D&D 5E Mearls' "Firing" tweet

[TerraDave]

I see this tweet was mentioned in that thread and then it was closed.

But other stuff was happening in that thread.

 

[LordEntrails]

Sometime people in positions of influence would do better for themselves and their cause if they kept their mouths shut and fingers off their keyboards.

Even in this day and age, not every issue needs to be addressed immediately and not every opinion should be instantly expressed.

 

[Grimkrieg]

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.

 

[TerraDave]

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.

Champions is one of the first things I thought of after reading it.

 

[Sunseeker]

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 I'm about a decade out of date though since Dungeon died.

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.

 

[abirdcall]

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.

'insist on gatekeeping' is the key part of the sentence and the complexity and density of lore are given as ways that people accomplish that. If the gatekeeping part was more passive and occurred at the end of the sentence then I would say that it was poorly worded. As it is, the subject is clear to me.

 

[Mistwell]

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

You're gatekeeping people's abilities to interpret his tweet.

 

[iamntbatman]

Funny thing is I actually had the opposite reaction to her hiring. A quick glance over her previous projects seemed to be totally lacking in D&D-related things, but instead experience working with other game systems. While fresh ideas are welcome, my only worry was that bringing in someone with much more of an outsider perspective in terms of game mechanics could actually lead to MORE rules complexity.

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

Yup, I know that, see my new thread about it titles Progressive D&D.

it doesn't bother me that much whats done is done give her a chance. If I wanted to hire a women though I would have been looking more towards Paizo freelancers at least for an initial interview as they have several who have worked on the APs apparently.

 

[Mistwell]

Monte Cook once wrote this about their design decisions for 3e D&D:

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.

Now Monte Cook changed his mind later about some of those decisions. But, he's saying they made those decisions when designing third edition. One way to I think fairly restate what he said is that in some aspects of 3e, the designers intended to use the rules complexity to gatekeep the game.

By implication, Mearls is implying Monte Cook might have a problem with women in gaming because he supported (at that time) rules gatekeeping.

I don't think Mearls intends to say that, but then that's my point - it's not a very thoughtfully worded tweet. I don't think there is a strong correlation between the two types of opinions and I don't think Mearls is privy to any evidence supporting his claim they're correlated.