Jeremy Crawford On The Dark Side of Developing 5E

WotC's Jeremy Crawford spoke to The Escapist about the D&D 5th Edition development process and his role in the game's production. "There was a dark side where it was kind of crushing. The upside is it allowed us to have a throughline for the whole project. So I was the person who decided if what we had decided was important two years prior was still being executed two years later."


You can read the full interview here, but below are the key highlights.

• Mike Mearls started pondering about D&D 5th Edition while the 4E Essentials books were being worked on in 2010.
• There were "heated discussions" about the foundations of 5E.
• Crawford is the guy who "made the decision about precisely what was going to be in the game".
• Crawford considers D&D's settings as an important pillar.

For another recent interview, see Chris Perkins talking to Chris "Wacksteven" Iannitti.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, the interview was an interesting read. I took two things from it that make me pretty sad though:

1. He's the reason why the only things I was highly enthusiastic about during the playtest were killed dead, and replaced by milquetoast-y alternatives that played it safe (with, IIRC, even less public review than the first round). The Sorcerer especially especially was a tragedy to lose. Yeah, yeah, "wasn't liked by the playtesters" (guess me and most every person I talked to didn't count as playtesters!) But Crawford has stepped up to the plate as the one who actually axed the whole class, barely a month after they introduced it, while other "problem" stuff (like Fighter and Rogue features) lingered for ages before finally being pulled.

2. Again we see strident official rhetoric that 5e is "big tent," yet the support for 4e style play remains woefully inadequate. The long promised "tactical rules module" is either vaporware or totally insufficient for my needs (if, that is, the DMG stuff was supposed to be the whole of it). And I find it painfully "funny" to hear 5e's rules compared favorably to the clarity of 4e's. Perhaps it's just because I'm a bitter edition warrior partisan, but I find much of 5e to be ambiguous at best and sometimes frustratingly difficult. Stealth it's one example. The muddy distinction between "trading the Attack Action" and "making an attack" is another--in their effort to use fewer terms to describe things, they have created a situation where two different meanings (with very different consequences) are referenced by identical or nearly identical words. That is...about as far from "clarity" as you can get without using actually incorrect terms!

I still wish them all the best and hold the slimmest margin of hope that the 4e support within 5e expands to more than a token gesture. Time will tell.

 

[pemerton]

We are all special in our own way.

Edit: I actually don't know what to make of this comment. I never claimed to be typical or atypical.

<snip>

It's not my interest to decide whether or not my opinion is valuable to WotC. My opinion is valuable to me. I'm not going to self-censor because of an unsubstantiated assumption that WotC doesn't value me.

Who is asking you to self-censor?

My point was that I don't think your standards for what counts as setting support - which I am inferring from your posts, including your self-description - are the ones that Chris Perkins has in mind when he talks about supporting settings.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The Sorcerer especially especially was a tragedy to lose. Yeah, yeah, "wasn't liked by the playtesters" (guess me and most every person I talked to didn't count as playtesters!)

Did any of you actually fill out the balky survey, though?

Every time a player bitched about something in the playtest I was running I'd tell them 'fill out the survey, mention that.' They never did.

2. Again we see strident official rhetoric that 5e is "big tent," yet the support for 4e style play remains woefully inadequate.

The warlord was never once in a playtest, nor even mentioned in a playtest survey. That, alone, gave the lie to the 'big tent.'

The long promised "tactical rules module" is either vaporware or totally insufficient for my needs (if, that is, the DMG stuff was supposed to be the whole of it).

Yes. And, between it and all the range/area/movement detailed to the foot, it's not that hard to bang 5e into some tactical shape.

And I find it painfully "funny" to hear 5e's rules compared favorably to the clarity of 4e's.
Perhaps it's just because I'm a bitter edition warrior partisan, but I find much of 5e to be ambiguous at best and sometimes frustratingly difficult.

It's part of how you design a game to run on 'rulings not rules.'

Stealth it's one example.

Really? In the playtest is was almost verbatim 4e.

The muddy distinction between "trading the Attack Action" and "making an attack" is another--in their effort to use fewer terms to describe things, they have created a situation where two different meanings (with very different consequences) are referenced by identical or nearly identical words. That is...about as far from "clarity" as you can get without using actually incorrect terms!

Natural language isn't clear, but it's clearer than jargon if you absolutely refuse to accept that the jargon isn't natural language...

I still wish them all the best and hold the slimmest margin of hope that the 4e support within 5e expands to more than a token gesture. Time will tell.

5e is what it's going to be for the forseable future. The pace of production is fairly slow, and limited to adventures. WYSIWYG.

