The numbers reveal an intriguing trend in how monsters are viewed by the player base.
Throughout the development of the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons the team at Wizards of the Coast has been polling the public about their monster and game design concepts via James Wyatt’s “Wandering Monsters” column. Today, in what was the last column, Wyatt released a visual representation of the statistics. It shows a fascinating trend of agreement among D&D players – blue is complete agreement with the D&D team’s design decisions, and red is near-complete agreement. From green down are people who mostly or completely disagreed with the D&D team’s description of what a monster should be like.
“Any time the green dipped below the 70 percent line, that was a clear signal that something needed more thought and discussion,” wrote Wyatt. It’s some of the only insight we’ve had into how the design team has been directly utilizing the feedback from fans. For example, we now know that the design team likely hasn’t changed anything about how the Beholder is represented in the game, but almost definitely changed the roll of good-aligned monsters like the Lammasu and Couatl.
You can see a few more results at the Wizards Daily D&D blog. Wyatt also discusses some other kinds of questions about the feedback on various D&D races and classes.
Here’s the big chart:
