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.

 

[billd91]

And, again, any game that has "D&D" written on the cover is going to sell extremely well. The (first) 4e PHB/DMG/MM all sold very well, and we had people speaking to that effect. Hell, even when talking about 5e, they've (repeatedly) stated that these start-of-the-line books are always the best sellers. By the standards of any other game, even Pathfinder, 4e was an enormous success. By the standards of the 800 million billion ton gorilla that is Hasbro, it's almost certainly not possible that 4e, even without Pathfinder, could have "succeeded." We've already got a pretty clear indication that 4e itself had its gamble pitched to the higher-ups (mainly, "we can bring D&D into the digital age and tap the subscription market to generate top-tier revenues"), and the gamble worked...again for the standards of the TTRPG market. DDI was an enormous success by those standards even if you account for all the stuff that went wrong or disappeared as vaporware. It just didn't live up to WotC's hopes and, thus, Hasbro's expectations.

It may have done well compared to other TTRPGs, but that's not the most important context here, is it? There are two that are clearly going to take precedence.
1) Hasbro's internal expectations. Based on savvy reports, these were pretty unrealistic for D&D and I think WotC's actions with the shift of resources to 5e indicates 4e must have failed to meet them.
2) D&D's internal expectations. These are what any owner of D&D would have without the extra quirks specific to Hasbro. If the estimate I've seen mentioned is true that 4e managed to convert only 30% of the player base, I suspect any owner of D&D would consider that unacceptable performance. No matter how you slice it, that's an indication of a major reduction of the market size and no company wants to suffer that for a new version of an established product.

Ultimately, it didn't matter if 4e sold better than Dogs in the Vineyard, Warhammer Fantasy, or Deleria. It was the flagship of the TTRPGS industry, and it lost that status and a big chunk of its market.

 

[pemerton]

I think WotC has been remarkably vague in their strategy. I ALSO think that a portion of the internet has interpreted that vagueness into a pretty strict orthodoxy.

I think we disagree here (and I think I fall into your "orthodox portion of the internet").

He notes that the previous plan has begun and ended with TTRPGs; they're changing to look beyond that. I don't read it as abandoning RPGs or settings altogether, but as looking for ways to leverage a setting into multiple platforms rather than just one. So, (AS AN EXAMPLE), instead of a Grey Realms book every month (12 books), we get 4 books, a board game with two expansions, a phone app game, some plushies, and...something else hip and new. A twitter feed or whatever.

My reading of it is that WotC has noticed it owns all this IP, which is a fairly large repository of economic value, and all they are using it for is to make very modest returns on RPG publications. And that, henceforth, they will be looking to derive more returns from it.

What exactly that will look like I don't know. Obviously the Marvel movies are the holy grail for anyone who owns this sort of IP, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of less lucrative and ambitious options that are still likely to generate more returns: better-selling table-top games that use this fiction (eg card games, board games), various sorts of computer games that use this fiction, action figures that use this fiction, etc. I haven't kept up with the staffing profile of the WotC D&D team, but how many story people do they have vs game designers/developers, and how many of those game-side people could be card or board games as well as they could do RPGs? (I'm assuming that computer games would be a licensing matter, on WotC's side, rather than a design matter.)

I honestly don't know what to expect (other than, per Chris Perkins, a surprise), but I feel I know what not to expect, namely, setting books of the traditional style. If you're lucky, I'll be shown to have been wrong in due course!

 

[pemerton]

While the old Greyhawk material is available, older sourcebooks are not always the easiest to parse through for material. Especially for new people who aren't familiar with the setting and don't know what to look for and where.
That's where new setting sourcebooks (or whatever) would be useful.

I've deliberately talked about Greyhawk because it's a setting I know. Whether or not FR is accessible I can't easily judge, except that all the current crop of adventure seem to be set in it, so it's hardly inaccessible. And whenever I have a FR query (generally triggered by reading a post that talks about FR lore), Google tends to send me to what looks like a fairly comprehensive FR wiki.

As far as GH is concerned, a newbie could buy the original boxed set, or From the Ashes, or The Adventure Begins, and do fine. Which one? Doesn't matter. All of them? That would be good for WotC's revenue stream!

A good catalogue/index of this old material would help - I haven't Googled for such pages but I assume they exist, and that newbies who care will track them down.

the back catalog lacks an easy point of entry for any newcomers into FR and Greyhawk (and Mystara). There are at least four points of entry into Greyhawk (gold box set; FTA; TAB; 3e book) , and a similar number into the Forgotten Realms (grey box set; big box set; 3e; 4e). There's also no clear guide/path through the material.

