[UPDATED!] The Unsung (Female) Half of the D&D Team!

Now that Jennifer Clarke-Wilkes is no longer at WotC, the core D&D design team of eight people (Mike Mearls, Rodney Thompson, Jeremy Crawford, Greg Bilsland, Chris Perkins, Peter Lee, Matt Sernett, Adam Lee) is comprised solely of men. However, it's easy to overlook the other half of the team, which consists of those not so much in the limelight, and who are essential to the game's success - and who include a number of talented female staff. According to Mike Mearls, the following members of the D&D team are female.

This amounts to 9 hardworking, essential people. Mike lists them as follows:

• all of our data collection, polling, research - done by a woman
• our director of publishing, aka the person who decides what we make - a woman
• our marketing senior manager - a woman
• the four person team who created the look of 5e - women
• our licensing director - a woman
• our marketing art director - a woman

I don't know the names of all of them (I've listed the ones in the credits of the books below). I've dropped WotC's Jeremy Crawford a quick line, as he's been helpful with providing WotC staff names and positions before, and I'll update this if I hear back.

The books themselves mention Kate Irwin, Mari Kolkowsky, Melissa Rapier, Shauna Narciso (art directors), Liz Schuh, Shelly Mazzanoble, Hilary Ross, Laura Tommervik, Kim Lundstrom (brand and marketing), and Emi Tanji, Bree Heiss, and Trich Tochum (graphic designers), which is at least 12 women working on D&D!

UPDATE - Jeremy Crawford has responded with an awesome reply which lists many of the people involved with D&D:

We're putting the finishing touches on Princes of the Apocalypse, so I need to keep this short for now.

Many committed, talented people work on D&D products at Wizards of the Coast, both inside D&D R&D and outside it. The D&D team spans multiple departments, and it works on the roleplaying game, video games, licensed products, novels, and more. Regarding the RPG, which is my focus, the credits pages of the three core books show that many people had a hand in forming the new edition of the game.

EN World currently lists the following people being on the D&D team: Mike Mearls, Jeremy Crawford, Chris Perkins, Greg Bilsland, Rodney Thompson, Peter Lee, Matt Sernett, and Adam Lee.

That list should include Kate Irwin, Dan Gelon, and Shauna Narciso, the art directors who oversee the creation of all art for D&D. The list should also have Bree Heiss and Emi Tanji, who created the gorgeous interior designs of the core books and who worked tirelessly with me, Chris Perkins, and Kate Irwin to lay out those books. Most recently, Kate, Emi, Chris, and I have been collaborating to bring Princes of the Apocalypse to completion. The way we work, art affects text and vice versa.

The list is only complete with Richard Whitters, our amazing R&D concept artist and world builder, who works with Chris Perkins and Adam Lee in shaping the stories and worlds we plan to visit in the coming years. A fun fact: the fabulous condition sketches in the Player's Handbook are by Richard.

The list should name Chris Youngs, Ben Petrisor, Tom Olsen, and Chris Dupuis, members of D&D R&D who work with our video game partners; who work on board games, like the upcoming Temple of Elemental Evil; who review numerous licensed products, like the WizKids miniatures; and who are part of our internal testing of the RPG.

The list needs Nathan Stewart, Liz Schuh, Chris Lindsay, Shelly Mazzanoble, Hilary Ross, Laura Tommervik, Kim Lundstrom, and Trevor Kidd—all members of the D&D brand team. They collaborate with R&D on shaping product plans, creating future stories, gathering playtest data, working with freelancers and outside game studios, planning convention events, and dealing with innumerable other parts of the D&D business.

The list should mention Chris Tulach, who oversees the Adventurer's League and who has participated in many design meetings for the RPG over the years.

I could keep going and going. The core books wouldn't have made it out of the building without the D&D project managers—John Hay and Neil Shinkle—making sure all our departments were working in sync with each other. Our books would never see print without people like Jefferson Dunlap and Cynda Callaway working with our printers. Our gathering of playtest data and potential errata is always helped by Sam Simpson and the rest of our enthusiastic customer service team. We also get feedback and occasional loans of personnel from Magic R&D. For instance, James Wyatt did his final work on the Dungeon Master's Guide while on the Magic team.

And everything we do is in consultation with Bill Rose, the vice president of R&D, and with the rest of the company's executive team.

None of this begins to scratch the surface when it comes to our contractors. People like Michele Carter, Anita Williams, and Robert Schwalb aren't on our staff, but each of them played a key part in creating the fifth edition books. And currently, Dan Helmick is a full-time contractor working for us in-house.

Oh boy, I said was going to keep this short. It's easy for me to get enthusiastic when acknowledging the contributions of the diverse group of people who make D&D what it is today!

​

 

[JTorres]

Pretty cool of Jeremy Crawford to send out that write-up of the D&D team. I have seen these threads the past few days about 8 people working on D&D and it seems those estimates were a bit off judging by Crawford's count. As an aside, I had a chance to meet and chat with Jeremy Crawford (along with Rodney Thompson and Greg Bilsland) at a D&D seminar during Gen Con last summer. He was kind enough to let me thumb through an advance copy of the Monster Manual and patiently answered every noob question I threw at him. I left that seminar wishing I could have met more of the team members; they were clearly a friendly bunch that were passionate about D&D and its legacy.

