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.

 

[Psikerlord#]

There was a throwaway line about unclear rules reducing the fun. Stealth rules. That is all.

 

[Remathilis]

Essentials marked a very pronounced "Shift" in tone for 4e. There were lots of signs of "idea bouncing" similar to Bo9S or Player's Options were in 3e/2e. Item rarity is one example. The subtle backing away form ADEU was another. However, most of the Essentials books were very much an attempt to grab back something that had gone "missing" somewhere; witness the Red Box reuse or the return of some classic elements (like elves, not eladrin, wizards).

Mike Mearls, in some interview somewhere, once said to make 5th edition, he played every edition of D&D and took notes on what he liked. He must have started this process during Essentials, because a lot of nostalgia started seeping into the rules around there. In 2008, the game screamed "THIS AIN'T YOUR FATHER'S D&D" and by Essentials, it was "Well, yeah it is. Check out this Elmore-cover we have!"

 

[Mouseferatu]

Keep in mind that work on Essentialls would've started at a minimum 6 months before release, and possible as early as 12 months before release.

Heh. Trust me, there's absolutely no way it started six months before release. I'd be surprised if it only started twelve. It was very likely more.

 

[Mercurius]

Perhaps some are forgetting that the main point behind Essentials--or at least the one Slaviscek advertised--was to create a simpler "entry ramp" into 4E, seemingly because of a perceived or actual difficultly for people taking to 4E. In other words, it would seem that 4E wasn't thriving the way they had hoped and they thought the reason was that there wasn't a simple enough way into the game.

In many ways Essentials was an attempt to revivify the line, not quite a last gasp effort to save the edition, but not far from it. The fact that 5E was announced as a working project just 16 months after Essentials came out seems to imply that Essentials didn't save the edition.

As for "throwing in the towel" on 4E, my guess is that it happened in stages - one of which was Essentials. Another one was the cancellation of the Nentir Vale Gazetteer which, if only symbolically, said "We're shelving this product because no one needs the setting for 4E because we're moving on to something else." If I remember correctly, the 4E line as a whole tapered away after Essentials came out, with a sparser release schedule through 2011 and then the last few products in 2012. In other words, my guess is that they pushed out the remaining products in the pipeline in 2011-12, but that they were starting to move on a few months after Essentials was published (so sometime in early 2011).

It seems crazy in hindsight, but 4E only had a life of 4 years. If we are generous we can start it with Keep on the Shadowfell in May of 2008 and end it with the setting-neutral Menzoberranzan in August of 2012, although the last true 4E product was really Halls of Undermountain in April, 2012. I really hope that 5E has a longer lifespan, although given the above it was probably about two and half years into the edition cycle (with Essentials) that there was any sign that 4E was gasping for breath, and even then only in hindsight. My point is that we probably won't really know how successful 5E is for another couple years yet.

 

[Mercurius]

A bit more. Whenever the 4E Red Box was conceived (not published) is probably when WotC realized that something wasn't clicking. That came out in August of 2010, I believe, so presumably was conceive of at least a year before, in mid-2009 - which is about a year after 4E came out. So my guess is that WotC wasn't happy with 4E's results within a year of release, but were strategizing on how to correct the course, which resulted in Essentials. It was presumably only after Essentials came out in late 2010 that they decided that they needed to "throw in the towel" - meaning, starting switching focus to the next edition.

 

[R_Chance]

They spent a lot of time stating how different 4E was. A lot of people didn't want "different", just improved and cleaned up. Pathfinder, in short. The Essentials line struck me as an attempt to reverse course and pull disenchanted players back in to D&D with a dose of nostalgia and a tune up of the rules. It was still 4E though. I bought the original 4E core books, read them, and gave them away. Not a bad game, just not my game. I moved my homebrew campaign from original D&D to 1E, to 2E, to 3E / 3.5 over the years. There were too many differences with 4E. So I stayed with 3.5 (and later Pathfinder). 5E is different, but close enough to port things over and I like what I've seen of it. If 5E had been the edition after 3.5 I would have stayed with D&D. Pathfinder is well established now and 5E is the new kid. It should be interesting to see how it goes.

