Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #857: AFR with Jules Robins

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

I sit down with Designer Jules Robins to talk about the design of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Coronavirus edition. So using my time at home to do interviews with people past and present, all about making magic. So today I have Jules Robbins, and we're going to talk about adventures in the Forgotten Realms. So welcome, Jules. Hi. Thanks for having me. Okay, so you and I, for those that haven't watched it, we did a video together for Comic-Con talking all about the inner working. So I'm hoping to go a little different. I don't want to repeat things we said in the video. So let's start with the following question, which is, how much Dungeons & Dragons have you played?

How much Dungeons & Dragons have you played? Ooh, a pretty fair bit. And a lot of, you know, spin-off tabletop role-playing as well. But I think the first D&D I played, I was probably 10 or 11. And got the starter box for 3.5. And what year would that have been? I guess 2003, 2004, something like that. Yeah, I got my first box for my bar mitzvah in 1980. Ooh, that was hard for me to beat.

It was the blue, it had like, it was blue and white cover. Mitzvah in 1980. Ooh. That was hard for me to beat. It was the blue, it had like, it was blue, like blue and white cover. It was monotone, it just was blue. And like had staples in it. It wasn't even a book really. It was just paper with staples in it. Nice. So how did you end up leading D&D?

How did that happen? Basically, once we decided that we wanted to make a Magic and D&D set, we started looking around the department for who was both ready to lead a team and really familiar with Dungeons & Dragons. And Andrew Veen and I ended up at the top of the list. We were even in a D&D campaign together at the time.

Wow, okay. So, okay, Day One. So, first thing I want to bring up, we mentioned this, but I really didn't get into it, is that one of the weird things about the set was we didn't quite know what it was. Like, it was this thing that kept changing, right?

Indeed. It went through a lot of iterations. It ended up being a core set. Well, it started as a core set, right? Right. So how did it end up being what it was? Like, what got it from being a core set to being which is a more normal magic set now?

Yeah. A lot of it was based on consumer testing. We got small groups of people who played magic and D&D or magic but not D&D or D&D but not magic or neither but were kind of interested into rooms and ran a bunch of stuff past them. And a lot of what we learned was, like, A, a lot of D&D players who don't play Magic have already heard of Magic. They know someone who plays it and have come up with whatever reason

that they haven't started playing themselves. And a lot of that was, you know, some gameplay difference in where Magic is and where D&D is. So we realized after a lot of thought on this, the way we were really going to reach those people and convince them to give Magic a try was going to be to bring some element of what they love in their games into this one. and at the same

time on the magic side it's like nobody was upset at the prospect of uh playing with a fairly normal magic set but for people who played D&D and magic, it felt like a letdown when they were excited to finally see this property they've loved for however many years appear in a magic set. And then everything just looked like kind of normal magic cards for them. So we realized we were going to need more complexity

to really bring the feeling of D&D out in the Magic gameplay. So here's a question I've gotten a lot. I'm curious to get your answer on this one. Clearly, if you make a D&D set, we could have just copied the flavor of D&D. We could have just copied, hey, we're in Forgotten Realms. Here's all the things from Forgotten Realms. Here's the characters and the monsters and the items and stuff.

We made a conscious decision, though, to incorporate a lot of meta things about D&D. There was die-rolling, there's choice-making. There's a lot of things we did that mimic the playing of D&D more so than just the world of D&D. What got us there? Some of that is the same thing thing where it's like there are elements of the play that we thought were going to draw people in who might not otherwise want to give magic a try. And a lot of it was just like that was a lot of what resonated with people across a wide swath. Well, tons of people play D&D in the

Forgotten Realms, lots of people play in other settings or even their own homebrew settings, but or, you know, their own variant rule sets, etc. But sort of the commonalities of the role-playing experience still spoke really strongly to everyone who had been involved in it and ultimately it just felt a lot more like capturing dnd playing with those elements than trying to stay a hundred percent in world yeah one of the things i found very interesting is like dnd is you, almost 50 years old, right? It got made back in the 70s, and role-playing games want content, right? One of the biggest things about role-playing

games is you want to give the audience options so they can craft and make the role-playing game. So, like, one of the challenges of making the set is, we have how many cards were in the set? 260? Okay, so we have how many cards were in the set? Uh, 260. Okay, so we have like 260-ish cards.

And there's, you know, 40-some years of content to do. Um, and the other big thing about it, like you're pointing out, is that if I played in a role-playing, a D&D game, and you played a D&D game, there might be zero overlap between my game and your game from

content, right? We might be playing in different realms, we might encounter different monsters, we might have different, maybe we're using different magical spells even. And that was one of the things I know when we did some testing that it's hard to say here's the one thing everybody knows because everybody doesn't use the same thing.

