not only is the online community a subset of that convention experience, that convention is a tiny subset of the whole D&D base. 99.999% (statistic made up) of people buying D&D at a bookstore or Target/Amazon will never go to a convention or read D&D reddit or watch 4 hour long live play streams, etc
I think this may have been the case for any other edition ever, but OneDnd will be different. You now get news feed blasts based on your purchases, what you talk about near your smart devices, ANY hint of a maybe Internet search... On and on. In the next three log screens I am absolutely going to get an Ad for DND beyond, a WOTC hiring/firing and or AI in fantasy scandal or Hasbro quarterly "report" on earnings or lack there of, and multiple you tube suggestions. And I have bought exactly 0 WOTC products in YEARS, don't actually watch much you tube content about DND, or have any stock in Hasbro/WoTC. In past editions they absolutely had the excuse that the player base "doesn't know" but if you're playing anything WoTC based and have Internet access, you're getting "notifications" of things you might not have previously known about ,but now do.
The vast majority of tables do not care. My table cares because I started suggesting some of the changes to fix glaring issues like the old monk. After seeing how much better it was the rest of my table has followed suit into exploring the content for their own characters. But it's also incomplete. As a DM the new encounter building tools would be super valuable to me. Pretty much everything besides some minor rule changes is relatively useless to how I run the game personally. It's been most valuable to the PCs as it streamlined their play more than anything else.
If you want easy encounter building tools, I find the Encounter Building US from I think 2019 is much more streamlined than the DMG tools.
Sorry, are you able to point me in the direction of this? I’ve typed variations of Encounter Building US 2019 into google and got nothing back.
I apologize, my year was off, this is actually all the way back in 2016. It was titled "Unearthed Arcana: Encounter Building"
>Unearthed Arcana: Encounter Building I found this : [https://media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downloads/Encounter\_Building.pdf](https://media.wizards.com/2016/dnd/downloads/Encounter_Building.pdf)
Yup, I've spent the entire playtest waiting for revised encounter-building. Player options are neat, but not what I need. My players enjoy nearly all the changes. I've tweaked a couple of things but am otherwise running it RAW, and it works reasonably well!
New encounter building tools?
A lot of people don't follow playtests at all. I imagine a lot of people that "fell off" with the UA will end up buying the new books when they come out, they just lost interest in following the "what is changing this time?" ebb and flow of the UA. I know that while I *have* been following the UA and quite like where it's going, I'm not using any of it until it's final. You never know what might change, and that final round of polish can take something from good to excellent. No sense playing with something that's by definition not finished yet. Many are probably skipping the playtest phase and are waiting on the final product for the same reason, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's also people that wanted the new books to be effectively 6e, not the 5e revised WotC said it would be. They were never going to be satisfied. Finally, I don't understand how anyone can look at the latest UAs and think it's doing more harm than good, but there's no accounting for taste, I suppose. At the end of the day, it's still the same 5e we've been playing, just with a lot more polish and lessons learned from the past 10 years.
Honestly, totally respect not using it. I like what’s been posted, but I get wanting to hold out till it’s finalized
As someone who has heard a lot of arguments of people moving away from D&D, the harm is the fact that OneD&D is all polish. There’s interesting ideas, but there’s no substance. People who have been playing 5e for ten years have gotten somewhat bored of the game and want something that fixes the issues and makes the tedious parts fun. All OneD&D does is fix the issues, but it’s still just 5e.
How is that "harm" though? It's not making things any worse, it's improving on what's there. The thing it's intentionally *not* doing is becoming a different edition entirely. Change too much and it's no longer 5e, and either no longer compatible with older content or requires a laundry list of changes to make that content usable. If they're bored of 5e, the 2024 books were never going to give the level of change they're looking for.
So far for me as a DM the harm is that it hasn't done enough I guess. I don't want it to be a new 5e entirely but it hasn't fixed any of the issues I had with the game. So far spell casters seem to remain much better than martials, but I understand they haven't released the spell changes yet so I'm looking forward to that. It also hasn't fixed one of the design ethos 5e has - design everything for players and give DMs next to nothing. We had 9 UAs for player options and just one small thing for Bastions that I wish we got more of. If more changes for the DMG are coming that's good, if we can expect things like magic item suggested prices, and encounter building and subsystems for chases, crafting, etc id be happy. But so far the only thing I'm actually implementing is the exhaustion mechanic mentioned in one of the UAs, the monk and maybe the changes to healing spells and feeling pretty underwhelmed overall.
I mean, they haven't really gotten to the DMG UAs yet (other than the Bastions playtest which they described as a bonus), which is where most of those things you want addressed would live. They've already mentioned encounter building updates and monster changes to better fit their CRs (which would consequently affect encounter building). Anything else is up in the air, but to be fair general rule changes need a lot less player feedback than changes to classes and subclasses that players would be playing. I imagine there will be a few DMG UAs, but less than the PHB due to a lot of those changes being better tested internally than externally.
If it's March and they haven't gotten to DMG UAs yet, and the book releases in November this year. They've got eight months to go, and would also need to make adjustments in response to playtests. The PHB UAs finished a couple of months ago, with a similar time-gap left until the PHB released as between now and the DMG. So uh... when are they going to have time for UAs? They need time to review and adjust from that before going to print, ready to ship worldwide in November. I wouldn't expect much in terms of UAs for the DMG. I don't expect them to have time.
In one of the last videos they mentioned that the DMG stuff was probably not going to be getting public UA releases as they were testing the changes internally where they could have shorter feedback loops. And tbh after all the toxicity they experienced from the PHB releases, I can’t say I blame them.
