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.

 

[Morrus]

It also didn't meet general market expectations (which were to retain the top spot in the ICV2 listings).

Nobody uses ICv2 rankings as their success barometer. Expectations are profit-based.

 

[Jeff Albertson]

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.

Cool. that and Planescape are my favourites. I am of two minds about conversion documents, as 5th is so intuitively easy to convert.

 

[pemerton]

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.

<snip>

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?"

I see the point, but I'm not sure I completely agree.

First, on settings, how much of a setting is mechanically determined? For Greyhawk, the answer is "bugger all". The god stats can be safely ignored; and other than that, you have stats for some NPCs, many of which are abbreviated to a significant extent (in the original boxed set, to class and level). What you're really buying the setting for is maps, geography, history, cultures etc - all of which are useable without worrying about mechanics.

Al-Qadim might have more mechanically-dependent stuff, and hence harder to convert - but on the flip side I think the likelihood of a newbie stumbling into Al-Qadim without knowing what s/he is getting into is fairly remote!

Modules can be more of a challenge for conversion, too, though many of the classic modules aren't all that sophisticated in their encounter design. I think adjusting the treasure rewards (often very profligate by contemporary standards, because of the XP rules) might be the bigger challenge for some of them!

If this is really how WotC wants to go, then conversion documents should have been one of the first things released.

Maybe, though maybe we can also reason backwards: if WotC feels that there is not overwhelming demand for conversion documents, this might show that (i) people are buying and using the old stuff without the need for it, and/or (ii) they're happy for the interwebs to carry the load of converting material (I haven't looked around for conversions, but by now they must be out there!), and/or (iii) the evidence suggests that new 5e players are not looking for the sort of setting/adventure support that would require conversion.

I don't know, but I would suspect that a lot of new players aren't looking for setting/adventure support beyond what WotC is providing (ie their FR APs), and that WotC figures that existing players already have the material they need, or will buy it from DriveThru.

Not much more than conjecture, of course!

 

[Shasarak]

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.

Or he found out that he had to go to six hours of meetings per day.

 

[Nellisir]

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

Ayup. Not all of you espouse exactly the same view, but....

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.
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!

You realize, though, that that sort of time investment in figuring out what to use, and why the grey box and FTA are so redundant, are exactly the sort of time investment Mearls' addresses players not having anymore?

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.

The atlas, as I recall, is just maps. It's a nice luxury product, but not something you could run a game with. I thought the 4e Players Guide was pretty useless, and it doesn't match up with any earlier stuff. Too many changes.

If you download one of them and are dissatisfied, you move on.

You must be a lot richer than I am. I don't like to throw away $10.

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.

Right, because WotC doesn't offer any support.

 

[Kramodlog]

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

My best guest is when he was hired by WotC.

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.

A clear success? Losing a two thirds of your customers isn't a success unless that is what they wanted to do.

 

[Wicht]

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

I think you are understanding the then situation exactly backwards. Hasbro paid a lot of money for Wizards of the Coast, making several people very rich, because Wizards of the Coast was such a desirable commodity with very desirable IP. The buyout was not the result of mismanagement, just the opposite.

 

[Wicht]

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. That's not something that's of concern to me. Is my opinion less valuable because of deviation from the norm, or more valuable because of experience? My "atypicalness" stems mostly from being in the right place at the right time to see someone else do something cool. Should I not be allowed to speak? Would my opinion have more merit if I were simply a long-time D&D player that started at the tail-end of 1e, played through 2e and 3e, dabbled in the OSR during 4e, and am now "back" (in some sense at least) to 5e? Should I be another frustrated amateur publisher under the OGL (I have a GORGEOUS cover ready to go for a book that's 12 years late...)?

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.

I always like to observe that I am representative of myself, and that is enough for me.

 

[Tony Vargas]

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.

If only a third of existing D&Ders played 4e, how did it beat out Pathfinder in 2009 store sales, even though pitting supplement releases against always-strongest core releases, /and/ simultaneously cannibalizing store sales with DDI?

There are a number of possibilities: goldomark could be wrong about what Mr Cook said, what he said could have be mistaken or taken out of context, Pathfinder could have attracted significantly less than a third of existing D&D players (or, as you suggested, 'D&D players' could have referred to everyone who ever played D&D - in which case 3.x also pulled in significantly less than a third, since the highest single-product D&D sales were over a million (at a time when there were two or three separate lines of D&D being published at once), while the highest single product 3e sales were around 300k units, when it as the only D&D line). Or, of course, 4e could have made up the difference with new players. Which, since 4e players seem to have blithely accepted 5e, could help explain it's robust sales.


You can really make almost any confirmation-bias-catering narrative plausible with the bits and pieces of 'information' we have about D&D's success in the market place. It really doesn't matter much when put in perspective, since that marketplace (the whole TTRPG hobby) is so trivial compared to the rest of WotC's, let alone Hasbro's, business.

 

[Eric V]

Or he found out that he had to go to six hours of meetings per day.

Well, that could be true also!