D&D 5E Kate Welch on Leaving WotC

Charlaquin said:

It can be hard to step outside of our perspectives as long-time fans, but D&D is an extremely intimidating game for a lot of people, and it doesn’t do a good job of making itself approachable.

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I've been playing for well over 30 years so you are right, its been so long I don't even remember what is was like learning the game, and I watched people play before I learned and that helped.

Charlaquin said:

It’s a shame WotC is losing someone who recognizes that and was working to try and address the problem.

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Reading her statement I get the impression that she may have been pushing to solve this issue and if it was rebuffed by her superiors she may have left as the job was no longer fulfilling for her. No one wants to stay in a job were their ideas are dismissed and fall on deaf ears. I've had jobs where this was the situations and it didnt take long before I questioned why I was even working there.

R_J_K75 said:

D&D, even 5E is a complicated game. Could the core books be laid out better, absolutely but its never going to be a game that one can pick up and play in 15 minutes. How exactly would you suggest they make it more accessible to players?

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1. The very first thing I'd present to a new player would be a pre-generated character. Meet Becky the Fighter Lady and her sidekick Ralph the Religious Dude. She's a pretty strong lady and she's got this cool sword that she can do rad things with. Here, we'll show you.

2. A scripted combat against a, I don't know, goblin or whatever. Here's a map. Becky's here, Goblinface is there. Roll your d20 and add that +1 next to Becky's Initiative entry. Did you beat Goblinface's initiative of 6? Congrats, you go first! Make a basic attack. Don't worry, we'll teach you next round how to use those cool things that Becky knows how to do. We gotta teach you a basic one, first. OK, now it's Goblinface's turn. He's going to try to stab you back but look, Becky has this neat thing she can do to stop it. Moving on to Ralph, he's got this spell called sacred flame and here's how it works...

3. Hooray, you defeated Goblinface! Now, here's a short, scripted roleplay encounter with Goblinface's heartbroken mother who was in the next room. Maybe something similar to conversation trees in a Bioware game, just enough to teach a few social skill checks.

4. Wasn't that fun? Now that you get the basics of combat, you can head on over to chapter Whatever to learn about some of the more advanced options available. If you'd like to see the other things Becky can learn, read about fighters starting on page This.

And then, yes, a massive overhaul of the core books. They are written like reference books (well, reference books with a really bad indexing system), which is great when you already know how to play. The books should start with the simple, basic concepts, and add complexity from there. Not start out with a billion character options before you've even been taught what a reaction is.

vincegetorix said:

Have basic rules for Dming in the ''main book''. Have the players learn about dming while reading about the players options, dont make them buy a whole other book just for the one that will ''play the bad guys''. The Dm is also a player.

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matskralc said:

And then, yes, a massive overhaul of the core books.

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Agreed. I think that they should have a walk thru example at the beginning of every chapter, and make things easier to find. I hate having to flip back and forth though a bunch of sections to find what I'm looking for. I would definitely be perfectly fine with paying more money for the PHB and DMG to be one book and the MM to be another. Perhaps the (3) core rule book model is outdated and based on the old premise that if youre a player the DMG is off limits. I also believe this is why most players are dont want to DM. Even if they made the PHB and DMG one book, the information should be grouped by chapter, not heres the PHB information in the first half of the book and the DMG in the second half.

QuentinGeorge said:

I think we're all too accustomed to D&D to understand that for most people, a game that requires you to learn the rules in 3 large hardcover books seems unusual to people as compared to a board game with a 5-page rule pamphlet (which is still too much for some people).

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Agreed. I mean, hell, I'm not going to put in that much work to learn a new game. D&D is grandfathered in because I learned it 30 years ago and I can draw on that framework of knowledge for each new edition.

Once in a while, I might try out a new RPG, but again, I can draw on my D&D framework. I understand how to zero in on the bits of the rulebook that i need to get started. And even so, I am unlikely to do so unless I see a clear case right away for why the new RPG is superior to what I've got. The design of most RPGs is piss-poor; I do not have so much gaming time that it's worth it to spend hours sifting garbage in search of gems.

And for a totally new game, with a giant book o' rules, where I have to learn not just the rules but the whole framework from scratch? Hard no.

matskralc said:

I'm puzzled as to why there would be any resistance towards making the game more accessible to new players.

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I am sorry to see Ms. Welch go as well, but it is nice to see a thoughtful forum here where people are trying to work out what she means by "new user experience" being "poor" in a spirit of relative positiveness.