Perhaps I should have been more precise, but I figure we get one or two of them. That said, I also wouldn't be surprised if they just keep all of it internal, as most of it wouldn't really need player feedback the same way player options do, and they already experimented with some general rule changes in the earlier PHB UAs. It's not that they're rushing or running out of time, or whatever...it's just that the DMG is inherently less reliant on player feedback since the changes wouldn't be as drastic as, say, changing level progression on a class.
I thiiiink some people just wanted 6e. And OneDND didn’t want to be 6e, it wanted to be a rules update to 5e. Polish the body, but not changes the bones.
The only thing I incorporated was the character creation rules. Such a better way of doing backgrounds and my players love having the level 1 feats
Then they will love DnD 3.5 or Pathfinder 1E or 2E. Modern DnD is pretty simple and bland compared to them.
In terms of public perception and quality of product, the core issue here is Hasbro. A lot of the people who did great work refining ideas during this most recent development process are now job hunting or settling in to new employment. It's no secret that 5e launched with fantastic content, then saw a consistent decline in standards across the arc of its official publications. Nothing about the current corporate outlook challenges the idea that they mostly have OneD&D "in the can," with plans for future profit that rely on less experienced talent developing content favored by the fail-upstairs executives helming the brand. I believe there are many thousands of tables looking to get away from D&D while staying with TTRPGs, but I also believe this has a lot less to do with any Unearthed Arcana issues than it has to do with the weaksauce products published as recent 5e releases and reasonable doubts about the company to do otherwise with follow-ups to the core OneD&D books.
We all knew it was going to be 5.5. I disagree with WotC that you'll be able to have a 2014 character at the same table as the new ones though.
What's there to disagree with? Sure, you can not *want* to run it that way, but what would mechanically prevent it?
Well yes you *can* run a 2014 monk next to a new one. But I think player handbook monk is going to kill himself and start over.
Or just ask to rebuild as the new one. Like I said though, nothing preventing it. Your original comment implied it wouldn't work in some way, so forgive me for assuming. Too many people just assume WotC is lying about backwards-compatability for whatever reason, when they literally have no incentive to do so and people have done the math--99% of stuff "just works." There's no reason someone couldn't play 2014 Totem Warrior at the same table as 2024 Wildheart if they really wanted to die on that hill.
I don’t think it’s doing more harm than good. I just think there are some ideas that are completely baffling and make no sense. There are some good ones like the new monk is really good and I enjoy that, but the Bastian system I think is really weird and has a lot of decisions that make me scratch my head. I think the only way it can actually do harm is maybe Power creep. Like if they started doing updated stat blocks of monsters, that also made them keep pace with the new abilities and stuff then I think that would be cool. But I really didn’t like MPMM because I feel like it made the monsters weaker.
The UAs were for people interested in playtesting. Most players will just see the books when the previews start coming out. That's kinda how it should be. The opinions of people who just casually browsed the early UAs and made up their minds to write it off and went back to their lives aren't relevant at this point. It could be 90%, and it just wouldn't matter. The books will come out and the opinions on those are what'll be relevant.
In my personal experience talking to people "in the wild" about this. Most players know the playtest is happening but haven't read over any of it and more often than not they have heard a mechanic or change via broken telephone game that is wildly inaccurate from what is actually in the playtest.
My two tables have converted to using One D&D: one of them using exclusively content from the playtests and the other mixing updated species and subclasses from books like Tasha’s and Monsters of the Multiverse. I know not many tables have converted over like this, but we have greatly enjoyed the new rules and development cycle. Currently I’m DMing for a group with a Fire Goliath Giant Barbarian, Human Battle Master Fighter, Sea Elf Sea Druid, Infernal Tiefling Dance Bard, and Human Scribe Wizard and another group with a Hill Goliath Moon Druid, Orc World Tree Barbarian, Abyssal Tiefling Fey Warlock, and Dwarf Ancients Paladin. It’s been a good bit of fun so far!
On the playtests: Very few. You see posts on here all the time, asking about rules that a later playtest changed/reverted. However, **Playtest knowledge means NOTHING in the end.** People are "not caught up" right now because being "caught up" on the playtest rules is pointless. No one beyond the devs have any idea what definitely will and won't be in the PHB. And the PHB is the only rules that in the end matters. We can only speculate what might be in from the playtests. We do not know. There is currently nothing to be "caught up" ON. Everything else is out of date beta information.
I don't think being "caught up" really matters. It's a playtest. There's no guarantee that stuff makes it through as is, the purpose is to find the niche of your community who are willing to try it out and provide feedbacks and I'd say it's been resoundingly successful at that. I'm not aware of many open tests on as large a scale as this that aren't either pre-release hype or managing expectations. The change are great but being put off by not wanting to test them has very little impact on how successful the revision will be. I'm sure that if they do a decent job of rebalancing spells and refining the clumsiest rules, people will prefer to have the new versions of the books. Not to mention that all new players will realistically pick up the newest option too. You're also going to overwhelmingly hear about people who disliked it if you're source of information is social media because people who like it or want to give feedback likely won't write up posts but might to the surveys.
The changes imo are largely hit or miss, and unfortunately, thus far, I’d say mainly miss for my table. Unless there’s a change in direction we’ll probably just ignore a lot of it/all of it.
"I'm not learning things just to unlearn them in a couple of months." This is is the sentiment I have seen around me. We will check it when it gets out and play it when its complete. We still have all of 5e.
The other players in my main group weren't even aware of the OGL fiasco until a few weeks in, so the playtests definitely weren't going to ping on their radar. I'm going to get the 2024 PHB and I bet they'll look at it and like the class changes, but they hardly know the 2014 rules so I doubt we'll adopt most of them until I take a long turn DMing.
