D&D 5E Kate Welch on Leaving WotC

Kate Welch left Wizards of the Coast a few days ago, on August 16th. Soon after, she talked a little about it in a live-stream.

She started work at WotC as a game designer back in February 2018, and has contributed to various products since then, such as Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Descent into Avernus, as well as being a participant in WotC's livestreams. In December 2019, her job changed to that of 'senior user experience designer'.

"I mentioned yesterday that I have some big news that I wouldn't be able to share until today.

The big news that I have to share with you today is that I ... this is difficult, but ... I quit my job at Wizards of the Coast. I no longer work at Wizards. Today was my last day. I haven't said it out loud yet so it's pretty major. I know... it's a big change. It's been scary, I have been there for almost three years, not that long, you know, as far as jobs go, and for a while there I really was having a good time. It's just not... it wasn't the right fit for me any more.

So, yeah, I don't really know what's next. I got no big plans. It's a big deal, big deal .... and I wanted to talk to you all about it because you're, as I've mentioned before, a source of great joy for me. One of the things that has been tough reckoning with this is that I've defined myself by Dungeons & Dragons for so long and I really wanted to be a part of continuing to make D&D successful and to grow it, to have some focus especially on new user experience, I think that the new user experience for Dungeons & Dragons is piss poor, and I've said that while employed and also after quitting.

But I've always wanted to be a part of getting D&D into the hands of more people and helping them understand what a life-changing game it is, and I hope I still get the chance to do that. But as of today I'm unemployed, and I also wanted to be upfront about it because I have this great fear that because Dungeons & Dragons has been part of my identity, professionally for the last three years almost, I was worried that a lot of you'll would not want to follow me any more because I'm not at Wizards, and there's definitely some glamourous aspects to being at Wizards."

She went on to talk about the future, and her hopes that she'll still be be able to work with WotC.

"I'm excited about continuing to play D&D, and hopefully Wizards will still want me to appear on their shows and stuff, we'll see, I have no idea. But one thing that I'm really excited about is that now I can play other TTRPGs. There's a policy that when you're a Wizards employee you can't stream other tabletop games. So there was a Call of Cthulhu game that we did with the C-team but we had to get very special permission for it, they were like OK but this is only a one time thing. I get it, you know, it's endorsing the competition or whatever, but I'm super excited to be able to have more freedom about the kinds of stuff that I'm getting involved with."

 

[QuentinGeorge]

As far as I can see, a good intro set would consist of steps, so to speak, like thus:

1) A "solo" adventure. No DM, just the 1 player. Introducing you to just what sort of game this is and some of the concepts.
2) An intro to DMing
3) Put it all together, (here's where you'd put in LMoP, for instance).

Set comes with dice, pregenerated characters, as well as basic rules for generating your own fighter/wizard/cleric/rogue, guide to creating your own adventures.

 

[Zardnaar]

I remember being at Gen Con in 2007 while WotC was giving a seminar on what would and wouldn't be in 5E. When one of the designers (I can't remember who) announced that 4E would do away with Vancian casting, the entire room burst into applause, to my stunned disbelief. Things like that serve to remind me that there's a Venn diagram of the parts of D&D that someone likes/enjoys, and the parts they find intrinsic to what makes the game "D&D," and that how that diagram is laid out is going to be different for everyone.



I'm reminded of what The Alexandrian has to say about "pay-to-preview" starter sets, i.e. introductory sets that, once they teach you how the game is played - and direct you towards the three Core Rulebooks that you need to buy - then serve no purpose. That is, after you've learned how to play the game and picked up the PHB/DMG/MM trilogy, do you get any further use out of your starter set?

Couple of other things can explain it.

1. They were preaching to the choir.
2. They were deferring to authority figures.
3. Being polite.
4. Doing what's expected, clapping after a presentation.

You would be amazed at what you can get away with in a high viz vest and a clipboard. It's almost as good as an invisibility spell.

 

[Marandahir]

Couple of other things can explain it.

1. They were preaching to the choir.
2. They were deferring to authority figures.
3. Being polite.
4. Doing what's expected, clapping after a presentation.

You would be amazed at what you can get away with in a high viz vest and a clipboard. It's almost as good as an invisibility spell.

My friends and I were all super excited for the end of Vancian spellcasting and the linear-warriors/quadratic-wizards trope that 4e brought along. 3.5e was broken to its core, and no patchwork of Pathfinder was going to fix that, either.

Just like the Wii U was a necessary stumble to form the Nintendo Switch, I think 4e was a necessary experiment to get to the balancing act that 5e has performed. 4e shows what you can do if you balance every class perfectly, and then later on with 4e PHB3 and Essentials, they tried pulling apart those structures to see if you could still preserve the balance while allowing classes to level up and work mechanically differently. They found it was working, and so that laid the stepping stones for 5e to have balance between the Fighter and the Wizard (and everything in-between) while still playing entirely differently in terms of power structure, versatility, ease of entry, etc.

