D&D 5E Orion Black No Longer a D&D Designer [UPDATED!]

WotC employee Orion Black announced yesterday that they were no longer working for the company or on D&D, citing the corporate culture at the company.

"It's July 3th and I no longer work for Wizards of the Coast. I no longer work on D&D, the little that I did. This is going to be a long thread and my last for quite a while, so bear with me.

I took the job for two reasons. The first was for the dream. To escape poverty doing what I love, writing and making games. The second was to make D&D welcoming to the millions who are scorned by it.

A lot of people had hope for D&D that they carried with me. While some people were upset to see me work for a corporation that overshadows indie, others hoped that I would be able to make real change. I tried. I failed. And I lost a lot.

Liking a tweet or post, RTing, or even following people who speak ill of WotC can lose you your job in an instant. That's why you never see it happen. @Zbeg is 100% correct. It's a silencing tool. I can say more now.

Kindness doesn't replace respect. Working within your comfort zone doesnt support change. Most people in that group were not ready for me to be there, a nonbinary Black person who would actually critique their problems. Idk what they expected.

I worked hard for a very long time. I got a lot of smiles and vocal support, but it was followed by inaction and being ignored. My coworkers were frustrated for me, and still are now. I confided in them often, cried on shoulders on a few occasions.

I realized at one point that leadership had given me 2 assignments over about 5 months. It was mostly me asking project leads for work, searching out opportunities. Leadership didnt really care about me or my growth. I had to.

I firmly believe that I was a diversity hire. There was no expectation for me to do much of anything. I probably disrupted them by being vocal and following up. It didnt matter if I was supported by seniors and positive.

I think genuine people proposed me as an option and it was accepted because it would look like a radical positive change. It would help quiet vocal outrage. And because I had to stay silent, it was a safe bet.

I started to lose all of my confidence. I started to lose trust in myself. After finding out that I wasnt getting an extension or FTE, I resolved to just finish things out and take care of myself. To stop fighting and to just survive, quietly. But it just kept getting worse.

They would talk about how they're going to start working on treating staff better, retaining contractors, actually answering questions. How much they were invested in diversity and change even though they hired two cis white dudes into two big leadership positions during this. One of whom claimed that he doesnt know what he's doing. No naughty word. I never want to hear "maybe they just hire the best person for the job" again.

I found out that some of my work was stolen, which destroyed me. It lined up with a project they were going to do and I had sent it in to someone in leadership months ago. The project was announced and this person who contributed "forgot" that we had a meeting where I gave them my ideas, and then a follow up document the day after. I knew nothing was going to be done about it. Someone else told me that the person said sorry that they forgot. That's it.

I was really losing my ability to do much of anything. I have depression and anxiety and ADHD, all of which I manage pretty well. But those parts of me were under the pressure of being ignored, disrespected, "forgotten", and not being able to say a word to the world.

Then, as social unrest continued global due to BLM, the D&D team comes out with their statement. It was like a slap in the face. How much they care about people of color, how much changing things (that I and others had been pushing for months, if not longer) was just going to happen now. It took weeks of protesting across the globe to get D&D to do what people they hired have been already telling them to fix. You cannot, CANNOT say Black lives matter when you cannot respect the Black people who you exploit at 1/3rd your pay, for progressive ideas you pick apart until it's comfortable, for your millions of profit year over year. People of color can make art and freelance, but are never hired. D&D takes what they want from marginalized people, give them scraps, and claim progress.

I spent my time in that building worrying about how much people hated me for working there. I spent a lot of time thinking about how much it hurt to work there. I had and still have supporters, and many. Thanks to you all for being my voice and speaking out when I could not. But I felt so isolated and alone. If not for some coworkers who checked in on me, who were going through the same things? I would've quit. Every angry statement about D&D felt personal because I couldn't fix it. Because I failed, whether it was my fault or not. I felt like I was being trashed by everyone because I could not disconnect what I set as a personal responsibility from the state of the game. That part IS my fault.

But I wound up as I am now because of all of this and much, much more. I am depressed. I am unable to write. I constantly question if anything I create is worth anything. I feel like I let everyone down, and no matter how much people tell me I didnt, that doesnt change. I feel guilty for not being what y'all needed me to be, what I wanted to be, and betrayed for how I was treated at that company. It's an exceptionally kind place on the D&D team. People are very nice to each other in a very genuine way that I truly enjoyed. However, that doesnt replace respect. That doesnt delete how I was treated. It doesnt change the fact that I honestly never want to play a trpg again and am definitely not working in that field anymore.

I know that I'm probably losing a ton of opportunities writing elsewhere because of what I've said here, as well as what I've sent in internally. It may mean that I will return to poverty, which makes me feel like a failure to my race, my family, and my partner who I want to provide the world. But under all these things, I have my integrity. I worked my ass off. I did my best for as long as I could. And I didnt let them treat me like that without telling the world what needs to be said.