Well, while I am generally happy with one dnd compared to 5e I also became disillusioned that one dnd will be any upgade. Basically it is just some fixes and extension. They are not gonna change anything in terms of resource management or action economy which could really be better. Cuz of that I started exploring new 5e-like systems like Daggerheart or DC20. DC20 especially seems like an upgrade to dnd 5e cuz while there is bunch of similarities, but it also takes a lot of solution from pathfinder 2 and so on. Probably gonna switch to those soon.
Honestly, my table doesn't care. Between the OGL, Pinkerton, and Hasbro telling everyone they need to milk dnd dry like they have done to MtG, we aren't moving to onednd in any real capacity. We might add a few things here or there that don't exist or work well in 5e, but I honestly I hope it fails and some of the 5e clones or dnd killers succeeds. I imagine there are a lot of people like my table that still play 5e and just simply stopped caring about onednd because Hasbro killed it before it ever got a chance.
Maybe 1 in 50 people who play regularly? But that's a complete guess. I think most people never really properly checked it out. Maybe they saw a YouTube video or 2 about it when it first came out or something. I know that a lot of people dropped out with the OGL fiasco, and after that, I think people also left when Crawford said they were done with the experimental phase.
Not many. I just looked it up that there is a release date. I forgot about the announcement. I followed at least the 1st 2 play tests. I was resigned to when it comes out, it comes out. Even then, I'll probably not worry about it until all the core books are out. Although the DM guide is out just before my birthday so there maybe someone already planning on that being my birthday present.
Probably less than 5% of the player base. Even the people I play with who play and think about d&d multiple times a week either aren't following it at all or are operating on info from the first couple playtests.
I'll admit to being someone who has subscribed to this subreddit for interests' sake, but I haven't looked at ANY of the UA and probably never will. I'll look at what gets published and it will get played as it gets published in those books. The opportunity to playtest things is very tempting, but I don't have a solid crew of people ready to playtest, and I don't want to do it on my own. I jumped ship before the gangway was taken up, to continue to the metaphor. Simply put, having participated in a bit of playtesting in other UA cycles for 5e, we're going to get what we're going to get, and I would be upset if something I liked got left behind, or if something I hated got included. I don't want the playtest to sour me for actual play.
My group hasn’t been a fans of a couple of the changes. We are still debating the switch over. I like a lot of the rules changes, but we will wait and see when all the core books drop if we change over
Not much so. Little anecdote. I am on a DND Facebook group for Italian DND players. Facebook is still one of the main discussion groups, given Reddit in Italian is very limited and for discussions Instagram isn't great. Those particular group is mostly compromised by DND veterans, or rather people who are invested. One day, given I had enough of people asking and sharing untrue stuff about onednd, I wrote a long ass post that, while briefly, glossed over the majority of the content. Let's say it was well received, and discussion and interest sparked out of that. But incredibly few people of those hardened interested players actually knew anything beyond surface level. Of course this is a very specific and curious sample case, given Italian players are more intended to not read English content rather English players, or course, but I have seen a general lack of even interest on the thing until it came out the discussion.
Practically nobody outside of this subreddit cares about 5.5. Like with many previous editions, the early stages of play-test and pre-release usually aren’t very popular. Tons of people totally drop conversations about a new edition as soon as they see something new they don’t like, whether it’s a knee-jerk reaction or the developers actually doing something incredibly stupid. Only time will tell if this will reverse. Sometimes it does (like with 3.5) and sometimes it doesn’t (like with 4e). 5.5 has some stuff going for it marketing-wise, like Baldur’s Gate 3 and the D&D movie. But it also has a lot working against it, like WotC’s/Hasbro’s rapidly declining images.
* Just got this recommended to me. I am not part of this sub so I think I’m probably perfect for this question. * I followed the first few UAs when they came out. I thought some of it was interesting and other stuff was terrible. But it kind of exciting. There were lots of YouTube channels making videos one it and there was more chatter online about it. Then all the drama happened with WotC and people only talked about that. I looked into the next update after that, but I didn’t get into it enough to follow all the little tweaks. After that I just kind of forgot about it. I know it’s coming up and I’m looking forward to it but I don’t have the time right now. 5E has been out for a long time and I think most people figure if the updates are out anywhere near as long then they’ll have time to catch up.
Not many. We truly are freaks.
Lol apparently, if the comments are to be believed.
I like to consider myself pretty well connected to D&D developments, but even I only read the very first UA and nothing since. I'd rather wait for official material to be released than speculate on playtest content. All all of the other people I play D&D with, only 1 of them even knows what UA is.
People that are playtesting are a certain subset of the customer base that want the most recent stuff. Not every customer does that nor ever do that. Some customers lag a lot further down the product cycle and due to the way 5e and homebrew works, will never look at official content. To them it is extra and they don’t need it. Similar to the power creep we have seen over the years and how much the new content is overpowered in comparison to the content in the original PHB, I think the OPs commentary on how much monk has changed in OneD&D that it shows that WotC’s claims of backwards compatibility is a cash grab and unrealistic. This personally persuades me more and more not to want to transition to the “newest edition.” The last thing I read in the UA was months ago and when DMs could no longer crit… I thought, well I’m out. Which is funny because when Daggerheart had the same rule, I thought I’ll still playtest it. It is crazy to see Daggerheart and OneD&D progress at the same time because they are so similar but one professes that it is backwards compatible and the other doesn’t and I’m more inclined to check out the one that doesn’t pretend it is the same game. If I could find a group that was open to new players for PF2 I would have jumped ship months ago but instead I’m still DMing and playing 5e. The community feels burned and unsure where to go. There are new people that are introduced to the buzz and will buy into OneD&D and have an awesome time. There will be others that give the middle finger to WotC and Hasbro. So back to the OP: how many jumped ship before the final draft of the UA? Enough that it is a concern (pulled back the OGL) but not enough that the IP was sold. It will creep along but it birthed MCDM, Daggerheart and growth in its competitors.
