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."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And, I think, they wanted to reduce the tendency to dump stats by giving them all some defensive value. I don't think they shifted enough to Intelligence or Charisma for defense, but that's not that hard to house rule.

It makes sense to design the game such that OVERALL you don't see one ability score relegated to insignificance, although I'm not sure they all have to really be equal, but there's little reason to do that on a single character level. In fact, what is the envisaged result? A character with all 13s, and maybe a 10 or a 15 here or there? That doesn't seem to fit with the original and primary goal of ability scores, which was to provide a way to characterize your character so that you would understand how to RP it and identify with it, and so it would be memorable. The most boring PC on earth is the one with all middle-of-the-road scores, IMHO. I don't want a system that promotes that (too much, its OK if that is your shtick).
My Catfolk has an 8 Wisdom. It really makes the character much more distinctive and interesting. I'm OK with that indicating a somewhat weaker will power or whatever.

 

[billd91]

It makes sense to design the game such that OVERALL you don't see one ability score relegated to insignificance, although I'm not sure they all have to really be equal, but there's little reason to do that on a single character level. In fact, what is the envisaged result? A character with all 13s, and maybe a 10 or a 15 here or there? That doesn't seem to fit with the original and primary goal of ability scores, which was to provide a way to characterize your character so that you would understand how to RP it and identify with it, and so it would be memorable. The most boring PC on earth is the one with all middle-of-the-road scores, IMHO. I don't want a system that promotes that (too much, its OK if that is your shtick).

Nobody's talking about forcing some kind of middle of the road stats - rather, that there are no (or minimal) costless trade-offs and dominating strategies/builds. Choices should have consequences.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Nobody's talking about forcing some kind of middle of the road stats - rather, that there are no (or minimal) costless trade-offs and dominating strategies/builds. Choices should have consequences.

Yeah, I can't comment on 3.x/PF and what the situation might have been there. Back in AD&D mostly every stat was pretty useful, unless you totally ignored some of the rules (IE reactions and such, and then CHA becomes just "how many henchies can I have?"). Likewise 4e, there really is no 'uber strategy' WRT ability scores. Clearly your wizard wants a lot of INT in all these games, but beyond that its pretty open-ended. 5e seems equally so. I am not sure why 6 saves was needed in order to do that, or why saves as opposed to defenses were needed.

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

Anyone with a modicum of common sense would not kill off vancian casting.

Shouldn't even need to do a poll for that one.

It's a very big D&Dism by now.

Essentially the average forum poster is smarter at marketing than WotC in 2006-8.

 

[Monayuris]

It's described in page 5 of the 5e PH.

If you never heard of an rpg before and came in completely new to the experience with no one to guide you, that section would be completely insufficient to properly explain the process.

it says what you do but it does not explain HOW to do it. It doesn’t give practical instructions on how to play the game. The must important and fundamental part of the game is given less than half a page of instruction.

 

[Zardnaar]

You say worse.

I say better.

You say potato, I say vodka.

You say potato I say fruit salad.

By fruit salad I mean grapes.

By that I mean grape juice.

Fermented grape juice.

It's wine.

I'm having wine for breakfast.

Is it wine O'clock yet?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

You say potato I say fruit salad.

By fruit salad I mean grapes.

By that I mean grape juice.

Fermented grape juice.

It's wine.

I'm having wine for breakfast.

Is it wine O'clock yet?

I have a drinking problem; two hands, and only one mouth!

 

[Li Shenron]

The emphasis on mega-campaigns is part of the problem. Running a campaign is a big, big step up from running an adventure. I don't think I ran anything that really looked like a campaign (rather than a sequence of discrete dungeons) until I had been DMing for 6 or 7 years. New DMs need to be encouraged to think small, and WotC needs to do a better job supporting adventure-based play.

That's a very good point. Running an adventure usually requires to first read it start-to-finish and know at least in broad strokes what's probably going to happen, even if you then mostly focus on the details of the first session. But you typically need/want to know as much as possible in advance, to better understand what's going on and why, and also to be able to deviate as soon as your players will take unexpected actions.

Someone may argue that the Starter Set has a fairly short adventure, but that's it, all other official adventures are long or extremely long. A first-time DM probably needs a single-session adventure to start with, and possibly more, followed by longer adventures but still not 200 pages each.

And all of this with a level advancement system that takes you way too quickly up to 3rd level! Clearly, the XP chart is built for experienced players who get bored when playing low-level characters.

 

[Parmandur]

That's a very good point. Running an adventure usually requires to first read it start-to-finish and know at least in broad strokes what's probably going to happen, even if you then mostly focus on the details of the first session. But you typically need/want to know as much as possible in advance, to better understand what's going on and why, and also to be able to deviate as soon as your players will take unexpected actions.

Someone may argue that the Starter Set has a fairly short adventure, but that's it, all other official adventures are long or extremely long. A first-time DM probably needs a single-session adventure to start with, and possibly more, followed by longer adventures but still not 200 pages each.

And all of this with a level advancement system that takes you way too quickly up to 3rd level! Clearly, the XP chart is built for experienced players who get bored when playing low-level characters.

I mean, literally all of the Adventure books are really a series of bite sized smaller adventure modules.

 

[Parmandur]

It makes sense to design the game such that OVERALL you don't see one ability score relegated to insignificance, although I'm not sure they all have to really be equal, but there's little reason to do that on a single character level. In fact, what is the envisaged result? A character with all 13s, and maybe a 10 or a 15 here or there? That doesn't seem to fit with the original and primary goal of ability scores, which was to provide a way to characterize your character so that you would understand how to RP it and identify with it, and so it would be memorable. The most boring PC on earth is the one with all middle-of-the-road scores, IMHO. I don't want a system that promotes that (too much, its OK if that is your shtick).
My Catfolk has an 8 Wisdom. It really makes the character much more distinctive and interesting. I'm OK with that indicating a somewhat weaker will power or whatever.

The point seems to be to give every player weaknesses... weaknesses they need teammates to compensate for.