What that is, is mostly a return to the 'classic D&D feel,' but with the less cumbersome d20 dice mechanic used throughout, instead of the weird mix of resolution systems in AD&D. It's not in any way positioned to become anything like 4e. It could become more 3.5-like with enough added material (again, if they were publishing a lot faster).

If you approach 5e as a walk down memory lane to the 20th century (and you have some mnemonic real estate there), it's fun and to spare.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Did any of you actually fill out the balky survey, though?

Every time a player bitched about something in the playtest I was running I'd tell them 'fill out the survey, mention that.' They never did.

I participated in...I believe the first two surveys? After that, I realized they were either (a) completely unaware of how to design proper surveys, or (b) only interested in push-polling. Since I wasn't actually playing the playtest (my group being only interested in Dungeon World at the time), I figured it was time for me to bow out.

The warlord was never once in a playtest, nor even mentioned in a playtest survey. That, alone, gave the lie to the 'big tent.'

The issue for me is less a matter of "proof" that the rhetoric is wrong, but rather that they keep saying it, rather stridently, and that it's not just one person doing so.

Yes. And, between it and all the range/area/movement detailed to the foot, it's not that hard to bang 5e into some tactical shape.

It's...not any different from 3.5e in that respect, and I doubt that "banging" 3.5e into a tactical shape that approximates 4e well (not perfectly, just well) is a house-rules exercise I want to undertake.

It's part of how you design a game to run on 'rulings not rules.'

I'm pretty sure "ranging from ambiguous to frustratingly difficult in several places" is not really the goal of "rulings, not rules." But then again, I don't really understand that style to begin with, so perhaps the fault is in part mine.

Really? In the playtest is was almost verbatim 4e.

Odd. There was a rather large discussion on another forum where the rules for exactly how one enters Stealth were discussed at length, and I had thought they were pretty different from 4e's. Admittedly, I haven't seen my 4e DMG or PHB in a long while (they're at my parents' house at present) so I could be forgetting. The issues centered around what broke "hiding" (do attacks break stealth and hiding simultaneously, or just hiding? Can you be "not seen" without being "hidden"?) and the multiple possible rulings based on what someone considers "common sense" e.g. do you have to be TOTALLY SILENT to remain in stealth, or can you make some noise, etc.

Natural language isn't clear, but it's clearer than jargon if you absolutely refuse to accept that the jargon isn't natural language...

Is...this supposed to be a koan or something? When I first read it I thought I understood it, but now I'm not so sure...

5e is what it's going to be for the forseable future. The pace of production is fairly slow, and limited to adventures. WYSIWYG.

What that is, is mostly a return to the 'classic D&D feel,' but with the less cumbersome d20 dice mechanic used throughout, instead of the weird mix of resolution systems in AD&D. It's not in any way positioned to become anything like 4e. It could become more 3.5-like with enough added material (again, if they were publishing a lot faster).

If you approach 5e as a walk down memory lane to the 20th century (and you have some mnemonic real estate there), it's fun and to spare.

Hence the "slim margin." I don't really expect 5e to change much in the near future. But hell, maybe they'll make a Big Book of Tactics full of crunchy crunchy goodness! (That is the highly optimistic side of my nature talking. The pessimistic side says, "5e was made specifically to ignore the things that I happen to like best about D&D, and the designers will consciously avoid anything more than superficial similarities to those things.")

Sadly, I have no D&D "mnemonic real estate" from that period. 2e was a strange, almost impenetrable mound that I struggled (and generally failed) to understand via playing CRPGs. 3e was my introduction to RPGs; initially I hated 4e, mostly because my friends were 3.5e fans and thus hated it, but once I actually gave 4e a try I loved it dearly. 5e is thus an abandonment of most of what I like, for things I usually don't care about or even dislike (e.g. the obsession with "natural language").

 

[pemerton]

Wizards of the Coast were bought out by Hasbro so their business strategy apparently wasn't reliable.

TSR was bought by WotC because it was bankrupt. WotC was bought by Hasbro because M:tG and Pokémon were money machines. This is all a matter of public record.

If WotC produces a few more books, it stands a chance of making more money. As I mentioned, producing modern APs is a new thing for WotC. A Forgotten Realms source book, might generate more sale than an AP and WotC has experience with thise.

WotC knows how many of those books it sold. Presumably it is drawing upon that information in deciding how many of those books to keep publishing.

Then how can Paizo sell three hardbacks, a monthly AP, and several supplemental softcovers per year and not drowned.

To really learn the answer to that question you'd have to ask Paizo.