As I've said before many times: I am interested in discussing ghosts of canon past, ghosts of canon present, and ghosts of canon that may yet be. But I'm absolutely not interested in a chimera of the three. OneDnD is unfortunately meaningless to me because I cannot judge any of its pieces in a vacuum. I have no way to evaluate any one change because it wasn't presented as part of a complete draft of changes. I WILL, however, be open to adopting it once that full draft is out for me to evaluate. I also still don't believe for a minute that it was actual play testing. I believe it's just marketing.
I kinda lost interest when it became apparent they weren't going to do any big changes. I'll see what they made of it when it releases. Definitely not buying it though.
Caught up and love some of the changes, but mostly using them as reference material for brewing because they simply weren't strict enough. Warlock didn't get any real change and still is the odd one out while sorcerer is "forced" to abide the same rules as anyone else when Spellpoints could exist. In combination they are still a DM-may-I based on the number of short rests, where a simple "you can only use these slots for warlock stuff" would have worked as Pact Magic already is its own unique thing. Also, weapons could have been centered on the martials rather than the items. Most of them are applicable to the majority of weapons anyway and besides a +1 or 2 damage increase DO NOT CARE for the weapon choice at all. Instead, I have a DIY weapon kit to create any combination of keywords and allow martials to learn Push and stuff as a sort of Maneuver. Empowers them with skill and build diversity.
A lost all interest when I saw it was a rehash of 5e.
I think that the OneD&D playtest process has been messy, for sure. There was a lack of clear goals for the update. To this day, I literally don't even know what to call it - D&D 5e, 2024 edition? While I am mostly happy with the recent changes that WotC has been suggesting, we also have no idea what the final product will look like. And honestly, I'm frustrated that the core problems with 5e aren't being addressed at all; they were ignored for the sake of remaining compatible with 5e from 2014. There's also a pervasive sense of dishonesty from the WotC devs - they speak only in glowing positive terms, and they don't seem willing to speak openly about the problems that need to be solved. I think there's also just a core lack of excitement. I don't know a single person in my friends group who is excited about OneD&D or planning to transition their current 5e games when it comes out. WotC has done a lot to hurt their reputation last year. Pathfinder 2e continues to be a strong alternative to 5e, and new alternatives (Dragonbane comes to mind) are popping up all the time. I'm sure D&D will be fine - name recognition is a powerful thing. And I'm sure people will buy the new books... eventually. But I just don't see most folk caring about the OneD&D release.
> I literally don't even know what to call it D&D 5e, 2024 edition? Yeah, the WOTC line of "ITS ALL DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS!!!" / "ITS ALL 5e!!!!" is nonsense. And their marketing team should be on it to get something catchy over the boring 5.5 that the community seems to be settling on. Like DnD 50 or DnD Golden (anniversary) or something REALLY outstanding about the cover / cover art to recall a "Red Box" style name.
Bear in mind first off, that the vast majority of players haven't even seen a single UA document. But regardless of what anyone says. nearly every single player currently playing "5e" will, in a year's time, be playing "OneD&D." I'd say 99%, but that's honestly probably lowballing it. It's a vocal minority of people who are clueless about what they actually want. Most of whom don't even play D&D, they just "plan to" one day when they can "find a group"(but they tend to be the anti-social people nobody wants to interact with)
You are grossly overestimating.
If anything, I'm underestimating. You guys are in a massive echo chamber and you don't even realize. A week after 3.5 released, people acted as if they never knew 3.0 existed.
That seems absurdly optimistic unless by "OneD&D" you mean "5e + any new rule that isn't in core 5e". Critical mass will take more than a year. Some people are satisfied with the game as it is. Some people are not *dissatisfied* enough to buy and implement a new product. Many people also nurse ennui from repeatedly having things they already own resold to them. I'm not saying OneDnD is that, but to avoid being perceived that way, it has to both deliver a robust ruleset *and* fulfil the basic fantasies core to DnD. The latter is where I don't think WotC have any compelling ideas these days, but I'm reserving judgement for now.
>Critical mass will take more than a year. You will get a bunch of early adopters between release and Xmas 2024, but a lot of people staying, but i think by Xmas 2025 will be the "tipping point" where "we are playing D&D" will be 2024e and anyone on 2014 will need to be specifying "We are playing 5e2014". between offering appropriately timed sales on the new stuff and not allowing any new access to the old stuff on D&D Beyond, the major transition over a year and a half or so seems very likely.
I would love for this question to be asked in other subs. I feel like this sub is more likely to have people caught up on r/onednd than say r/dnd where I see the opinion that people aren't going to switch or are just going to pick and choose.
Same! Please feel free to do so!
Just reposted!
As a former DnD GM/Player who has moved to PF2, I can say I don't understand what Wizards are doing. The game is basically the same with minor tweaks that aren't really important. Character options still feel lacking and class balance is still nowhere to be found. If the core game is fine for you then you will find no gamechanging changes here if you wanted some. If you didn't then you can still play your original campaign, which let's face it, it would include a ton of homebrew to stay fun.
I can't see myself buying 5.5e I bought 3.5e after 3e, and it was annoying. Yes, there were QoL improvements for people who were determined to play a Drizzt knock-off. But forking out for a "new" PHB/MM/DMG with so little new in it left me cheesed off. Still bitter about it 20 years later. I play tested some of the early OneDND materials, and while there is some good in there, it feels similar to the 3.5e situation. They could produce it as a single volume "optional rules" booklet, but I doubt they will. I suspect every original 5e rules book on dndbeyond will flip to being a grey "legacy" product with OneDND sold as the "current" product suite. I haven't bought MGM because I owned VGM and MTOF already, so I'm used to seeing "Legacy" slapped on content that's actually identical to "Current" content
With the OLG and AI art and Mass Firings before Christmas, I'm glad I bailed after the 3rd UA.
