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Tabletop RPGs D&D 5e Game Design Interviews

James Introcaso on Becoming a Professional Designer | Insight Check Episode 5

An in-depth interview with prolific TTRPG designer James Introcaso discussing his career journey, contributions to D&D 5e products, and insights on tabletop RPG design

Introduction

“Hey folks, I got a very special Insight check for you guys. Some friends and I recently formed a Draw Steel Creators Collective called the Manifold. It’s just a loose Collective of folks working together to make the best Draw Steel products that we can. This interview was made with the Manifold in mind as a gift for the group. James agreed to discuss his early career with me and how he broke into the industry. I think the discussion led to a lot of helpful insights for people who also want to make a career out of TTRPG design. I know I certainly learned a lot.

Speaking of the Manifold Creator Collective, regular viewers may have noticed the new look to these interviews and thumbnails. These templates were made by someone I met through the MCC, Mr. Matt Dollar. Matt does graphic design and professional layout. I’ve linked some of their work in the description. Check it out if it interests you. I’m sure I will be working with them a lot in the future.

Before jumping into the interview, I also want to apologize and give a quick disclaimer. I had some audio quality issues in this one that I’ve never really encountered before at this level. Of course, I tried my best to fix them, but I am still learning this stuff, and the result is audio quality when James is speaking that is definitely below the standard that I want or I’m proud of. I almost didn’t release this video at all, but James said so many insightful things in the interview, I ultimately decided it wouldn’t be fair to him if I didn’t. So I’m sorry, I hope you’ll be patient with me. My audio is usually better than this.”

Interview Start

“We are joined now by James Introcaso. James is a senior designer at MCDM and the current lead on Draw Steel. In this interview we will be talking about his career working in the tabletop RPG space. So if I say anything else in the introduction, I’ll be spoiling it. But of course, James has been on this podcast many times. I do recommend you check out those other interviews that we’ve done. James, welcome back.”

“Hey, thank you so much for having me, Aus. I love being here and love chatting with you, so this is going to be a fun time.”

“I’m really excited for this one. So just to let the audience know the plan for this interview, I reached out to James a while back because me and some friends had just started a community of people that are looking to make third-party products for Draw Steel when it finally releases. And when you’re doing any kind of creative work, I think it is really tough to do it solo, and we kind of wanted to band together. And so there was a lot of energy, all of us talking about making Draw Steel products. And there’s always the hope—I know speaking for myself and I’m sure many others—that you know, this go somewhere and potentially roll this into a career for us, making products for tabletop games. And of course, you can never expect because it’s a very niche field, but it just occurred to me: James, you were someone who, you know, you were like us at one time. You wanted to break into the field of tabletop RPG design, and you did it when D&D Fifth Edition was just releasing, just like we’re trying to do it now when Draw Steel is releasing. And I thought it would be really cool to talk to you about how you got your break, how your career started, and that might have some insights for all of us about how we could maybe do the same thing for Draw Steel.”

“Absolutely. I’m so excited to talk about this. A big thing for me, right, is that I want Draw Steel to be something that third-party creators enjoy making stuff for, enjoy being part of a community for, because that was a big part of me getting my start—was finding friends and working with a great community of 5e creators. Right? We don’t have the audience that 5e has, but we have the power to empower creators and foster those folks in ways that a big company like Hasbro may not. And so one thing that we want to do is make sure we’re telling you as much as we can, we’re as much as we can, and we’re giving you the tools to create really cool stuff for Draw Steel.

So yeah, and part of that is also having this conversation, right, and talking about it. My hat is off to the fact that there is already a community of creators for a game that hasn’t actually officially released yet, and that is amazing to me. Because that’s how I started. I started making stuff for 5e before the actual official release of 5e because there were public play tests and stuff.”

“Yeah, I’m really excited to talk to you about that. It’s such an interesting time in history for me as well.”

The Epoch Change of D&D 5e

“5e has obviously become such a landmark edition in Dungeons and Dragons history, but you know, in the buildup to its release, I mean, at that time, it seemed like Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons and Dragons was still losing a lot of customers to Pathfinder. And you know, we just had no idea of knowing that the Fifth Edition would become what it became. And so going back and studying your career, it’s really fascinating just from a historical point of view to see you right in the middle of that kind of epoch-changing moment, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah, it was. I mean, 5e, for a lot of different reasons, has really grown the hobby in a huge and wonderful way. You know, and it’s made things more accessible for creators. Right? Like, there isn’t—there probably is not an MCDM without the number of people who wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons because of the boom of 5e leading them to come to YouTube to search ‘how do I become a dungeon master,’ leading them to find Matt Colville.