Now, I'm sure there were a lot of people warded off by the abjuration spell "Slaughter Sacred Cows" cast by WotC in 2008. WotC didn't do a giant public playtest from 2006-2008 to see what most people wanted. These are people who tend to prefer Earth-616 to Ultimate Marvel reboots - people who have found what they like and want to stick with it. That's fine. There's always a splinter group that sticks with what they've invested in when a new edition comes around. The difference here was that 4e was SO radically different, and the OGL & 3.5 SRD opened the door for 3rd party competitors. And who arose to fill in that gap with a 3.5 d20 successor? The company that WotC had licensed out Dragon & Dungeon Magazines to, the people who knew almost as much as WotC how to make D&D.

Even then, 4e probably would have been more successful if it had delivered on its promised virtual tabletop tools. In 2020, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, D&D Beyond, Twitch, and the DMs Guild have made D&D an extremely easy game to play over the internet (and that's not counting the other virtual tools available that make the game even easier for DMs like Obsidian Portal and World Anvil). But in 2008, the promise was that WotC would deliver all of this in a neat in-house suite of virtual tools for D&D players who subscribed to D&D Insider. Plus, you'd get official core expansion rules and adventures and content through the Magazines, which were back in WotC's hands and were going all digital. It was arguably a bigger promise than the suite of apps and functionality that Nintendo promised the Wii U would come with (Wii U TV never actually took off, for example, despite being built into the console with a dedicated button on the Game Pad!). We all know what happened - the 2nd-party team hired to develop the tools crashed and burned, the Character builder was made 3 different times, each time angering a different part of the base, the 4e encyclopedia was worth the cost when it came with EVERYTHING in 4e (no extra purchases necessary beyond a sub) but was slow and difficult to use (easy to copy-paste into word docs though), and the Encounter Builder never really came at all. 4e was successful in 2008, but by 2009 was flopping its way to the finish line with too many splatbooks coming out - many more than anyone could really afford to buy, and riddled with errors that required hundreds of pages of errata documents.

The 4e/Pathfinder chasm was a colossal marketing mistake. But 4e was not a bad vision, and I doubt 4e would have been as controversial had it been laid out differently, or had the tools been successful, or had Pathfinder not been there to compete with it, or had there been sufficient online support tools to make the game more manageable. And ultimately, WotC learned from the error and were able to turn around a 5e with a public playtest from 2012-2014 that for the first time in any edition, reclaimed the market rather than splintered it further.

I have friends who stayed with 4e because that's what they like. But 5e by and large did the Smart Hulk thing - took the brains and the brawn and put them together to become the best of both worlds. It's not perfect, and it's still being refined. But 5e is able to play like a 1e game or like a 2e game or like a 3e game or like a 4e game, and it's more accessible to new audiences than ever, so it's good in my book.

 

[Alzrius]

We all know what happened - the 2nd-party team hired to develop the tools crashed and burned, the Character builder was made 3 different times, each time angering a different part of the base, the 4e encyclopedia was worth the cost when it came with EVERYTHING in 4e (no extra purchases necessary beyond a sub) but was slow and difficult to use (easy to copy-paste into word docs though), and the Encounter Builder never really came at all.

It's also worth remembering that one of WotC's Senior Project Managers committed murder-suicide.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm reminded of what The Alexandrian has to say about "pay-to-preview" starter sets, i.e. introductory sets that, once they teach you how the game is played - and direct you towards the three Core Rulebooks that you need to buy - then serve no purpose. That is, after you've learned how to play the game and picked up the PHB/DMG/MM trilogy, do you get any further use out of your starter set?

Well, there's the dice.

But yeah, this a problem with the 5E Starter Set. The adventure is great and the stripped-down rulebook seems like it'd be ideal for leaving on the players' side of the table as a quick reference. But they're both made out of incredibly flimsy slick paper and seem unlikely to hold up to that sort of handling. The enormous depth of the box suggests that WotC thinks groups are going to put something else in the box with those materials, but there's nothing obvious that people would want to. (In contrast, all of the Tails from Equestria adventures and supplements fit inside the Curse of the Statuettes box, as does the rulebook, so it becomes a de facto carrying case for everything, especially as the box includes the screen and a set of dice.)

If WotC is really going to be re-releasing older adventures (which I think is a dubious claim -- Tyranny of Dragons was so old and so early, it needed updating, and reviews say that the changes weren't as substantive as needed, while Strahd offers an obvious opportunity to do a spooooky fall deluxe set), I'd like to see Lost Mines put out in a sturdier format, possibly with the starter rules as the beginning of the hardback.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Couple of other things can explain it.

1. They were preaching to the choir.
2. They were deferring to authority figures.
3. Being polite.
4. Doing what's expected, clapping after a presentation.