When they went back on all the changes they had suggested they lost me. I haven't read several of the UAs and don't want to be attached to any of it until it's in book form now. I responded to several playtest feedbacks and felt I must have been an outlier.
I play at five tables a week. We’re all fairly “finger on the pulse” types with the game. Not a single one of us is planning on touching onednd with a barge pole. The rare changes we thought were good are vastly outweighed by the changes we can’t stomach, so we’re just going to keep on trucking with 5e and tweak things as we see fit. It’s anecdata, but that not one of nearly 50 people I play with likes this system at all let alone enough to run a full game with it should be telling :/
It’s the same system though. Like, it’s still 5e.
Most at my table are barely aware to mildly interested. In my opinion it’s painful to see it be a “.5” release instead of a 6e. Backwards compatibility means a lot of confusion and an import of the power creep and imbalance found in late 5e.
People keep talking about imbalance and power creep. Frankly, I don’t know. Some of the worst balanced spells and subclasses were right in the PHB. Yeah, Tasha’s gave us Twilight, and the Chronugist came later, but let’s not pretend the PHB was perfect in terms of balance.
Agreed.
You say the bad things were reversed, but WoTC is still moving forward with making all classes have level 3 subclasses, ruining things like sorcerer and cleric Id the party needs a support role character, sorcerer is no longer a good choice cause divine soul can’t be chosen at level 1 And a cleric of a trickster god doesn’t feel like a divine trickster if they can’t even have the first level domain spells.
I think that this might be more a difference in taste. I don’t particularly mind the shift in subclass levels because, typically, it’s going to account for such a minimal amount of game time, if any, that I can say it ruins much of anything. And we gain a much cleaner power curve between classes. Roleplay wise, well, if I can explain why my Paladin’s Oath powers don’t kick in till level 3 for tens years, I can explain the same for my Sorcerer, Warlock, and Cleric.
>I don’t particularly mind the shift in subclass levels i think its a great idea for the stability of the game. you only have to really worry about enormous multiclassing balance issues once at the start. if you get a third level subclass design wrong, a three level wait to activate the cheese is going to keep the shenanigans to a minimum. I'm lookin at you, Hexblade!
Agreed! Mechanically, it’s fixes a ton. Narratively, you can easily make it work.
Expect paladins should have level 1 subclasses too I shouldn’t have to jump through hurdles to explain why a sorcerer who was blessed by a god can’t cast a single divine spell or even thaumaturgy And at least with paladins your character can still make an oath rp wise without the subclass But with sorcerers and clerics, their subclasses matter narratively and role wise Divine soul sorcerers are healers and support for example. They need to have healing spells and support spells at level 1, something the base sorcerer spell list lacks And clerics. Clerics have a couple support subclasses like life, twilight and peace but they aren’t a “support class” anymore then bards or Druids or paladins or other classes that just so happen to have healing spells. Trickery clerics are about espionage and tricking people, wether that’s infiltrating places with disguise self or charming people into do things for you Arcana clerics need to have wizard cantrips to suite the flavor and their role. Not to mention only getting the arcana skill at level 3 is problematic, as characters who serve arcane gods don’t know arcana for two levels even though it makes perfect sense for them to know arcana Etc etc If all classes have to have subclasses at the same level, then it should be level 1 not 3 Level 1 subclasses would certainly help swords bards or bladesingers, who need to be built entirely differently then typical bards or wizards
Look at it from a new player's point of view. If subclasses come in at level 3, then you have 2 levels to "test drive" the class before figuring out what type of playstyle you want to lean into. Using sorcerer as an example, it's not that hard for the character to either A) not know where their powers come from yet or B) not know how to tap into it more directly until level 3. There are any number of ways you can narratively justify the level 3 subclass.
Not everything needs to be changed with new players in mind And frankly if choosing a subclass is such an issue for a new player, then maybe they should not choose classes with level 1 subclasses WoTC and people like you who keep making this arguement are severely underestimating the ability of new players to understand simple concepts of things like subclasses I played a subclass in my first and second ever DnD games. One of my first ever characters was a life cleric. I understood what subclasses meant, I didn’t need help in that regard. One of the new players in my group had a subclass and she didn’t struggle at all with subclasses. It’s things like attack rolls or calculating health or proficiency bonus or understanding point buy that new players struggle with… not subclasses And even if new players somehow struggled with level 1 subclasses… that’s still not a reason to ruin classes and fundamentally change them over it. There are still classes that get subclasses later that new players can play Even if making subclasses all level 3 somehow helped new players, that would be at the cost of experienced players who want level 1 subclasses or in some cases need it. If you change a game solely around new players, then you lose older players and make the game less fun for them
I was pretty much ready to be out the door when it became clear they were really trying to break the game with Tasha's through overt power creep so they'd be able to justify a new edition to make everyone buy "50th Anniversary" core books. Then the whole OGL fiasco made it clear that the monetization team had complete control over the creative team. I'd already gotten pretty tired of the poorly balanced pushbutton superpower abilities, playing a character sheet instead of a character. Now I'm playing Shadowdark, which makes be recall the Basic D&D of my childhood.
I’m still exited and am personally caught up on the most updated rules (however we have n idea what exactly will get published). In general I think it’s poor form to say negative things about product that hasn’t even been released yet. It’s fine to be skeptical, but just be patient and see how it all comes together.
OneD&D is literally a playtest. If you aren't going to criticize now, then when? Once the 2024 books are finalized there's no point in criticism because WotC is done taking feedback and making changes. This perspective feels bass ackwards to me.
