D&D 5E Kate Welch on Leaving WotC

Kate Welch left Wizards of the Coast a few days ago, on August 16th. Soon after, she talked a little about it in a live-stream.

She started work at WotC as a game designer back in February 2018, and has contributed to various products since then, such as Ghosts of Saltmarsh and Descent into Avernus, as well as being a participant in WotC's livestreams. In December 2019, her job changed to that of 'senior user experience designer'.

"I mentioned yesterday that I have some big news that I wouldn't be able to share until today.

The big news that I have to share with you today is that I ... this is difficult, but ... I quit my job at Wizards of the Coast. I no longer work at Wizards. Today was my last day. I haven't said it out loud yet so it's pretty major. I know... it's a big change. It's been scary, I have been there for almost three years, not that long, you know, as far as jobs go, and for a while there I really was having a good time. It's just not... it wasn't the right fit for me any more.

So, yeah, I don't really know what's next. I got no big plans. It's a big deal, big deal .... and I wanted to talk to you all about it because you're, as I've mentioned before, a source of great joy for me. One of the things that has been tough reckoning with this is that I've defined myself by Dungeons & Dragons for so long and I really wanted to be a part of continuing to make D&D successful and to grow it, to have some focus especially on new user experience, I think that the new user experience for Dungeons & Dragons is piss poor, and I've said that while employed and also after quitting.

But I've always wanted to be a part of getting D&D into the hands of more people and helping them understand what a life-changing game it is, and I hope I still get the chance to do that. But as of today I'm unemployed, and I also wanted to be upfront about it because I have this great fear that because Dungeons & Dragons has been part of my identity, professionally for the last three years almost, I was worried that a lot of you'll would not want to follow me any more because I'm not at Wizards, and there's definitely some glamourous aspects to being at Wizards."

She went on to talk about the future, and her hopes that she'll still be be able to work with WotC.

"I'm excited about continuing to play D&D, and hopefully Wizards will still want me to appear on their shows and stuff, we'll see, I have no idea. But one thing that I'm really excited about is that now I can play other TTRPGs. There's a policy that when you're a Wizards employee you can't stream other tabletop games. So there was a Call of Cthulhu game that we did with the C-team but we had to get very special permission for it, they were like OK but this is only a one time thing. I get it, you know, it's endorsing the competition or whatever, but I'm super excited to be able to have more freedom about the kinds of stuff that I'm getting involved with."

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

For new players the hooks are:

media productions, for example cartoons and movies.

board games with simple rules to be played by late preteen and teenages, something like Hero-Quest by Milton Bradley.

videogames.

* I guess WotC should know the strong and weak points by the rest of the TTRPG system if it wants to create the universal multigenre d20 system.

 

[Cadence]

That said, given the youtube and twitch, it's easy enough to see how people play.

I spent an hour trying to find a good intro video to share with my son's friends and their parents. They might be out there... but I didn't stumble on any that I felt did a nice job. Maybe I googled the wrong terms, or maybe they were buried under a lot of badly made too high level things.

 

[SuperTD]

Pure hypothesis here: She may be hoping that her streaming numbers are high enough, after WotC, that she can do her own thing.

I also wonder if her leaving has anything to do with Orion's experience?

Wish her well either way.

She must either have a lot of money put aside or be VERY optimistic. I could not imagine leaving even an abusive or dangerous job in this climate

She mentioned later in the video she is fine for money - her partner is still earning and they have enough savings.

 

[R_J_K75]

f D&D, which is a multi-million dollar brand owned by an even bigger corporation, needs established players to teach new players how to play, WotC absolutely deserves the blame.

I totally agree that WotC could make it easier for new players to learn the rules and the books should be redesigned. My point was that at some point the onus lies on the players to read and attempt to learn the game. I've seen many players show up to play and have no clue what's going on because they haven't read the PHB. IME its almost expected that the DM will walk the new players through the learning process every step of the way. Which is unrealistic and unfair. No matter how well written the core rule books are with examples of play and walk throughs if the players dont take the initiative to learn the game, how can WotC be faulted for that?

