Blog (A5E) Meet Our ‘Level Up’ Team!

We’ve crossed the ‘t’s and dotted the ‘i’s, signed on the dotted lines, and we’re very excited to introduce our team of 5E designers to you! They’ve already started work on Level Up!

Hundreds of people applied when we advertised these positions. Whittling them down was a challenge, but we are very proud of the group we’ve brought together to work on this game. Some you may have heard of, while others we hope you’ll get to know over the coming months.

Check them out on our Team page!

If you are interested in working on Level Up, keep an eye on this website, as more opportunities will be available.

 

[M.T. Black]

What a great team! Well done, and I think the book is going to be outstanding!

 

[Sacrosanct]

Not at all, no. Perhaps I wasn't expressing myself well.

I think you expressed yourself very well, FWIW. As someone who has been a manager in businesses for a long time, it's been shown study after study that a diverse team is more effective. Upwards of 20% in some studies (like a Stanford study I recall from years ago). Also, in terms of RPGs, when we pull all these fantasy elements from real life cultures and myths, it's just good sense to have a diverse working force that can represent many of these cultures, and have them represented in a respectful way and not subject to cultural appropriation, intentional or not.

 

[OblivionDrive]

Not at all, no. Perhaps I wasn't expressing myself well.

You expressed yourself fine. It feels more like a willful misreading of the thing to me.

You said "So, when choosing a team with one of the goals being diversity, one has to be able to look past one's own assumptions and "soft" racism and not only look for who stands out as the best, but maybe who has great potential but hasn't had the best opportunities yet, or hasn't been recognized yet, or whose work has just the...something that you're looking for." The emphasis on those two words is what's being ignored.

The short version is basically, "If all other things are equal, going with a choice that makes your team's viewpoint more diverse is the way to go." It's not as if there's some etched-in-stone objective holy metric about quality of someone's work that you can judge one work vs another on. Nobody is putting Designer 1 and Designer 2's work on a scale and weighing it vs whatever the designerly version of the Feather of Ma'at is and casting the lesser one into the mouth of a waiting beast.

There will always be a degree of subjectivity in picking who you think is most qualified. And in those situations? If I have, say, ten positions I need filled and have 30 candidates who I feel are all around the same level of skill and quality? I'm gonna lean more heavily on making sure non-cishet white males are represented on my team. Does this mean no cishet white men will be hired? Of course not! But it's also not gonna mean that the team will be 90% white guys like it's historically been throughout tabletop's history. Because if we want to get to that mythical future meritocracy that some very vocal people always tout as the SOLE REASON ANYONE EVER SHOULD BE HIRED, you don't get to do that without getting experience under the belts of people who historically get ignored in favor of the entrenched old guard. That's how systemic change gets made - it starts as small moves on a local level and works its way up the chain.

TL;DR - your post was fine and I don't think most folks didn't get what you were saying.

 

[Nilbog]

That's a heck of a lot of talent, my excitement has just gone to 11!

Good luck @Morrus and all involved

 

[Tyler Do'Urden]

Owen K.C. Stephens AND Paul Hughes?

Mechanically, this book is gonna be a BRICK HOUSE.

You just sold a copy!

 

[Sacrosanct]

Actually, I take my earlier comment back. I think the biggest challenge is keeping within the mission statement: compatible with existing 5e. Looking at all these threads, and there are an awful lot of suggestions that would make the proposed new version much more powerful than the existing 5e PCs, making compatibility extremely difficult.

I truly wish the design team good luck with that, and reigning in scope creep.

 

[Von Ether]

Well, if we are playing the numbers game, I've seen the names of six of them. A few I met in person and others on the web.

What can I say, be more curious?

OTOH, I didn't pay attention to the names in the fine print back either in the day. While I always had my eye on the big name genre authors I discovered, I'm much more guilty of paying attention to mid-listers and game designers only after years of trying to become either. (For my fascination in cinema, I started paying attention to directors more because it made it easier to find films I liked.)

But I beg you, don't be that person who loves to read media tie-in fiction or gaming books and then has zero interest in following the writer's name beyond that franchise/supplement book you really, really liked. That's being lazy-minded almost on purpose.

Dollars to donuts, if you look into @Morrus 's new crew, you'll find some stuff you enjoy - or even crazier - discover that you've been accidentally following some of these creatives and didn't even know it.

 

[Connorsrpg]

Well done to everyone involved.

 

[Connorsrpg]

It does not say where everyone is from, so I am asking here whether any of the team is from Australia? Simply want to know as I would like to follow more Aussie's progress on Twitter, etc.

 

[dwayne]

As long as they picked them for their talent and abilities, not because of anything else i will be happy