 

[transtemporal]

I'm not sure how to unpack this sentence. Is he implying a larger shift to an open multiverse (where we get Eberron, Ravenloft, Dragonlance, etc support) or is he implying a distilled version (akin to Nentir Vale, borrowing from everything) or that settings will be less unique in fluff (elves are elves) or crunch (not needing 27 wizard classes to cover sha'ir, defilers, artificers, etc). Or just maybe some of the really out there worlds (Athas, Ravenloft, Al-qadim) aren't getting any support to keep the game in line with the classic Pseudo-Tolkien settings.

Hes saying that all future products will be Forgotten Realms products, so Ravenloft becomes "Forgotten Realms: Ravenloft"!

Seriously I think he is referring to the crunch variances across all the settings (rather than the flavor or genre of the settings). I can only imagine how hard it is to manage the "crunch continuity".

 

[aramis erak]

Essentials "half-assed"? Nah. Articles of Faith? Whut?

[snip]
Some folks liked the new formats, or elements of the new formats, others didn't. Since 5E went back to the traditional structure, I'm assuming the experiment didn't play out positively.

I'm sure WotC saw 4E losing steam and felt that moving on to 5E wasn't right, not yet. So, they did two things with the Essentials line, 1) an attempt to rescue and prolong the 4th edition, and 2) an opportunity to try something different with the book release formula. The experiment wasn't half-assed at all, but was very well done. It just didn't sway enough folks to make the Essentials format stick around longer.

It would likely have panned out a lot better had 4E not (1) seriously hurt the player base, and (2) burned its own bridges with excessively high expansion rates.

The reactions in the 5E schedule look like a strong reaction to (2)...
That the DMG is almost all optional while the PHB is all the core mechanics shows that Essentials wasn't a complete flop, either.

Really, 5E can play beautifully with just the PHB and MM. It's playable with just the PHB, if one restricts to relatively settled settings.

 

[pemerton]

Heh. Trust me, there's absolutely no way it started six months before release. I'd be surprised if it only started twelve. It was very likely more.

According to this March 2009 interview with Rob Heinsoo, preliminary work on Essentials-model classes was being done before 4e debuted:

We weren't always planning to give all characters equal numbers of powers. Many times we experimented with vastly different power acquisition schemes for different classes. And when we decided against those approaches, there were people in R&D, including myself, who sometimes balked and felt like giving different classes different numbers and types of power might be a good way of differentiating between classes. But sentiment didn't pan out. All of our actual experiments with different power-distribution schemes didn't work out, so we moved ahead with the notion that a richer understanding of our system might give us room to experiment in the future.​

 

[Jester David]

As for "throwing in the towel" on 4E, my guess is that it happened in stages - one of which was Essentials. Another one was the cancellation of the Nentir Vale Gazetteer which, if only symbolically, said "We're shelving this product because no one needs the setting for 4E because we're moving on to something else." If I remember correctly, the 4E line as a whole tapered away after Essentials came out, with a sparser release schedule through 2011 and then the last few products in 2012. In other words, my guess is that they pushed out the remaining products in the pipeline in 2011-12, but that they were starting to move on a few months after Essentials was published (so sometime in early 2011).

I imagine the Nentir Vale Gazetteer would have been a slightly expanded version of the information from the DMG along with Keep on the Shadowfell, cancelled when Essentials was not a huge hit and the realized that reprinting content from previous books in a new format might not go over well (as seen by the cancellation of Class Compendium: Heroes of Sword and Spell that was just a handful of classes from the PHB1).

In retrospect, Essentials seemed to be the last ditch attempt to save 4e after sales dipped. When that didn't go over well, they cancelled books and started work on 5e. With that in mind, it makes sense that they might have been kicking around ideas for 5e in the event Essentials did fail. That just seems logical: hope for the success of the product line, but prepare for the worst.
And it makes sense that while retooling the edition for a minor revision that they would be considering what worked and what didn't and thinking about what comes next.