This is what I had in mind when I said, upthread, that a decent catalogue or index would help. But I also think, at the prices for a lot of this stuff, that new players might just take a punt!

And it's not as if anything is actually going to go wrong if you download From the Ashes rather than the original GH boxed set.

I'm a newby. I like the 5e Starter Set. I go online and buy...the big box set. What then? Waterdeep and the North? The Waterdeep hardcover? (I think there was one.) The Savage North softcover? The 4e book (Neverwinter?)? I've just read about The Sundering; which book covers that?

When I stick Forgotten Realms into the DriveThru search box, the top 5 entries are FR Adventures (2e), Book of Lairs (2e), FRCS (3e), Player's Guide to FR (4e) and the FR Atlas (2e). I think it's not optimal that the first two entries aren't very good starter products, but in the top 5 there are 2 that clearly are (the 3E and 4e ones), and I would have thought the Atlas would be fine as well (I don't know it but assume it lives up to its title and hence has maps and some description). The prices are between $9.99 and $15.99.

If you download one of them and are dissatisfied, you move on. How often does this happen? I honestly don't know. If you download one and are interested or find it useful (which I think is probably more likely), then before moving on to your next purchase you are probably engaged enough to go to a wiki, or Wikipedia, or search some threads at ENworld or elsewhere.

I think that WotC could obviously sell many more FR handbooks if it published a new one rather than relied on downloads of PDFs - presumably by a factor of ten at least, I'm less confident in raising that factor to 100 - but would it make better returns?

Maybe the surprising thing that Chris Perkins will reveal in due course will also, somehow, leverage the PDF catalogue. Maybe the conversion guides, when they come out, will be intended to do so.

I think that you might be underestimating how much easier your existing knowledge makes the process. There is a recent thread here on EN World asking what to buy to start a FR campaign (OP was leaning towards 4e book, under the assumption that more recent = more informative.)

The thing is, from WotC's point of view I don't think it matters. As long as no one who buys the 4e books feels actively ripped off - and I don't see why they would, it has maps and gods and calendars and history and racial backgrounds and all the usual sort of stuff - then from WotC's point of view they have another satisfied D&D group playing their own Realms campaign.

(This is also why I think it's a bit unfortunate that FR Adventures and Book of Lairs come up so prominently on a Forgotten Realms search - I think they would create the potential to feel ripped off.)

 

[pemerton]

I'm not sure exactly what you're defining as fiction

<snip>

I think any talk about "settings" conflates several different topics: static information (waterdeep is a city); game mechanics (Khelben is X level); and campaign narrative thread (Khelben is dead). The static information is largely edition-neutral; the game mechanics in the back catalog are not current (it's possible to convert, but without a guide to converting, it's not necessarily intuitive, particularly for new DMs. If an item grants Strength 18/99, what does that mean?); and the campaign narrative is confusing and/or out-of-date in the most prominent cases (GH, FR, Mystara).

Nellisir[/MENTION] 's categories (and good job on breaking those down, BTW), that "fiction" in this context refers to both static info and campaign narrative. More primarily the latter than the former, but some elements of both.

IOW, there will not be a book specifically devoted to "This is Cormyr, its history, and its government," nor will there be one devoted to "This is what's happened in Cormyr since the Spellplague." (Or to both combined.) If I'm interpreting properly, of course.

When I referred to "the fiction" I mostly had in mind what Nellisir called "campaign narrative".

The static information you will get from any of the old sourcebooks (eg any of the three GH onramps will give you the basic geography and history).

The game mechanics I am treating as secondary. That may be controversial - personally I have a lot of experience converting over a wide range of fantasy RPG systems, and have always taken it for granted that that's what you do if you like a scenario or a setting and want to use it for a different game system. But I also think this is why it is important from WotC's point of view that 5e resonate with the earlier (especially AD&D) material, as it helps underpin conversion: if the NPC in the module or setting book is a 12th level assassin, well you just convert them over using the NPC lists and rules in the 5e MM and DMG.

When Perkins, Mearls et al talk about "new" or "surprising" ways of delivering settings, I think this will mostly be in respect of "campaign narrative". My reading, for what it's worth, is that they have formed the view that authorship of that material is not delivering the return that it might, so long as the mode of release is predominantly tabletop RPGing books. And so they're looking for new modes.

