This is Why I’m Not a Journalist: Andy Collins Interview

On the last morning of Gen Con 2009, I, along with my good friend Graham, were given the opportunity to sit down with Wizards of the Coast’s 4e head honcho Andy Collins and perform an interview.

He was gracious enough to grant a little more than one hour of his precious time to answer our questions. You can follow Graham’s part of the Interview here.

A fair bit of warning, we decided to release this interview with minimal editting to give you the complete exausted, friendly but excited, English as a second language Chatty DM treatment.

I hope you enjoy!

Finally, a thousand thanks to Graham and Christine who slaved for hours to transcribe more than 13 pages of text to produce these interview posts.

ANDY: Let’s do it.

PHIL: First of all, thanks for seeing us. It’s Sunday, and we’re all super tired. So I was basically thinking we could spend the next thirty minutes just sitting around in silence, basking in the awesomeness of the game.

ANDY: Sounds great to me.

(Laughter)

PHIL: And so I was basically thinking we’d do a 2 parts interview. I will do the first part, focusing on DMing, and Graham will do the next one, focusing on some questions about the game and whatnot, whereas mine will be more general vision type of stuff. I’m not much of a news or scoop blogger, but I’m very interested in GMing.

GRAHAM: The questions that I have are actually from members of the forums. We thought we’d give them a chance to ask some questions too.

ANDY: Absolutely.

PHIL: And so the first questions are going to be a round-table thing about DMing.

ANDY: Alright

PHIL: I know you’ve been around D&D for quite some time. I was interested to know how you became a DM, the funny stories about how that, and what you really like about DMing.

ANDY: I became a DM really from day one of owning the game. I got the Basic Set of D&D for my tenth birthday, had never heard of the game, didn’t know anyone who played, so it was a complete mystery to me. But I puzzled over those rules for months. Finally almost a year after I got the set I finally sort of said, “Alright, I really don’t think I know how this game works, but we’re going to try it anyway.”

So my brother, my best friend and I retreated to one of our bedrooms and just started playing. 9 hours later we emerged from the room, having missed lunch and missed dinner, and I think it was that moment I said, “Well, this is the greatest thing ever” right? “I’m going to play this game forever.”

It just seemed natural for me to take on the role of dungeon master. I like being the organizer, I like being creative and helping in storytelling. I think it’s… you would not be hard-pressed to peg me as the dungeon master of the group cause I’m also the guy who’s “Hey we should go to a movie tonight!” or “Hey where are we going for lunch today?” I just tend to be the guy who organizes things or brings people together to have fun. I love bringing people together to have fun, whether it’s D&D or anything else. I like playing and I think it’s important for dungeon masters to be on the other side of the street now and again, because it really reminds you of how different those two experiences are. But ultimately

I can’t imagine not being a dungeon master, and I think that’s true of the vast majority of them. It’s sort of like being a writer or an actor. You do it because you have to. You couldn’t imagine not doing it.

PHIL: So based on the love you developed, the passion you have for DMing, how did you infuse this into the new version of the game? What parts of all those things you loved about DMing have you shunted into D&D?

ANDY: Sure. We tried, when we were thinking about dungeon mastering for Fourth Edition, we tried to really focus on: what are the obstacles that prevent people from becoming Dungeon Masters, prevent people from having successful campaigns, and just from having fun around the table.

I think third edition was really successful in many ways, including empowering players to have more options and more choices for their characters. I think some of that came at the expense of the Dungeon Master. The complexity of the rules required to know what characters could do, to know what monsters could do, how to build adventures, really hindered the Dungeon Master from maybe spending as much time as he wanted on other elements of the game: building the story, thinking about how the characters interweave with each other and his plot lines.

So we tried to remove as many boundaries as possible for the DM building his game. Making monsters easier to run and easier to read in the stat-block. Making encounters simpler to build, it’s much more like sort of assembling a very simple puzzle, just put these pieces together and we give you a lot of models to follow. Making characters easier to understand from the dungeon master’s perspective, so that you have a better sense of what the group is capable of and how we can scale these encounters to them. All of those things are about letting the DM spend less time fiddling over the minutia of the rules, and more time developing his own story.

PHIL: I’m pretty sure I speak for ninety-nine percent of the 4e DMs out there, and I’m sure you guys get that all the time, when I say that those who’ve touched 4e as a DM don’t want to go back to prepping earlier editions of the game, unless they’re so much earlier that prepping was actually very easy.

