Who Makes WotC's Adventures?

There are now three large hardcover adventures for D&D 5th Edition. There's the two-part Tyranny of Dragons campaign produced by Kobold Press; there's Princes of the Apocalypse, from Sasquatch Game Studios; and there's the imminent Out of the Abyss, from Green Ronin publishing. All of these are official, hardcover adventures produced for WotC by third party companies. But how does that actually work? What is the relationship between the company producing the products and the company publishing them? WotC's Jeremy Crawford told me yesterday that the term "outsourcing" is innacurate when it comes to describing this arrangement.

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If we go back a bit to when I asked Kobold Press' Wolfgang Baur about the process, he told me that "the 5E adventures are produced as a combination of studio work and WotC oversight." He went on to describe it in a little more detail, highlighting a to-and-fro between the companies -- "we'd do some portion of the work, then we would get feedback from WotC on Realmslore, or story beats, or mechanics. Then we did more of the design, and got feedback from swarms of playtesters. Then we turned over another version for feedback on the art and layout. And so forth. It was iterative..." So collaboration clearly takes place all the way through the process.

He describes Kobold Press role as "the heavy lifting in design, development, and editing" with WotC having "crucial input and set the direction for what they wanted".

Moving ahead to now, WotC Jeremy Crawford observes that "It's bizarre to see a few posters on ENWorld mistake our [D&D 5E] collaborations as outsourcing. Each book has been a team effort." The input from WotC isn't just greenlighting the book at various stages; as Jeremy tells us "Our reviews are deep. We create the story & the concept art. We write portions of the books. We design mechanics. Etc.!" As he also points out, the credits page of each book tells us who contributed to each.

So there we have it. These books aren't outsourced to third parties in any traditional sense of that word; the books are written as a collaborative effort with writing and more done by both companies.

 

[Parmandur]

There should be some kind of meme that goes:



I dont always engage with my fans



but when I do I make sure it is 140 characters or less.

Yup, they used to post here, back in the day.

Now they don't, and focus on more useful mediums for their purposes. Oh, well.

 

[Mistwell]

For me I consider it freelancing (individuals) to outsourcing (company).

When you freelance to individuals, it's still a company you're hiring. They're called sole proprietorships, and can use their social security number in place of their federal ID number. It's the same exact 10-99 form being filed for either the individual freelancer or very small company being hired (in fact I fill out 10-99s all the time, and my company has 30 people). The contracts with them probably even say, "You represent yourself as your own company, understand you are obligated to carry your own workers compensation insurance, etc." or something like that. Bottom line, if a company hires someone as a freelancer, the freelancer is a company. It might not be a corporation or an LLC or partnership, but it's a sole proprietorship of some sort. They're writing expenses off against that sole proprietorship, if they are doing line item tax deductions. Which is really one of the main things we're talking about here with very small companies - the tax treatment. There isn't really even much liability protection in such small companies, as you can almost always pierce the corporate veil when you get that small.

I am curious what you think the differences is between hiring Person A, Person B, and Person C as freelancers together to work on Project X, and hiring Company D composed of just Person A, Person B, and Person C to work on Project X? I can't really think of any meaningful difference that's relevant to this discussion. There's no real "company entity" doing the work, it's all just a fiction. It's the same people, doing the exact same thing in the exact same manner under the exact same circumstances. What is the difference to you?

 

[lkj]

So, terminology debate aside, it seems obvious to me that Jeremy is trying to respond to the sentiment that some people have that wotc barely do any of their own work. This sentiment is sometimes expressed something along the lines of

"Hey why do wotc need any staff at all since they now outsource everything?"

His response is:

"Hey, we do a lot of work on all of those products. It's not like we just hand the thing off"

Which strikes me as the important point here. Definitions of outsourcing and his potential misapplication of it notwithstanding.

AD

 

[Patrick McGill]

So, terminology debate aside, it seems obvious to me that Jeremy is trying to respond to the sentiment that some people have that wotc barely do any of their own work. This sentiment is sometimes expressed something along the lines of

"Hey why do wotc need any staff at all since they now outsource everything?"

His response is:

"Hey, we do a lot of work on all of those products. It's not like we just hand the thing off"

Which strikes me as the important point here. Definitions of outsourcing and his potential misapplication of it notwithstanding.

AD

I think this is the most important point. Whatever you want to call it, they are collaborating together with experienced individuals to produce d&d content. Splitting hairs doesn't seem awfully productive.

 

[Morrus]

So, terminology debate aside, it seems obvious to me that Jeremy is trying to respond to the sentiment that some people have that wotc barely do any of their own work. This sentiment is sometimes expressed something along the lines of

"Hey why do wotc need any staff at all since they now outsource everything?"

His response is:

"Hey, we do a lot of work on all of those products. It's not like we just hand the thing off"

Which strikes me as the important point here. Definitions of outsourcing and his potential misapplication of it notwithstanding.

AD

That is, indeed, the point. Pages of dictionary definitions were not the point.

 

[occam]

Ok fine. I'm wrong for feeling that what they are doing IS outsourcing and expressing that. I never attacked him or used the word liar.

Ah, so you didn't say this in your first post to this thread?

I call doublespeak on Jeremy Crawford.

