Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work.

Okay. Today, I thought I would talk about an important part of R&D. So, I'm the head designer, and so I talk about design all the time, because that's what I do.

But there's another section in R&D called Development.

And from time to time, I mentioned development, but I figured, you know, they deserve an entire podcast where I talk about what does development do?

Because it's a very important part of the process.

In fact, I believe that the design development structure of Wizards of the Coast R&D is one of the most defining things about our company,

and that I think it's a very interesting way that we function.

And I want to talk a little bit of what development does.

Because I think that development, in fact, the split between design development is not

well understood. So today, I'm going to try to explain it. Okay, so basically, there's lots of

metaphors that I could use, but my favorite metaphor is a magic metaphor, which is talking about

deck building, that the designers are the deck creators,

meaning they come up with the wacky ideas for what the deck's going to do.

And I mean, I don't necessarily wacky, but this deck is going to do this thing, and this deck's going to do that thing.

That they create a vision.

That design, the major role of design is to come up with a vision and then to try to

execute on that vision.

So for example, I will use Theros, because Theros is a recent set as my example.

So for Theros, I, as the head designer, walked away saying, okay, I want to make a Greek

mythological inspired set, and I wanted enchantments to be a component of it.

And so I figured up from that, you know, gods, heroes, and monsters, enchantments would be

the field, the gods on the world, and then I wanted mechanics for the heroes.

...