ANDY: Right

PHIL: I totally agree, with the approach you took. I got from the DMG that a lot of the tools you just described in the DMG provided a lot of hard skills for DMs to make their game better. What about soft skills? One thing I am noticing at Gen Con this year from my own experience and those of my friends who have played in different games, and it’s a truism that’s still very important, is that the DM or the GM makes the game.

ANDY: Yes, absolutely.

PHIL: And with the experience I’ve got, I’m pretty sure that soft skills probably account for eighty percent of what makes a good or bad DM. So are you working on, I know the DMG2 is coming out, but are you working on a vision to help… actually, I’ll rephrase that: Should a game like Dungeons & Dragons help provide DMs with soft skills?

ANDY: I think so, yeah. I think that’s another thing that we tried to bring out even in the first Dungeon Master’s Guide for Fourth Edition and again in the second one, is remind dungeon masters that it’s not just a game about rules and building mechanical things, but it’s a game about managing personalities and knowing what your players want and how to provide that. I really like the section in the first DMG inspired by…

PHIL:(interupting rudely… It won’t be the last time) Robin Laws

ANDY: Exactly, Robin’s stuff about player personalities. It was very illuminating for me, because I’ve read articles like that before, but this was the first time it really clicked for me, among other things I saw my personality in there: “Oh, I’m the instigator, that’s me.”

PHIL: Oh, we’re all instigators!

GRAHAM: I think every DM has a little bit of instigator in him.

PHIL (Getting excited, his Frenchiness starting to show in his speech and attitude): Because we make the game… okay, but that’s another question about DMing…

ANDY: So I think those sort of things… In a lot of ways I see the Dungeon Master’s Guides, and I couldn’t have made this analogy ten or even five years ago, it’s like a collection of great blog entries about dungeon mastering from all sorts of <Drowned out by Phil. Transcriber’s Note: Shut up, Phil.>

PHIL: That was my exact comment on my review of the DMG.

ANDY: Yeah, I mean it’s, you know: here’s two pages on this topic, here’s four pages on this one. And that was very deliberate in our approach: to enter a topic, treat it with the amount of space it needed, but no more than that. And speak much more plainly to the dungeon master as another DM like “Hey, we’re taking you aside DM to DM: here’s something you’re going to run into, here are some ways you can solve it.”

I think previous editions of the game and many other roleplaying games have sometimes treated those sorts of skills almost like secret knowledge – you can only get this if you earn it the hard way. And that sort of elitism is… is fun, because it makes you feel sort of better than other folks, but it doesn’t help other people come into the hobby. And without new people coming into the hobby, it dies. It atrophies and withers away, so I’ve never been very sympathetic to folks who maybe express… contempt is too strong a word, but there’s a sense of it in there, that “oh I don’t like… we shouldn’t cater to new players,” or that we shouldn’t make the game easier to learn…

PHIL: Or DMs should be the ultimate tyrant…

ANDY: Right. That’s… hey, if that’s the way you want to play your game, then certainly we’re not going to stop you, but we’ve got to have more people coming into this hobby.

PHIL: And bad GMs hurt the hobby more than anything else.

ANDY: And a good GM helps it more than anything else. If you have a good dungeon master at your table, it makes you want to play more. And maybe even sometimes makes you want to be a GM yourself. Then you’ve spun off and created a whole new group.

PHIL: And the cream of GMs will basically help that player. “You want to GM? I’ll lend you my group and I’ll become a player for a few sessions.”

ANDY: Yeah, absolutely.

PHIL: Alright so that’s actually very interesting because we were talking about personalities. I’ve been a huge fan of player motivations and personalities. I actually met with Robin Laws at the airport and we discussed it. I’m starting to think that the players’ motivations are actually reflected in your DMing skills. In fact, I don’t think we need new types for DMs, they’re exactly the same. Do you believe it shows, like that?

ANDY: I think so. I mean, it would be interesting to sort of reverse that perspective, and look at the kinds of DMs and what styles of… it’s almost like we need to write a player’s guide for knowing your DM.

PHIL: There’s actually an old Dragon article that Robin told me that was written a few years ago about that, but I’m pretty sure that they almost mesh one to one. So for an Instigator DM, it’s more important to get the action moving than to actually explore every nooks and crannies of your story.