Yeah, in fact, we made some conscious effort to try to get a really broad swap there, but we made sure we were going to have content that showed up a lot in very recent books and stuff from all across the D&D timeline. We made sure within the fifth edition books, we tried to have some representative piece from each of them

and also did a bunch of data mining, trying to figure out, like, what elements of D&D people actually have show up in their games the most. So do you remember, like, the most common thing that people know from D&D? Do you remember that? It was somewhat hard to compare across various classes of things, like how much people talk about a spell versus a monster or whatever, but I think the tops of the lists were like

a dragon, fireball, trying to remember what the gear list toppers were. Yeah, it's funny because when I think back to my time playing D&D,

and this has happened, when I go on my blog and people are like, this is the spell I love in D&D, where, and this has happened, when I go on my blog, like, people are like, there's a thing, this is the spell I love in D&D, where's this? Or this is the character I love, where's this? Or this is the monster I love. Like, the one for me is, for whatever reason, I was a wizard in the

longest campaign I played, and one of my favorite... What? You still are. I still am. One of my favorite spells was, I think at the time it was called Bigby's Crushing Hand. I think it's now just called Bigby's Hand. But I'm like, where's Bigby's Hand? There's infinite spells, so all of it doesn't fit. It's just funny talking to the public how they have something they love that was their favorite,

and we only have 260 cards. But I know that was a big challenge of this product for sure yeah and a few more with the commander decks but still just no way to fit even a small portion of all the things in dnd into a magic set so here's another thing that that came up i'm curious to get your on, is one of the interesting things is magic sometimes does the D&D thing, and sometimes does our own version of the thing, right? So, like, you know,

we have goblins, and they have goblins, you know, but, like, for example, halflings are the D&D thing, and we have Kithkin, you know, or tieflings are the D&D thing, and we have Azra. How did you find, like, what, how do you figure out when to use, like, where's the balance there? I mean, obviously you're doing the D&D, you want to do the D&D things, but, like, where was the tension point of figuring out when you could use the magic thing and when you couldn't use the magic thing?

Yeah, there was a lot of debate and back and forth on a lot of these. debate and back and forth on a lot of these but the main guiding light that we really landed on at the end of the day was like if i know the dnd thing and i pick up this magic card how weird is it to read these words on it like if i pick up a card that's an illithid and it says it's a horror in the type line like yeah that makes sense if I pick up a tiefling and it says it's an Azra

I go what's an Azra so I here's one of the ones I know you guys debated a bit so we'll talk about we'll talk about

beholders for a second or not beholders yeah beholders okay two things about beholders that were big controversies I know behind the scenes one is

is it or is it not an eye for the creature type? And the second is, does it or does it not fly? So can we talk about resolving those two issues? make when figuring out these sorts of flavor elements for the set um and most of where we finally got to here was a combination of like the eye type is thematic to beholders but not quite accurate they have 11 eyes not one and kind of the shtick is each eye doing a separate thing and the singular just ended up feeling a little weird on that front without knowing it was a magic type to begin with and the other element being just Beholder is such a recognizable D&D term. It carried a lot of weight getting to show up on cards like Xanathar that weren't going to have the word Beholder in their name. As for the flying thing, this is a really awkward spot.

As for the flying thing, this is a really awkward spot. In our magic world building, we try to make a big point of making it really clear whether things fly or not. Either they're soaring through the air or they're on the ground. But beholders tend to hover a couple feet off the ground and move pretty slowly. a couple feet off the ground and move pretty slowly and we ultimately decided it was going to be a lot weirder to have the beholders jumping up into the sky to intercept speeding dragons than it was going to be to have the ground creatures step in the way of a beholder

which you often do when playing D&D than it was going to be to have the ground creature step in the way of a beholder, which you often do when playing D&D. Yeah, I mean, I think, interestingly, a lot of it is just sort of working through, logistically, how does it actually work? And the idea essentially was, floating is not really flying in a larger sense, right? You're not going to go and intersect with flying creatures, and a ground creature can't stop you, so that made a lot of sense. Right. Yeah, it was definitely

contentious. Through the end, there were people on both sides staunchly, and the beholders should be nowhere near flying, or they should definitely all fly. So, just a little tidbit I find interesting. You bring up Xanathar. I know one of the things they did is they did a bunch of recognition