Trust actions, not words. Not "look at how much we freelance so and so", because freelancing is exploitation of diversity with no support for the freelancer. Not "here we finally did what we KNOW we should've done a long time ago", because they only care about how optics turn to dollars. EVERYTHING involving D&D will continue to farm marginalized people for the looks and never put them in leadership. They wont be put on staff. They will be held at arms length. I hope they prove me wrong.

A lot of BIPOC and other marginalized people are trying to make their way by using D&D. Dont shame them for that. Think about how much, and when you wield your anger, that it is done righteously.

That said, I dont recommend to anyone, working for the D&D department of Wizards of the Coast."

Orion's Tweet about this. They also cite this statement, The Wizards I Know, by Zaiem Beg.

WotC's PR person, Greg Tito, commented publicly on the issue.

This should not have happened the way it did & I'll continue to fight so it does not happen again. I'm sorry if I let you down, Orion. You deserve better.

In response to an observation that this required more than just a PR statement or donation, and that it required diversity at the executive level he continued:

I have said almost these exact words for years, and more recently to executives put in charge of a community they don't understand. I am in the awful position of saying things I believe without the company making even a single, simple action of real change.

UPDATE! WotC has issued a short statement:

We sincerely apologize to Orion Black for the negative experiences they had as a contractor with the D&D franchise team. Their statement is being taken seriously and is an opportunity for us to improve the experiences of all those who contribute to our company and community. We're not perfect and we know there is more work to do. The ongoing dialogue with our community is critical to make meaningful change. We remain committed to making D&D a more inclusive community by supporting voices from people of all backgrounds.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

if you're gonna characterize Kwan as just some guy looking to make money off videos I see no reason to believe you've given him any due consideration.

And yet I said I watched some of the videos and found them unconvincing and monetizing YouTube videos and driving controversy so people watch them is an actual thing that happens on a daily basis. Just look at the average title for them, so many are click bait and then filler to hit the magic 10 minutes. Kwan presents zero credentials or evidence that he speaks for any large group and Asians are so fragmented with many disliking each other over a long history that I look sideways whenever someone claims to represent them. The democratic countries are even as divided and full of in-fighting as Europe and the US is (not to mention places like where I grew up where language rules are in place and a significant portion of the population wants to separate from the rest of the country). The videos are badly done and boring to watch and could be summarized in written form. The fact that they refuse to is evidence that they want YouTube views.

Your point is that this qualified Asian guy did a YouTube video series complaining about and you are Asian as well and you don't like it. Although I am not Asian, I did live in Asia for 8 years and worked and traveled there for way longer. I have played Magic and D&D and other games there with local gamers and gone out for dinner and beers afterwards. No one complained about the tropes and many played standard character classes as Asian themed with the same tropes as the video claims is insulting. Many of the tropes in the OA book came from Japanese and Chinese (mainly Hong Kong) movies that made it over to the West (the globe is round so the West can be East depending on what direction you go to, from me, Asia is much closer going West than East).

So if your point is that some Asians don't like it, my point is that some do and most do not care. If your solution is more extreme, mine is less. OA is old and barely anyone plays using those rules any more. So write better and more modern rules that present whatever culture you think deserves better representation the way you want it to. The sales of OA is not even a rounding error to Hasbro, but that found money does help to provide budgets to hire freelancers, so pitch spending that money on making something better.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

When it comes to adventures, long experience as a DM almost certainly helps. 20+ years is probably unnecessary. But I think most people aren't turning out top-rate homebrew adventures until they have at least 5 or 6 years of experience of running the game and creating adventure under their belts. Then, like any professional writing job, you need a couple years experience in submissions, meeting style guides, proving you can hit deadlines, and establishing a body of work before you're trusted with larger assignments.

Unless someone is a rare prodigy, I'd be skeptical of the quality of adventure turned in by someone who started DMing three years ago and submitted their first published content a year ago.

I think this would need a lot of evidence before I could say it was anything but opinion.

Re: design, the evidence I have is that people new to RPG design often suddenly arrive, apparently ex nihilo, and have a good design. This has happened countless times. Sometimes those people have played RPGs for twenty years, sometimes two, sometimes perhaps not even that. And certainly they haven't designed an RPG before in a lot of cases.

With adventures, I've seen totally awful adventures turned out by people with a multiple decades of experience, making rookie errors, and I've seen extremely well put-together adventures by people who, well I don't know about then having more than a few years of experience.

It's a bit like DMing. Yes you learn by doing in many cases, but if you start as an adult, and follow certain principles (not complex ones), and have played RPGs a bit (not necessarily DM'd at all), you have probably hit the ground running. As an anecdotal example we could look at one of my friends, who DM'd for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago, and was, frankly, already better than maybe the vast majority of DMs I've played with. Plus he'd put in a lot more effort than I see a lot of experienced DMs do (possibly including me...).

