Today marks my 20-year anniversary at Wizards of the Coast! WHOA. #wotcstaff #forawhilenow #holycrap Here's a thread of some little lessons I've learned over 20 years.

Good game design focuses on fun. And delivering on fun leads to money. But focusing on money doesn’t lead to good game design.

On a long enough time horizon, every weird interest you’ve ever had, every random elective you’ve ever taken, and every TV show you’ve ever seen will end up becoming job relevant.

You start out wanting to make things that are exactly for you. Then you grow up and figure out how to make things enjoyable for people who aren’t you. Then you grow up even more and figure out how to include others in making the thing so it speaks to as many people as possible.

As I’ve aged, I think every bit of emotional intelligence I’ve ever gained has been at the expense of an equal amount of logical, "rational" intelligence, and every bit of that trade has been worth it.

Here’s why pitching is so hard: Because when you’re pitching the thing, it’s at the start of its life, when it’s the worst version of itself it'll ever be. Your goal is to excite people about the promise of the coolest version while having only the crappy version in hand.

Your setting needs more answers for what a 4/4 green creature could be.

Ambition responds to ambition. If you pitch something that’s slightly impossible but exciting, most of the time your coworkers won’t shut down your idea – they’ll change their own mental parameters of what’s possible to help make the thing.

Your reptilefolk should not have breasts. Not just because it’s biologically nonsensical, but also because it makes the reason you put them there just that much more obvious.

Some jerks will always want your thing, whatever it is, to remain small and just for them. If you ever want to see that thing grow, you have to make more people feel welcome in it, which means you’ll have to exclude some jerks.

Doing a thing once is a novelty. Twice is a pattern. Three times is a sacred tradition. Think very hard about whether to do the thing a second time.

When someone brings up a suggestion on your work, it’s good to listen to their solution, but way more important to hear the emotion behind it. It’s your project, and you’re the expert on how to implement fixes on it – but they’re the expert on how it’s making them feel.

Your setting STILL needs more answers for green 4/4s. Did you remember to make green 4/4 humanoids? Green 4/4s that can cast spells? Green 4/4s that make sense having all the major set mechanics? It's GOING TO COME UP.

The art doesn’t always have to perfectly match the game mechanic, but it should never actively contradict it. Put another way: if the art *doesn’t* actively contradict the mechanic, it can probably be weirder?

You can’t sustain a career of creating for other people if your heart is freely available for everyone to stomp on. But you also can’t make anything meaningful if you wall yourself off from all possible criticism. Keep your drawbridges down, but oil the chains.

People say they want to be surprised, but what they mean is that they want to be *pleasantly* surprised. The hardest thing in the world is to create things that surprise yet satisfy, but that’s what you have to do.

Fandom is a kind of mastery. Canon is another form of “content for hardcores.” If you’re not careful, what’s meant as the fun, approachable, creative parts of your IP can become just as exclusionary and gatekeepy as its most cutthroat competitive aspects.

Every name that now sounds so perfect and apt -- that nails it so well that it’s unimaginable that it could ever have been otherwise -- started out sounding absurd.

The good idea will eventually fly down and alight on you, but only once you’ve built a proper nest of terrible ones. If you want to do good work, start cranking out tons of awful work immediately.

Your setting should LOOK like it was made from pure seamless creative ideation, while simultaneously functioning as the perfect answer to everything the gameplay needs. (You still don’t have enough answers for green 4/4s. Also did I mention small white flyers?)

Work in such a way that the company's status quo at the end of your tenure is better than the status quo when you started. If you've had the blessing of a long career as a passionate weirdo, create a path for the passionate weirdos who will come after you.

I want to end this thread by expressing my love and gratitude for my colleagues and friends I've worked with at WotC all these years, and to all the awesome humans who play and care about what we make. Because of you I've had an incredible two decades so far. Here's to more.