So you've got a fresh, steamy playtest packet in front of you and a Feedback Survey open in another tab, and you're ready to start diving in and telling Wizards of the Coast exactly what to do to Save D&D Forever. It's time to educate the design team on how to design D&D, get your work and ideas into the game, and make your mark on D&D, right? Right?
STOP.
Wait.
Before you make a fool of yourself and waste your feedback survey giving completely unusable "feedback" that accomplishes nothing but wasting an hour of a dev team member's time, let me help you. I'll tell you what Wizards is looking for, and how to make the best and most effective use of your limited written survey feedback. I can tell you how to leave feedback that makes whichever poor dev schlub it is that pulled the short straw nod and note your feedback down rather than roll their eyes and discard your feedback. Most importantly, I can tell you what NOT to do, and how to avoid being That Guy. Nobody wants to be That Guy.
So what's the secret? How do you leave feedback that actually gets listened to? It's truly quite easy. Dead simple, even.
All of your feedback should directly relate to your experience using the content or reading the content.
It's that simple. Phrases like "This was really fun, it improved our game night" or "this is confusing, I'm not sure what this means" or "we tried this and it was a real drag" or "when I read this it gave me dry heaves and I immediately banned it from my table" is all valuable, desirable, actionable feedback. That's the exact sort of thing Wizards is looking for. Your feedback should be reactive - it should contain your reaction to the content being surveyed. How it made you feel, whether it made your game more or less fun. You can include some detail on why you reacted that way, i.e. "the new Jump Action rule was really unstable, I didn't like how swingy and unpredictable it made jumping compared to knowing exactly what you can clear with the 2014 Jump rules", but even then the feedback should focus on how you felt and what you liked or disliked.
Which seems self-evident and obvious when explained, ne? But there's an issue. Many, many, many players don't give feedback related to their experience with the content. In public 'share your feedback!' threads and Reddit posts, players who show off what they submitted almost never give this type of feedback. Instead, they give the other type. The 'That Guy' type. The type that makes whoever's reading their feedback roll their eyes and toss a survey into the Recycle bin. How do you avoid getting your feedback Recycle'd and being That Guy? Simple.
NONE of your feedback should EVER include the phrase "I think you should..."
Any feedback beginning with or including the phrase "I think you should..." or any other similar phrase is called Unsolicited Design Advice (UDA), and it is the bane of development teams everywhere. It goes beyond reactive, how-content-made-you-feel feedback and directly impinges on the developers' jobs. Proactive feedback, where you try to explain your idea on how to change D&D to the design team and tell them how to do their jobs, is actively anti-desirable. Wizards cannot use your UDA. They, legally, cannot use your ideas without causing themselves tons of potential legal trouble. They will instead bin your feedback because the less exposure they have to UDA, the safer any development team - not just Wizards, but ANY dev team you may be giving feedback to - becomes.
Remember - THEY are the game designers. YOU are a player. Your job is not to design the game. Your job is to play the game, then tell Wizards how playing the game went for you when you tried their new content. If they wanted your design advice they would hire you as a design consultant and get your name on a contract that allowed them to use your design advice freely and legally in exchange for pay, and you would have to actually have game design experience/chops. Since you're not a consultant and you don't have game design chops beyond basic homebrew tweaks to your home game, your UDA has negative value. It is less valuable than "zero valuable"; it is actively harmful.
It's hard. Dead gods above and below, it is hard sometimes to avoid leaving UDA. When the solution seems blindingly obvious to you and you're just bursting to tell them how to fix something you know how to fix, or when you have a supremely clever idea that really worked fantastically in your home-game playtests and you want to share it? It can be a real act of will to avoid putting that into your feedback survey. But it's an act of will that must be done. They cannot and will not use UDA. Instead, talk about your cool solutions and ideas in the public sphere. Post your awesome ideas on the DDB forums here, or on Reddit, or wherever you discuss ideas with your fellow players. Wizards has their eyes on that space; they have Community Management people whose primary job function is collecting and distilling what the community is talking about and delivering that to the dev team. If your idea is good enough it'll pick up traction online, and then Wizards will see that idea as part of their community feed where they can use ideas. Note that a lot of the One D&D playtest UA is codifying common homebrew and house rules; if your awesome idea becomes a common piece of homebrew/house rule, it stands a fair chance of eventually being codified in the game. That is how you can Leave Your Mark on D&D.