My guess is that WotC insists on a higher return on investment than does Paizo. I also think that WotC is hoping to achieve more ambitious things with the D&D IP than Paizo is with its IP, and that this is a factor in their decision on how much, and what, to publish.

I have a feeling Hasbro doesn't completely understand the RPG market.

I would say Wizards doesn't have miserable growth according to TTRPG standards. I would say their growth is great by the normal standards, but Hasbro being the huge company that they are, probably doesn't see it that way. I would say they are holding D&D to a unreal standard.

I think Hasbro does understand the RPG market, including that it can't generate the sorts of returns that Hasbro wants, and hence WotC is not focusing its efforts primarily on publishing into that market.

 

[pemerton]

I participated in...I believe the first two surveys? After that, I realized they were either (a) completely unaware of how to design proper surveys, or (b) only interested in push-polling.

I didn't complete many surveys, because it fairly quickly became clear that they were not really looking to pick up my opinions.

But I don't think that means they don't know how to design surveys. I suspect, rather, it shows that they do know how to define surveys, and had worked out very early on that views in the neighbourhood of mine were outliers and hence not worth picking up on.

My reasons for thinking this are two: (1) what possible benefit is it for WotC to push-poll in its own marketing surveys? and (2) 5e seems to be extremely popular and selling well.

The muddy distinction between "trading the Attack Action" and "making an attack" is another--in their effort to use fewer terms to describe things, they have created a situation where two different meanings (with very different consequences) are referenced by identical or nearly identical words.

4e also had this problem - "attack" sometimes meant "making an attack roll" and sometimes meant "using an attack power". Most of the time the ambiguity didn't matter, but sometimes it did.

That's not to defend the 5e stealth rules, which I agree are poorly drafted, but to acknowledge that sometimes perfect precision isn't achievable. The whole Barkskin/Magic Armour debate is another case of poor rules text - ideally similar effects would be written in a similar way to promote cohesion and consistency - but again in 4e you can see cases where the same effect is described using different language, for no good reason but simply due to a lack of perfection in drafting and editing.

 

[pemerton]

the majority of the D&D community wants one thing while Wizards wants something else.

It's very hard to know much about "the majority of the D&D community". But WotC wants to sell lots of 5e rulebooks, and all the evidence suggests that lots of people - who, presumably, belong to the D&D community - want to buy 5e books, so that would seem to be some sort of meeting of minds!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I didn't complete many surveys, because it fairly quickly became clear that they were not really looking to pick up my opinions.

But I don't think that means they don't know how to design surveys. I suspect, rather, it shows that they do know how to define surveys, and had worked out very early on that views in the neighbourhood of mine were outliers and hence not worth picking up on.

My reasons for thinking this are two: (1) what possible benefit is it for WotC to push-poll in its own marketing surveys? and (2) 5e seems to be extremely popular and selling well.

Push-polling to "prove" that the choices you're making are actually the ones you "should" be making? I dunno. I agree, though, that they didn't really have much reason to intentionally do that. Which is why I think their polls--which definitely had the form of push-polling at times--were simply designed by people not trained in statistics and data gathering. The questions were often loaded, or targeted in such a way that they constrained the possible answers you could give. If you yourself admit that they "weren't looking to pick up your opinions," despite considering yourself part of the sample, then that's enough evidence right there to say that their surveys were badly designed. Whether by accident or intent, they were filtering out some of the sample space purely through the design of the questions.

4e also had this problem - "attack" sometimes meant "making an attack roll" and sometimes meant "using an attack power". Most of the time the ambiguity didn't matter, but sometimes it did.

Hmm. I can't recall a time where I had to figure out a situation that was one or the other. Not saying this isn't true, but rather that the situation is substantially more common in 5e.

That is: there are numerous features in 5e that talk about "when you attack" or "as part of your attack" or whatever. One simple example being the Battlmeaster's maneuver riders. When are you allowed to tack a maneuver on? There are (at least) three valid options:
1. Each time you perform an attack roll, you may expend expertise dice to add a maneuver to that specific roll.
2. Each time you take the Attack Action, you may expend expertise dice to add a maneuver to that entire action.
3. Each time you take the Attack Action, you may expend expertise dice to add a maneuver to one attack roll within that action.