to figure out what characters the audience knew. And I think Xanathar was the most recognized character just because he has a really famous book in 5th edition that's named after him. He's in the name of the book. Yeah, and the thing a lot of people might not know when looking at what we're trying to pick for this set is just how much dnd has exploded

in popularity recently like more dnd players have started playing with fifth edition than there are playing from all the editions before that yeah because it's interesting if you say the uh so a longtime dnd player that more people know who xanathar is than dritz you're like what are you talking about but like dritz are books separate from it and xanathar is than Dritz. You're like, what are you talking about? But like Dritz are books separate from it. And Xanathar was on a fifth edition book that you would buy, you know? And I mean, we did Dritz too, actually, but I mean, it's just, let's talk about Dritz for a second. Cause he was probably sort of the most famous, like long time, you know,

character novels and things. How much pressure was there to get Dritz right? A ton. This was, I think one of the first things we started on in vision design and we're still tweaking it to try to get the card right through ffl it's it was a really hard task there's just so much content about grits like such a deep characterization there's no way we're going to fit it all onto a magic card. And so we spent a lot of time trying to dig into, like, what's really important and essential to, like,

the feeling of this being drixed. Yeah, that's something that the audience, just to talk a little bit about designing characters. When we make up a character, whatever, we can make up whatever we want if we're making the character. But when it's a known character that you're trying to capture, one of the tricky parts is, like, what's the most important? We can't put everything on the card.

What's the most important thing? And, like, Dritz is like, what's his cat's name? Gwynnimer? Right, I mean, like, okay, well, his cat's pretty iconic. You gotta have a cat, right? You know, and he uses two sword. I mean, like, okay, well, his cat's pretty iconic. You gotta have a cat, right? You know, and, you know, he uses two swords. I mean, like, what's the most important thing?

Like, there's books and books and books about him, but you have to get, like, what's the essence of what makes Drift a fun character? Because one of the things about design in general is over-designing something actually makes for a less fun magic card. Like, being more accurate does not necessarily make a better card because it doesn't

play as well. Or, you know, there's, I mean, it's tiny text and it's hard to understand what's going on. And so that's part of making a card is, let's capture the essence in the simplest way we can. Right. And there's this added layer that can be hard to see thinking about it up front. But when you're reading a bunch of books about which the most essential elements will get touched on over and over and over again and the other things show up once but on a magic card everything has equal weight we're not repeating the important parts so even without getting confusing or too complicated just adding a less important part of the character can actually make the card as a whole feel less like them.

Yeah, I know it's tricky. There is a very interesting... I know I've had to do some other stuff designing characters that aren't our characters. I've had some experience now doing that, and it's hard! What is the essence of the character? I find it a cool design

challenge, but it is something... Maybe that'll be a podcast at some point. I'll talk about it down the road once more Universe of Beyond sets are out. Okay. Let's dive a little bit into dice rolling. This was another contentious thing, right, that happened.

That's for sure. How sure were you that dice rolling should be in the set? It's, I certainly vacillated a fair amount on how much I thought we should do it. do it. I was really confident it should show up somewhere, but I, a lot of it really depended for me on like, once we get everything right, so that this like sort of variance plays out in a way where it's always good for you and somewhat predictable. And like, we do everything we can to make this a mechanic that you can enjoy playing with even when trying to compete i wasn't sure where we were going to land at the outset

before we figured all those things out and thought you know maybe this is going to fail and we're just going to say like we should put some dice rolling cards in the commander decks but there's no way we can make it fun in the competitive limited environment. But the more we played with it, the more confident I got it should stick. It was just like every iteration we had on ironing out how the cards worked. It got more and more fun to try to compete with. Yeah, one of the interesting, I mean, probably as someone who's done more die rolling

than anybody else in the building, like, one of the things that was really interesting to me is, like, Unglued had die rolling for the first time, and one of the weird things was they were some of the highest rated and lowest rated cards. In fact, I didn't put them in Unhinged because I was like, oh, people don't like die rolling.

But then when I went back and looked at the deck, I was like, oh, wait. It depends how you roll the die. The big lesson was the audience wants to have some understanding of what's going to happen. We had a bunch of cards where, like, who knows what's going to happen? And the audience was like, I can't put that on my deck. I don't know what's going to happen.