 

[Mistwell]

You can view the page here. UPDATE - Jeremy Crawford has responded with an awesome reply which lists many of the people involved with D&D:

We're putting the finishing touches on Princes of the Apocalypse, so I need to keep this short for now.

Many committed, talented people work on D&D products at Wizards of the Coast, both inside D&D R&D and outside it. The D&D team spans multiple departments, and it works on the roleplaying game, video games, licensed products, novels, and more. Regarding the RPG, which is my focus, the credits pages of the three core books show that many people had a hand in forming the new edition of the game.

EN World currently lists the following people being on the D&D team: Mike Mearls, Jeremy Crawford, Chris Perkins, Greg Bilsland, Rodney Thompson, Peter Lee, Matt Sernett, and Adam Lee.

That list should include Kate Irwin, Dan Gelon, and Shauna Narciso, the art directors who oversee the creation of all art for D&D. The list should also have Bree Heiss and Emi Tanji, who created the gorgeous interior designs of the core books and who worked tirelessly with me, Chris Perkins, and Kate Irwin to lay out those books. Most recently, Kate, Emi, Chris, and I have been collaborating to bring Princes of the Apocalypse to completion. The way we work, art affects text and vice versa.

The list is only complete with Richard Whitters, our amazing R&D concept artist and world builder, who works with Chris Perkins and Adam Lee in shaping the stories and worlds we plan to visit in the coming years. A fun fact: the fabulous condition sketches in the Player's Handbook are by Richard.

The list should name Chris Youngs, Ben Petrisor, Tom Olsen, and Chris Dupuis, members of D&D R&D who work with our video game partners; who work on board games, like the upcoming Temple of Elemental Evil; who review numerous licensed products, like the WizKids miniatures; and who are part of our internal testing of the RPG.

The list needs Nathan Stewart, Liz Schuh, Chris Lindsay, Shelly Mazzanoble, Hilary Ross, Laura Tommervik, Kim Lundstrom, and Trevor Kidd—all members of the D&D brand team. They collaborate with R&D on shaping product plans, creating future stories, gathering playtest data, working with freelancers and outside game studios, planning convention events, and dealing with innumerable other parts of the D&D business.

The list should mention Chris Tulach, who oversees the Adventurer's League and who has participated in many design meetings for the RPG over the years.

I could keep going and going. The core books wouldn't have made it out of the building without the D&D project managers—John Hay and Neil Shinkle—making sure all our departments were working in sync with each other. Our books would never see print without people like Jefferson Dunlap and Cynda Callaway working with our printers. Our gathering of playtest data and potential errata is always helped by Sam Simpson and the rest of our enthusiastic customer service team. We also get feedback and occasional loans of personnel from Magic R&D. For instance, James Wyatt did his final work on the Dungeon Master's Guide while on the Magic team.

And everything we do is in consultation with Bill Rose, the vice president of R&D, and with the rest of the company's executive team.

None of this begins to scratch the surface when it comes to our contractors. People like Michele Carter, Anita Williams, and Robert Schwalb aren't on our staff, but each of them played a key part in creating the fifth edition books. And currently, Dan Helmick is a full-time contractor working for us in-house.

Oh boy, I said was going to keep this short. It's easy for me to get enthusiastic when acknowledging the contributions of the diverse group of people who make D&D what it is today!

Wow, that is a HECK of a lot more people than I've previously seen listed. And he's not even counting the overhead general personnel who contribute to D&D along with many other departments, like HR, legal, payroll, accounts receivable, accounts payable, warehouse, shipping, quality control, facilities, office managers, general assistants, etc...

I think we can stop calling this a "skeleton crew" from here on out. It's clearly not that. It sounds more like "people wear multiple hats, some people share duties in multiple departments and divisions depending on the projects, and some people might be technically contractors but functioning more similar to employees sometimes". So, hard to put a definitive number on it, but easier to just name a lot of people who have done work on it and are still employed or contracted.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

Wow. That is a lot of people.

Definitely seeing that this company is doing well.

 

[was]

I wonder if the "we are socially progressive because we employ many women" discussion is supposed to distract us from the recent "we just laid off another bunch of quality employees" thread.

 

[GX.Sigma]

I wonder if the "we are socially progressive because we employ many women" discussion is supposed to distract us from the recent "we just laid off another bunch of quality employees" thread.

The conversation was not started by anyone from WotC. It was a Twitter response to someone who said (in response to the layoffs) "There are now Zero Women working on Dungeons and Dragons." Mike Mearls was correcting that person.

 

[CasvalRemDeikun]

At a glance, it looks like the D&D team is much larger than we originally thought. I count at least two dozen. Lots of names on there.

