WotC WotC Removes Digital Content Team Credits From D&D Beyond

According to Faith Elisabeth Lilley, who was on the digital content team at Wizards of the Coast, the contributor credits for the team have been removed from DDB.

The team was responsible for content feedback and the implementation of book content on the online platform. While it had been indicated to them that they would not be included in the credits of the physical books for space reasons, WotC apparently agreed to include them in the online credits.

It appears that those credits have now been removed.

I just discovered that I have been removed from book credits on D&D Beyond for books I worked on while at Wizards of the Coast.

Background:

While at Wizards (so after D&D Beyond was purchased) - with numerous books, my digital content team and I worked directly with the book team on the content, reading through rules drafts, suggesting changes, giving ideas, and catching issues. We had a full database of the content and understood exactly how it interacted.

Given that we were contributing to the content in the books, I felt it reasonable to request that team be added to the credits, but was informed the credits section was already too crowded with the number of people involved and many of the marketing team had already been dropped from credits. I felt strongly that anyone actually contributing to what is in the printed book should be credited though, so we agreed a compromise, that the team would be added to the credits page on D&D Beyond only, as there is no issue with "not enough space" on a web page.

I've added screenshots here that I had for some of the books.

At some point recently, those credits pages have been edited to remove the credits for me and the content team. Nobody reached out to let me know - it just happened at some point, and I only just noticed.

We've even been removed from the digital-only releases, that only released on D&D Beyond, such as the Spelljammer Academy drops.

I'm not angry or upset, just yet again, really disappointed, as somehow I expected better.

EDIT TO ADD MORE CONTEXT

It's not just getting the books online. I worked with Kyle & Dan to improve the overall book process from ideation to delivery across all mediums (you should have seen the huge process charts I built out...)

The lead designers would send over the rules for each new rulebook and we'd go through it, give feedback, highlight potential balance issues, look at new rules/design that was difficult to implement digitally and suggest tweaks to improve it etc etc. We even had ideas for new content that was then included in the book.

We'd go through the whole book in detail, catching inconsistencies and miscalculations, and I'm proud to say that we dramatically reduced the need for clarifications or errata on those books.

I'm not saying anyone on the design or book team was careless - far from it, they're consummate professionals - I am just illustrating the role my team and I had in contributing to the content, quality & success of the physical books, let alone the digital versions.

We should have been in the credits section of the physical printed book. We were part of the creative process. That was something we were actively discussing when I was informed I was being laid off.

Adding the team to the credits pages just on D&D Beyond was, as I mentioned above, a compromise while we figured things out.

My team were fully credited on the Cortex: Prime and Tales of Xadia books when D&D Beyond was still part of Fandom, before the Wizards acquisition.

In fact for those books we made sure to credit the entire digital development team, including developers, community managers and so forth - everyone who helped make the book successful.

I know that Wizards has hundreds of people involved and previously hit issues with the number of people in credits for D&D books, so pulled back from crediting some roles.

Would it be so bad to have to dedicate extra space in a book to the people whose contributions made the book successful?

I really don't think it would.

 

[jerryrice4949]

Oh, good, we have reached the point of the discussion where we are going to use the most ridiculous levels of hyperbole.



You are welcome to, but I imagine it must be exhausting to constantly judge everything anyone does.

Look: that WotC was motivated to give books to school game clubs because it provides good PR and creates more potential customers in no way diminishes the fact that those school game clubs now have books and other materials in hand.

I wish you were right but being on these forums long enough I think it is quite the opposite. I think a lot of people live to make these judgements.

 

[SteveC]

You are welcome to, but I imagine it must be exhausting to constantly judge everything anyone does.

This is one of the things that I just don't get and it comes out of left field. Looking at the "why" of an action or caring about it doesn't necessitate judging anyone at all. Frankly, what you wrote came of to me sounding like you're making an objective pronouncement of truth, and ... it's just not. It's your opinion, and that's cool of course, but people do care about the why's. And people care about some issues and not others.

I care about this issue because of the creative people I know in my life. I headed down a different path, but in the 90s I was moving towards writing in the RPG field. That's why it's important to me.

The fact that WotC has given RPG books to school is great, but it also has nothing to do with what we're talking about here. And if we were discussing that, I would wonder why they did it. I've been involved with enough corporations who do things in the community purely to get points on the good side of the balance sheet that they hope they won't get yelled at when their next crappy decision comes around.

It's totally okay to not care why a company does good in the world. It's also okay to care. Either position can make logical sense and be ethically consistent. And I'm sure people are on one side of the aisle in some cases, and the other for others. There's just opinions here and not objective truth either way.

