D&D General Dan Rawson Named New Head Of D&D

Hasbro has announced a former Microsoft digital commerce is the new senior vice president in charge of Dungeons & Dragons. Dan Rawson was the COO of Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Hasbro also hired Cynthia Williams earlier this year; she too, came from Microsoft. Of Rawson, she said "We couldn’t be bringing on Dan at a better time. With the acquisition of D&D Beyond earlier this year, the digital capabilities and opportunities for Dungeons & Dragons are accelerating faster than ever. I am excited to partner with Dan to explore the global potential of the brand while maintaining Hasbro’s core value as a player-first company.”

Rawson himself says that "Leading D&D is the realization of a childhood dream. I’m excited to work with Cynthia once again, and I’m thrilled to work with a talented team to expand the global reach of D&D, a game I grew up with and now play with my own kids.”

Interestingly, Ray Wininger -- who has been running D&D for the last couple of years -- has removed mention of WotC and Hasbro from his Twitter bio.

 

[MichaelSomething]

If you're sick of mega corp made TTRPGs and are looking for an alternative, may I suggest EN Publishing???

He's a plucky indie developer who also happens to run this very forum!

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Changing monster statblocking, changing subclasses to match the rewritten classes. That's a lot right there.

Okay. I’m not particularly worried about those things in the context of 3pp, but at least this is specific. Thank you.

Much the same sort of problems that popped up for 3pp during the 3.0 to 3.5 transition, I expect. He mentions the primary one, 3pp being pressured to update products to match the 2024 rules, or risk folks leaving them behind. This is more challenging for 3pp if the 2024 rules have significant differences from 2014, and Wizards doesn't release the new rules under the OGL... though some 3pp have experience in workarounds for that problem (early 5E 3p products just hacked the 3.5 SRD to fit, 5E SRD hacks should be easier than that).

Significant changes in 2024 also mean that 2014 compatible products will no longer sell as well, if at all, due to their being seen as outdated. This is a bigger issue for print publishers like Kobold or Goodman, who may be left with harder-to-market unsold product.

I mean…IMO the expert UA shows that they’re serious about these new options being compatible with old supplements. It’s not going to be hard to use a 2014 Bard subclass with the 2024 Bard, we just don’t know yet for sure exactly what the rule will be. I strongly suspect it will just be that you get a feat at level 14, and get the 3 feature levels of the older bard subclass at the first three new bard subclass levels, but we will see.

It’s not a big adjustment to make, and I can’t see many 3pp struggling because of it.

If Wizards also intends to pull most D&D players into the D&D Beyond ecosystem and associated VTTs, and succeeds in doing so, that will likely add to 3pp struggles, since I doubt Wizards will be inclined to promote 3pp on their platforms. (3pp might want to consider partnerships with Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds...)

This is wholly irrelevant, IMO. It doesn’t present a difficulty for 3pp in publishing new options or handling thier older products.

I think of D&D in general as Half A War Game. It's definitely not a full war game, but war gaming is so baked into the DNA of D&D that it saturates and influences how the game even approaches challenges. Compared to games like Fate, Monsterhearts, World of Darkness, etc, going back to D&D really feels like wading knee deep back into war gaming.

I can kinda see it, but to me 4e was just…organized and rational? Like sure it made strong use of maps, but it ran fine ToTM, and idk we just didn’t play it in a way that lent to war game style thinking, pretty much ever, I guess.

We certainly spent less time in combat and more time exploring and interacting, compared to 3.5 play (or Star Wars revised core rules, which I played vastly more than 3.5 D&D, because my friends loved that game somehow). To me, 4e was D&D taken and rewritten as a well built game finally.

I certainly wanted a simpler version by the end, and even essentials still had most of what I wanted to hack out of the game, but it had such excellent lore, so bloody much of it, and really solid out of combat mechanics (IMO skill challenges ran fine if you just weren’t a stickler about them) and evocative combat abilities that helped us see our characters 3-dimensionally.

If anything 3.5 felt more like a war game to me, because I always felt obligated, by an extremely unbalanced game with hidden win buttons and trap options, to optimize and strategize everything.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Tabletop and videogame RPGs are different. The paper-printed version needs time to update the rules to reach a better power balance, but videogame in internet age only needs a new patch after some weeks or months. And the digital market moves a lot of money, but also there are a lot of rivals fightings to get enough number of players who pay to buy the DLCs.

In the comingsoon videogame Baldur's Gate III the rules about ranger' favored enemy had to be altered. I suspect the videogame experencie affected very much the design of next editions.

The online D&D offers the option to show new suggestion, but also there is a lot of feedback and work for the game designers. For example? The return of the monster-templates, or playtesting of new class with special game mechanic (psionic, incarnum, ki martial maneuvers, pact magic with vestiges, shadow mysteries..). Or a module about creating an army, building a stronghold, or managing a spelljammer trade company.

