Kate Welch is WotC's New D&D Designer

Ad Hoc and Dave...

Now I am curious... how many different players do you both normally play with... 1 table of maybe 5 or 6 players like a home game... or you expose yourselves to a bigger community?

My comments are based on my experiences in the Los Angeles area of a community of like 500 people... which I see and play with many at monthly game days and local conventions that draw huge amounts of people from all over the nation and sometimes the world.

If you both have similar experiences in a roughly same sample size then OK, I guess you have seen different outcomes.... but if you are only speaking of your own home game... that sample size is rather small to make the sweeping comments.... even if your whole group agreed with you... that would be only 6 or 7 players out of what you quoted as 9.5 million players. Even if you countered with my community is small at 500 but it is still a much bigger sample size than yours.

Good luck to her. I am sure she will bring a new spark of creativity and new approaches to the team.

My last post on this thread....

It is obvious from the replies... that once I wrote the words optimization and powergaming... some of you made an assumption that I am speaking of the player type that eeks out every single point of damage in a round or builds a character with an AC of a million... or any kind of character that is an extreme... I was never making an argument for those kinds of players... even though I believe there is a place for those players in this community.

When I was speaking about many players power game or optimization to some extent... I was speaking about the players that decide whether they want to use a weapon and shield or a two handed weapon. One choice optimizes AC and the other choice optimizes damage output normally. Those two choices when playing D&D are very basic and everyday kind of choices... the same can be said on the choices of what spells a player chooses for their character... each choice is an optimization of some type, maybe not to what the idea in your own heads what is optimization...but it is a choice that the player feels that will make he or she more effective.

Some of you claim that your players have no interest in getting better or no interest in optimization.... do they play their characters naked with only a stick to defend themselves? I am going to assume that they don't do that, I am going to assume that they buy armor and arm themselves... as the party levels, I am going to assume that the spellcasters pick spells that help the party by having better control or bigger damage against more creatures or something. All these choices and many others that I have not mentioned all make the player's characters better.

What I describe above to me is a normal D&D game that a large percentage of the 9.5 million people experience.... If what I describe does not apply to your individual games, then I am not sure if you are playing D&D.

Sacrosanct said:

D&D is not a competitive game, so there is no need to be better. It isn’t required at all, and how “good” you or your PC is has no bearing on how much fun you can have. So without that core aspect to drive the behavior Mathilda says people do, they won’t do it and thus that argument is flawed on a fundamental level. Sure, some people view the game that way, but that’s not how it’s designed, and thus not how most people play it.

If I’m playing basketball, I want to get better because I’m competing against something. In D&D, not so much. Doesn’t matter. So I disagree with your premis that if a game has a numerical aspect, you’re driven to be a better player. I also disagree that a persons fun is tied to how good they are at a game. Brand new players for every game out there seem to have just as much fun as experts. Or do you claim that a new player can’t have as much fun as you because they aren’t as experienced or as “good” as you? Needless to say, I strongly disagree with that.

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Sorry.. this time really last post...

D&D is not a competitive game in the traditional sense because the players do not compete with each other... but I will argue it is competitive from the standpoint that the DM provides a goal for the players to achieve. From that perspective, it becomes competitive because the party has a succeed or fail task to attempt.

No one likes to fail and once it happens... many times there is self reflection as to how to be successful next time and that is what drives changes to the character

You could counter and say that is up to the DM to determine success or failure and that is true.... but there is a pitfall with that which is a cheapening of the game experience

Jacob Lewis said:

So to recap: A young woman gets coveted job working on the world's most popular role-playing game. Forum posters reignite the classic feud between roleplayers and power gamers.

D&D is doing just fine.

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Sir, you obviously have not been reading my posts... I am saying is that a game designer should include ALL types of play when considering additions or changes to the game because there are different kinds of players that enjoy this game in different ways.

If you disagree with that notion, then that says more about you than about me.

ad_hoc said:

I go the other way, typically the better I am at a game the less fun I have.

I don't really play competitive games anymore. The fun has been drained from them for me. There are even some that were I in the game it would ruin everyone else' fun too. New games don't help as they usually have the same mechanics of previous games. I can never play Poker for fun again or M:tG for that matter. Now when I have a board game night I mostly play social games like Codenames or Werewolf.

Playing D&D for the competition has always seemed strange to me. There are a lot of highly competitive games out there; Chess, Go, Poker, M:tG, heavy board games, war games. So why play a game for competition in which most people aren't competing?

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I really enjoy the game now, after 35 years of playing. But honestly, I had the most fun as a kid just starting. We didn’t know all the rules so we didn’t let anything get in the way. We just made stuff up and did whatever sounded fun. When I DM’d my youngest son and his friends for their first time a few years ago, I saw it all again in them. I’ve found, the more we know about the rules of the game, the more we try to adhere to that structure. For me as a kid, and my kid learning? Literally it was imagination with much fewer constraints. Which for me, was more fun.

Sacrosanct said:

I really enjoy the game now, after 35 years of playing. But honestly, I had the most fun as a kid just starting. We didn’t know all the rules so we didn’t let anything get in the way. We just made stuff up and did whatever sounded fun. When I DM’d my youngest son and his friends for their first time a few years ago, I saw it all again in them. I’ve found, the more we know about the rules of the game, the more we try to adhere to that structure. For me as a kid, and my kid learning? Literally it was imagination with much fewer constraints. Which for me, was more fun.

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That's why I like that one of the design goals of 5e was to have the rules be such that if people were to guess them on the fly they'd likely be right.

So basically, instead of needing to memorize rules, all a table needs to do is understand the concept of the rules/design. The actual rules themselves will follow.

Well... That escalated quickly.

Wow, congratulations are due, but to WotC. They are the lucky ones to have her. And as far as optimizers go, I don’t think they have anything to worry about. She is absolutely about the role play but many folks I know would also put her in the capable optimizer camp.

Nice job whoever hired her, you’ve done WotC, and us, a favor.

This is great news!