Unfortunately, and I do think this is a difference from 4e, there is NO terminology that refers purely to "attack rolls" (or some equivalent term) within "an Attack Action." The two--"taking the Attack Action" and "making an attack roll"--are treated as natural-language synonyms, but they have very different mechanical meaning. Some interpretations seem fine in isolation, but may neuter other classes or grossly overpower them (a Battlemaster spending three dice on three attack rolls within a single Attack Action? Jeez.) Doubly unfortunately, the rules don't even uniformly use the phrase "Attack Action," nor are they consistent about whether it is "taking the Attack Action" or "using your action to Attack" or just straight up "attacking." I've heard it argued that you're not supposed to think of An Action as something you Have, but rather that, on your turn, you may "take an action" which must be selected from a particular list--but again, the terminology is inconsistent and neither interpretation is free of difficulties. And this is with one of the most fundamental, frequently-used elements of the game--just making a "basic attack" (in 4e terms)!

That's not to defend the 5e stealth rules, which I agree are poorly drafted, but to acknowledge that sometimes perfect precision isn't achievable. The whole Barkskin/Magic Armour debate is another case of poor rules text - ideally similar effects would be written in a similar way to promote cohesion and consistency - but again in 4e you can see cases where the same effect is described using different language, for no good reason but simply due to a lack of perfection in drafting and editing.

I'm not even really interested in "perfect" precision. I just want rules that make sense, and do not admit two or three or more interpretations that are both mutually exclusive and difficult to see whether they will be overpowering, underpowering, or just right.

 

[Imaro]

That is: there are numerous features in 5e that talk about "when you attack" or "as part of your attack" or whatever. One simple example being the Battlmeaster's maneuver riders. When are you allowed to tack a maneuver on? There are (at least) three valid options:
1. Each time you perform an attack roll, you may expend expertise dice to add a maneuver to that specific roll.
2. Each time you take the Attack Action, you may expend expertise dice to add a maneuver to that entire action.
3. Each time you take the Attack Action, you may expend expertise dice to add a maneuver to one attack roll within that action.

Each maneuver is pretty precise when stating when it can be used... could you perhaps give a specific example of one that is unclear? Or are you saying you want all maneuvers to be usable in the exact same situation?

Unfortunately, and I do think this is a difference from 4e, there is NO terminology that refers purely to "attack rolls" (or some equivalent term) within "an Attack Action." The two--"taking the Attack Action" and "making an attack roll"--are treated as natural-language synonyms, but they have very different mechanical meaning. Some interpretations seem fine in isolation, but may neuter other classes or grossly overpower them (a Battlemaster spending three dice on three attack rolls within a single Attack Action? Jeez.) Doubly unfortunately, the rules don't even uniformly use the phrase "Attack Action," nor are they consistent about whether it is "taking the Attack Action" or "using your action to Attack" or just straight up "attacking." I've heard it argued that you're not supposed to think of An Action as something you Have, but rather that, on your turn, you may "take an action" which must be selected from a particular list--but again, the terminology is inconsistent and neither interpretation is free of difficulties. And this is with one of the most fundamental, frequently-used elements of the game--just making a "basic attack" (in 4e terms)!

Again... the actions that trigger maneuvers are both natural and pretty specific...

When you hit a creature with a weapon attack...
When you take the attack action on your turn...
Use a bonus action on your turn...
When you make a melee weapon attack on your turn...

And so on... where exactly is the confusion or ambiguity at in these statements?

Edit: Also most/all maneuvers state how many superiority dice you can expend during the action/maneuver...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Each maneuver is pretty precise when stating when it can be used... could you perhaps give a specific example of one that is unclear? Or are you saying you want all maneuvers to be usable in the exact same situation?

I stand corrected. I must have been thinking of something from the playtest. Serves me right for writing at 6 am after little sleep.

That said, there are a few other places. Certain Monk features (Fangs of the Fire Snake) have an odd amount of very specific verbiage ("range extended for that action") and very general verbiage ("when the attack hits"--so presumably it applies if you hit with both? but it doesn't specify, which seems out of place). It's a smaller ambiguity than I had thought for the Fighter ones though. From the Shadow Monk, though, what does "make an attack" mean? Does it mean taking the Attack Action at all, or actually landing a blow (aka if you miss, are you still invisible)? Or "Open Hand Technique"--does it apply every time you hit, or just on one of the hits? (It could be read either way--e.g. each one hit = one use, or any hits = ONLY ONE use.)

I could swear this was a hell of a lot more ambiguous previously, so again I must be remembering the playtest. Unfortunately, that happens an awful lot; the vast majority of my experience with 5e has been with the playtest rules rather than the PHB, so I unfortunately tend to conflate them. Especially when I'm tired.

I still think that their effort to subsume everything into "take the Attack Action," as if your Action wasn't a thing you expend in order to attack things, was a silly idea that leads to weird and annoying circumlocutions--unnatural language, IMO, but I'm picky.