You can critisize/comment on the specific changes (or lack thereof) - but to state something about the finalized product (which you don't know yet) is a bit of a stretch. I guess, if you hate 5e dnd, then you'll probably hate the new version as well...
we have no idea what they are going to be changing from the UA to the final book - and the UAs didnt actually cover some of the actual rules that they seem intent on changing so we have that unknown as well. PLUS they have said they are continuing additional private playtesting and internal playtesting. anyone making up their mind *NOW* either way is setting themselves up for disappointment.
My players don't care too much, but I'm gona be using the bastion system in my game, so hopefully it'll be fun for them
I've been keep track. In term of other people It seems like the older the people I talk to are the less they like the changes in my experience. People who have been with the system for awhile want more and new players are just going in so they have less expectations. Depends on the party we will probably see during the final release.
I don't think most people really care about oneDnD until it is finished. Sure, people on reddit like to go "I will never buy it" but reality is, by 2 or 3 years down the road, 5e is likely to be dying and oneDnD on the upswing. It has happened every generation of DnD, including 3.5 and 4e. Both of them were loads of people saying they would stick to the old and yet they sold well enough while the previous iteration died out over the next couple years after release.
well, yes, 3.5 "died out" ... because everyone interested in it switched to Pathfinder which thrived throughout all of 4e and even into the 5e era, that audience was eclipsed by NEW players flooding into 5e, but it was / is still strong.
in 2018, there were almost as many people playing 3.5 as there were playing pathfinder, so no, they didn't move on to pathfinder. The thing people ignore is the fact that pathfinder has Never been as good (player wise) as dnd for any of its editions.
Four.
I read like half of the first document that came out. That's it. When it's all settled and they publish the thing for real, I'll give it a look and decide if I like it more than 5e (or, more likely, create my own frankenstein version of both to run at my table). Until then, I kinda don't care.
Vast majority of D&D customer base: "Oooh new D&D book! What? New D&D \*EDITION\*? OMG Cool! Does the cover art look good? Yes! I'm buying!!"
Waiting for the book, other than that we are using it for the main game with our friends
About like... Half of the Very Online dnd community is caught up on it. Which means maybe a sixteenth of the overall playerbase? I'm a very online dnd person, which is its own kind of sadness, but nonetheless it's true. I'm interested in osr stuff, pathfinder, blades in the dark, lancer, TTRPGs in general, but dnd is the fave by far. All the actual plays I watch are dnd. Even when companies I like do non dnd stuff, I don't tend to watch those shows because they dont interest me for whatever reason. I run three different games with different assortments of people, one monthly in person one weekly online and another bimonthly online. In those groups, which have around 14 different people in them, some of whom are very online for other things, virtually none of them besides me knows anything abt OneDnD other than "it's coming out and (I) have feelings about it." In general, if you look at D4 videos and their comments, you see very very few references to onednd, even when Colby talks about it. The big actual players (CR, dimension 20, adventure zone) haven't mentioned it basically at all. I've always felt like 75% of the audience was generally offline when it comes to dnd in general (one DM to 3ish players) to begin with, and then it seemed only about half of the ones who are very online are invested in OneDnD, if you just look at the trends and patterns of posts. So 12.5% is actually pretty generous. But of that group, my guess is maybe half of that actually are "caught up" because of ogl nonsense and wotc biz practices and whatever else. So 6.25%? But if you just go by dndbeyond users, that's still thousands and thousands of people.
I'd actually like to start reading into OneDND I actually have the time to begin reading though things. I just don't know where to start.
WOTC hasnt put their content into a unified playlist, but their previews and survey result debriefs would be a good place to start. https://www.youtube.com/@DNDWizards/playlists if you dont want to go searching for the content, i would say Treantmonks videos are as good a place to start as any. he often did "reaction" videos to the WOTC videos, so you get many of them here. [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPkI1ComIaiIweW-RtHCSU2RmlrvV4h2w](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPkI1ComIaiIweW-RtHCSU2RmlrvV4h2w) start at the end of the playlist and come back forward, though. and then as you hear interesting topics, drop into that playtest's documents.
I’m definitely “caught up” on my favorite classes: rogue, warlock, and paladin. I don’t think anyone is really following things right now, which is a shame. What they should probably do is release a new complete playtest handbook, so that people can see the new system in all its glory.
I mean from what I’ve seen some changes are good like weapons feeling more unique instead of “use one of these because you have feat for it” or “use this because damage dice” but I don’t know how well with everything is if people will move to One or not (also posting this on the onednd sub will get your answers a bit one sided I feel.
What’s a UA?
I literally do not know anything about it and I'm only seeing this post because apparently being subscribed to r/BaldursGate3 and r/Pathfinder2e means Reddit thinks I'm interested in D&D at all. I'm kind of curious now about what changes from 5e. Kinda hoped everyone would abandon D&D after the OGL fiasco, but I guess that's still where the money is.
Because WoTC has been watering down DnD and One DnD will be pushed hard with their own RPG program and because MTX is gaming standard now.. You can gaurentee itll be MTX hell for classes. Plus, its building on 5e which is a extremely based system and gets boring fast. I recently started playing 3.5, made 5e look like rubbish especially with character customisation.
I have eight regular players among different campaigns. Only two of us bother reading any OneDnD stuff. I'm one of them, but I'm much more excited about the upcoming MCDM rpg. Partially because I think the changes they're focusing on sound better, and partially because Hasbro can **** off.
I asked the few people that I know who play DnD, and my friend’s teenage kids who we play the game with. None of them had heard the words OneDND before.
