D&D 5E D&D Head Talks Future Plans (Sort Of)

WotC has launched a new design blog. The first edition is written by D&D head Ray Winninger, and he talks a little about future plans.

"Later in the year, Chris will return with our big summer adventure, James Wyatt will deliver a substantially improved version of a concept that I initiated myself, and Amanda Hamon will close us out with a project that was jointly conceived by herself and several other studio members. As usual, Jeremy Crawford is working with all of our leads, overseeing mechanical content and rules development.

In addition to these five major products, look for a couple of additional surprises we’ll unveil in the months ahead."

You can read the full blog here:

Who We Are & What We Do | D&D Studio Blog | Dungeons & Dragons

The first of many design blogs, direct from your friends at the Dungeons & Dragons Studio!

dnd.wizards.com

He also mentions that a D&D book takes 12-14 months to make, and half the projects developed don't make it to market. Winninger describes the structure of WotC's 'D&D Studio':

"The D&D Studio itself is organized into four departments: Game Design, Art, Production, and Product Management, each led by a department head. Game Design is responsible for the developing game mechanics and stories. Art establishes the “look and feel” of Dungeons & Dragons by creating visual concepts, directing our freelance illustrators, and creating innovative graphic designs. The Production department manages our project schedules, interfaces with manufacturing experts, and generally handles administrative matters for the studio. The Product Management department interfaces with sales, marketing, and market research. They also own our long-term product roadmap and look after the D&D business."

The studio has five Product Leads: Jeremy Crawford, Amanda Hamon, Chris Perkins, Wes Schneider, and James Wyatt.

 

[Parmandur]

I would say that it goes deeper than that.

Going back to OD&D and 1e, a fundamental problem with psionics was this- if the system was "tacked on" and not part of the core mechanics, it became difficult to adjudicate how it interacted with everything else. The modules weren't written with psionics in mind. The monsters, largely, weren't written with psionics in mind (with a few exceptions). The classes and magic items weren't written with psionics in mind. A psionic character could often be either overly powerful (because that character wasn't considered) or overly weak (because, again, that character wasn't considered).

The 5e system, moreso than any other version of D&D that I can think of, is largely built on spell-equivalency. Magic items are expressed, often, in terms of spells. Abilities for classes are often expressed in terms of spells (or can be traded, such as smite). Most of the classes are either spell-casters or have a spell-casting subclass.

While I think that having a psionics system completely separate from spells would be awesome, and that the original Mystic was a mighty fine class (maybe too fine- it needed some tinkering), I can understand why they would choose to make psionics into, well, pretty much more spells.

They go into it a bit in the DMG, but Mike Mearls really spelled out on his old Happy Fun Hour show that the basic unit of measurement in 5E is hit points: Spell slots are worth a given amount of hit points (there's a table in the DMG that gives the numbers), and that is how they judge Class abilities and Feats as well.

 

[dave2008]

It can be unbalanced easily, especially if you allow burning all your points on you highest level spells. Seven 1st-level spells are not equivalent to one 7th-level spell.

There is a spell point variant in the DMG which is pretty well balanced, if more versatile.

 

[imagineGod]

So does all this mean we get Mystara for 5th Edition?

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

At a seminar at Origins some years back, Chris Perkins talked about developing a cosmic horror campaign that involved mind flayers beaming mind control rays from nautiloids in space. It got dropped because design-wise, they had trouble with the lethality of that many mind flayers.

This interests me. What have they pulled the plug on??

I miss the official forums. There was some good discussion there. The official FB page just isn't the same.

I still remember the good days when WotC still had a forum and you could talk to them there too. This site gained a lot of new regular members when those forums were killed off.

 

[Mercurius]

Isn't the whole point of psionics to provide an optional and different type of "magic" from arcane and divine? What is the point of having "psionic wizards"? I mean, they could just be a different sub-class of sorcerer, say "mind sorcerer," reskinned and with one or two unique bells and whistles.

To call what is essentially a reskinned wizard a psion or mystic does a disservice to the tradition of psionics in D&D.