Right? And part of that is the slower release strategy that accompanied 5e. Part of that is Stranger Things, right, something outside that nobody really understood was going to have an impact on D&D the way it did. Critical Role, all this kind of stuff. Right? And like, the rise of Critical Role can sort of directly be traced to the Witch Hunter movie, which no one ever talks about.”

“Which is like—I’m a big Vin Diesel fan, so yeah, I was there for that.”

“Right, and one thing that made Critical Role more popular, right, was that like, it was already kind of popular, and then they put out this D&D Diesel promotional video where it was like, ‘Hey, who was that Dungeon Master, and who were those people playing with Vin Diesel? Oh, you can see them play more D&D over…,’ you know? And it like, that helped things.

So like, there’s all of these different things, this confluence of events. And largely, like, also the rise of internet video allowing people to just see how a game that was hard to explain to people who had never experienced an RPG before. Now you could just say, ‘Here, watch this clip. That’s what D&D is.’ And people would be like, ‘Oh, I… oh, okay, yes. Yeah, that thing they played at the beginning of Stranger Things. All right, I know what D&D is.’ Right? And they can go from there. The landscape really has changed a lot and happened in the 5e era and maybe a little bit because of 5e.”

“The transition from 4e to 5e was something I kind of missed because at that time in my life, I was playing tabletop games, but I wasn’t playing D&D. And it wasn’t because I didn’t want to, but I was in college and I was so broke. I could not afford anything, and I wanted to play D&D, but I went to the bookstore and I was looking at the Fourth Edition books, and they were too expensive for me. And there were so many—I remember being really intimidated by that.

And I didn’t have my old books because me and all my brothers shared books growing up, and I just didn’t get them. You know, one of my other brothers had all of the books. And I started making my own game is what I did. I decided, ‘I want to run tabletop fantasy games, I can’t afford books, so I’ll just make my own books.’ And I made my own, and I ran it for my friends, and we played it a lot. But because of that, I was not plugged into D&D.

And going back to that time period where I was thinking about all of these kind of high-minded design questions at the same time you were talking about all the same questions in connection to the release of this new addition. And yeah, it’s been really fun for me to go back to that time period. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I forgot to thank you on behalf of me and all the people at the Manifold Creator Collective. Thank you and MCDM for taking the time to talk to us about all of these things. We really appreciate it.”

“Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me on, honestly. Thank you for having me. So I appreciate it.”

Three Stages of James’ Career

“So here’s what I did. I went through and I studied your career, mostly focused on the very early parts of it. So I tried as best as I could to read and listen to everything that you created that I could get my hands on from 2014 till about mid-2016.”

“Oh, great.”

“And doing all of that, I got a perception of your career where I guess I kind of think of it as going in three phases. And maybe you don’t think of it this way, but I think of there as being the kind of podcast phase where you were primarily blogging on your personal blog, the World Builder Blog, and you were releasing podcasts, which were primarily the Round Table Podcast on the D&D Show, but you had many others.”

“Yes.”

“And then that kind of led to a freelance design career where you were mostly—you were making your own products, which you sold on the DM’s Guild, but also working as a freelancer for Wizards of the Coast. And you got to work with a lot of what are now, I think of as, you know, kind of defining products in Fifth Edition and also defining personalities of that era. I mean, of course, you now work with Matt Colville, but you also worked with Matt Mercer on products. You worked with Chris Perkins. I believe, is that right?”

“Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Worked with Chris on a couple products. Yeah. The first WotC official hardcover I worked with Chris was Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.”

“Right, okay. Yeah. And so that was your freelance career. And then, of course, you got hired full-time as a line developer for MCDM. So that’s what I consider the third part is your kind of full-time, no longer freelance design work for MCDM.

It would be really fun to cover all of these periods of your career, but the one I’m really interested in this interview is kind of that early podcast portion and sort of the early part of your freelance work as well. Because I guess that’s the one that overlaps with the Manifold Creator Collective and me—we’re all in that portion of our careers if we ever end up having careers as well. And then it’s also the beginning of 5e, just like we’re in the beginning of this Draw Steel era. So yeah, those are mostly the parts that I’ll be asking questions about.”

Resources

Episode Timestamps

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