 

[CrashFiend82]

I don't Kate's words about New User experience being piss poor. I agree with so many that said the PHB could after a much better layout. I always thought starting with character creation was odd. Here let us tell you how to calculate all these values AC, HP, Attack Bonus.... oh and pick from these traits which you have no understanding of yet. Yes starter sets are great but imagine the amount of kids with disabilities or don't know others who would be willing to play. I love D&D and simply want everyone to have the opportunity to experience how awesome it is. That being said the barriers to many kids specifically those with disabilities are really high. I have come across kids with dyslexia to difficulties with math are quickly turned off the rules even though I know they would love the "spirit" of D&D. It amazes me with the available technology WOTC doesn't have direct links on their website to dozens of tutorials... quick play throughs, simple building guides, visual spell descriptions and the like. Not to mention having or at least guiding New Users, Players, Customers, etc. towards online games with others, its not like 10 year old kids don't have access to the internet.

 

[Neonchameleon]

It is exactly this. My fiancee loves games but even with me being a decades-long veteran there to teach her, she's not interested in putting in the work to learn D&D. There is a ton of terminology, rules, processes, tropes, and very unintuitive things that we don't think about twice because we know it all.

But for somebody walking in blind, there is a lot to grok and the game tends to throw everything at a new player at once (think of all the different parts of the game that you touch before the game even starts just by creating a wizard with a familiar). There really isn't a good "tutorial" mode that isn't "play with somebody who's played before".

And this is to me a huge issue of D&D. I've taught D&D and numerous other RPGs to multiple new players, and 5e is simply not that easy to teach by the standards of many other games. There are a lot of mechanics, a lot of numbers, and quite a few things that we only accept as D&D players because we've been playing it so long. (For the record the D&Ds I've found easiest to teach have been the Rules Cyclopaedia and 4e running under Death To Ability Scores and only ever calling for skills, replacing Dungeoneering with Engineering).

The response "well she should just git gud" is not to me an adequate one. Making the game easier to share is a good thing.

 

[SuperTD]

I totally agree that WotC could make it easier for new players to learn the rules and the books should be redesigned. My point was that at some point the onus lies on the players to read and attempt to learn the game. I've seen many players show up to play and have no clue what's going on because they haven't read the PHB. IME its almost expected that the DM will walk the new players through the learning process every step of the way. Which is unrealistic and unfair. No matter how well written the core rule books are with examples of play and walk throughs if the players dont take the initiative to learn the game, how can WotC be faulted for that?

It doesn't help that whenever an interested person on somewhere like reddit makes a post asking what they need to do to learn the game, inevitably there are several people telling them to read the PHB cover to cover, which is ridiculous. I can't imagine that is going to encourage new people to pick up the hobby.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

The new user comment is really wierd and IMO incorrect

Nobody goes cold into anything. You find your football team, your fondness for a certain food, TV programme and every other recreational pursuit via " an older cousin" type

Strange decision indeed

Actually, if you think of a lot of the apps you download onto your phone, they are brand new to you. And typically, you don't have someone else helping you figure out how to use the app. And yet, you can figure it out, because the new user experience is well designed.

 

[ChaosOS]

One thing I will note is D&D isn't the only game to have issues with the new player experience. DOTA is fresh on my mind due to TI, and it's got a notoriously horrific new player experience - there's an established community of hardcore gamers who enjoy the complicated nature of the game, but for new players there's so many aspects to the game to learn and many of them aren't explained at all in the game. DOTA has the advantage of being digital, but also the disadvantage of it being a game that sees major, fundamental changes at least once a year, unlike D&D which has had the same core rules for six years now.

I will place some of the blame on the DMG, this editions is one of the worse ones they've published.

 

[matskralc]

I totally agree that WotC could make it easier for new players to learn the rules and the books should be redesigned. My point was that at some point the onus lies on the players to read and attempt to learn the game. I've seen many players show up to play and have no clue what's going on because they haven't read the PHB. IME its almost expected that the DM will walk the new players through the learning process every step of the way. Which is unrealistic and unfair. No matter how well written the core rule books are with examples of play and walk throughs if the players dont take the initiative to learn the game, how can WotC be faulted for that?

What this tells me is that lots of people really want to play this cool game that we all play but the presentation for a n00b sucks.

This isn't like showing up to Scrabble night without having invested 3 minutes in reading the two-page rulesheet. I don't fault people for wanting to play this super cool game but being turned off by the idea of having to read a 300-page poorly organized, densely written textbook to figure out how to play.

Fewer people would be showing up at your tables and asking "what's an attack bonus?" if the books were written in an engaging, intuitive, educational manner.