Justice Ramin Arman Promoted to Game Design Director of Dungeons & Dragons

Arman now leads the D&D design group.
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Game designer Justice Ramin Arman has been internally promoted to the position of Game Design Director for Dungeons & Dragons. Arman announced the news yesterday over on Linkedin, and later specified what the role entails over on Discord. As Game Design Director, Arman will be responsible for directing the game design department as a whole. Previously, Arman was a Managing Game Director, which was a leadership position but not one placed in charge of the entire D&D department.

Arman has worked for Wizards of the Coast since 2022 and has led several projects, including the most recent Starter Set and Quests From the Infinite Staircase. Prior to that, he worked as a game designer for Beadle and Grimm's.

Several months ago, Wizards of the Coast announced that they were hiring a principal game designer for Dungeons & Dragons, seemingly to replace Jeremy Crawford (who left Wizards earlier this year), so it appears that Arman is stepping into that role at least in some fashion.

In a statement provided to EN World, a Wizards representative noted that they are thrilled to see Justice continue his great work with D&D.
 
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Christian Hoffer
Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer is a veteran tabletop journalist and Forever DM. His non-tabletop hobbies include Pokemon, Ohio sports, and building miniatures.

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I don't think I'd call Ravenloft in 5E watered down. Certainly the nature of some of the domains of dread have changed, but they're still broadly horrific.

That said, I do think there's a risk that, in the interest of making a safer product, some of the edge will be sanded off Dark Sun... no pun intended. Hopefully it's just a more thoughtful take rather than toothlessly banal.
 

Sometimes you just have to trust your customers to deal maturely with mature topics and ignore those that jump up and down and carry on about what you can and cannot have in a roleplay game setting.
 

I mean I don't think customers were ever the issue with Dark Sun. It was always internal resistance to the setting as expressed by Kyle Brink or whoever he was speaking on behalf of.

Which, to be fair to him... the setting has thoughtlessly presented some very thorny topics in the 2E and 4E iterations. They're right to be careful, especially after the carelessness of the hadozee lore in Spelljammer.
 

Chaltab said:
I don't think I'd call Ravenloft in 5E watered down. Certainly the nature of some of the domains of dread have changed, but they're still broadly horrific.

That said, I do think there's a risk that, in the interest of making a safer product, some of the edge will be sanded off Dark Sun... no pun intended. Hopefully it's just a more thoughtful take rather than toothlessly banal.
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Cozy rpg Ravenloft alone makes it ,"watered down" because instead of providing the gm with optional sidebars for testing/recovery changes spell/ability changes and so on to fit the themes and tropes of Ravenloft it throws that at the gm and tells them to just do it to player abilities when the book itself should be doing significant lifting first.
 
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Chaltab said:
I don't think I'd call Ravenloft in 5E watered down. Certainly the nature of some of the domains of dread have changed, but they're still broadly horrific.
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VGR is a much better "telling horror stories in D&D" book than the 2nd edition boxed set ever was.
Chaltab said:
That said, I do think there's a risk that, in the interest of making a safer product, some of the edge will be sanded off Dark Sun... no pun intended. Hopefully it's just a more thoughtful take rather than toothlessly banal.
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If done well, it could be edgier, with environmentalism and totalitarianism far more topical than at the original time of writing. But I expect less nudity and racism.
 

Pathfinder handles these and similarly difficult topics in their base game. There are fiends of self harm and trauma and one of the main deities is the goddess of kink complete with temples that double as sex clubs. When introducing a potentially difficult subject they put down a sidebar to remind GMs to check with players before using it and why it's important to do so.
 

Incenjucar said:
Pathfinder handles these and similarly difficult topics in their base game. There are fiends of self harm and trauma and one of the main deities is the goddess of kink complete with temples that double as sex clubs. When introducing a potentially difficult subject they put down a sidebar to remind GMs to check with players before using it and why it's important to do so.
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There are like multiple goddesses of kink in Forgotten Realms. It's kind of baffling that they never retconned the literal BDSM goddess (named after a real Finnish one who had nothing to do with leather) out of the setting with the spellplague.
 



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