I would guess that if we went back through history and got accurate numbers on how long people had been DMing when they wrote some fondly-remembered adventure, or even an obviously well-designed one, we'd see a really wild variance, from quite short times to very long ones. Equally with terrible adventures, if we went through, I suspect a lot of them were written by absolutely veteran DMs (indeed I know some were!). I very much doubt those people actually run bad adventures - they're just not good at writing interesting adventures for commercial sale (just look at Keep on the Shadowfell, which is a staggeringly bad adventure on a variety of levels, even though nostalgia has begun to tint it now, these were people with vast experience, but good god it was bad!).

An interesting anecdotal example for me is me vs my wife. I've DM'd for 30+ years. I've written and read and played adventures for that time. My wife only started playing in 2010-ish, and has only DM'd a few times. She is, however, actually a good writer, unlike me, and a great storyteller (even though that is in no way her job or really hobby). The adventures she wrote for when she was DMing were of extremely high quality. I was genuinely shocked. I don't say that because she's my wife - she doesn't read ENWorld, but because I was incredibly impressed that a new DM, even an adult, could do so well, just basically out of the gate, telling an exciting and involving story, putting together good encounters, making good use of loot and so on. For me, I don't feel I could, even with 30+ years of experience, put out an adventure which would be worth publishing. Whereas I am quite sure she could. I don't think she'd be interested, but that's a separate issue. Would a few more years of experience make her even better? Sure, but it really doesn't seem like there's much correlation between experience and quality beyond an initial learning phase. I still see veterans put out adventures with rookie mistakes in them that she was already beyond making (indeed, one official WotC adventure we played recently was so bad in certain elements, it felt like it was designed by a very verbose 15-year-old, not in terms of themes, but in terms of design ideas).

 

[Umbran]

The notion that these culture war struggles are white men vs marginalized groups is tidy and attractive. But it's not borne out by reality.

Mod Note:

There is not a gaming-relevant word in your post. As I just told Ruin Explorer, we need you to bring this back in to something relevant. Thank you.

 

[Parmandur]

Another factor is we might be seeing the effect of no Dragon/Dungeon for 13 years.

There's no real new way to enter the hobby the current designers used.

There's DMGuild but that's gonna take time.

DMsGuild has been around for years now, and DMsGuild folks have transitioned to contract and even full-time positions at WotC already. The pipeline is active.

 

[Parmandur]

Adventure-wise? Not really. I mean, maybe you don't mean adventures, but you just mentioned them re: Paizo. 5E's adventures have been of quite variable quality. Even in terms of production values. I see them because my friends have bought some of them on Beyond and we're all content-sharing, but I've definitely not been particularly impressed by what I've seen, overall. Strahd was pretty good, so I guess there's that.

In terms of other products? I think the main success has been something @Parmandur has articulated - 5E's team have been good at picking stuff that will actually sell. I'm skeptical that has anything to do with designer experience, and I strongly suspect it's down to management decisions. The actual mechanics, spells, subclasses, races and so on have been of variable quality. UA has mitigated this to some extent, but unfortunately a lot of material that really should have gone via UA and been helped, hasn't been, and a bunch of other stuff received post-UA/playtesting changes that were not

From a financial perspective, WotC is making none of the mistakes TSR did. From a design perspective, they're still making mistakes. Not the same mistakes as 3E or 4E, but mistakes nonetheless. I think what this shows is that's there's some significant value in management experience, but much less value in lengthy design experience. 5E's arguably best mechanical designer (Jeremy Crawford) has significantly less experience than a lot of other people who have been involved in D&D.

There have also been some kind of wacky decisions about what to focus on in books, which have left me pondering the value they offer, and which very much reminded me of some the more dubious decisions White Wolf made in terms of allocating space in splatbooks and the like. And the stuff where they have seemed really solid? Like the monster books and Xanathars? They seem to have given up on that.

Bit of an eye of the beholder situation with the Adventures there: many people like them, and they sell extremely well. The individual who makes decesions in the Adventure department is highly experienced, if not one of the most experienced people working in TTRPGS: Chris Perkins has been publishing Adventures across five decades, and knows what people want.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Sounds to me like a lot of avoidance, non-communication and non-engagement. If you're trying to introduce more diversity in the workplace, it doesn't end with the hire, it STARTS with it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

DMsGuild has been around for years now, and DMsGuild folks have transitioned to contract and even full-time positions at WotC already. The pipeline is active.

I suspect it's not quite as valuable as Dragon for getting new people's work seen because it's still (weirdly) low profile. I suspect stuff like the OA argument actually probably helps DMs' Guild because so many people don't seem to know it/use it (even experienced D&D DMs I know). Still we do have things like Beyond emerging in more of the Dragon role. Hopefully that continues. Certainly it's easier to get at least some eyes on your work now than it was in say 1992, one way or another.