Oh, and also, we had a bunch of, like, and you get punished. And they're like, okay, I don't want to, like, I don't know what's going to happen you know oh and i also we had a bunch of like and you get punished and like they're like okay i don't want to like i don't know what's going to happen sometimes it's bad for me like i i don't want to touch that with a 10-foot pole but cards were like like i think the one of the popular cards we did uh was a card called uh elvish impersonators where you rolled uh one die for the power one die for the toughness right and like you knew you're getting a creature but is it a one one is it six six like there's a lot of variants um and so it's interesting like one of the you were getting a creature, but is it a 1-1? Is it 6-6? Like, there's a lot of variants. And so,

it was interesting. Like, one of the big lessons for me on die-rolling is die-rolling can be a lot of fun, but, right, the audience wants to have some expectation of what's going to happen. Like, one of the things I always joked about is, you know, here's a game. I give you a million dollars, or I

chop your head off. Not that fun a game, you know? But if it's a game where, like, you can win $5 or $10, hey, that sounds like a fun game, you know. But as soon as there's, like, some risk involved, like, oh, I don't want to do things that I don't like the outcome. Now, one of the big challenges for you guys, like, the unsets, we embrace variance. Like, because we're super casual, it's like,

hey, high variance is great you know uh and you guys couldn't really do that like sort of normal you know standard play you couldn't just say crazy swings so how did how did you figure out how to balance that yeah the biggest thing was i think taking some inspiration from coin flipping where like rolling a d6 you've got these six different outcomes and often scale on it like making a 6-1 is very different from making a 1-1 and hugely disparate in power level but we didn't there was first of all no way we were going to be able to be that granular with 20 sided dice magic just doesn't have enough things that you can scale from 1 to 20 and still be playing a game rather than just have this card decided all on its And that meant we were going to have to subdivide somewhere

and we could sort of tone down the usual uncertainty in what was going on, even when we put a big upside for rolling a 20, keeping the 1 through 9 and 10 through 19 areas we ended up putting on the cards fairly close together makes it a lot easier to plan with what your card's likely to do. Yeah, that was, I mean, there's some that deviate from this, but the main model was 1 to 9, effects you can predict

and know it'll happen, and it's worth playing the card for. 10 through 19 is like, okay, an upgraded version that I'd be happy, and it's a little better than the main version. And then 20 is like, ooh, something very exciting happens. That seemed to be the model that you guys embraced. Yeah.

Taking some inspiration from the D&D front on like, well, normally you have like a DC threshold that determines success or failure, but actually failing wasn't that much fun when you put it into magic context, competing against the other players instead of cooperating with them. Now, you did make one card that had a one. So what got you to do that? Why did you decide to make one card? Treasure chest, right?

Yeah, so treasure chest and the death of many things to some extent both kind of violate all of these lines I've been talking about with die rolling. And this is because our main magic sets serve a lot of audiences so a lot of the stuff i've been talking about is you know uh very important to people trying to win their games of magic regardless of whether they're competing for something like in a limited tournament or just hoping to win. But not everybody is coming to their table trying to win. Lots of people, for instance, play their multiplayer games just as a way to hang out with their friends and are there for the experience more than the victory.

And the more that you're into that sort of cooperative rather than competitive mindset the more fun it can be to sort of let go of your fate in the game and get the fun moment that happens when you open the treasure chest in dnd where you're just like i want to see what happens there's going to be a moment of tension. Something cool is going to come out of it. So we tried to capture that feeling in small quantities and high rarities so that it wouldn't be coming up a bunch in limited games for people who didn't want it, but people who did want that opening booster packs

and expecting to get that sort of thing out of die rolling would have a chance to play with it. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the... I mean, I talk about this all the time on this podcast, is Magic has all these different audiences, and sometimes they just want opposite things. Like, some people go, I don't want die rolling to limit skill in any way,

and other people are like, I want randomness. Give me exciting tension moments. But a lot of that, I think, was in what cards you chose, what rarity you chose. Like, there's a lot of sort of as-fan placement, if you will, to sort of limit effects. Okay, so before we... I can see my desk here.

We don't have tons of time left. But I do want to talk about dungeons just a little bit. That was another... We have messed around in design with what I'll call outside game elements for quite a while. Pretty long time, actually. But this is... I mean, I don't know whether the Monarch comes just the first time, but this is kind of the first outside game component being brought in that we've done.

What do you think made this the one we finally did it? Like what made this the one that, like we've tried a lot, but why was this the one? I think at the end of the day, the reason this one got through when we haven't in the past is like, there is a lot of overhead to doing these sorts of things. We have to make sure everyone has access to the external element. It's more stuff to track in the past is like there is a lot of overhead to doing these sorts of things we have to make sure everyone has access to the external element it's more stuff to track in the game and we we needed it to really make things feel like dnd when we're making a set on a magic plane

we're dictating what it feels like somewhat and it's harder to uh clear the bar for something like this when we could make another easier to execute mechanic that could also capture a really cool facet of the setting but here people knew what they expected and this captured the adventuring feel that we really knew we needed to get a lot better than anything else we came up with. Yeah, I know early on that one of the things, I remember, I think Andrew was the one that said that.

