Taylor Navarro Joins Wizards of the Coast as D&D Designer

Wizards of the Coast has hired yet another D&D game designer - this time UK-based designer Taylor Navarro. Navarro announced that she was joining the D&D team this week on BlueSky. Navarro notably was a winner of the Diana Jones Emerging Designer Award back in 2024 and has worked for Ghostfire Gaming and Evil Hat in addition to working on several DMs Guild projects. Some of her most notable works was contributing to the DMs Guild publication Journeys Beyond the Radiant Citadel and publishing Not Yet: A Romantic Duet TTRPG.

Navarro is the fourth D&D game designer to join Wizards of the Coast in recent weeks, with James Haeck, Leon Barillaro, and Erin Roberts also announcing that they've joined D&D in a similar game designer capacity. Additionally, Justice Ramin Arman was promoted to Game Design Director of the group.

 

[Charlaquin]

Personally, I thought the last season was fine. Not great, not terrible, but inoffensive and entertaining enough for what it is. Which is exactly what I went in expecting. I think there were a lot of folks who had much higher expectations for it and were let down.

 

[mamba]

Oh, I’ve seen an absolute ton of critique of 5. The constant exposition, the degradation of the stakes, the poor use of the characters, the lack of consequences for basically anything…

not sure about degradation of stakes, wasn’t it basically the world ending…

My main critque is that it all went far too all out superheroes, we started with a teenager with some psychic powers and ended with Thanos

Also, RE: Will being gay, that’s been heavily implied since the first season (though, leave it to homophobes to utterly fail to pick up on even the most obvious queer subtext).

yeah, that didn’t really come as a surprise

 

[TwoSix]

You don't have to unsell me on it; I already hated it.

Stranger Things is a bit like D&D; there are quite a few different flavors, and the one you love is almost certainly the one someone else hates.

 

[Reynard]

Personally, I thought the last season was fine. Not great, not terrible, but inoffensive and entertaining enough for what it is. Which is exactly what I went in expecting. I think there were a lot of folks who had much higher expectations for it and were let down.

Season 4 was such an improvement over the previous 2, I sort of figured we would see at least that level of quality in 5. But in the end, it was a vain hope; television shows, especially ones that are fandom phenoms, rarely stick the landing.

It is one of those shows that would have been better left a single season/limited series.

 

[HatWearingFool]

That is... huh.
Glad you liked it, I guess.

It was one of my favourite as well. To me the second season was by far the weakest.

I’d go 4,3 & 1,5,2 for my ranking but 2 was waaaay behind the others for me. I almost stopped watching after the second season.

 

[HatWearingFool]

Personally, I thought the last season was fine. Not great, not terrible, but inoffensive and entertaining enough for what it is. Which is exactly what I went in expecting. I think there were a lot of folks who had much higher expectations for it and were let down.

There was no way the finale could possible live up to expectations.

 

[TwoSix]

It is one of those shows that would have been better left a single season/limited series.

Nah. Each season drop was a mini-event in and of itself, and the season 5 drop was the closest thing we get to a water-cooler event in our fragmented culture.

Those moments are worth more than the actual show itself.

 

[Zardnaar]

It was also a time when a lot of brands were trying to reinvent themselves. Something was in the air between the turn of the millennium and the emerging financial crisis, and a lot of popular brands attempted big reboots that didn’t end up working out for them. The exact same thing happened with “new” (at the time) World of Darkness. If I recall correctly that was also when Magic the Gathering changed the card frame for the first time, although that change stuck better.

4e added crunch? Compared to 3.5e? Uh, no lol. It was actually highly streamlined in comparison, and that was one of the major critiques of it at the time - that it was “dumbing down” the game. Slow combats had more to do with inflated monster HP than mechanical crunch.

I remember during the D&D Next playtest, there were a lot of folks hoping 5e would bring back the crunch. I remember complaints about things like Advantage/Disadvantage and the unification of proficiency bonus progression not leaving enough room for “fiddly little differences” that at least some people viewed as something 4e had been missing! Fortunately, @mearls knew what he was doing and dismissed those requests, to the betterment of the edition.

Yeah people who want more crunch are a small minority.

A the biggest selling D&Ds are a comparatively simple ones. 5.0, Basic line then 1E (layouts terrible its comparatively simple however)

I think ship has sailed on more complex D&Ds for a generation at least.

DM shortage. Won't be helped by more complex D&D. The comparatively few DMs who can do it probably want paid or getting older and want easier to run.

 

[Reynard]

There was no way the finale could possible live up to expectations.

No, but it could still have been, you know, good.

 

[Zardnaar]

The difference between online discourse and the playtest results was mindboggling. I believe that people who are very online about TTRPGs are engaged in a different hobby compared to people who play weekly.

I had this suspicion 2002. Online 3E discussion was mostly theorycrafting. Casuals were playing it much the same as 2E imho.