 

[Parmandur]

I suspect it's not quite as valuable as Dragon for getting new people's work seen because it's still (weirdly) low profile. I suspect stuff like the OA argument actually probably helps DMs' Guild because so many people don't seem to know it/use it (even experienced D&D DMs I know). Still we do have things like Beyond emerging in more of the Dragon role. Hopefully that continues. Certainly it's easier to get at least some eyes on your work now than it was in say 1992, one way or another.

It helps for developing new talent, because WotC at least does pay attention and sift through material.

 

[Mercurius]

@Ruin Explorer , we should only continue with this discourse if we can bring it back to RPGs. You've made some crazy assumptions about my position re: real world politics that I can't reply to, or attributed bad motives to me, but it makes me realize that you don't understand my position if you think I'm wanting to silence minority voices. You have no idea what my political stance in real world politics are, so let's keep it to RPGs.

As far as RPGs go, I'm not trying to silence anyone. I think all voices should be heard. I think we should try to understand all voices. If I'm WotC, I'm trying to serve the largest swath of the community that I can.

I started a thread on "heritage and inclusivity" because I'm interested in solutions that honor a diversity of views -- that preserve D&D traditions as best as possible, while making the game more inclusive. My main criticism with those who see racism in every nook and cranny of D&D is hermeneutical, and that I think it ends up creating more division and even perpetuating the things that they say they want to fix (e.g. connecting orcs to specific ethnic groups). I have been saying, "I hear you, but maybe there are other solutions that will lead to the same goal."

I have offered solutions - such as broadening orcs to include a wider variety of depictions, or alterations to drow. Some are amenable, some are intractable and generally don't seem interested in understanding diverse views. That has been my experience, anyway. My interest is in a Big Tent approach, not one side winning out over the other. I don't think extremists on either side want a Big Tent, and thus aren't serving the goal of inclusivity.

As far as Orion Black goes, I don't think we have enough information for me to take a strong position. As I said early on, I empathize with their pain. That's about all I can say without conjecturing.

 

[Panda-s1]

And yet I said I watched some of the videos and found them unconvincing and monetizing YouTube videos and driving controversy so people watch them is an actual thing that happens on a daily basis. Just look at the average title for them, so many are click bait and then filler to hit the magic 10 minutes. Kwan presents zero credentials or evidence that he speaks for any large group and Asians are so fragmented with many disliking each other over a long history that I look sideways whenever someone claims to represent them. The democratic countries are even as divided and full of in-fighting as Europe and the US is (not to mention places like where I grew up where language rules are in place and a significant portion of the population wants to separate from the rest of the country). The videos are badly done and boring to watch and could be summarized in written form. The fact that they refuse to is evidence that they want YouTube views.

Your point is that this qualified Asian guy did a YouTube video series complaining about and you are Asian as well and you don't like it. Although I am not Asian, I did live in Asia for 8 years and worked and traveled there for way longer. I have played Magic and D&D and other games there with local gamers and gone out for dinner and beers afterwards. No one complained about the tropes and many played standard character classes as Asian themed with the same tropes as the video claims is insulting. Many of the tropes in the OA book came from Japanese and Chinese (mainly Hong Kong) movies that made it over to the West (the globe is round so the West can be East depending on what direction you go to, from me, Asia is much closer going West than East).

So if your point is that some Asians don't like it, my point is that some do and most do not care. If your solution is more extreme, mine is less. OA is old and barely anyone plays using those rules any more. So write better and more modern rules that present whatever culture you think deserves better representation the way you want it to. The sales of OA is not even a rounding error to Hasbro, but that found money does help to provide budgets to hire freelancers, so pitch spending that money on making something better.

yo, okay, there's a huge difference between Asians in Asia and Asians, like me and Kwan, who didn't grow up in a primarily Asian country. an average Korean person living in Korea can go to work with almost entirely other Korean people. their day to day interactions are almost entirely with other Korean people. they'll watch TV and hey! mostly Korean people are on TV. they might watch some fantasy show that has a lot of tropes that people here might find contentious, but that's okay because virtually everyone they know understands that it's just a fantasy and nothing real.

that's not the case for me. I'm an Asian (and Latino!) person living in America, a lot of work teams I've been on I'm the only visible minority, I mostly interact with other white people in my day to day interactions, and if I see an Asian person on TV they're usually gonna be a weird stereotype and not at all a regular cast member. keep in mind I also live in a part of this country with a noticeable Asian American population.

the fact that you're trying to point to Asians from Asia as proof OA is okay says that you don't really understand the underlying issues here. I'd suggest reading about the "perpetual foreigner" stereotype to understand why it's messed up for you try and invalidate my opinion because those Asians don't take issue with it.