 

[Parmandur]

Isn't the whole point of psionics to provide an optional and different type of "magic" from arcane and divine? What is the point of having "psionic wizards"? I mean, they could just be a different sub-class of sorcerer, say "mind sorcerer," reskinned and with one or two unique bells and whistles.

To call what is essentially a reskinned wizard a psion or mystic does a disservice to the tradition of psionics in D&D.

No, the point is to simulate psionic powers from weird fiction. In that fiction, the line between Psionics and magic is thin, and psionic wizards are decently represented in fiction. WotC found through testing that people overwhelmingly did not want a separate mechanical system for this narrative distinction. Hence, Psionics as they are in Tasha's Cauldron.

 

[Mercurius]

No, the point is to simulate psionic powers from weird fiction. In that fiction, the line between Psionics and magic is thin, and psionic wizards are decently represented in fiction. WotC found through testing that people overwhelmingly did not want a separate mechanical system for this narrative distinction. Hence, Psionics as they are in Tasha's Cauldron.

Right, and there's room to disagree with popular opinion. I'm not going to protest or anything, but I personally prefer a different sub-system of psionics and find the Tasha's version to not go far enough (it isn't horrible, though, just not "psionic-y" enough. imo).

While I generally feel that rules are meant to serve the fiction, and anything can be reskinned, I do think that rules impact the fiction in a significant enough way. A good example would be powers in 4E; they worked nicely from a rules perspective, but contributed to the "samey" feel of classes, which was one of the main criticisms of 4E. Part of what made psionics different and unique is the alternate system (in a similar sense, some have argued that sorcerers aren't different enough from wizards).

That said, I do like the feats approach, which harkens back to 1E a bit.

EDIT: I would also add that the Tasha's version doesn't negate the possibility of a different psion/mystic class. Who knows, maybe they'll make a Dark Sun specific one like the Artificer for Eberron.

 

[Mercurius]

You could be right but I suspect people are only going to buy what they are interested in, unless they are a collector or feel they can repurpose the products content. I don't think someone's going to buy a Ravenloft or Dragonlance book if its no use to them regardless what's coming out next, or later in the year. Personally I really liked when they came out with their annual product catalogs and even planned my games around it sometimes.

I'm sure WotC has done their market research and deemed their current approach to best serve the (economic) bottom line. But yeah, I miss those catalogs too, as well as the print version of Dragon, and 32-page models, and metal miniatures, and...

Or it could be that they have a masochistic streak and just like watching us endlessly speculate...

 

[Nellisir]

Interesting stuff. It's nice to see a bit more of a voice coming out of WotC after years of pretty much complete silence engaging with fans.

Anyone else remember the days when you could actually talk to someone who currently worked at WotC here on En World? I miss that.

I had some excellent conversations with Roger Moore on the AOL boards. The whole reason I got my first modem was to connect with the TSR people on AOL (spoiler: it worked, briefly. I got one article accepted into Dragon and two (three?) rejections. (One went through three different commentators. SO. MUCH. RED. INK.)

Then 3e was announced and I was two years away from learning it with any degree of familiarity. Ironically, they made the announcement at the same time, and the same Gen Con, that my article was in Dragon. Definite mixed feelings.

It does worry me that my check from that article would still be a pretty good check today.

 

[Nellisir]

My ears are burning.

Yeah, I'm one of those. If you're going to add psionics to the game, which I really don't feel it needs or fits, then a most minimal implementation will always get my vote. I have zero interest in classes where I have a player at the table playing a completely different game than everyone else. Nor do I have any interest in learning the mechanics of such a game. So, it either has to fit with existing classes or I'd rather it wasn't there at all and let DM's Guild handle it.

I mean, I can't have a warlord class and that's nowhere near as disruptive to the game as adding psionics which affects PC's, monsters and a host of other things. So, adding in a whole new mini-game just to add something that I don't even want in the first place is never going to get my vote.

I had this exact conversation yesterday. Psionics has pretty much always been an all-or-nothing buy-in. You can't have just ONE psionic character; nothing is set up for it and it's a whole different system of doing [weird unnatural stuff].

Plus, I run a pretty cliché medieval fantasy campaign setting. I can handle some occasional weird mind powers, but full-on psionics in the same campaign just isn't to my taste.