One D&D and Me

I help tend a small Slack workspace devoted to tabletop RPGs in general, and mostly focused on Dungeons & Dragons. For the past almost-a-year, I’ve been posting there with my breakdowns of the “One D&D” playtest packets and my initial impressions of the material to help the other folks navigate the various changes and new ideas being presented. This started off as me just “live tweeting” my reactions as I read things but eventually turned into basically dumping lightweight blog posts into Slack. Besides exploring the playtest packets, I’ve also started summarizing the WotC videos as they’re released. Several friends have been on me to publish these infodumps as actual blog posts so that they’re more readily available after they age out of our free-tier Slack message history.

So, now, this is me saying, “Oh, all right, here you go.”

I’m going to start with a series of posts about the latest Unearthed Arcana packet, Playtest 6, but I’ve got plenty of older notes that I might share as well. (My perfectionist brain is struggling to decide whether or not I should backdate those posts. What do you think?)

I know that there’s plenty of Internet Discourse™ on the topic, and that by saying anything publicly I invite all manner of folks to let me know that I’m wrong, that I didn’t do the math, that I’m smoking copium or simping for WotC, or whatever. Well, nuts to that! I’d rather be having fun than arguing on the Internet, so I’ll instead refer you to the following Very Official Disclaimer:

  • I’ve been playing D&D since ~1982. Still have my pink box dice.
  • I think it’s cool that so many more people are having fun with RPGs than ever before. The more, the merrier!
  • It’s not perfect, but I’ve had a lot of fun with 5E.
  • I’m interested in where things are going, and so are my friends.
  • I try to keep an open mind. I’ve come to appreciate a lot of things I used to think were dumb or pointless.
  • I like doing rigorous diffs of text. Expect a bunch of that.
  • I don’t like crunching numbers. Expect none of that.
  • I like to like things.
  • I might not like the same things you do. That’s okay.

Kind feedback is appreciated via Mastodon; unkind feedback is best kept to yourself; both our souls will benefit from this arrangement. If you have strong feelings about a potential change, I urge you to let WotC know via their survey process.

Speaking of surveys… I’d better start posting before the next one opens!