Beyond, y'know...playing it. Remember, the fun of this game isn't leaving your mark on it; it's letting the game leave a mark on you. The memories and experiences you have playing D&D are the end goal, and Wizards wants very much to hear about those. Wizards cannot and will not ever be ordinary players; even when they play the game themselves, they cannot help but see their home games through Game Designer lenses. Your experience as an ordinary, non-dev player is invaluable to the team and is the one thing they cannot supply for themselves. Give them that experience, and the team will be deeply grateful for it. Try to do their own job for them and they will be annoyed.
Keep this in mind, and your feedback will always make whichever dev reads it smile.
Which seems self-evident and obvious when explained, ne? But there's an issue. Many, many, many players don't give feedback related to their experience with the content. In public 'share your feedback!' threads and Reddit posts, players who show off what they submitted almost never give this type of feedback. Instead, they give the other type. The 'That Guy' type. The type that makes whoever's reading their feedback roll their eyes and toss a survey into the Recycle bin. How do you avoid getting your feedback Recycle'd and being That Guy? Simple.
NONE of your feedback should EVER include the phrase "I think you should..."
Any feedback beginning with or including the phrase "I think you should..." or any other similar phrase is called Unsolicited Design Advice (UDA), and it is the bane of development teams everywhere. It goes beyond reactive, how-content-made-you-feel feedback and directly impinges on the developers' jobs. Proactive feedback, where you try to explain your idea on how to change D&D to the design team and tell them how to do their jobs, is actively anti-desirable. Wizards cannot use your UDA. They, legally, cannot use your ideas without causing themselves tons of potential legal trouble. They will instead bin your feedback because the less exposure they have to UDA, the safer any development team - not just Wizards, but ANY dev team you may be giving feedback to - becomes.
The principle may be sound but in practice there is a bit more going on. This survey is their data and subject to the wizards of the coast terms of service. Those terms say summited data is for their use. (which in the case of surveys is reasonable IMO ) Besides as we all know mechanics can't be copyrighted but they will probably never admit it out loud.
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The big thing I think people need to remember is both too powerful and too weak should be listed as Dissatisfied. It might be counter intuitive for some even popular youtubers miss this with their opinions.
Whether or not they can use it isn't the issue. The issue is whether or not it's the right kind of feedback to give.
Won't even "Spoilers" it: it is not the right kind of feedback to give.
Anyone with the design chops to give UDA-style feedback has better channels to do it in than the public surveys. Whether you're a friend of the dev team, a freelancer in the field, or whatever else, you have other ways of giving UDA feedback. Your feedback might even by SDA instead, but whichever way you slice it the surveys are not the place for Design Advice. The surveys are for saying what worked and what didn't for your table and in your game. It's up to the game developers to figure it out from there.
Wildshape isn’t fun now. Especially as a moon Druid. I feel squishy on the front line. In 5e I could tank. I want more hit points or at least temp hp. Anything that allows me to stay up front longer. Also my Wildshape form doesn’t feel like the animal I imagine. I’m missing features I had in 5e. My spider form can’t spiderclimb. It’s evident I’m not a spider, I’m in magical cosplay. Is there a way to add spiderclimb to beast of the land? Can I get a least of traits to add to my Wildshape forms?
How to give UDA, without it looking like UDA, lol.
Whether or not they can use it isn't the issue. The issue is whether or not it's the right kind of feedback to give.
Won't even "Spoilers" it: it is not the right kind of feedback to give.
Anyone with the design chops to give UDA-style feedback has better channels to do it in than the public surveys. Whether you're a friend of the dev team, a freelancer in the field, or whatever else, you have other ways of giving UDA feedback. Your feedback might even by SDA instead, but whichever way you slice it the surveys are not the place for Design Advice. The surveys are for saying what worked and what didn't for your table and in your game. It's up to the game developers to figure it out from there.