You would be amazed at what you can get away with in a high viz vest and a clipboard. It's almost as good as an invisibility spell.

Toward the end of 3E, there were a lot of people complaining about Vancian casting, as it was perceived as a straightjacket on other styles of fantasy gaming -- D&D did a great job of modelling D&D, but didn't feel like other fantasy properties.

The OGL, Pathfinder, the OSR movement, 4E and non-D&D games like Dungeon World have since offered lots of other ways for people to tackle those other fantasy settings and other ways to approach magic, so the demand has largely slipped away. People who want to do dungeon crawling without Vancian magic have a ton of other choices now and even 5E's semi-Vancian magic is a lot less restrictive than it once was. (Which leaves the sorcerer with something of an identity crisis, but one problem at a time.)

 

[Dausuul]

Couple of other things can explain it.

I don't see any reason to explain away that reaction. I think it was entirely genuine.

It's telling that even as 5E trumpeted its return to form and to the game's roots, it did not return to "true" Vancian casting. Instead we got a system where everyone casts like a 3E sorcerer, but some people can change their spell selection daily instead of on level-up.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

4E's interactive tools were troubled from the start, with weird decisions made by people who didn't seem to have a good sense of the digital marketplace, what end users were likely to have on their computers, or even which companies' platforms would be sticking around long term. Nearly all of their problems were predicted well in advance on ENWorld, and all of them ended up coming true. Self-inflicted wounds by the company.

Likewise, making such a big break with the past likely was thrilling in-house, but when you're managing a decades-old commercial brand, you need to get a sense of what the audience beyond your conference room wants.

I was worn out by 3E at that point, which had turned into a competitive sport between players and DM in terms of who could "master the system" more by assembling the Lego bricks together to create something the other side couldn't keep up with. I had players unhappy with their perceived power levels since power gamers at the table were demonstrably more powerful than them and as DM, I had to either let those folks run roughshod or balance around their abilities, which meant the other players felt even further behind.

4E aggressively sanded down these differences in power -- which I think is a laudable goal -- but it threw out a lot of other elements of the game to do it. At least at the beginning (I didn't stick around long enough to see if this changed significantly over time), everyone essentially had the same handful of possible abilities they could use, in different combinations, often with special flavoring stretched over them to attempt to disguise that fact. I had been playing a 3E illusionist for years at that point, and the idea that illusions could be a handful of controller effects with some custom descriptions stretched over them didn't feel like a recognizable version of my character could exist in 4E.

Ideally, maybe, everyone would start a new campaign with every edition change, but doesn't seem like something that can be reasonably expected from long-term groups. And it's not unreasonable for those groups to want their characters to have their recognizable fundamentals carry over to new versions of the game.

Getting more players, rather than just enthusiastic game designers, involved early on would have helped. Or, if they did, when everyone says "I can't play my old character any more," they should have been listened to as an important warning.

 

[Parmandur]

Toward the end of 3E, there were a lot of people complaining about Vancian casting, as it was perceived as a straightjacket on other styles of fantasy gaming -- D&D did a great job of modelling D&D, but didn't feel like other fantasy properties.

The OGL, Pathfinder, the OSR movement, 4E and non-D&D games like Dungeon World have since offered lots of other ways for people to tackle those other fantasy settings and other ways to approach magic, so the demand has largely slipped away. People who want to do dungeon crawling without Vancian magic have a ton of other choices now and even 5E's semi-Vancian magic is a lot less restrictive than it once was. (Which leaves the sorcerer with something of an identity crisis, but one problem at a time.)

The semi-Vancian casting of 5E pulled off quite a trick. It mostly seems to retain what many liked in classic Vancian casting, but feels much closer to simulating a broader array of general Fantasy fiction, where a caster getting too tired to continue is pretty normal. Indeed, semi-Vancian casting actually first reared it's head in the Wheel of Time RPG from WotC, which adjusted d20 spellcasting to better reflect the Channeling from the books...

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

The semi-Vancian casting of 5E pulled off quite a trick. It mostly seems to retain what many liked in classic Vancian casting, but feels much closer to simulating a broader array of general Fantasy fiction, where a caster getting too tired to continue is pretty normal. Indeed, semi-Vancian casting actually first reared it's head in the Wheel of Time RPG from WotC, which adjusted d20 spellcasting to better reflect the Channeling from the books...

I mean, I always hear about the greatness of neo-Vancian casting.

And then I look back at "true Vancian" casting in 1e.

Clerics (and druids) can cast any spells they want to (that are level-appropriate). Choose each day. Rinse, repeat.

Magic users (and illusionists) must prepare (memorize) their spells from a larger list of spells known. Choose each day.* Rinse, repeat.

Other than putting in an addition (you can choose to cast whatever spell you want, from a smaller list), I've never seen the big deal. It's basically a fancy Rary's Mnemonic Enhancer!



*If you are following the rules regarding time for memorization, then you might take a little longer.