Jeremy Crawford Also Leaving D&D Team Later This Month

Jeremy Crawford is leaving Wizards of the Coast later this month. Screen Rant (via me!) had the exclusive announcement. Crawford was the Game Director for Dungeons & Dragons and was one of the guiding forces for D&D over the past decade. In the past year, Crawford has focused on the core rulebooks and leading the team of rules designers. He has also been a face of Dungeons & Dragons for much of 5th Edition, appearing in many promotional videos and DMing Acquisitions Incorporated Actual Play series.

He joins Chris Perkins in leaving the D&D team in recent weeks. Perkins, who was the Creative Director for D&D, announced his retirement last week. Both Perkins and Crawford appear to have left Wizards on their terms, with Lanzillo very effusive with her praise of both men and their contribution in our interview.

On a personal note, I've enjoyed interviewing Jeremy over the years. He was always gracious with his time and answers and is one of the most eloquent people I've ever heard talk about D&D. I'll miss both him and Chris Perkins and look forward to their next steps, wherever that might be.

 

[Dire Bare]

This is the point. True quality and innovation doesn't care about target customers and market research. Make something you personally think is f'ing cool, commit to it fully, and hope people like it.

Making something you think is cool without concern for market research and such . . . is passion. Which is a good ingredient to have in an RPG product, but does not necessarily equate to quality or innovation.

 

[SteveC]

I never heard any prognosis from WotC, nor have I seen any actual sales numbers. What I have heard is that they are the fastest selling, I do not doubt that, anything else would be a major failure, but that leaves a wide range

Indeed. They definitely listed the PHB as the fastest-selling product ever, and called the PHB the fastest-selling book in a call to investors. But that was last quarter. Nothing was mentioned at all in the latest report, which tells me things must have slowed. Having been involved with many of these productions behind the scenes in a different industry, you mention any good news you have.

Who knows what the next quarter will bring, but I believe their next scheduled release is the dragon adventures book in July. So probably steady at best.

 

[Dire Bare]

So you figure that a company should ignore what fans expressly tell them so they can publish something “innovative “ which just happens to be what you want. And WotC listening to fans is only due to corporate oversight.

Yeah I’m going to stand pat on “innovative is stuff I like”.

I'm with you mostly, but . . .

There is something to giving fans what they didn't know they wanted.

Nobody wanted D&D in 1973. But Gygax and Arneson created lightning in a bottle and an entire hobby and industry was born.

Admittedly, that's hard to do. Harder to replicate.

I do think WotC is wise to do marketing research and listen to their fans when designing products . . . but every once in a while, I wouldn't mind if the D&D team tried something they thought was cool, even if less than 70% of survey respondents gave it a thumbs up.

 

[Dire Bare]

No, I'm saying that if you want to buy games that are labors of love and are by creators who wrote what they wanted to write, you should go for indie and small press games.

If you want to buy games where financial matters are in charge of what does and doesn't get written, stick to larger companies.

I feel like you keep making this a binary . . . either we have indie games created out of pure passion, or corporate games driven solely by the need for profit.

I would argue that indie games, corporate games, and everything in between have both of these as factors. You're more likely to get a passion-driven project from an indie designer, but that does not mean they also don't have an eye towards making a little bit of money and meeting an existing fan need/want. Corporate projects, like each official D&D book, lean more heavily on the side of, "How does this support the D&D franchise's profit and growth?", but that doesn't mean that passion, creativity, ingenuity, and innovation aren't poured into those projects. It's a balance, and the balance isn't always passion over profits for indie designers or the reverse for corporate designers.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I feel like you keep making this a binary . . . either we have indie games created out of pure passion, or corporate games driven solely by the need for profit.

I would argue that indie games, corporate games, and everything in between have both of these as factors. You're more likely to get a passion-driven project from an indie designer, but that does not mean they also don't have an eye towards making a little bit of money and meeting an existing fan need/want. Corporate projects, like each official D&D book, lean more heavily on the side of, "How does this support the D&D franchise's profit and growth?", but that doesn't mean that passion, creativity, ingenuity, and innovation aren't poured into those projects. It's a balance, and the balance isn't always passion over profits for indie designers or the reverse for corporate designers.

I get where you're coming from here, but I think this is more binary than you're really accounting for, because there's such a gigantic gap between WotC and smaller RPG companies, and most people making RPGs are absolutely tiny.

WotC is making hundreds of millions, and is part of corporation, which is turn owned by another, much greedier and more heartless corporation which directly intervenes in WotC affairs.

Paizo have a revenue of like $35m on a very good year, and they're not a corporation and whilst obviously making money is of concern to them - as it is to everyone, it's not influencing their decisions in the same way it does for WotC, because they're simply not the same kind of business in real terms.

I do think WotC is wise to do marketing research and listen to their fans when designing products . . . but every once in a while, I wouldn't mind if the D&D team tried something they thought was cool, even if less than 70% of survey respondents gave it a thumbs up.

The 70% rule is absolutely arbitrary. It's not some fundamental principle of good business, tested through decades. It's something Mearls (I think) made up, as arbitrary threshold, when he and the rest were under huge time pressure to get DND Next out the door. So not ignoring at times isn't "good business" it's in fact kind of cultic/ritual behaviour. Cargo cult-y even.

 

[mamba]

I'm with you mostly, but . . .

eh, do you think the people that did not like 4e did not find it innovative? There is no relation between the two

I do think WotC is wise to do marketing research and listen to their fans when designing products . . . but every once in a while, I wouldn't mind if the D&D team tried something they thought was cool, even if less than 70% of survey respondents gave it a thumbs up.

same. I can understand not making a change the majority disapproves of, but something new plays by different rules

 

[Argyle King]

4E got started even earlier than that. Page 8 of Wizards Presents: Races and Classes (affiliate link) says:



Despite ending on a joke, the next entry notes that the first instances of "design workshop" began in May of 2005.

I vaguely remember that from discussions that were on the WoTC boards at the time.

 

[soviet]

Making something you think is cool without concern for market research and such . . . is passion. Which is a good ingredient to have in an RPG product, but does not necessarily equate to quality or innovation.

Obviously. But I think it's more likely to lead to quality and innovation than some milquetoast 'give them what we think they like' approach.

 

[Argyle King]

when they started working on it and when they announced it are not the same thing. I doubt they have been taking the first steps towards a 6e in parallel to working on 5.5


guess we will see, to me the reason for WotC wanting a radical change would be the sales tanking drastically, that was always the reason in the past. I don't think 5.5 is meeting expectations, but I am not seeing it tanking to that point already either.

I don't believe it's "tanking."

However, I am inclined to believe that a future vision for what the game (and brand) should be (in the eyes of the corporation) may be different than the current iteration of the game.

There may also be a position that the certain mentality and sentiments involved in crafting 5.5 are no longer en vogue.

 

[Dire Bare]

Obviously. But I think it's more likely to lead to quality and innovation than some milquetoast 'give them what we think they like' approach.

More likely? Not in my experience.

I've stumbled across some passion projects that are incredibly cool, innovative, and of high quality. (I really like Rowan, Rook, & Decard's Spire and Heart product lines) But I've also experienced much more indie passion projects that leave me shrugging, "Meh."

YMMV, of course.