Andrew Veen led the vision design. He said, it's Dungeon Dragons. We have to have Dungeons and Dragons. Right, we spent some time very early on going like is dungeon like a land subtype and wow did nothing we came up with there both fit on a magic card and feel like exploring a dungeon yeah it's a it one of the things that's interesting in design the interesting design challenge is when you have to match a resonant... Like, it's a thing.

Okay, people do this. This is a game thing. People go through dungeons. How do we capture that sense? And, like, I know contraptions. I had a similar thing where, like, okay, how do you make contraptions work? And it was just like...

It had such a... I had to match a known thing to a certain extent. And, like, it really dictates what you can and can't do. And I do like, the dungeons do a great job of making you feel like you're going off on this little quest. I knew we were sticking with it when we did our sort of open company-wide at Wizards playtest for the first time with the set and saw people who had never seen any of this before

pick up their dungeons and just start traipsing through and there was a smile on every one of their faces. Yeah, no, it was, so, just so the audience knows, like, we will do testing internally, like, and we'll sometimes do more of what we call wide testing, where it's people that have never played the set before, but internal to Wizards, so, you know, it's within the company.

And we get a lot of great feedback, because a lot of people who work at Wizards like Magic, but they're not R&D members, you know, they're just people who work at Wizards like magic, but they're not R&D members. They're just people who casually enjoy the game. And I'm excited we did dungeons for what it's worth. I'm glad we did. As someone who's been trying

to do this forever, it's hilarious to me that the ones that I don't work on is where it happens. Don't pretend like you had no hand. There was a good attempt at this that you and I worked on together for War of the Spark how much did Skirmish

how much did Skirmish influence this? I'm just curious yeah definitely in the back of my mind a lot I can't say for sure where I first got the idea to get here but I'm not sure if we would have gotten over the finish line without Skirmish,

because the learnings from playing that certainly helped get to a remotely workable version of the dungeons a lot faster than... Real quickly for the audience, just so the audience might know, Skirmish was a mechanic we tried in War of the Spark, where it represented the fight that was going on, and you brought this outside component that was kind of this tug-of-war sort of game, where as you did damage and stuff, you would move toward your

line, and you sort of... And you got a prize once you did it, and so you were fighting the other opponent, but it went... It was like a metagame that went back and forth as you were playing. We didn't end up doing it, obviously, but that's what we're talking about. Yeah, people have asked me if Skirmish had anything to do and then I didn't

I thought about it you were on War of the Spark so that makes some sense but my answer has been I don't know yeah I don't think it was the inspiration but I can't really tell you the inner workings of my own subconscious but it definitely helped figure out the execution of it it was the inspiration, but I can't really tell you the inner workings of my own subconscious.

But it definitely helped figure out the execution of it. That's very cool. So I'm almost at my desk here. Any final thoughts on the making of Adventures in the Forgotten Realm? I guess just you know, Mark, you do a great job of collating all the audience feedback.

So I would be really excited to know, like, what elements of the set did people feel like were knocked out of the park? And what from D&D and the Forgotten Realms do people really miss? I mean, working on this set was really fun. I hope we'll get to do it again. Yeah, it's funny. One of the biggest comments I got is people who are like, I'm so excited. I love

the set, but this one thing that I love about D&D you didn't do, or like Elminster, for example, was a character that commonly comes up that wasn't here. Um, and a few of them, like Elminster come up a lot, but a lot of them is just, I love this individual thing. Why was this individual thing that you, you could have printed this thing, you know, just like for me, it's like, you know, if I was doing this, that Bigby's hand would have been, I love

Bigby's hand, but you know, um, there's just too much, I mean, but the good news is, I say this to the audience all the time, is success breeds repetition, which means if the set does well, there's a good chance we'll do more, and so far, so far, it's looking good, so I've said this in one of my articles,

that I'm optimistic that someday we'll do another D&D thing, only because, hey, our company owns D&D, and the audience seems to like it. So anyway, I'm optimistic. We have to see how the set does, but I am optimistic. Fingers crossed. It was a lot of fun to work.

I loved it. But anyway, I can see my desk. So we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me my drive to work. So instead of talking to magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So thank you, Jules, for being with us. Thanks for having me.

And everyone, I will see all of you next time. Bye-bye.