WotC Who should be the next President of WotC?

Who should be the next President of WotC?

  • Ed Greenwood

    Votes: 5 7.5%
  • Jeff Grubs

    Votes: 6 9.0%
  • Erin M. Evans

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • A MBA already working at Hasbro

    Votes: 2 3.0%
  • An MBA external to Hasbro

    Votes: 3 4.5%
  • A creative type external to Hasbro

    Votes: 11 16.4%
  • Ray Winninger

    Votes: 6 9.0%
  • Mark Rosewater

    Votes: 3 4.5%
  • Tracy Hickman

    Votes: 2 3.0%
  • Lady Gaga

    Votes: 14 20.9%
  • Sydney Sweeney

    Votes: 9 13.4%
  • Mike Mearls

    Votes: 6 9.0%

EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way
Upvoted for the interesting lore. That being said, I’m not a big fan of Chesterton, as his article on Chesterton’s fence reads to much to me as a defense of the status quo for its own sake.
Personally I would say that misses the point. Instead, it is doing the exact reverse: criticizing unthinking "reform." Consider, for example, the relatively recent total failure of the farming "reform" undertaken by Sri Lanka, and contrast it with the successful reform undertaken by one of the states of India, Sikkim.

Sri Lanka has many, many problems and it would be impossible to disentangle them from decades or centuries of history, colonization, civil war, economic depredation, government mismanagement, etc., etc. The simplified story is, for a lot of reasons not entirely under their control, the government ran out of foreign currency, which made doing any kind of international business extremely expensive. The government was looking for a way out, and settled on eliminating artificial, nitrogen-based fertilizers. The government had long had a policy of heavy subsidies for artificial fertilizer, so stopping that and switching to healthier, organic fertilizer had the potential to not only improve health and welfare, but would save the government hundreds of millions of dollars on import costs.

Unfortunately, these reformers failed to apply Chesterton's Fence productively. They banned all artificial fertilizers effectively overnight, and did nothing whatsoever to assist farmers in the switch-over process. The net result, when combined with other government monetary and infrastructure problems, was a massive loss of yield, which induced the government to import food from other countries...totalling more than the amount saved by the ban. The disaster was so complete, they ended up having to repeal the ban in less than six months.

Note, however, that I contrasted this with Sikkim. In that Indian state, they had a highly successful ban on artificial nitrogen-based fertilizers, because they did apply Chesterton's Fence correctly. They asked what purposes the old way fulfilled, what was needed to make the transition happen, and how to help the farmers in the interim period where the old was being removed but the new had not yet become the norm. Instead of a nearly instant ban, they phased the artificial stuff out over three years; instead of unceremoniously dumping the farmers, they invested in training and cooperative efforts to get the farmers ready to make productive choices on their own, and they tapered off artificial fertilizer subsidies while immediately implementing organic subsidies. Now, Sikkim is 100% free of such chemicals, without any sign of failure or breakdown, because organic fertilizer can replace artificial, it just has to be done wisely.

That is the essence of Chesterton's Fence. "I genuinely have no idea why this is here, so we should remove it now" is a dangerous, foolhardy approach that really does lead to much misery. That doesn't mean "only if you can explain in exhaustive detail why every single part of this is the case will I let you change even one thing about it." It means that reform conducted in ignorance is a crap shoot and often toying with the lives of others for little more reason than "because I don't like the look of it."

I hope the above example, contrasting terribly botched reform (one that has had serious negative consequences, and that now acts as a wonderful bad-faith argument against critically necessary environmental reform by pernicious conservative pundits!) with highly successful reform shows that there really is value here. As with any maxim, it can be abused in its own way, and we must respond to its invocation with wisdom rather than mere deference or denial. But used properly, it is a very important reminder that unthinking reform is like unthinking diagnosis and treatment: unreliable, dangerous, and unsound.
 

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That being said, I’m not a big fan of Chesterton, as his article on Chesterton’s fence reads to much to me as a defense of the status quo for its own sake.
Much like @EzekielRaiden I read it more as a call for careful consideration before making changes even in an obviously flawed system lest your reform manages to do even more harm due to unforeseen knock-on effects. Not so much a desire for stasis as for caution and moderation until the practical effects become clear. That might be overgenerous to Chesterton but it's my read on that work, anyway. There are things I dislike about the man's writings, but his fence isn't really one of them.

That said, he's still not the first moldering corpse I'd choose to head WotC if I had to pick a dead person to do so.
 

EzekielRaiden

Follower of the Way
That said, he's still not the first moldering corpse I'd choose to head WotC if I had to pick a dead person to do so.
It would seem my joke was not made clear.

I was saying actually ME, just recognizing that the joke (probably) originally came from Chesterton.

With the idea being that I was criticizing the underlying premise, because this question is (IMO) effectively "who do you think would run it the way you'd run it if you had the chops to do it yourself."
 

It occurs to me that Mike Mearls should have been on this list. Dude created 5e, he was apart of BG3, and he worked on extremely profitable MtG sets, its a no brainer really and I don't know how he slipped my mind.

I just added Mike Mearls,although my vote is still with Jeff Grubbs, because it was under his influence that we got Al Qadim, Maztica, FR in general, etc..., plus he wrote Brothers War novel, etc...
 

It would seem my joke was not made clear.
Oh, I got it. But you also gave me an opening to snark more about resorting to the dead for leadership, which is absurdist extreme of the "D&D has only gone downhill since Gygax" crowd's argument, and how could I resist? :)

I suppose the other extreme would be to suggest they install an AI as president (regardless of its actual existence at the moment) because that would be the ultimate in "looking to the future" right?
 

Doesn't Mike Mearls fall into the "external creative" category that's currently in second place, lagging only behind the juggernaut of Lady Gaga? He's not actually with WotC at this point, is he?
 

bedir than

Full Moon Storyteller
It occurs to me that Mike Mearls should have been on this list. Dude created 5e, he was apart of BG3, and he worked on extremely profitable MtG sets, its a no brainer really and I don't know how he slipped my mind.

I just added Mike Mearls,although my vote is still with Jeff Grubbs, because it was under his influence that we got Al Qadim, Maztica, FR in general, etc..., plus he wrote Brothers War novel, etc...
He wasn't even the D&D leader when he was there. He has worked on Magic, which makes him more qualified than the novelists that were listed because this is a D&D forum that likes to center D&D despite the game being worth what a single Magic set is and the brand being a single quarter of the MtG brand.
 

Meech17

WotC President Runner-Up.
He takes a lot of the blame for stuff that is decided by those higher up the food chain.
Yeah, I voted Rosewater in this poll.

I feel like he gets a lot of flack because he's one of the few people who is so open about these things. He constantly addressed questions on his Tumbler about questionable decisions he likely had no control over, and he usually opts to answer them in diplomatic ways. He kind of gives politician answers.

I think he is a clever guy and he's been in the business long enough that he knows how the corporate game is played, but he still really cares about the actual game at heart.
 

Stormonu

NeoGrognard
Has anyone mentioned Monte Cook?

I think a lot of people are forgetting thought that WotC isn't primarily D&D - it's MtG, with a dash of D&D. Need someone in charge who can do a good job with both products, and then some.
 

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