Interview: Bill Slavicsek and Andy Collins from Wizards of the Coast

My groups, I’ve been gaming with a lot of the same people for a long time. I have some people in my group that I’ve been playing with since the very first time I played D&D. My brother, who was 8 or 9 at that point, still games with me. We have gamers from grade school, middle school, high school, college and my work peers at Wizards. So, but, even the new guys have been playing with us for years, and most of them for a decade or more. So, as a result, we have a sort of a shared style of vocabulary that we’ve all just sort of come to accept.  All of us are, by nature, sort of pop culture nerds and prone to, you know, breaking out a Simpsons reference now and again. But I think we all know how to sort of keep that in check and keep the game moving along reasonably well.  I’m traditionally the dungeon master in our group, not always, but I’ve fallen to that role far often, far more often than not. I generally just, I keep the group focused but I know when to sort of let the throttle off for a few minutes and let people bust up over something funny that’s happened. My personal preference is always to allow the humor to come out of the players and their interactions rather than trying to force it on the situation. I don’t like silly names for characters or pun-filled adventures or anything like that. I prefer to sort of play it straight as the DM and let the humor come out of just the craziness that is this particular story we’re telling.

I would say we bust up laughing a few times a session at least, but that never keeps us from moving the story forward.

In general, my style of play tends to be towards, once we get to play, it’s serious. My Thursday group, which is my long-running campaign, and it goes from game to game, but right now we’re doing Dungeons & Dragons, obviously. It was Star Wars for a long time back in the day.  But it’s got people like Jeff Grubb and Steve Winter in it, and the whole time, game designers are naturally just funny, so I have to try to keep them on the straight and narrow. But like Andy, I’d rather the humor comes out in play, not because I set up a funny situation or because they made a stupid name.  And we usually have dinner together before the game, and I try to make that where they get out all of the jokes and the puns and the news of the week, right, so that when we get to the game, we’re concentrating mostly on the game. But it’s still meant to be a fun time, so if everyone starts giggling for a half an hour, I usually just let that go. And you asked about mood and stuff, I also, depending on what we’re playing, like when I ran my Star Wars campaign, I would put the Star Wars albums or soundtracks on in the background. If we’re doing a horror game, I’ll do like Dracula or whatever creepy music I can find. Just to help set the mood.

I love using music in the background for mine. And I have a couple of players who are convinced that I choreograph my adventures to the soundtracks just because I’ll be talking as an NPC and I’ll come to some momentous point in the speech and the music behind me will rise and the players look at me like, you totally planned that, didn’t you!

Speaking of silly names, this was way back in First Ed play, when I was running my first game group. One of my players created a character named Elfie. I said, you know you don’t really want to be Elfie the Elf. Really? Come on, is that the best you can do? No, no, I want to. All right, fine. Goes into the Tomb of Horrors, you remember the alter. Goes up to the alter. And no one wants to deal with this alter at all. And he says, Ah, it’s there for a reason. Touches it. Lightning bolt goes down the aisle, kills the whole party. All right, see what happens when you have a stupid-named character. So what does he do? He makes Elfie 2. He got through Elfie 7 before he finally learned his lesson.  And, because, he thought there was some trick to it, he kept touching the alter. That’s how he kept losing Elfies.

Boy, every time I hear this story, the number of Elfies goes up.

Hey!

What genre of campaign do you prefer? What do you prefer to play yourselves?

Prefer to play? Depends what I’m in the mood for, what the idea I have at the time when I launch a campaign. And I’ll even change genres throughout a campaign just to mix it up. I’m very fond of horror, so I tend toward that. I’m very fond of action-adventure, like Star Wars, like Indiana Jones, like Eberron. My D&D campaigns tend to be more cinematic.  Well, all my roleplaying tends to be cinematic.  It’s what I learned at West End, West End Games. And it’s just stuck with me as the best method, for me, to do roleplaying.

My group definitely prefers a combat and action focused game, no matter what the genre. So I try to make sure that there’s plenty of action. I can sense the tension at the table if too much time has gone by without Initiative getting rolled. That said, I like to play in a lot of different genres. Right now, I’m in three different groups. One of them is a sort of traditional heroic fantasy with a bit of a dark tinge to it. The players found out recently that they were working for the villain and have to cope with that moral-ethical dilemma.  I’m running another one that is a heavier, sort of intrigue-based game that splits its time between this very corrupt city and a deadly jungle filled with ruins and monsters. And then I’m playing in a third game that’s heavily inspired by the Deadwood series from HBO. So we’re in this sort of the characters in this frontier town populated with lots of really not-very-nice people, and we’re sort of struggling to figure out where, how do we fit with all these things. So three sort of different types of games but really they all eventually come down to let’s roll some dice and crack some skulls.