 

[Reynard]

This is one of the things that I just don't get and it comes out of left field. Looking at the "why" of an action or caring about it doesn't necessitate judging anyone at all. Frankly, what you wrote came of to me sounding like you're making an objective pronouncement of truth, and ... it's just not. It's your opinion, and that's cool of course, but people do care about the why's. And people care about some issues and not others.

I think we all know that we are all spouting our opinions.

I care about this issue because of the creative people I know in my life. I headed down a different path, but in the 90s I was moving towards writing in the RPG field. That's why it's important to me.

I do work (occasionally freelance) in the industry, so it matters very much to me.

The fact that WotC has given RPG books to school is great, but it also has nothing to do with what we're talking about here.

Exactly. The issue was when someone said that the books to game clubs was sullied by marketing intentions. That's a completely separate/side discussion that has nothing to do with WotC's erasure of credit for the Beyond team.

 

[Umbran]

Some of this is starting to sound like a litmus test for people: Do you continue to support WotC or not?

That makes me decidedly uncomfortable.

 

[Clint_L]

Well, I can see where being negative all the time is bad. Let try this. I heard someone mention that wotc donated gaming materials to a school. Lets see what other good things they did? Anyone got anything? Seriously. Lets look at how they helped in the… lets be generous, last five years.

We can then look at their behavior in a more balanced light. On the good side, they've done nothing so wrong that it falls into a moral pit that I know of. They just made themselves a threat to the community and businesses around them.

Lots of current and former employees, though definitely not all, say good things about them as a place to work. They seem to pay better than most companies in the same field (certainly better than Paizo did until very recently if at all). The OGL fiasco was a thing, but so was ultimately putting the whole SRD into the Creative Commons, which is a pretty unprecedented move for a major IP. They've recently opened up DnDBeyond to a number of 3rd party providers. They've expanded the availability of their content on 3rd party providers despite working on their own VTT.

I'm not sure what you mean by "made themselves into a threat to the community and businesses around them." I'm not a business, but I'm a member of that community, and they aren't a threat to me. Do the Dungeon Dudes find WotC to be a threat? They are trying to compete with businesses around them, which could be considered a threat, but that's sort of the inherent threat of capitalism.

 

[Umbran]

I mean may as well since people started playing at some weird whatabout-ism, if the reality of the situation isnt obvious exaggeration may help someone understand.

Okay, time to stop.

Listen, folks. This is the internet. Not everyone is going to agree with you.

Continuing to crank up hyperbole and rhetoric until they do is NOT an acceptable approach to dealing with disagreement. This is not going to become an exercise in escalation.

Folks losing perspective may find themselves disinvited from the conversation. I hope that's clear enough.

 

[Faolyn]

For one they do a lot more than donate books.

Well, whenever they do so, feel free to post about it.

But really it doesn’t matter. People come here with their pitchforks ready. For a lot of people on these forums their beef with WoTC goes way beyond their recent actions and is a historical dislike of a corporation running their game and for making a game they feel doesn’t fit what they’d like it to be.

Or for trying to yank the OGL in a way that would hurt many, many content creators, for sending Pinkerton goons after a YouTuber, for producing more expensive books with a less content, and so on.

But keep telling yourself that it's only because it's they don't like the game.

I agree with those upset about removing people from the credits but then making this into WoTC being evil is just boring and It’s so predictable.

Well, maybe WotC should stop doing stupid things like that.

Seriously, how many times does a company have to do stupid things before you accept that they aren't that great?

 

[theCourier]

Amazing how people are asking others to coddle a giant company in a thread reporting on them doing something bad.

 

[jerryrice4949]

Amazing how people are asking others to coddle a giant company in a thread reporting on them doing something bad.

It just gets old. Sauron WoTC is not. There is just no perspective. Bad turns to terrible turns to catastrophic turns to the great evil of our time trying to destroy the game and all the ‘creatives.’ I just prefer nuance. It was crappy thing for WoTC to do, based on my current understanding. Not an act by the evil TTRPG overlords this thread would have me believe.

 

[Reynard]

It just gets old. Sauron WoTC is not. There is just no perspective. Bad turns to terrible turns to catastrophic turns to the great evil of our time trying to destroy the game and all the ‘creatives.’ I just prefer nuance. It was crappy thing for WoTC to do, based on my current understanding. Not an act by the evil TTRPG overlords this thread would have me believe.

You aren't really helping things by being hyperbolic about what most folks are saying. the majority of people in the thread are saying it was dumb, and maybe mean, and (most importantly) tone deaf considering their difficulties with community good will. Nobody has said this is catastrophic.