ANDY: Yes. I like building intricate plotlines for my games, but I don’t like building vast worlds. I know there are some DMs who can run their games as sort of a giant sandbox. I can’t do that. I don’t have the time to be ready for anything from the players. I like to give them options, but I like to have a general sense that I know “Okay, they’re probably going to go in this direction. This is where I put the biggest carrot.” But yeah, there’s no substitute for a monster kicking in the door and attacking when things get quiet.

PHIL: Alright, so I’m winding down to my last question before I give the interview over to Graham. So the game will evolve in time. The game will likely change, so how does your original love of the game and the things that you’ve done out of love for the game influence how the game will be shaped in the future? Now, I’m not asking for what you’re going to implement, but what will be your principles towards helping DMs out in future books?

ANDY: I think my guiding principle is always making sure that we are empowering fun for the table. Everybody at the table, not just the players or just the DM. Again that’s someplace where the game has sort of yoyo-ed back and forth at times, but I think we have to remember that it’s not about the DM lording it over the players, or coming up with a killer dungeon that’s going to annihilate all of them. It’s easy to kill characters, it’s not actually a measure of skill. The measure of skill is in creating…

PHIL: Is nearly killing them!

ANDY: Yes! Exactly. Creating just enough tension that the players at the table look around and go “I don’t know how we’re going to get through this” and then somehow they manage to. Because afterwards, they go “Oh, it was so hard, but we actually killed it… Do it again!” And that’s the moment, when I’m sitting at a table, when I go “Ah, this really worked.”

So, I think it’s about managing the complexity creep of the game to make sure that everything we add is for a good reason. It’s a very difficult design principle to adhere to. Just because you can design something doesn’t necessarily mean you should. And that’s a discipline that we’re working hard to distill in ourselves through practice, through trial and error, and experimentation. Really, even since the middle of third edition, we’ve been experimenting a little with the game.

I mean, third edition itself was a bit of an experiment, but we’re always going to keep pushing those boundaries and asking “Where else can the game go? Where else should it go? What are the players looking for? How is the player mentality of 2008 different from what it was in 2000, and what is it going to be like in 2015?”

PHIL: And it’s going to change, because now that we’ve had about 20 years, from my perspective as I look back, you can see the shifts from late ‘80s, to ‘90s storytelling, the settings, and then going back to the super-crunch, putting the rules in the hands of the players, and now this new shift, which is really about team playing, with the DM as part of the team.

ANDY: Exactly. And that’s something that we think tabletop roleplaying can really benefit from its setting. There are a lot of games out there, particularly computer games, that cater a little more to the solo activity, but allow for group activity. We think that D&D is strongest when it is that group activity.

PHIL: Is that your euphemism for World of Warcraft?

ANDY: Oh, well, I love those games! And we play them with our groups, but there’s always that sort of tension between, is this game for solo play, or is this game for group play? And even group play can be a little solitary at times.

PHIL: LEEEEEERROOOOOOYYYYYY JEEEEENNKINNNSSSS!!!!!!!!!! (Chatty, Editting: Did I really shout that? Oh my.)

ANDY: Yeah. We really want our game to be about the folks, about the friends, sitting around at a table, rolling dice and telling a story together. And as long as D&D continues to deliver that experience, I think it’s just going to continue to grow and thrive.

PHIL: For what it’s worth, when I started playing 4e, I played published adventures to learn the system. They were cool, but I was “Eeehhh…”, I wanted more. Once I started making my own adventures, my players and I went “Oh my god!” and we can’t wait for me to play again.

ANDY: Excellent.

PHIL: Alright, thank you very much, I have one last question and it’s over. Look, I’ve got this 100% fail-proof project, okay?

ANDY: (Unsure) Okay?

PHIL: It’s about a magic item recycling plant, based on rust monsters with taps in their abdomens! Would you be willing to invest in that?

ANDY: (Laughing) I think you need to send a submission to Dragon magazine, submissions@wizards.com, and you send that article in…

(Laughing, transfer of interview to Graham.)

GRAHAM: Okay, first off, now you know why he’s called the Chatty DM.

PHIL: Yes!!

And there you have it, Andy was nice enough to go with the flow and I think it turned out into a great interview. Now hop on to the next part of the Interview over at Graham’s blog.