D&D 5E Mearls' "Firing" tweet

Grimkrieg said:

I find his wording a bit off, especially since I like complex rules ... but I have to apply the principle of charity here. I think he is referring to the gate-keeping behavior being the problem, not my love of Champions and Power-gaming nature.

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Zardnaar said:

Is this about WotC hiring a women game designer?

Personally I don't care but she doesn't seem to have that much in the way of design credentials, that might be an issue for some. Most of the experiences/good game designers are men at least on the D&D/WoTC side of things not sure if Paizo has some high profile ones who have worked on their APs.

I do look at names on the credits now, Bauer, Cook, Gygax, Mona, that new Blackman person on the DMGuild (male?). Only high profile D&D women I can think of are Weiss, Lorraine Wiliams (boo), and Lisa Stevens. I'm about a decade out of date though since Dungeon died.

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Grimkrieg said:

I find his wording a bit off, especially since I like complex rules ... but I have to apply the principle of charity here. I think he is referring to the gate-keeping behavior being the problem, not my love of Champions and Power-gaming nature.

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ad_hoc said:

'insist on gatekeeping' is the key part of the sentence

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shidaku said:

You understand the irony here right? Men have experience because it is easier for them to get into the hobby and the industry, and thus easier for them to gain experience. So if we only hire people with established experience, we're only ever going to get men.

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@OP: Having female friends who have gone into gaming stores only to get the oh-so-stereotypical challenge to their nerddom by some guy who thinks the only way to be a nerd is to know Eleminster's second-counsin's first wife's maternal grandmother's date of birth I understand that Mearls is making a point that is two-fold: established members of the game use rule complexity and lore to bludgeon newcomers and especially women out of the hobby.

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Monte Cook said:

Magic also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others. Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it's not the best choice of feat. If you can use martial weapons, a longsword is better than many other one-handed weapons. And so on -- there are many other, far more intricate examples. (Arguably, this kind of thing has always existed in D&D. Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game.) There's a third concept that we took from Magic-style rules design, though. Only with six years of hindsight do I call the concept "Ivory Tower Game Design." (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it's got a ring to it.) This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves -- players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones.

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