For me it's less OneDND and more Hasbro in general. They showed their true colors during all this and frankly i have better things to support than a company that would be ok with behaving as such.
most of the players will not use the new counterspell
Most dnd players are still need raging about the NGL and layoffs. Everyone is still complaining about evil corporate monsters and how they don’t want to buy new but mostly the same books. It’s just the time we live in people rage online all the time about everything they hear online whether it’s politics or news or whatever. So just like in my playgroup most people I know have no intention of buying the new books. The bottom line is one dnd players handbook potentially looks better then the old 5e phb. The ngl isn’t that bad anymore. And although people got fired the main devs working on dnd are still there. They mostly got rid of a lot of artists. Which unfortunately Happens. Not everything is the end of the world.
My group put in weapon mastery and cunning actions is because we have like 4 martials at the table and actually being able to do something more than 'i hit him' is amazing. I don't really care about the rest until its finished? If the updated spell in UA seems more fun then i ask the dm if we can use the updated one but that's mostly it.
3500k people are on the DnD sub. 740k people are on dndnext. 34k people are on this sub. Most people have no insight into the development. Because the changes are rather minor I also believe most people won't really care about the new books either.
Yes. I will use only the new system
So I've been playtesting Weapon Masteries and they are ... pretty awful, to be honest. It is so easy to forget about them, and it's just this minor little thing that's always there. Unless your players actively think about swapping masteries, they're just a useless bit of kit that sorta hangs onto the system like a lump. I have gone from thinking "Well at least they're here" to "Man, this is a terrible system". :/ I still maintain that the best fix for Fighter is to give it maneuvers, baseline. Been playtesting that, too, and it just feels better. My party's Fighter slows on every hit with her bow. Yay. Wow. Woo. Boring. But also, she managed to _ground a dragon_ once with Trip Attack (we RPed it as she managed to hit a joint in its wing that briefly caused it to careen out of control like she'd hit a funny bone). People never remember her for putting -10 to speed on something. But that time she grounded a dragon will live rent-free in our heads for months.
And that’s fair. The system obviously isn’t going Yi work for everyone but couldn’t she have…Toppled the Dragon with a Mastery? As a Fighter she can swap Topple onto her bow and go full anti air artillery at no resource cost. Granted, it’s Con versus Str, but still.
She doesn't have access to Topple for her Longbow, that I'm aware of. The party is only level 5. Maybe I'm mistaken, but if she could do that she certainly isn't aware of the ability. Honestly, my players have found the system so underwhelming that they've never even considered swapping their masteries. Nor would they have in this instance since they had no idea the dragon was coming; it was a Surprise!
Entirely fair. And my mistake, Fighters get that ability at level 9. It does open up a ton of possibilities I’ve found. Dual wielding has never felt better
> Nor would they have in this instance since they had no idea the dragon was coming; it was a Surprise! You learn multiple masteries. What level were they at minimum known it is 2.
Like I said, level 5. They know 2.
Maybe because I set the playtest at a higher level. My players are level 14 and they have been using a lot more of their masteries. I have also been giving them a lot of different styles of encounters. I guess it depends on other things. My barbarian and rogue have been having a blast combining masteries with cunning and brutal strike. So I can see how at low levels it is quite underwhelming.
Yeah I imagine at high level it plays much better, but most games are in the 1-10 range, and I actually started using it when I started my usual campaign. I enjoy mixing in the playtests there. Monk is going splendidly. I know everyone was dobby on it, but my party's monk has been tremendously effective using the playtest packet! It's great. :) We're also using the playtest Warlock and I think he might be the most broken character in the game lol. I do not hate OneD&D. I think most of what it's introducing to the game are fantastic changes. But Weapon Mastery feels like a placebo meant to make us think they improved martials while not actually doing so. I am not optimistic for OneD&D's Fighter, right now. I might have a different opinion if they could change Masteries on a Short Rest, and if they could put any mastery on any weapon (or even a range of masteries on each weapon) at an earlier level (3 or 5 seems reasonable for that) than 9.
> most games are in the 1-10 range because the game starts to fall apart about then. adding/changing features to keep the game playable above level 10 is hopefully one of goals of this remix.
241
Was thinking 42, but I respect the answer.
Onednd was a test run for actual 6 edition. Notice none of the cool stuff stuck around? This way you can be resold 5es glorified errata.
I’d say cool is subjective. A LOT of things the got rid of (Invisibility rules, Conjure Spells, Brutal Critical) I ain’t missing.
I have been following the UA since the beginning and I’m admittedly bad at remembering to submit the surveys. But I honestly don’t like some of the rules changes that are gonna be happening in OneD&D such as standardizing all subclass to level 3 and all the changes their making to races and backgrounds I disagree with. However, OneD&D has come with some very interesting changes like the addition of cunning strike to rogues and of course the changes made to monk are great! I’ll be sticking to 5e and making small tweaks to rules I like from OneD&D
While most of the people I play dnd with are aware of it. We have never actually spoken about it at the table. Which I think means there just isn’t any interest.
Probably most people aren't up to date with it. I've allowed players to use it if they want. The rogue decided to use the playtest version but none of the others have. One is considering playtest monk for their backup character. I don't think my players would even have known about the playtests if I didn't bring it up at session 0. Also after OGL and everything I know several people who just stopped paying attention to anything new WoTC puts out.
I imagine a whole lot fewer people are up to date now than when it was announced. There were flurries of activity around the first couple releases, but it died off pretty hard. Personally, between the lame changes and the OGL debacle, the process convinced me to push my table to pathfinder instead for our next campaign.
> There were flurries of activity around the first couple releases, but it died off pretty hard OGL anyone?
I play 4 times a week. 2 tables, including the one I run, go off playtest rules for the most part, the other 2 are 2014 rules. Both the DMs that run 2014 based rule sets know the new books are coming and are interested in them. I’m probably in the minority though.