The transition of edition may a true headache for 3PPs if these are more focused into crunch than fluff(lore+background). I wonder if some 3PP may be willing to talk with Hasbro to licence their IP into a merchandising product (toy, animated serie or videogame for example).

 

[dave2008]

Changing monster statblocking, changing subclasses to match the rewritten classes. That's a lot right there.

But you don't have to make those changes. In fact, many 3PP monsters don't follow the current or future statblock format and they work great. LevelUp monsters have their own format and work just great with O5e and will work with '24 5e (from everything we know so far). I even asked Morrus about the statblock changes previewed he said they had no plans to change the levelUp format and didn't see a need to. MCDM's "Flee Mortals" had a $2 million kickstarter and they will use their own statblock that doesn't match current ones or future ones and are expected to be used with both. I think you are vastly overstating the need, and effort, to make statblock changes.

Now classes I think will be in the similar boat (can't be sure yet), but I think there will be more "pressure" to follow the new format. However, I don't see how writing to the new format will be more difficult than writing to the old one. It may be even easier. Now if your talking about a transitional product, a 3PP may need to revise a subclass or class to follow the '24 standard. That doesn't seem like it will be a lot of work yet, but it is hard to know, and it should just be a one time thing.

 

[dave2008]

So I'm a masochist and spent the time to bring up the Next Design Goals documents. They were in the Legends and Lore area of the WorC site. You can view them all here.

But more specifically the modularity bits are found in Part 4 (Advanced Rules) directly found here.

Its not unreasonable to have assumed that 5e was going to have "advanced" and "modular" rules added to the game based on this roadmap of the project.

Thank you! I spent way to much time on the way-back-machine looking through the Next blogs and I couldn't find much (just the links I provided). Your link is gold!

It is clear they where think about modularity, but it was never promised. Even the title of the post is specifically about "goals." We don't always make or goals and goals change. However, I think how Mike ends the post is interesting:

"It's a big list, and probably more than we can fit into what we hope to provide. At the end of the day, the advanced rules are likely to be more of an ethos or an attitude that casts the DM as a game designer who can alter the mechanics or add to them to suit the specific needs of a campaign."

I feel that what Mike is suggesting here is what they delivered. It was just not what people conjured in their minds when WotC mentioned modules / modularity.

 

[dave2008]

The promises of 5e were delivered in a three part Design Diary series hosted on the WotC website, but since taken down. I have found links to them in the not to distant past but it takes awhile and is difficult to do on my phone. They were not a simple personal blog statement made privately.

So, on the surface, the promise of modularity in Next is very similar in timing and general concept to our current promise of backwards compatibility or not-an-edition-change.

A quick Google turns up this EnWorld thread from 2 playtest packets into the Next era. It's as close to the same point in lifecycle as I can get to this conversations timing today. See what people thought about modularity back then.

Were people's expectations of "Modularity" set a little too high?

We still have the play experience of /all/ editions, and the individual experience in the hands of the players. Modules that are nothing more than pre-made house rules for the DM to aren't exactly in the players' hands, are they? Sure they are. Give a cook a pantry full of ingredients, and...

www.enworld.org

I think my response to your previous post was sufficient. I still believe my stance was correct that it was not promised, but it was discussed more than I remembered. As I noted in your other post I believe Mike believes they delivered what they where think of as modularity, even if it was not what we were thinking.

 

[Maxperson]

The MMO reference is pretty clearly pointing to player characters and thier abilities, things like special class features that enforce a “role”, “tanks” being “sticky”, etc.

And encounter and daily powers do resemble clickies with recharge timers.

The ideas that the classes are the same, or that the superficial similarity makes 4e a tabletop MMO, are laughable, however.

They didn't make 4e an MMO, but the character class set up did feel video gamey to me. It was one of the things I disliked about 4e. Now 4e also did things that I liked, but overall the dislikes were numerous enough to make me avoid the edition, because I would have to rework too much of it to make it worthwhile to switch from 3e.

 

[Parmandur]

Always confused me when people said 4e was a war game. I hate those games. I find them painfully dull. But 4e? Fantastic.

I mean, it's a good wargame, do that makes sense.

Note that WotC still put out new 4E rules D&D Adventure board games into the 20's.

 

[Maxperson]

since I don't play any MMOs I can't say, but I will say 4e seemed to me to be a lot like making a 2e character

I don't understand this. Could you explain further?

To me making a 2e character outside of a spellcaster involved no real choices. If you made a rogue, your backstab and thief abilities were set. A fighter just attacked. A paladin had his 1st level set paladin abilities. There was no selection of powers like 4e had.

 

[darjr]

I mean, it's a good wargame, do that makes sense.

Note that WotC still put out new 4E rules D&D Adventure board games into the 20's.

WizKids now. Latest was an expansion for Ghosts of Saltmarsh.