Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft is less than a month away, and it already looks like it’s going to be a massive expansion to the tabletop game. But there are still a lot of questions about whether this new expansion is going to lean more towards the combat-oriented approach of the MMO or just be a traditional D&D game on Azeroth.
At New York Comic Con, I got a chance to sit down with Wizards of the Coast principal game designer James Wyatt to talk about the first Universes Beyond expansion for D&D. From how he was talking about the expansion, it really does sound more like a D&D game taking place on Azeroth than trying to shove WoW’s complicated mechanics and combat focus on the TTRPG.
IGN: I know that there are a lot of people who play both WoW and D&D, and I’ve heard some WoW players say that this is going to get them into D&D. Does the Expansion have a good on-ramp for those players?
James Wyatt: That is not its purpose, but I think it is a fantastic on-ramp in terms of someone who’s a WoW player. Sitting down to make a D&D character, you’re like, “Okay, what’s a Tiefling? What’s a Dragonborn? And what do these classes mean?” Whereas if you have that foundation of here’s the WoW species, here’s the WoW classes, you know the kind of character you want to make right away. This can help you steer and make those choices as a new player. We also have a very brief introductory “What is D&D?” just in case you don’t know or for people who aren’t familiar with it. And we steer you to D&D Beyond in particular as a place to find resources to help you get started.
So yeah, we took this down for a playtest at Blizzard last fall in the early stages, and Blizzard employees who had signed up, they signed up blind for a playtest of something. They didn’t know what.
And so some of them were like, “Woo, D&D. Yes, I love D&D.” And others are like, “Okay, I’ve never played it before. How does this go?” And I always love playing with new players because they don’t know what they’re supposed to do. So they are more willing to try anything they can imagine, which to my mind is really what the game is all about.
I was just telling the story of the guy who was playing the Forsaken Warlock who decided that, because he had no lower jaw, he couldn’t properly cast spells. So his first spell backfired and knocked him down the stairs. And so then he tore off his own arm and threw it at the monster.
And, awesome! That’s Dungeons & Dragons in a nutshell. It’s not “What buttons do I have to press?” It’s “What can I imagine and how do I do that? What does it look like?”
IGN: Yeah. Speaking of the combat, I know that there’s a selection of dungeons that have been poured into the game, but obviously there are just too many dungeons in World of Warcraft to bring all of them over. So why did you pick the dungeons that you picked?
Wyatt: There were a couple of factors that went into that. One of them is that we started with this section on conflicts of Azeroth, which outlines the six conflicts that really have been the driving forces behind most of the expansions of WoW and talk about how they shape the world, and how you might bring them into a campaign.
All of the dungeons, I think, tie into these themes. That was one of the things that we used as a selection criteria is, does it reflect the themes of the conflicts that we’re trying to emphasize here? So that was one. I was looking at popularity ranking on some wiki as another factor, just trying to get at what Dungeons people love and what’s resonant for them. We started with a much larger list, made it smaller. So then it was what can we do in the space that we have and what works for the various level ranges of characters and that sort of thing.
IGN: There are some people who are probably going to want to see more of the raids. I think the only raid that I saw on the list was Onyxia’s Lair, I might be mistaken. But will people be able to create their own Icecrown Citadel?
Wyatt: Icecrown Citadel, we are doing as a digital download adventure. We have a separate map pack that has five double-sided poster maps that are the boss fights from Icecrown Citadel. And that comes with a code for a digital download of the Icecrown Citadel adventure. So you can play through that. But I ran Blackfathom Deeps 20 years ago. It was just downloading the map from the internet and making up stats for Nagas at the time. And so using the tools in this book, you can absolutely adapt any dungeon you want to.
IGN: I saw some people concerned that this will be too focused on combat and having prescriptive dungeons. What would you say to that?
Wyatt: I think that’s kind of the opposite of what we were going for, because the beauty of D&D is that when you walk into Shadowfang Keep, you can talk to anybody you meet, you can interact with anything you can see. And so the possibilities just open up tremendously over what a developer can program into any game, no matter how much care they’re putting into it, because you have a DM at the table who can improvise and decide what happens.
So the dungeons that are presented here are given a pretty light touch and it’s sort of like, okay, here’s the dungeon map, here’s the pins in the map that mark the bosses that we know you’re going to encounter at some point. And what happens in between is largely a matter of improv and that you can roll on tables to generate encounters if you want a combat encounter, but you can also do something where you’re exploring the environment in a way that you can’t necessarily do in the MMO.
IGN: I take it that even the adventure hooks that you have open on that page there of Dire Maul, I’m sure people can create their own adventure hooks and assign their own reputation rewards and everything like that.
Wyatt: Yeah.
IGN: So this is for people who are familiar with Dungeons & Dragons at large. This is more of a guideline of how to play a game within World of Warcraft than anything else.
Wyatt: Yes, exactly. It is a great big toolbox. I mean, that’s how I describe most of the books that I work on. I don’t write a lot of adventure products. I do a lot of source books, and really there’s that sense of we’ve got character options, we’ve got monsters, we’ve got dungeons you can explore. We’ve got guidelines for crafting your own campaign, and we’ve got just a big blank slate for you to play with.
IGN: World of Warcraft’s obviously an evolving game that never really sits in one place. This goes up to the beginning of Midnight. Obviously, there’s going to be more stories that come out over time. Are there going to be supplemental products or will it just be like, we gave you the tools, you know the story, kind of do your own thing with it?
Wyatt: Who knows? Okay, I keep saying that if I get to do another World of Warcraft book, I might postpone my retirement a little bit in order to work on it because I had so much fun working on this, loved it so much. And that depends entirely on my relationship with Blizzard and how things go from here, but I would love to do more.
And honestly, the book doesn’t spend as much time on the War Within and Midnight as it could have. There’s almost nothing about Xal’atath in here. Would’ve loved to give her a stat block, but she didn’t sort of make the cut. And I’m not sure we could give her a stat block.
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