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."

 

[Zardnaar]

One big thing is to give a decent index. I mean, when I look up Abyss, I get "See planes of existence," instead of "See page 5, 300-303." They spend 3 more characters to not tell me where to go when they knew what I was looking for, and they do that a LOT.

Yeah it's useless.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It seems like "D&D would be better if it was easier to learn" should be an uncontroversial statement

Why do you think that?

Noughts and Crosses is easy to learn. Snakes & Ladders is easy to learn.

People don't take up hobbies because they are easy. Who, when asked "why did you climb that mountain?" answered "because it was easy"?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It seems like "D&D would be better if it was easier to learn" should be an uncontroversial statement, but here we are spending two dozen internet pages arguing about it.

It's just gatekeeping. That's all "back in my day", "it's supposed to be difficult", and "if I could do it, so can you" really are. Acting like barriers to entry are a good thing serves only to make those who have previously cleared them feel better about having to do so.

That's not true, at all. Quite frankly, your comment is unnecessarily divisive.

I once knew a user interface engineer who had this amazing poster from the 50s breaking down the steps for sharpening a pencil. I thought it was the coolest, funniest thing ever. One day, I was talking to him about it, and I realized that I completely misunderstood the purpose of his poster. It wasn't a joke. It was to remind him, on a daily basis, that even the most simple thing can require painstaking, step-by-step instruction. That when you're in the UI business, you always have to re-examine your assumptions as to what people know, and what they have to be told. Instruction is not easy, even for the easiest things. There is a push and pull between simplification of the thing to be taught, and teaching.

The statement that "something is better if it is easier to learn" is necessarily different than "we need to do a better job teaching people something we love." To put it in terms of someone who doesn't agree with you, you are saying, "I think we need to make D&D as dumb as possible, instead of working to bring more players to the game we love. Heck, most people don't have the dice, but do have d6s. So let's only use d6 in D&D." Now, I don't think you are saying to make D&D "dumb," I think you want D&D to be accessible. But so do I! I just want D&D to be good and accessible, not just accessible.

In effect, people here are having a discussion about the types of rules they prefer. Which is a normal and acceptable thing to do! There are costs and benefits to different rules. For example, D&D would be much easier to learn if there were no spells to choose from, right? That's a serious learning curve! For that matter, we could easily return to the Basic (and proto-OD&D) system of just using d6 for all weapon types. That's much easier to learn!

I say this because it should be unacceptable for someone to use pejorative terms (gatekeeping) in order to assert a preference for their own rules. To put it in terms of video games; Witcher is harder to learn than Flappy Bird. And that's fine. That doesn't mean we need to make Witcher into Flappy Bird.

 

[jayoungr]

If you have pre-generated character sheets (which the book doesn't start with) and don't expect them to have read the entire PhB before you started

Isn't that what the Starter Sets are for? They come with pregenerated character sheets and a stripped-down version of the rules.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I once knew a user interface engineer who had this amazing poster from the 50s breaking down the steps for sharpening a pencil. I thought it was the coolest, funniest thing ever. One day, I was talking to him about it, and I realized that I completely misunderstood the purpose of his poster. It wasn't a joke. It was to remind him, on a daily basis, that even the most simple thing can require painstaking, step-by-step instruction. That when you're in the UI business, you always have to re-examine your assumptions as to what people know, and what they have to be told. Instruction is not easy, even for the easiest things. There is a push and pull between simplification of the thing to be taught, and teaching.

This is an interesting example. Most people do not need a poster to tell them how to sharpen a pencil because they where shown (usually as a small child) how to sharpen a pencil.

But suppose someone had never been shown? Then you could design a poster to give them step by step instructions. And the poster would make it look like a complex task. It's a lot easier to show someone how to sharpen a pencil than to design a poster to tell them how to do it. And harder still to design the poster in such a way as to make the task look simple.

 

[Umbran]

Hence the hostility. People who claim that equating "improving the new player experience" and "dumbing down" is a strawman are living in cloud cuckoo land. It is not possible to do one without the other.

Mod Note:

When you can no longer imagine that intelligent people can come to a different conclusion than you without suffering some metal aberration, that is the point when you are not longer in an equitable discussion yourself. So, you're no longer part of this discussion.

In the future, leave room for you to be, well, wrong about things, or at least keep yourself short of the point of insulting people who disagree with you.

 

[Cadence]

Like D&D you can muddle though it so long as someone at the table knows the details. And experienced players get really cross because (unlike Poker) inexperienced chumps can win easily over veterans.

There's a reason we use a cheat sheet for bridge... and some of the tournament bridge players in the building don't come play with us.

 

[Cadence]

Isn't that what the Starter Sets are for? They come with pregenerated character sheets and a stripped-down version of the rules.

We got the essentials box and not the starter one. I need to go back and check what that one had. The rules in it, anyway, started right with making characters. The essentials, anyway, was a lot more than the Moldvay Basic, for example. I was surprised how free-from the module with it was too.

 

[ChaosOS]

I'm deeply confused why the brigade here has constructed a strawman out of changing the rules being the method of an improved new player experience as opposed to simply seeing an opportunity for improvements in layout. Indexes, bolding/italicizing/capitalizing/something for keywords, reminder text, explanatory sidebars - all things that don't change the rules but would make the books much easier to comprehend. That's not even getting into things like "Chapter 8 spells could be much better organized", such as sorting spells by level then alphabetically.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I'm deeply confused why the brigade here has constructed a strawman out of changing the rules being the method of an improved new player experience as opposed to simply seeing an opportunity for improvements in layout. Indexes, bolding/italicizing/capitalizing/something for keywords, reminder text, explanatory sidebars - all things that don't change the rules but would make the books much easier to comprehend. That's not even getting into things like "Chapter 8 spells could be much better organized", such as sorting spells by level then alphabetically.

I mostly agree. I think organization, presentation, and coherence (instead of rules changes) mean a great deal. Just a usable index ... I mean, c'mon!

However, I disagree about keywords. I'd rather have the books be more readable than be more ... gameable. I think that a strength of 5e is the readability of the books; that the lore/rules mix isn't broken up with emphasized and italicized key words.

On the other hand, a simple, easy-to-use flow chart, or explanation of key terms (even conditions, or what the different type of natural language words mean vis-a-vis attacks or breaking down the difference between "action" and "reaction" and "bonus action") would be helpful to many people.