But a big part of the argument in your original post was predicated on that being true. You reiterated a few times that WotC won't and can't look at it.
I don't know if this is just your writing style, but there's a lot of authority implied in the tone of your post that I don't think you actually possess.
I have an alternate take: If WotC wanted to tell us how to fill out their survey, they'd have someone from their design team (or legal team) do it. They wouldn't need an unaffiliated person on their forums to do it for them. If they couldn't tolerate a spectrum of design feedback, they wouldn't leave 200-word comment boxes on every page.
Wildshape isn’t fun now. Especially as a moon Druid. I feel squishy on the front line. In 5e I could tank. I want more hit points or at least temp hp. Anything that allows me to stay up front longer. Also my Wildshape form doesn’t feel like the animal I imagine. I’m missing features I had in 5e. My spider form can’t spiderclimb. It’s evident I’m not a spider, I’m in magical cosplay. Is there a way to add spiderclimb to beast of the land? Can I get a least of traits to add to my Wildshape forms?
How to give UDA, without it looking like UDA, lol.
Tell them that Wild Shape isn't fun for you. You feel more fragile than you did before and you miss the range of abilities you used to have. That's valuable feedback. "Make a list of traits I can pick from to add to my Wild Shape" is not. Common ideas like that are things the design team is already aware of; they'd rather have experiential, reactive feedback on the surveys than lists of ideas they already have access to.
But a big part of the argument in your original post was predicated on that being true. You reiterated a few times that WotC won't and can't look at it.
I don't know if this is just your writing style, but there's a lot of authority implied in the tone of your post that I don't think you actually possess.
I have an alternate take: If WotC wanted to tell us how to fill out their survey, they'd have someone from their design team (or legal team) do it. They wouldn't need an unaffiliated person on their forums to do it for them. If they couldn't tolerate a spectrum of design feedback, they wouldn't leave 200-word comment boxes on every page.
Here's the thing. Why would Wizards give a shit about your specific idea? Dimestore armchair-gamedev design advice is free everywhere on the Internet. UDA is omnipresent and inescapable. Like I said to Ain, they already have their eye on common homespun ideas like "Give me a list of three hundred and twenty-seven traits I can choose six from every time I Wild Shape to better simulate beasts while adding a gigantic skegload of extra complexity and overhead to the ability and making it effectively impossible for the New or Casual to ever use properly." If that's the way they end up going, they didn't need you to tell them about it. They need to hear from individual responders whether or not the proposed Wild Shape was fun. They need numbers on how many people hate it, something they can't get from monitoring community discussion.
Whichever way you slice it, however you try to justify it, UDA is never justified. It's never helpful. Just don't do it.
Wildshape isn’t fun now. Especially as a moon Druid. I feel squishy on the front line. In 5e I could tank. I want more hit points or at least temp hp. Anything that allows me to stay up front longer. Also my Wildshape form doesn’t feel like the animal I imagine. I’m missing features I had in 5e. My spider form can’t spiderclimb. It’s evident I’m not a spider, I’m in magical cosplay. Is there a way to add spiderclimb to beast of the land? Can I get a least of traits to add to my Wildshape forms?
How to give UDA, without it looking like UDA, lol.
Tell them that Wild Shape isn't fun for you. You feel more fragile than you did before and you miss the range of abilities you used to have. That's valuable feedback. "Make a list of traits I can pick from to add to my Wild Shape" is not. Common ideas like that are things the design team is already aware of; they'd rather have experiential, reactive feedback on the surveys than lists of ideas they already have access to.
But a big part of the argument in your original post was predicated on that being true. You reiterated a few times that WotC won't and can't look at it.
I don't know if this is just your writing style, but there's a lot of authority implied in the tone of your post that I don't think you actually possess.
I have an alternate take: If WotC wanted to tell us how to fill out their survey, they'd have someone from their design team (or legal team) do it. They wouldn't need an unaffiliated person on their forums to do it for them. If they couldn't tolerate a spectrum of design feedback, they wouldn't leave 200-word comment boxes on every page.