I would say that, having read all of the comments here, I do not come away with the impression that there is "resistance" per se to Welch's comments, simply that many of those commenting (including myself) are not able to imagine precisely what she has in mind for a better experience. The comment from Matskralc wrote about how playing the game could teach the game to a player is interesting, but I have a failure of imagination to picture what that would mean. Without hearing what specific suggestion(s) Welch would have liked to implement, I do not know how to improve the new user experience.

This is not to invalidate Matskralc's experience with his fiancé's barrier to learning the game. It would be great if everyone who had an inkling to play the game could instantly learn it...but my experience has been that the "work" to learn the game is fun. I taught my daughter the game when she was seven and we had a blast playing it with simply me DM-ing her in one-player sessions. I took her to a local game shop and we played in Adventures League when she was almost eight and I was a bit unsure how that would go and everyone was very supportive and encouraging of her and we had a great time. When she was nine and her best friend wanted to play, I bought the Essentials Kit for $15 and gave its book on player creation to her and her dad (who was clueless about D&D) to read and then had them over for a zero sessions where we made characters and then we took off and played and had a great time. To them (and me) it is simply "make-believe" with some rules to handle uncertain events.

It would be awesome if there are more ways to lower the barrier to learning the game. I am not resistant to that at all. I simply think, Matskralc, what you are detecting here is that many people are puzzled as to what precisely Welch means, simply because many have found that this is a terrific time to learn the game as a "new user." It sounds like others have not had that experience. But, without being able to imagine what Welch wanted to do that was (presumably) rejected, we are all left to fall back to our experiences. And, given that there has been a vast influx of new "users" (I would prefer the term "players") in the last six years, many people have had the experience of seeing and hearing about many new players start playing.

I do not know what other RPGs have a superior way of introducing new players to the game? I was intrigued by Monte Cook's No Thank You, Evil, but I have not purchased it, so I do not know specifics about how it goes about teaching the game.

So, I'm guessing the experience of putting together the Rick & Morty Starter put a new in her bonnet to refurbish the onramp process for the game, hence the new position. And then that probably led to a bunch of hitting her head against the brick wall of resistance to change.

Hope she does well with whatever is next.

This might be nostalgia speaking, but I have a very fond memory of the "Mentzer" Red Box Basic Set. It really takes you by hand, introducing new concepts (such as to hit roll, damage roll, saving throw, different ability scores, etc.) one a time and makes you participate in a sort of guided adventure. After that, there is a choose your own path adventure further helping to get into the game. I managed to teach myself quite well with it when I was 12 years old and had no one to teach me or explain the game to me.

Parmandur said:

...refurbish the onramp process for the game, hence the new position. And then that probably led to a bunch of hitting her head against the brick wall of resistance to change.

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I've seen this so many times over the years in companies I've worked for, or just the opposite. On one hand companies have the old guard mentality "That's the way we've always done it, why change now" more times than I care to remember. You're the new hire, who are you to tell us were doing things wrong and should change. On the opposite end I've also seen a group of managers decide on a change, implement it in a knee jerk reaction and not giving much thought to the consequences.

I really don’t think she’s saying that the bad new-user experience was a reason for her to quit. She’s saying it was one of the things she was hoping to have an impact on while working there. Maybe you could read between the lines and conclude that the fact she wasn’t permitted to improve that experience in the ways she wanted to is related to a reason for quitting (feeing stymied in her goals for changing the game or the game products). But that may or may not be accurate.

Really all she says here about her motivations for quitting are: she wasn’t having fun; she concluded the job wasn’t a good fit for her. Those would both be true about almost anyone who quit any job ever without having another job lined up.

Maybe you could also infer that she was feeling: constrained by WotC’s refusal to condone employees’ public participation with competing products; dissatisfied with having too much of her professional identity tied up with the brand. (This last one reminds me of actors who walk away from successful recurring roles for fear of being typecast—which doesn’t mean it’s not a rational motivation for them, but honestly it’s kind of hard to imagine it being a major decision factor for her under these circumstances.) Neither of these seems likely to be a really strong motivator for such a move.

At any rate, whatever specific details motivated her decision, I’m not sure this interview clarifies much.

Nikosandros said:

This might be nostalgia speaking, but I have a very fond memory of the "Mentzer" Red Box Basic Set. It really takes you by hand, introducing new concepts (such as to hit roll, damage roll, saving throw, different ability scores, etc.) one a time and makes you participate in a sort of guided adventure. After that, there is a choose your own path adventure further helping to get into the game. I managed to teach myself quite well with it when I was 12 years old and had no one to teach me or explain the game to me.

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Agreed. The Choose Your Own Adventure model really works for learning a new RPG. The new Call of Cthulhu box set does this, including step-by-step character creation, and it's really quite nice.

Why D&D moved away from it is a little beyond me.