What does a company like WotC mean when they talk about designers and developers in a book? The designers get the cover credit, so I assume they did most of the writing. For what section is a developer (or lead developer) responsible? Is this a crunch vs. fluff distinction?

The developer oversees the writing process, has overall control of creative content and acts as liason and command/control for any writers working on the project. Or at least that's how i've seen it so far.

Quote from: SosthenesWhat does a company like WotC mean when they talk about designers and developers in a book? The designers get the cover credit, so I assume they did most of the writing. For what section is a developer (or lead developer) responsible? Is this a crunch vs. fluff distinction?

A designer creates the text for the book. He concepts and creates both story material and rules. Designers take a tactical view of the game, building stuff within a book that works well together, though usually within the strategic concept of book X covers topics Y and Z.

The developers then take his work and check it against existing parts of the system. We take a more strategic view of a book. We try to make it fit better with the rest of the game. In many cases, we take interesting stuff in a book and make it more important or visible.

For instance, let's say that The Book of Big Monsters comes into development. There's a critter in it called the mind master. The mind master is a big, strong guy who has the ability to mind control others. One of its abilities gives it a small mob of followers.

In development, we might look at that monster and see that:

A) There are already lots of big, strong monsters in the game.
B) We don't have many monsters that come with underlings as part of their CR.

In this case, we might develop the monster to make its minion abilities more important. The creature might get a special ability that interacts with its followers. Maybe it drains a follower's soul to activate an spell, or its followers gain big bonuses to attack and damage when flank an enemy with it, and so on.

We also change story elements, too. In this situation, we'd also try to emphasize the creature's unique mechanics. Maybe it gathers followers to engage in a strange, ritualized competition with others of its kind, wargames fought with living pawns. We'd talk about these guys' building elaborate, trap-filled dungeons as "terrain" for their games, sneaking into towns to kidnap promising new pawns, and so forth.

Other companies use developers in a much different manner. Usually, they coordinate freelancers and put a book together for publication. At WotC, the freelance coordinator handles that.

Considering that the question came to me whilst reading the credits section from the "Tome of Battle", I think that answer couldn't have come from a higher authority. Thanks, Mike.

So if I think some introductory text is bed, I'll have to blame the designers and if the feats in the example characters don't add up, I'll blame the developers. That should make my kitchen voodoo much more efficient...