Here's the thing. Why would Wizards give a shit about your specific idea? Dimestore armchair-gamedev design advice is free everywhere on the Internet. UDA is omnipresent and inescapable. Like I said to Ain, they already have their eye on common homespun ideas like "Give me a list of three hundred and twenty-seven traits I can choose six from every time I Wild Shape to better simulate beasts while adding a gigantic skegload of extra complexity and overhead to the ability and making it effectively impossible for the New or Casual to ever use properly." If that's the way they end up going, they didn't need you to tell them about it. They need to hear from individual responders whether or not the proposed Wild Shape was fun. They need numbers on how many people hate it, something they can't get from monitoring community discussion.
Whichever way you slice it, however you try to justify it, UDA is never justified. It's never helpful. Just don't do it.
Why would I need to to say for me. Who else would I be speaking for.
Wizards cannot use your UDA. They, legally, cannot use your ideas without causing themselves tons of potential legal trouble. They will instead bin your feedback because the less exposure they have to UDA, the safer any development team - not just Wizards, but ANY dev team you may be giving feedback to - becomes.
I understand your overall point, but this part - "they legally cannot use your ideas" - isn't actually correct as Roscoeivan cited.
On the subject of UDA, that's more or less the format I used for Dragonborn feedback (we should be able to choose between cone or line breath / we should have darkvision / we should be able to breathe in place of an attack) and they ended up implementing everything I asked for. Not saying your way isn't better, and maybe everyone else coincidentally worded it differently, but I don't think the devs are quite as particular about feedback as is being suggested.
(Somewhat ironically - the feedback I gave that was more experiential in nature was how I felt reading the Ardling/why I liked it, and I ended up losing that fight.)
Have to agree they aren't looking for some random guys hot take on how the druid should be designed. I get tired enough of seeing stuff like "well for sorcerer's at my table I do x y and z" sorry I personally don't care.. I want a fix from wizards.. I can't imagine how tired of it they have to get
They are looking for with the new wildshape I went down a lot, it was a bad experience and I didn't like using the ability
Here's the thing. Why would Wizards give a shit about your specific idea? Dimestore armchair-gamedev design advice is free everywhere on the Internet. UDA is omnipresent and inescapable. Like I said to Ain, they already have their eye on common homespun ideas like "Give me a list of three hundred and twenty-seven traits I can choose six from every time I Wild Shape to better simulate beasts while adding a gigantic skegload of extra complexity and overhead to the ability and making it effectively impossible for the New or Casual to ever use properly." If that's the way they end up going, they didn't need you to tell them about it. They need to hear from individual responders whether or not the proposed Wild Shape was fun. They need numbers on how many people hate it, something they can't get from monitoring community discussion.
Whichever way you slice it, however you try to justify it, UDA is never justified. It's never helpful. Just don't do it.
Until they tell us the types of feedback they use from the surveys, any of our opinions on it is pure speculation.
Look, I'm not the borderline strawman who types out a full design spec in every text box. But if I see a bad design, I'll write why I think the design is bad and not just leave a comment that could be just as easily summarized with a satisfaction score. And if I have an idea for how it could be improved, I might suggest it.
Someone is tabulating the data. I don't think my idea is unique, or that someone from the design team hasn't thought of it before, but maybe the popular design suggestions will be more likely to be explored in another UA. Or it might give them a few places to focus their attention on. Either way, I'm not going to be heartbroken if the books come out and it's not the exact game I would have designed. I'll be satisfied knowing I gave the best feedback I could.
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But more than this, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish. What are the possible outcomes?
You have guessed the feelings of WotC's design team with 100% accuracy, and your argument is convincing to people. Maybe you save an employee an hour because you've convinced a handful of forum lurkers to change their ways.
You have not guessed with 100% accuracy, but your argument is still convincing to people. You have silenced someone's useful feedback based on pure speculation.