 

[JTorres]

Another interesting part of Jeremy Crawford's post is the snippets about finishing work on Princes of the Apocalypse. From what I could gather, the WotC team is working much closer on that book than I had thought. It seemed to me that WoTC's strategy in farming out the APs is to put the bulk of the work (adventure design, writing, layout, art direction, etc) on their partners, in this case Richard Baker and his crew at Sasquatch, yet Crawford's post mentions four WotC employees by name that are working to complete PoA. Perhaps WotC is involved in more than just providing the AP story bibles. Not that we'd ever be privy to this kind of information, but I'd love to know more of the particulars of WotC's arrangement with Kobold Press and now with Sasquatch and just how much leeway WotC's partners have.

 

[samursus]

Wow, that is a HECK of a lot more people than I've previously seen listed. And he's not even counting the overhead general personnel who contribute to D&D along with many other departments, like HR, legal, payroll, accounts receivable, accounts payable, warehouse, shipping, quality control, facilities, office managers, general assistants, etc...

I think we can stop calling this a "skeleton crew" from here on out. It's clearly not that. It sounds more like "people wear multiple hats, some people share duties in multiple departments and divisions depending on the projects, and some people might be technically contractors but functioning more similar to employees sometimes". So, hard to put a definitive number on it, but easier to just name a lot of people who have done work on it and are still employed or contracted.

Yeah, this is what I took from the article.

 

[Sacrosanct]

How dare Jeremy put the kabosh on all the righteous indignation going around.


Ok, in terms of full disclosure, I will admit that I'm probably a bit more irritated about this thing than I would be if it were in a vacuum. But it seems that over the past couple years, there have been people who seem to take an almost pathologically unhealthy obsession with attacking WoTC and Mearls. For what? Because they're designing a game that you don't like? Implications and/or accusations of sexism and bigotry are pretty darn serious things in my opinion. And I'm getting pretty frustrated at the same group of people who will piss in the pool by immediately doing crap like this. I.e., making some claim that Mearls and WoTC is against women (the whole "D&D has no women working for it anymore. Way to go misogynists!") when the truth is nothing of the sort. There's plenty of legitimate misogyny and privilege in the world going on, so how about we focus on those instead of trying to bring Mearls and WotC "to justice" based on false accusations? I like D&D. I like what WoTC did with this edition. I understand WoTC is a corporation and thus I understand things like layoffs happen. I can open the books and see that WoTC has an incredibly diverse team that worked on D&D, including putting women in significant positions of importance. I think that really helped the product, but I think it happened because those women were the best qualified for the job and not given the position to meet some quota. Based on the quality of the things those women were in charge of (like the art), I have no doubt in my mind that they were the best for the job because it's some of the best art in D&D ever. And this coming from a guy who loves a lot of the TSR era art. Tramp, Otus, et al are some of my all time favorites. I do NOT assume they got those positions just because WoTC wants X % of staff to be women. I believe that women are just as good as men at every facet of this industry, so the only logical conclusion is that if you hire the best person, you're going to get pretty close to a 50/50 split. When I look at the books, that's what I am seeing.

But I also don't think it automatically makes them sexist or discriminatory if they didn't hit that magical # of what % of each team is part of an ethnic group. I don't think it's intellectually responsible or honest to assume they are "part of the problem" if the 8 folks are men because that statement assumes there's a problem there to begin with because it assumes WoTC is perpetuating and/or reinforcing a discriminatory environment. Not only is there no evidence of this, but based on the highly diverse workforce they had on D&D, it seems very unlikely. Can we look a little deeper before we start throwing out baseless accusations please? Can we stop attacking WoTC like it's some sort of evil entity when they are doing nothing any different than any other business? Can we stop taking shots at Mearls personally because he may endorse a rule that you don't like? Can we stop with these statements that are not much more than "if you're not with us, you're against us."? Can we stop looking for offense where there is none, just as an excuse to attack them?

Is all this too much to ask?

 

[aramis erak]

Whoa now, hold on there! I thought 5E was going to be the gender-nonbinary edition.

Do you know the occurance rate for Herms and genetic Intersexuals? It totals out to about 0.35%... It would be remarkable if any of the staff there were perceptably non-binary.

The rules themselves leave out a number of other perceptually binary issues: Gender of character, handedness, beardedness ...

Handedness isn't binary, even tho people treat it that way. Some are Left, some are Right, some are Mixed Dominant, some are ambidextrous, and some are mirrored quasi-ambidextrous (directional tasks learned with one hand can only be done with the other in reverse direction). Further still, some people learn certain tasks off-handed, but never learn those tasks for the dominant hand (especially shooting skills).

And then eye dominance... most people have one dominant eye; Others have dysfunctions resulting in split dominance by focus range or by light level. (I've one acquaintance who is functionally color sighted, but only in one eye; the other is only in B&W... in dim light, he functions with the B&W eye only... which happens to match his dominant hand.)

Beards likewise. Aside from Elves and Dwarves, who have implied beardedness (Elves no, Dwarves yes), the game makes little assumption about facial hare, and doesn't even put a spot on the sheet for it. And yet, it was an issue in several of the inspirational appendix N stories. And I've several female acquaintances with significant facial hair, so it's not like bearded ladies are all that uncommon.

Really, it's the Gender-issues-unmentioned edition. Fine by me.