I love the advice that the first Dungeon Master’s Guide for 4th Edition presents. It’s a very straight forward, Look, if your characters are Level 10, five monsters of 10th level are a good place to start. Take a few front-line bruisers, soldiers or brutes, use the monster roles to guide you. And then sprinkle in a couple of other monsters for a little more flavor. I think that that sort of very, almost blunt, straight-forward advice is something that the game’s really been lacking over the years. It’s been a little too much, we’re not going to tell you how to play or run this game, we’re just going to let you figure it out, that I think is off-putting particularly to new players and especially new DMs, right? I think back to the year I struggled with that basic set, trying to figure out, wait, where’s the board? Where’s the pieces? Do I just lay out the map and have the players tell me where to go? Those sorts of what are obvious questions to the new player that the experience player just doesn’t even realize he’s already answered for himself.

Favorite class and why?

That’s a tough one. I like any class that allows me to be very active during the combat. Often that means mobility.  I’ve had a lot of fun playing, in third edition, sorcerers with the Fly spell. A monk who’s able to bounce around everywhere. I had a great, sort of, barbarian-martial artist character in a Hong Kong action themed game that my brother ran. I had him loosely based on Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China. I play two characters right now. One is a warlord who’s loosely based on The Tick. High Charisma, low Wisdom leader, so tends to throw himself head-long into fights. And also a SwordMage. Little more dark and mysterious type, but lots of teleportation, bouncing around the battle field. I am, at heart, an instigator. I like to go where the action is or make the action happen, so I have no patience for classes like Wizard or what have you that want to sit in the back. I need to be in the front, whether or not I’m durable enough for it. I need to be in the action.

I never get to play. < Laugh > But when I do, the two most memorable characters that I’ve played in Dungeons & Dragons have been a Paladin and a Halfling Fighter-Thief, who was very much a curious individual who liked to open every door, much like your instigator.

Good thing he wasn’t called Elfie.< Laugh >

Actually, I started him in D&D, but when I was at West End, Greg Gordon ran a Torg campaign as we were developing the Torg system. I brought that halfling into a Torg, from the fantasy realm. But he was sure that whatever he had… He saw these ninjas parachuting out of World War II planes, and they all pulled these rings to float down to the ground. So he was sure it was the ring and not the parachute. So he grabbed that ring off one of the bodies after the fight. And for the rest of the adventure, he would leap off of things, and Greg would have me roll dice, and I would always survive, so I was sure that I had a magic Featherfall ring, but it wasn’t.

What is your favorite villain or monster from the movies or any literature? The Big Baddies.

That’s funny that you ask that question. I actually got that as an interview question, not going into Wizards, but in a job for a small software company. Which is a totally off-the-wall question. And I was young, fresh out of college. And literally drew a blank. Like, huge nerd, right, watched every sci-fi /fantasy movie, and I’m like, I can’t think of a villain. Uh, uh, Darth Vader.  Right?  And the guy’s like, Really, that’s the scariest villain you can think of. Yeah, the breathing. I didn’t get that job. I like villains that have a little depth and reason for existence. I’d much rather see a villain with a complex backstory, like a Magneto or a Dr Doom, who doesn’t necessarily think that they’re a bad guy. Right? I like that sort of depth in those characters, rather than just the raving megalomaniac.  So, yeah, those are definitely two that come out for me.

Randall Flagg in the Steven King books.

The best villain that I’ve ever run in one of my campaigns.  My first third edition campaign, which ended up running for several years, had a villain who the characters fully believed was their best friend. He was a high-ranking member of one of the temples a couple of the characters belonged to. He helped them along the way. Essentially, they came to believe that they were going to have to in some way bump off, get rid of, assassinate this guy’s superior. So they were sure the superior, the archbishop of the church, he was the real trouble. That they were eventually going to have to get rid of that guy. But all along the way, it was this other guy who was, that they would come to and say, look at this great thing we just did for Good. We recovered this evil artifact. Will you destroy it for us? Yes, yes of course I will. Thank you so much. The great reveal came.

They had been hanging out for this guy for levels and level and levels. Finally, they followed the trail of some evil occurrence, and it leads right back to the temple. And they’re like, we can’t figure out why the trail is left here. There’s nobody else here. What’s going on? And the cleric is talking with this guy, and the rest of the party is like, oh, this is a talking encounter, we’ll ignore this. So they’re all chatting amongst themselves while I’m talking with this one player.  And the cleric is sort of coming closer and closer to figuring out, wait, there’s nobody else here, but the people came here, what are we… And the bad guy looks him right in the eye. Hey, we’re looking for this guy, this Hummelson character. Would you happen to know who he is, Lorthen? Pleased to meet you, Durrin. Hope you guessed my name. And the player’s kinda like, wait… uh, guys? Roll initiative. And everyone else at the table is like wait, what happened? Rar, evil minions come storming out, great big slam-bang fight.

Never let the cleric get into a conversation. < Laugh >

Also, learn to pay attention to conversations that don’t include you. They might result in initiative.

This was a great first interview for us here at StupidRanger.com.  Andy, Bill, and the rest of the WotC representatives that we interacted with were nothing short of excellent.

To build on Vanir’s previous statements, we had no idea we were going to get to interview two people that were so influential in the roleplaying industry.  The three of us were thrilled and excited to get the opportunity (nervous too!), and we’d like to thank Andy and Bill for the opportunity to speak with them.  Speaking for myself, this was the highlight of GenCon this year.