Your argument is not convincing because it's just a guess, and you don't actually represent the people you are arguing for. Your opinion is exactly as valid as any other random poster on these forums. No one changes their behavior.
The borderline strawman guy who's leaving a full design spec in every text box is not going to stop being a total weirdo just because you asked him to. No one changes their behavior.
Of these outcomes, one is actually pretty bad. And the one you want to happen is only marginally good.
I have guessed the feelings of Wizards' design team accurately, and I manage to convince people to change their behavior. People whose feedback would have been ignored by the design team as being distracting nonfeedback is instead taken into account, and those who change their behavior have not wasted their feedback surveys.
Look, I get it. Everybody wants to be the next Jeremy Crawford and design D&D themselves from the ground up. If you think you've got the chops, apply for the job. But they get 10k+ answers on these feedback surveys. What are the realistic odds that your one, specific piece of UDA is so magnificently, awe-inspiringly perfect that the entire design team unanimously agrees that it must go into the game 100% unaltered?
Answer: effectively zero percent.
So if the odds are zero percent, why waste the word count?
I have guessed the feelings of Wizards' design team accurately, and I manage to convince people to change their behavior. People whose feedback would have been ignored by the design team as being distracting nonfeedback is instead taken into account, and those who change their behavior have not wasted their feedback surveys.
Look, I get it. Everybody wants to be the next Jeremy Crawford and design D&D themselves from the ground up. If you think you've got the chops, apply for the job. But they get 10k+ answers on these feedback surveys. What are the realistic odds that your one, specific piece of UDA is so magnificently, awe-inspiringly perfect that the entire design team unanimously agrees that it must go into the game 100% unaltered?
Answer: effectively zero percent.
So if the odds are zero percent, why waste the word count?
Sorry I have to agree with barefoot here. It’s not wasted word count if it’s getting read. Whether is UDA or not it tells them you don’t like what they had. If they keep seeing the same types of UDA they are likely to come up with something in that vein that actually works for their goals. Look at the Ardent. Enough people said we want a beast class that they tried to appease those people while still holding to the goal of it being a celestial. Then they realized people still weren’t happy with the new rework so they scraped. Clearly people weren’t just posting “the ardent isn’t fun for me.” I’m sure they had a crap ton of UDA on the ardent. You’ve been telling people how to fill out the survey for over a month now. Until WotC decides to put out a something that asks for no UDA they are going to get it. I’m pretty sure they expect it.
I have guessed the feelings of Wizards' design team accurately, and I manage to convince people to change their behavior. People whose feedback would have been ignored by the design team as being distracting nonfeedback is instead taken into account, and those who change their behavior have not wasted their feedback surveys.
I still say this is a marginal outcome at best. Unless you think a WotC employee is so petty that they would ignore a whole survey because someone puts design feedback in one of the text boxes.
Look, I get it. Everybody wants to be the next Jeremy Crawford and design D&D themselves from the ground up. If you think you've got the chops, apply for the job. But they get 10k+ answers on these feedback surveys. What are the realistic odds that your one, specific piece of UDA is so magnificently, awe-inspiringly perfect that the entire design team unanimously agrees that it must go into the game 100% unaltered?
This is a strawman.
I can't speak for everyone, but this is not what motivates me to fill out the survey. I don't want to be the next JC. I don't want to work for WotC. And I specifically wrote that I don't think the design team reads unique feedback from any one person. The results of a survey with this many participants can only be useful in aggregate.
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When I first read your post I wasn't even going to argue with you. You're welcome to your opinion and this is a small audience with likely minimal impact. But the way you made your argument really bothered me. To manufacture authority on so many topics, and then to use it to be so condescending, and ultimately to present your opinion as fact for the purpose of policing peoples' behavior... it isn't great.
I'm not going to argue more in this thread. If anyone else reads this, I hope you continue to fill out the surveys in whatever way you think is best.
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So you've got a fresh, steamy playtest packet in front of you and a Feedback Survey open in another tab, and you're ready to start diving in and telling Wizards of the Coast exactly what to do to Save D&D Forever. It's time to educate the design team on how to design D&D, get your work and ideas into the game, and make your mark on D&D, right? Right?
