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.

​

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.

 

[Staffan]

If they are super involved as they say they are why do they keep laying off people and "restructuring"? It feels like all I ever hear from WOTC is layoffs, and never new hires. I mean.. I KNOW they have to hire, or else they'd have like... negative people working there. It's just all I ever hear is the exit of people very rarely do I hear about the hiring of new people.

They hired Sean K Reynolds in May to be a lore guru, mainly for FR, and Greg Tito as communications manager in February.

 

[S_Dalsgaard]

And again, when a WotC rep actually takes the time to reach out to the "fans" and communicate, they get accused of lies and doublespeak.

 

[TheDonger]

Don't want to get into a battle of semantics, but when I think of the term of "outsourcing," it generally refers to a situation where Company A hires subcontracter B to manufacture a component, based on specs provided by Company A, to be used and incorporated in the final widget produced by Company A. I think Crawford takes umbrage with the term because it suggests that the WoTC team simply handed off the work to a third-party, and there was little collaboration between the two, which we know is simply not the case. I've listened to an interview with Richard Baker from Sasquatch on the design and creation of Princes of the Apocalypse, and he confirmed that the WoTC team was involved in pretty much every single aspect of the adventure, from plot, tone, mechanics, art, editorial, etc.

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter to me who takes the laboring oar in creating this content, as long as it is good, quality content. Also, all the guys who have a hand in helping WotC -- Rich Baker, Wolfgang Bauer, etc -- aren't they TSR/WoTC alumni anyway?

 

[justinj3x3]

Perhaps "sub-contracting a bulk of the work" is a more apt description. I don't really care how they get it done, as long as they produce quality adventure material.

Sub-contractors are self employed 10-99 employees. Outsourced is the right term.

 

[justinj3x3]

And again, when a WotC rep actually takes the time to reach out to the "fans" and communicate, they get accused of lies and doublespeak.

Umm because it is doublespeak.

 

[JeffB]

And again, when a WotC rep actually takes the time to reach out to the "fans" and communicate, they get accused of lies and doublespeak.

More like he doesn't understand the term "outsourcing"

It really depends on what the meaning of "is", is.....

 

[Staffan]

Which is fine. I think they just need to communicate more (which they seem to be starting to do) and stop with the corporate BS which is insulting to the fans (well fan, speaking for myself).

IMO, the D&D side of the company really needs their own Mark Rosewater. He's the head designer of Magic (which is doing very well), and in addition to that does a huge amount of work in communicating with the fans: a website article each Monday, not one but two podcasts a week (which he records while driving to work), and an enormous presence on social media like Twitter and Tumblr where he answers questions from fans.

The Magic side of things is also a lot better at announcing things in advance. This fall's major expansion was announced in March, about 7 months before the release in October. This set is also the first two-set block - a change they announced last August, over a year before the release (to be fair, that was because the change meant that last year's fall block would "only" be Standard-legal for 18 months instead of 2 years). When they announced that change, Mark wrote an article explaining "This is how things work now. These are the problems with this model. Here's how we're going to change things, and here's how that is going to affect you."

 

[S_Dalsgaard]

Umm because it is doublespeak.

English is my second language and I clearly doesn't understand it as well as I thought. Please tell which part of the two quoted sentences (repeated below for easy reference) counts as doublespeak.

"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."
"Our reviews are deep. We create the story & the concept art. We write portions of the books. We design mechanics. Etc.!"

 

[Maggan]

I'm not familiar enough with business English, so I'm wondering if there is there an amount of work "bought from outside" that crosses an outsource line?

Like, 70% in-house, 30% freelancers = In-house. 30% in-house, 70% freelancers =Outsource?

Or is any use of freelancers e.g. outsourcing?

 

[Uder]

That's some Stark-level newspeak.

Edit: lol, should've read before posting. Hilarious to see people already essentially saying "He says right there what he wants us to believe, so we have to believe it!"