Dungeons & Dragons is a well-known board game rule that has been around for more than 40 years since the first edition was released. As a consumer product, this "gaming industry" veteran also needs to attract new players. To keep up with the times, Dungeons & Dragons chose the popular survey to get feedback, but... The effect is a bit hilarious.
The combination of the rules of a traditional tabletop game and modern questionnaires does produce some unintentionally funny situations. Last weekend, Dungeons & Dragons launched a survey that asked players how they felt about the game's iconic spells.
The questionnaire asked, "How satisfied are you with the spells presented in the Player's Handbook?" Then go on to detail the dozens of iconic spells in the Fifth Edition Rules. For example, the satisfaction of fireball, are you very satisfied, satisfied, or dissatisfied, very dissatisfied? What do you think of lithophysiosis? Have you recently used manipulative phytotherapy? How does it feel? Problems like that.
The surveys are not very innovative, but they do look funny. D&D publisher Wizards has been pursuing "player engagement" lately, after all, it took time to produce the 5th edition of the rules, and it is normal to collect feedback from eager gamers.
Now, they regularly publish models of new content, including character races and classes, before asking for direct feedback on players' experiences at the table. Even in most new books, QR codes are affixed to guide players through more project-specific surveys.
But beyond being hilarious, it's actually a positive move for the future of the world's most popular role-playing game (and its company).
In September, during the annual "D&D Celebration," Dungeons & Dragons executive producer Ray Winninger said the game's "next evolution" was in development and was scheduled for release in 2024. The stated goal of the new version is to commemorate the "50th anniversary of the birth of D&D", but also to push the current version of the game forward.
However, Ray Winninger did not particularly explicitly state that the next "version" of Dungeons & Dragons was being developed. Over the years, the tabletop game has undergone many intense iterations, resulting in a split community of players and a fragmented community.
The final round of farce split the Trailblazer series of games and spawned the poorly received the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons. No one wants to see this happen again, fans don't want to, Wizards doesn't want to, and of course, the boss Hasbro doesn't want to.
Like the survey released over the weekend, it was clear that Wizards wasn't going to reinvent spells now, they just wanted to polish the surface of the Magic Book a little. Ray Winninger and the creatives behind Dungeons & Dragons hope for a smooth transition in 2024. They wanted to grind away the rough edges of the game, refine the rules, and make the entire series suitable for modern society.
From this point of view, this time the spell investigation is not so funny, in fact, it is a rather conservative document.