STOP.
Wait.
Before you make a fool of yourself and waste your feedback survey giving completely unusable "feedback" that accomplishes nothing but wasting an hour of a dev team member's time, let me help you. I'll tell you what Wizards is looking for, and how to make the best and most effective use of your limited written survey feedback. I can tell you how to leave feedback that makes whichever poor dev schlub it is that pulled the short straw nod and note your feedback down rather than roll their eyes and discard your feedback. Most importantly, I can tell you what NOT to do, and how to avoid being That Guy. Nobody wants to be That Guy.
So what's the secret? How do you leave feedback that actually gets listened to? It's truly quite easy. Dead simple, even.
All of your feedback should directly relate to your experience using the content or reading the content.
It's that simple. Phrases like "This was really fun, it improved our game night" or "this is confusing, I'm not sure what this means" or "we tried this and it was a real drag" or "when I read this it gave me dry heaves and I immediately banned it from my table" is all valuable, desirable, actionable feedback. That's the exact sort of thing Wizards is looking for. Your feedback should be reactive - it should contain your reaction to the content being surveyed. How it made you feel, whether it made your game more or less fun. You can include some detail on why you reacted that way, i.e. "the new Jump Action rule was really unstable, I didn't like how swingy and unpredictable it made jumping compared to knowing exactly what you can clear with the 2014 Jump rules", but even then the feedback should focus on how you felt and what you liked or disliked.
Which seems self-evident and obvious when explained, ne? But there's an issue. Many, many, many players don't give feedback related to their experience with the content. In public 'share your feedback!' threads and Reddit posts, players who show off what they submitted almost never give this type of feedback. Instead, they give the other type. The 'That Guy' type. The type that makes whoever's reading their feedback roll their eyes and toss a survey into the Recycle bin. How do you avoid getting your feedback Recycle'd and being That Guy? Simple.
NONE of your feedback should EVER include the phrase "I think you should..."
Any feedback beginning with or including the phrase "I think you should..." or any other similar phrase is called Unsolicited Design Advice (UDA), and it is the bane of development teams everywhere. It goes beyond reactive, how-content-made-you-feel feedback and directly impinges on the developers' jobs. Proactive feedback, where you try to explain your idea on how to change D&D to the design team and tell them how to do their jobs, is actively anti-desirable. Wizards cannot use your UDA. They, legally, cannot use your ideas without causing themselves tons of potential legal trouble. They will instead bin your feedback because the less exposure they have to UDA, the safer any development team - not just Wizards, but ANY dev team you may be giving feedback to - becomes.
Remember - THEY are the game designers. YOU are a player. Your job is not to design the game. Your job is to play the game, then tell Wizards how playing the game went for you when you tried their new content. If they wanted your design advice they would hire you as a design consultant and get your name on a contract that allowed them to use your design advice freely and legally in exchange for pay, and you would have to actually have game design experience/chops. Since you're not a consultant and you don't have game design chops beyond basic homebrew tweaks to your home game, your UDA has negative value. It is less valuable than "zero valuable"; it is actively harmful.
It's hard. Dead gods above and below, it is hard sometimes to avoid leaving UDA. When the solution seems blindingly obvious to you and you're just bursting to tell them how to fix something you know how to fix, or when you have a supremely clever idea that really worked fantastically in your home-game playtests and you want to share it? It can be a real act of will to avoid putting that into your feedback survey. But it's an act of will that must be done. They cannot and will not use UDA. Instead, talk about your cool solutions and ideas in the public sphere. Post your awesome ideas on the DDB forums here, or on Reddit, or wherever you discuss ideas with your fellow players. Wizards has their eyes on that space; they have Community Management people whose primary job function is collecting and distilling what the community is talking about and delivering that to the dev team. If your idea is good enough it'll pick up traction online, and then Wizards will see that idea as part of their community feed where they can use ideas. Note that a lot of the One D&D playtest UA is codifying common homebrew and house rules; if your awesome idea becomes a common piece of homebrew/house rule, it stands a fair chance of eventually being codified in the game. That is how you can Leave Your Mark on D&D.