So I think I'm at least roughly in agreement with Mouseferatu.

 

[Kramodlog]

Of course not. He's not there to talk about 4e.

But he did mention it.

He's there to talk about 5e. But it is utterly inarguable that, during the entire playtest, they continued to rake in tens of thousands of dollars (at least) from DDI. This income almost surely is how the D&D portion of WotC was able to produce essentially nothing for nearly three years while taking a large gamble.

We do not know how much money DDI brought in. When words like "gamble", "risk" and "report to executives" are used, I'm incline to believe non-D&D money was invested in the R&D of 5e by WotC. It isn't unusual. Investing in R&D can bring in long term profits for a compagny.

What I get is that 5e was perceived as very risky. Monte Cook said on his blog that only a third of D&D gamers played 4e. That is quite the drop of players. I can see why Mearls would need to "sweet talk" executives into investing in 5e.

From what they have been doing, I'm incline to believe the that the PnP RPG is a locomotive to the rest of the brand. They didn't need the RPG to make video games and boardgames. By neglecting the RPG they could gimp the rest of their products.

 

[aramis erak]

But he did mention it.

We do not know how much money DDI brought in. When words like "gamble", "risk" and "report to executives" are used, I'm incline to believe non-D&D money was invested in the R&D of 5e by WotC. It isn't unusual. Investing in R&D can bring in long term profits for a compagny.

What I get is that 5e was perceived as very risky. Monte Cook said on his blog that only a third of D&D gamers played 4e. That is quite the drop of players. I can see why Mearls would need to "sweet talk" executives into investing in 5e.

From what they have been doing, I'm incline to believe the that the PnP RPG is a locomotive to the rest of the brand. They didn't need the RPG to make video games and boardgames. By neglecting the RPG they could gimp the rest of their products.

We know that between D&D 4 and DDI, it didn't meet the expectation (IIRC, $50M/year).

It also didn't meet general market expectations (which were to retain the top spot in the ICV2 listings).
It also didn't meet a lot of people's expectations, as evidenced by the WotC-admitted loss of players.
It also largely built itself a new player base.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What I get is that 5e was perceived as very risky. Monte Cook said on his blog that only a third of D&D gamers played 4e. That is quite the drop of players. I can see why Mearls would need to "sweet talk" executives into investing in 5e.

Firstly, I'd like to know where Monte's getting his numbers.

Secondly, "a third of D&D gamers" is an incredibly squishy phrase. A third of the 3e playerbase? A third of all people who have ever played D&D? A third of some theoretical, calculated market capacity? A third of all non-lapsed players, whatever that means? All of these have significant differences in meaning, and some of them would still be fully compatible with calling 4e a clear success even if it didn't meet Hasbro expectations/WotC promises.

 

[Jeff Albertson]

Well, 4th Ed, obviously did not do well, for whatever reason, in whatever time.

 

[Eric V]

As far as GH is concerned, a newbie could buy the original boxed set, or From the Ashes, or The Adventure Begins, and do fine. Which one? Doesn't matter. All of them? That would be good for WotC's revenue stream!

I sort of agree with you here (It's what I am doing with my supersized Al-Qadim campaign), but there's a lot of work involved, and I'm saying that as someone who has been playing 25+ years. If this is really how WotC wants to go, then conversion documents should have been one of the first things released.

I'm trying to imagine someone completely new to the game doing all the work on converting and not wondering "Why am I doing this work when there are other games that are just as much fun with no work required?"

-E

 

[Eric V]

Firstly, I'd like to know where Monte's getting his numbers.

Secondly, "a third of D&D gamers" is an incredibly squishy phrase. A third of the 3e playerbase? A third of all people who have ever played D&D? A third of some theoretical, calculated market capacity? A third of all non-lapsed players, whatever that means? All of these have significant differences in meaning, and some of them would still be fully compatible with calling 4e a clear success even if it didn't meet Hasbro expectations/WotC promises.

Yeah, logically, it's pretty much the essence of a non-verifiable statement, even if it comes from Monte Cook.

On that topic...

You know how Cook surprisingly left the team, but said it had nothing to do with the design team itself? Do you think he found out that 5e was going to receive only (as compared to previous editions) skeletal support, with the main goal being licensing, and that's what inspired him to leave? I can imagine being disappointed at being brought in to work on the "ultimate" version of D&D only to find out that the main goal is not the game itself (and so little rpg support) but brand recognition for movies, toys, mugs, etc.