These notes are from the 1st playtest packet, concerning character origins and the first revision of the glossary (which includes redefining some core game mechanical terms). At the point I was writing this (September 2022), I was still writing as if I intended to submit comments as part of the feedback process, and thus addressing Wizards of the Coast designers as “you”.

1. “Race”. You’re making a good effort to avoid unfortunate implications by associating ability score increases at character generation with background, but retaining “race” as a term for the character’s biological origins means you’re still sending a message to players and potential players that you’re on the same wavelength as the worst sort of people. It’s time to ditch Race as a term – I’d suggest going with Ancestry. It also works with mixed-origin characters, since you can describe them as having multiple Ancestries, while you’d have to be very delicate about calling them multi-racial, or of mixed race.

2. Mixed origin characters. I think the removal of previous options like the half-elf and half-orc would go down a bit better if the mixed-origin rules included some ability to have mechanical abilities from each ancestry. I realize a complete free-form mix-and-match isn’t viable, but perhaps certain individual features from each ancestry could be marked as minor features, and a character could trade minor ancestries 1-for-1. Examples of minor features would probably be things like Darkvision, an automatic proficiency or language (the halfling’s Stealth, the Dragonborn’s knowledge of Draconic, the Ardling’s very limited flight), but not a lineage or subtype, as seen on Ardlings, Elves, Gnomes, and Tieflings.
   1. Aarakocra are an interesting counter-example to Ardlings – their flight certainly isn’t a minor feature, but their natural attacks are.

3. Character origin overview says that Size “determines the amount of space the character occupies”, but the Orc’s Powerful Build feature indicates it influences carrying capacity and the weight you can push, drag, or lift. Size also determines who you can grapple and be grappled by (pages 19-20). If players are going to choose the Size for a character, the text shouldn’t mislead them about the effects of their choice – ideally,  there would be a complete list of what’s affected by Size in one place in the text.
   1. It’s also very strange that (for example) Humans can choose to be Small but Dwarves cannot, and that nobody can choose to be Large. If there’s a reason PCs shouldn’t be allowed to be size Large, the text should address that outright (even if it’s just to say that the option of Large PCs hasn’t been sufficiently playtested at this time).

4. Ardlings. As a counterpart of Tieflings they seem fine, but at first I was thinking of their limited flight as a headline feature and was pretty disappointed at what is essentially the ability to multi-jump up to 6 times per day. I think calling that out as a minor feature (or at least emphasizing their lineage/spell abilities as their major feature) might help avoid player discontent here.
   1. I’ve seen some discussion of the idea that Ardlings are presented partially as an anthro/furry PC option. I think they’re pretty half-hearted on that front – their animal nature is purely cosmetic. I realize the my preferred approach is unrealistic (I prefer the mutant animal generation rules from Palladium’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, later imported into their After the Bomb game), but I personally would like an anthro option to have a bit more mechanical heft than a permanent Disguise Self – I’d prefer something like the hengeyokai (as presented in earlier editions) for that purpose.

5. Dragonborn still feel pretty uninspiring. I’m not speaking in terms of power in play; my problem is that they just don’t feel very draconic. I think they could benefit from some additional features, even if those are at the level of what the optimization types refer to as “ribbons”: for example, changing creature type to Dragon, and providing at least some mechanical effect for the scales, teeth, and claws we see in all the art. The scales might give an unarmored AC of 10 + 1/2 proficiency bonus; claws and teeth might give the ability to make unarmed attacks that do proficiency bonus + strength bonus in slashing (claws) or piercing (teeth) damage – hardly the sort of thing that will change the balance of power, but it does let that mouth full of teeth mean something.

6. I like having multiple options for Tieflings now. I also like that mechanical differences between types of Tieflings, Ardlings, and Elves have been compressed enough to fit in a table so it’s easy to see the different options available. I’m less thrilled about not having options for different types of Dwarves, if only because it might make it harder to add Duergar as a Dwarf lineage later on.

7. I think that making all types of D20 Tests have the same auto-fail on 1/auto-succeed on 20 behavior is a good idea because so many players were obviously missing that wasn’t the case in 5E. The flipside of this is there are still some features that confuse players by having different mechanics even though they seem like they should be similar. For example, the Lucky feature of Halflings works very differently than Luck and doesn’t involve Luck Points at all. The advantage granted by Luck (can be invoked after the initial dice roll) works differently than the advantage granted by Inspiration (must be invoked before the die is rolled). People are going to get these kinds of fiddly differences mixed up all the time. I suggest you standardize: if you have to spend a metagame resource to get Advantage on a roll, you can spend it after the die roll to get what is effectively a re-roll.

8. I preferred feats as optional, mostly because I think they’re a bad influence on the way players think about the game, pushing character personalization more towards out-of-game time and away from playtime; sadly that doesn’t seem to be the popular opinion. I like that as long as we have feats there’s a somewhat restricted pool of feats available at 1st level and that everybody gets one – I think 5E’s variant Human was like a character building black hole, drawing in players not only because some they were the only characters who could start with a feat but also because some of the starting feats were so powerful. With that said:
   1. I hope that aren’t a ton of different tiers of feats above 1st level, or prerequisite chains – those both tend to encourage people to spend more time developing their characters as theoretical builds well in advance of what they do in play.
   2. Some of the feats seem to be much better than others. The document says that options will be re-balanced over time, but I still don’t see how you’re going to make Skilled feel nearly as valuable as Magic Initiate, especially since everyone gets a background that gives them 2 skill proficiencies of their choice. Unless perhaps classes are going to be skill-starved? I guess Skilled could give the option of gaining a single Skill Proficiency and Expertise in a skill…

9. The Musician feat makes me think of Bards, and how weird it was in 5E that it was possible to make a Bard who didn’t have Perform as a skill proficiency. I know the class document isn’t out yet, but I think it’ll be weird if we have that situation again or one like it, where the party’s Druid might be a Musician while the Bard somehow isn’t.

1. Short rests still take too long. 5 minutes like 4E is fine, 10 minutes (like an old-school dungeon exploration turn) is also good. 1 hour discourages players from taking short rests, which causes intra-party tension if some but not all PCs have short rest refreshes. 
2. No feats that customize combat proficiencies at 1st level. You can gain all the skills you want, but there’s no way to improve your weapon or armor options, even though there are ways to improve your magical options.
3. It isn’t clear that custom backgrounds are the default – clearly present examples as examples (attached to characters, with different versions of a same-named background for different characters, or with construction examples)
4. I don’t know how I feel about power source-based spell lists. I like the idea of the “arcane” part of an arcane caster meaning something, but I’m hesitant to buy into anything that would make Sorcerers less distinct from Wizards than they are now.
5. Bad: crappy re-roll powers (Savage Attacker, for example)
6. Critical hits only for weapon dice damage for PCs – seems bad, at least out of context of classes (Sneak Attack dice, Smite dice)
7. Limit 1 instance of Inspiration per character will tend to cause hoarding for some hypothetical time when it’s really needed (see how CRPG players tend to handle recovery items). Characters should probably be able to have multiple instances – perhaps a number equal to proficiency bonus? I suspect even that won’t be enough to get players to spend Inspiration, but I think they’re more likely to do so if they know they’ll have some left in the tank afterward.