Beyond, y'know...playing it. Remember, the fun of this game isn't leaving your mark on it; it's letting the game leave a mark on you. The memories and experiences you have playing D&D are the end goal, and Wizards wants very much to hear about those. Wizards cannot and will not ever be ordinary players; even when they play the game themselves, they cannot help but see their home games through Game Designer lenses. Your experience as an ordinary, non-dev player is invaluable to the team and is the one thing they cannot supply for themselves. Give them that experience, and the team will be deeply grateful for it. Try to do their own job for them and they will be annoyed.
Keep this in mind, and your feedback will always make whichever dev reads it smile.
Please do not contact or message me.
The principle may be sound but in practice there is a bit more going on. This survey is their data and subject to the wizards of the coast terms of service. Those terms say summited data is for their use. (which in the case of surveys is reasonable IMO ) Besides as we all know mechanics can't be copyrighted but they will probably never admit it out loud.
https://company.wizards.com/en/legal/terms
The big thing I think people need to remember is both too powerful and too weak should be listed as Dissatisfied. It might be counter intuitive for some even popular youtubers miss this with their opinions.
Whether or not they can use it isn't the issue. The issue is whether or not it's the right kind of feedback to give.
Won't even "Spoilers" it: it is not the right kind of feedback to give.
Anyone with the design chops to give UDA-style feedback has better channels to do it in than the public surveys. Whether you're a friend of the dev team, a freelancer in the field, or whatever else, you have other ways of giving UDA feedback. Your feedback might even by SDA instead, but whichever way you slice it the surveys are not the place for Design Advice. The surveys are for saying what worked and what didn't for your table and in your game. It's up to the game developers to figure it out from there.
Please do not contact or message me.
Wildshape isn’t fun now. Especially as a moon Druid. I feel squishy on the front line. In 5e I could tank. I want more hit points or at least temp hp. Anything that allows me to stay up front longer. Also my Wildshape form doesn’t feel like the animal I imagine. I’m missing features I had in 5e. My spider form can’t spiderclimb. It’s evident I’m not a spider, I’m in magical cosplay. Is there a way to add spiderclimb to beast of the land? Can I get a least of traits to add to my Wildshape forms?
How to give UDA, without it looking like UDA, lol.
But a big part of the argument in your original post was predicated on that being true. You reiterated a few times that WotC won't and can't look at it.
I don't know if this is just your writing style, but there's a lot of authority implied in the tone of your post that I don't think you actually possess.
I have an alternate take: If WotC wanted to tell us how to fill out their survey, they'd have someone from their design team (or legal team) do it. They wouldn't need an unaffiliated person on their forums to do it for them. If they couldn't tolerate a spectrum of design feedback, they wouldn't leave 200-word comment boxes on every page.
Tell them that Wild Shape isn't fun for you. You feel more fragile than you did before and you miss the range of abilities you used to have. That's valuable feedback. "Make a list of traits I can pick from to add to my Wild Shape" is not. Common ideas like that are things the design team is already aware of; they'd rather have experiential, reactive feedback on the surveys than lists of ideas they already have access to.
Here's the thing. Why would Wizards give a shit about your specific idea? Dimestore armchair-gamedev design advice is free everywhere on the Internet. UDA is omnipresent and inescapable. Like I said to Ain, they already have their eye on common homespun ideas like "Give me a list of three hundred and twenty-seven traits I can choose six from every time I Wild Shape to better simulate beasts while adding a gigantic skegload of extra complexity and overhead to the ability and making it effectively impossible for the New or Casual to ever use properly." If that's the way they end up going, they didn't need you to tell them about it. They need to hear from individual responders whether or not the proposed Wild Shape was fun. They need numbers on how many people hate it, something they can't get from monitoring community discussion.
Whichever way you slice it, however you try to justify it, UDA is never justified. It's never helpful. Just don't do it.
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Why would I need to to say for me. Who else would I be speaking for.
