WotC How new Wizards of the Coast head John Hight turned around World of Warcraft

[dbm]

But . . . offering full support for classic books could build customer confidence in purchasing NEW books on D&D Beyond. We've had folks in this thread still salty (rightly so) about losing access to their 4E digital investment, this pushback would (mostly) disappear.

I think that’s a good point and perhaps a way to directly apply the experience described in the article to D&D. Make Beyond and Sigil the best way to play any edition of D&D using a computer and you will boost your subscriber numbers, if that is what they are caring about.

You wouldn’t need any TTRPG dev staff to do this, just to code a base which could run any of the dice mechanics which aren’t that complex ultimately since they are originally intended for meat-space processing.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

If they're not afraid of splitting the game, it would be interesting if they could make a slightly more complex version of DnD to go alongside how simple and gamified 5e is.

Like a 'basic' and 'advanced' version of the game, aimed at different audiences.

 

[BigZebra]

God yes - I would love a bit more "craziness" from WotC.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Interesting article, I'm not sure whether anything from WoW necessarily carries over to DnD, but one of the lessons that could be relevant is how WoW made giant improvements recently by starting to actually listen to what players were asking for and actually doing it instead of always trying to convince their customers that "you think you want X but you really don't", and that the developers always knew better.

That might not change DnD as much since WotC has generally been more receptive to considering player opinions than Blizzard ever was, but it can't hurt.

Given the mishandling of beloved settings like Planescape, Spelljammer, FR, DL, Ravenlift, etc..., I will have to disagree with you on WotC being good at listening to fans.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I'd say that most WoW players have been satisfied or better with the way the Dragonflight expansion has gone. They even went really experimental in the normal end-of-expansion lull this time with Plunderstorm (which was... ok) and the Mists of Pandaria Remix (which was awesomely fun, both in my opinion of course). I do have to say that the real proof will be how The War Within goes, as it's due to be released in just a couple of weeks.

So the War Within would be still done mostly within John's time as Boss?

 

[Shardstone]

Given the mishandling of beloved settings like Planescape, Spelljammer, FR, DL, Ravenlift, etc..., I will have to disagree with you on WotC being good at listening to fans.

How was Planescpe mishandled?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Interesting piece over on Polygon.





It's probably not going to be a one-to-one carryover of lessons, but if Hight applies the same strategy of letting WotC games get more experimental, more creative and not worry about having a singular monolithic success that all customers have to buy into, that sounds like a very good thing to me.

One thing which was vital to turning WoW around was that the stuck-in-their-ways people who were in charge of WoW prior to Hight were gone.

He didn't have to remove most of them, because they mostly abandoned ship due to being adjacent to various horrifying scandals/allegations, but them being gone was vital.

This is what allowed them to become more creative, experimental, etc.

That's not going to be possible as long as Crawford and Perkins are in charge, frankly. They've both shown that they're actively opposed to doing anything particularly creative or experimental, and not really interested in trying stuff out. They both want a single, unified, monolithic D&D.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

How was Planescpe mishandled?

It's very much a blandified, toned-down version of Planescape, with none of the energy and daring of the original, and far, far, far too much page count dedicated to an adventure and bestiary, and when it really needed more dedicated to the setting to actually convey it. It's not a disaster, to be clear, not actively offensive or anything, but it's also not very good.

Only one previous setting has been "done justice" in 5E I would argue - Eberron. And it's no coincidence that had the creator writing for it.

I think one issue here is that neither Crawford nor Perkins actually seem to be fans of any of these older settings. I'm not sure if they just prefer the FR or homebrew or whatever, but they've certainly not acted the way people keen on them would act.

 

[WisdomOfWombats]

I am not sure that Crawford and/or Perkins are the blocking people. They are in charge of designing and writing the rules. But are they in charge of determining the design process? I am giving them the benefit of the doubt that the design-by-commitee style for the 2024 edition might not have been their idea. It could be a case of higher-ups saying: "Hey, D&D Next worked well for us and got us the best-selling edition yet. So we keep that process in place."

My personal opinion here is two fold: One, if you ask the current player-base of an RPG to help you design the next iteration, you are not going to get innovative results. Two, innovation was never the aim of the 2024 edition of D&D 5e. The aim was backwards-compatibility. To what extent is a bit open to debate looking at the OGL-disaster. But after that point, compatibility was definitely a major point.

Also, I am not sure about setting presentation in 5e. It seems to be aiming for a slimmer presentation. In the past, settings have been rather thick books with lots of lore. With 5e WotC seems to aim for a lean presentation, leaving room for the DM, and concentrating on immediately useful content, while not expecting readers to digest too much. It reminds me more of Dragonlance Adventures or the slim booklets in the Greyhawk boxed set than the first Eberron book. Also, the setting were originally presented in rather slim volumes. We just got a lot of lore added in latter books that somehow we expect to be there now.

What I would like to see, are follow-up books for a setting. Be it a additional adventure fleshing out more parts of the setting, while staying true to the original, or deeper lore (kind of like Baker did with the DMs Guild books on Eberron).

 

[DrJawaPhD]

Given the mishandling of beloved settings like Planescape, Spelljammer, FR, DL, Ravenlift, etc..., I will have to disagree with you on WotC being good at listening to fans.

Bringing back beloved settings is listening to the fans though. They bungled the execution and put out some bland and uninspiring products, but they at least attempted to do what players asked for. You can listen to what people want and still suck at delivering it successfully.

Old School Blizzard just would've tried to convince players that they don't actually want Planescape or Spelljammer, and refused to publish anything in those settings.