And you didn't use the term "doublespeak" at least twice more after that? Using your preferred sources of dictionary.reference.com:

doublespeak
1. evasive, ambiguous language that is intended to deceive or confuse.

and Merriam-Webster:

doublespeak
: language that can be understood in more than one way and that is used to trick or deceive people

So your're right, you did avoid using the word "liar". But who's engaging in doublespeak?

Clearly things are much too sensative around here for people to have a thing called freedom of speech, to express their views.

Please. You're certainly welcome to express your views. At times, I've appreciated your position, even if I don't agree with it. But being unnecessarily antagonistic weakens your argument, and you should at least be honest about what you've been doing.

 

[Morrus]

Ah, so you didn't say this in your first post to this thread?

And you didn't use the term "doublespeak" at least twice more after that? Using your preferred sources of dictionary.reference.com:

and Merriam-Webster:

So your're right, you did avoid using the word "liar". But who's engaging in doublespeak?

Please. You're certainly welcome to express your views. At times, I've appreciated your position, even if I don't agree with it. But being unnecessarily antagonistic weakens your argument, and you should at least be honest about what you've been doing.

He can't reply; he's been asked to leave the thread.

 

[occam]

Why is any of us making a stink about this? It takes two to argue, and the other side seems just as vested in giving WotC full credit for the adventures.
I just don't believe WotC should get full credit. Or principal credit. That the answer to the question "who made the adventures?" is not "WotC made them."


But it's not JUST WotC's name on the product. There's a whole other design studio. There are a number of people who didn't work for WotC, who worked for Sasquatch Game or Kobold Press or Green Ronin, who were hired by an entirely different company. And it's unfair to give WotC full credit for someone else's work.

The questions are:
Is Sword Coast Legends a WotC product?
Would you judge WotC's involvement with that product the same as with this product?
How is the authorship and creative responsibility of this product different?
Ehy are the adventures different? Just because they're RPG book? Should the format make a difference in who gets primary credit.

Who ever said that WotC claimed, or should claim, full credit for any of these products? You're making a straw-man argument; no one said anything like that. IMO, they've been very generous in promoting the small companies they're working with, compared to how most companies handle this kind of relationship.

There does seem to be a few people who insist that because WotC wrote some of the content and have so many people credited, it's as much a WotC book as the core rulebooks.
And WotC doesn't always drawing attention to the... um... use of hired labour (to avoid the terms "freelancing" or "outsourcing").

Besides the credits page, you should check the back cover of, for example, Princes of the Apocalypse. Right there, next to the WotC logo….

 

[Benji]

If a product is outsourced we say it's bad because they didn't do any work and Wotc accept the blame [not the outsourced writers]. If we think it isn't wotc still take the blame as it's 'not hiring enough staff'. So what we are really arguing is how we're exactly going to blame wizards.

I'm speculating but I'd guess Crawford knows this and is trying, very politely, to put the 'outsourcing' thing to bed. If it was me, I'd just say 'hey Enworld, it doesn't matter. The product being outsourced has almost no effect on quality. What does is the writers and we'retrying to hire busy people with a proven track record, shut the hell up about outsourcing.'

And that's why I don't work for wizard's PR.

 

[occam]

One, it seems the word 'outsourcing' carries negative connotations for some people that I am really not sure are inherent in the word (though, again, I am no professor of economics, nor linguistics). The other is people who do seem to know objected to being (I guess what they felt was) dictated to about whether things were or weren't outsourced. I suppose they found that somewhat condescending, perhaps. While I don't necessarily feel that way myself, I guess I could see how that would sound like doublespeak to someone with better knowledge on the topic than myself.

Finally, with complete respect for the moderators and Morrus in particular, I'm not sure the message given (that WotC will stop posting if the content of what they post gets challenged critically) was the best response. It at least insinuates that only a particular spectrum of reactions to WotC posts are ok if we ever want to find out new information. That's a far cry from thought police, but I wonder how someone who really did believe what was said was corporate doublespeak was supposed to respond?

That's a good question. Here's the deal, from my PoV. Calling something "doublespeak" (a word which is doublespeak for "lies") is something you can do based on facts. If a company representative tells you "Smoking is good for you, it doesn't cause lung cancer!", you can call them on it. You can point to scientific studies, to company memos, etc. to prove your point that the person is being deceptive.

That's not what Jeremy did. He attempted to bring clarity to the issue by providing more detail about how these business relationships work, because some have mistaken impressions that WotC is "not really writing their own books" anymore, in some way that's fundamentally different than before. I don't think anyone is arguing against the facts he presented, they're criticizing his use of language. For that, he was accused of engaging in doublespeak, of being a liar; WotC was "called on it" for supposedly being deceptive. How does that make sense?

So this whole thing has been a pointless argument over semantics, about whether everyone has the exact same understanding of the word "outsourcing", with all its connotations. Denying that there are negative connotations associated with that word in present-day culture is either honest ignorance or disingenuousness; I won't presume to ascribe either to anyone in particular. But I think what people cared about discussing was the level of WotC's involvement in recent D&D products, and what ended up mostly being discussed, and what generated the ill feelings and occasional insults, was the definition of a word.