I understand your overall point, but this part - "they legally cannot use your ideas" - isn't actually correct as Roscoeivan cited.
On the subject of UDA, that's more or less the format I used for Dragonborn feedback (we should be able to choose between cone or line breath / we should have darkvision / we should be able to breathe in place of an attack) and they ended up implementing everything I asked for. Not saying your way isn't better, and maybe everyone else coincidentally worded it differently, but I don't think the devs are quite as particular about feedback as is being suggested.
(Somewhat ironically - the feedback I gave that was more experiential in nature was how I felt reading the Ardling/why I liked it, and I ended up losing that fight.)
Have to agree they aren't looking for some random guys hot take on how the druid should be designed. I get tired enough of seeing stuff like "well for sorcerer's at my table I do x y and z" sorry I personally don't care.. I want a fix from wizards.. I can't imagine how tired of it they have to get
They are looking for with the new wildshape I went down a lot, it was a bad experience and I didn't like using the ability
Until they tell us the types of feedback they use from the surveys, any of our opinions on it is pure speculation.
Look, I'm not the borderline strawman who types out a full design spec in every text box. But if I see a bad design, I'll write why I think the design is bad and not just leave a comment that could be just as easily summarized with a satisfaction score. And if I have an idea for how it could be improved, I might suggest it.
Someone is tabulating the data. I don't think my idea is unique, or that someone from the design team hasn't thought of it before, but maybe the popular design suggestions will be more likely to be explored in another UA. Or it might give them a few places to focus their attention on. Either way, I'm not going to be heartbroken if the books come out and it's not the exact game I would have designed. I'll be satisfied knowing I gave the best feedback I could.
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But more than this, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish. What are the possible outcomes?
Of these outcomes, one is actually pretty bad. And the one you want to happen is only marginally good.
Or, and hear me out here:
I have guessed the feelings of Wizards' design team accurately, and I manage to convince people to change their behavior. People whose feedback would have been ignored by the design team as being distracting nonfeedback is instead taken into account, and those who change their behavior have not wasted their feedback surveys.
Look, I get it. Everybody wants to be the next Jeremy Crawford and design D&D themselves from the ground up. If you think you've got the chops, apply for the job. But they get 10k+ answers on these feedback surveys. What are the realistic odds that your one, specific piece of UDA is so magnificently, awe-inspiringly perfect that the entire design team unanimously agrees that it must go into the game 100% unaltered?
Answer: effectively zero percent.
So if the odds are zero percent, why waste the word count?
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Sorry I have to agree with barefoot here. It’s not wasted word count if it’s getting read. Whether is UDA or not it tells them you don’t like what they had. If they keep seeing the same types of UDA they are likely to come up with something in that vein that actually works for their goals. Look at the Ardent. Enough people said we want a beast class that they tried to appease those people while still holding to the goal of it being a celestial. Then they realized people still weren’t happy with the new rework so they scraped. Clearly people weren’t just posting “the ardent isn’t fun for me.” I’m sure they had a crap ton of UDA on the ardent. You’ve been telling people how to fill out the survey for over a month now. Until WotC decides to put out a something that asks for no UDA they are going to get it. I’m pretty sure they expect it.
I still say this is a marginal outcome at best. Unless you think a WotC employee is so petty that they would ignore a whole survey because someone puts design feedback in one of the text boxes.
This is a strawman.
I can't speak for everyone, but this is not what motivates me to fill out the survey. I don't want to be the next JC. I don't want to work for WotC. And I specifically wrote that I don't think the design team reads unique feedback from any one person. The results of a survey with this many participants can only be useful in aggregate.
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When I first read your post I wasn't even going to argue with you. You're welcome to your opinion and this is a small audience with likely minimal impact. But the way you made your argument really bothered me. To manufacture authority on so many topics, and then to use it to be so condescending, and ultimately to present your opinion as fact for the purpose of policing peoples' behavior... it isn't great.
I'm not going to argue more in this thread. If anyone else reads this, I hope you continue to fill out the surveys in whatever way you think is best.