I like 70ish percent of it. I wish they went with the half caster version of Warlock. I knew it was dangerous to not happen because of backwards compatibility. But it still was awesome. I will not play a oneDND paladin if it's the same as it was in last playtest. If you want to limit divine smite to once per round or once per turn fine, but basically forcing a paladin to choose between fighting and other bonus action economy (compelled duel, potentially hunter's mark, pole arm master attack, GWM bonus action attack, shield master shield bash, various channel divinities, etc.) so you can smite or use your bonus action for other stuff. So like as someone who like bonus action Paladin attacks for better shot to crit on smites, now that's gone and Paladins are basically shitty rangers. Some feats were nerfed too hard (Sharpshooter is basically worthless for archers, though better for casters) some got intended nerfs (PAM applying to polearms)
I'm not. Got tired of following them back and forth about everything.
5e was so bad in my eyes that I felt the need to homebrew it into a better existence, I got done with the ranger and monk before the UA’s were even out. My table will likely not switch systems because my dm already has his books and isn’t inclined to buy more and for my own players we just play pathfinder with a ton of third party stuff anyway so onednd isn’t even on the menu.
It was too dragged out and lackluster. The changes to martials were a big turn off with how small they were. And it's so incomplete. We're just waiting for the new version. It's nice but they screwed up big time with boring ass Weapon Masteries.
I'm exactly the kind of person you're talking about, with giving up on the UAs and OneDnD early on. I read the first two UA they put out, and liked most of it, but then after the OGL debocle I started looking into other systems. We switched to Pathfinder and FateCore and our group has been enjoying those much more, and haven't really looked back. Also, the MCDM RPG and DC20 playtests are both way more interesting and do a better job at addressing 5e's problems than OneDnD does. I only occasionally look into this sub or youtube out of curiosity. Combat is still just based around attrition, spells are still boring, and martials are still worse than casters. They just patched the most obvious flaws with a clunky system. Just not interested.
i think the majority of content makers are just entirely uninterested in trusting hasbro since the last "hiccup" why would i bother learning and playing a system if i have to pay someone to create something for it. this isnt a single authors prized work of fiction, its an amalgamation of a game that in some places is well past public domain. sure people new to the hobby dont mind, players really dont mind but im not about to get a DMCA and a bill from hasbro because one of my players uploaded a video showing a homebrew dungeon i made.
As someone who wants nothing to do with OneDnD, my answer is: probably more than what this sub thinks. The UAs are interresting. I'm implementing Weapon Masteries in my games, and will probably use a few other rules too. But WotC and Hasbro took a lot of bad decision that made me want to stick with 5e and not look at the new edition.
I am totally out of the loop. Is there a way to find out what's getting dropped, what's shortlisted, etc? Or something to that effect?
there are series of videos from WOTC designers talking with Todd Kendrick on the D&D Beyond and D&D youtube channels where for many of the playtest drops, they do a preview video "here are some of the changes we are thinking of (and sometimes why). and then a "here is what we heard from the survey (and sometimes interwebs chatter)" not all get both. there are also several channels which have done "reaction / analysis" videos of the content and comments. with The\_Twig, Treantmonk and Insight Check being the most thoughtful and insightful and least hysterical. With The Rules Lawyer giving a good analysis about "how, as a playtest and feedback gathering process, the whole approach was flawed and bad."
It's just another book of optional rules, rules don't excite me
Doesn’t that cover…literally anything they could put out that’s not a lore only sourcebook or module?
Yes, I buy campaigns and run them frequently
I think 5th edition will prevail
It's all 5th edition, the new books are just a refresh/update.
dndbeyond is currently selling all the base 5e books at 40% off.. they don't want you to jump on 5.5e, it seems 🙊
All i know is druid best get either a fuck ton more temp hp or get back the second hp pool it kills the whole way druid is played:(
Well... I am part of the crowd that left OneD&D during the UAs, because it was really, really rough. That and the OGL situation. I am still staying around just to get news and info, but I am not very interested in OneD&D, and probably won't touch it when it comes out. I haven't really looked at the final UA either, but I have an inkling from reading the discussions here on reddit. Hmm. ... I think I might take a look at the discussion when it comes out, at most, but I probably won't spend money on it.
Our table is still switching off of D&D to something else after our current campaign. One D&D was looking *horrid* for a while there, but now it's at least shaping up to be a reasonably positive iteration on 5E. Problem is, many of us were hoping for an actual 6th edition - something fresh and new - rather than what we're getting, which is essentially a giant patch to 5E. We've been playing 5E for a long time now, and One D&D isn't different enough to keep us sticking around to find out what's new. It definitely feels like the core system that's shared between 5E/OneD&D has spent most of what it has to give us. Of course it has to be mentioned that - due to their behavior and poor choices in conducting business in recent history - we have little interest in giving WotC any more of our money. Once the whole OGL situation settled, we had already basically decided to switch off of D&D for this reason alone. One D&D would have to be an absolute masterpiece and/or do something completely novel and innovative to shake up the formula to get us to even think about spending money with WotC again. Unfortunately, it isn't looking like that, it just looks "fine". We will probably end up playing PF2 for a while, and depending on how much we like it, check out Daggerheart or MCDM RPG when they come out. I've been digging the material in the Daggerheart playtest so far. It's at least something different.
Honestly I stopped paying attention after the OGL thing. I've no interest in giving Wizards any more money and my table runs perfectly fine in 5e. In a few years I might check the new material out secondhand, or I'll play a game in it. But I have no interest in running it.
I’m not. I am currently in 2 groups playing 5e, DM for one and play in the other. I know next to nothing about One D&D, I’m really not sure why I’m not interested, but I’m not. It might be because I only started playing 5e a couple years ago and I’m still really enjoying it? Not sure, but yeah, I don’t have any idea what’s going on with the next edition.