John Wick Game Designer Divorce

Allandaros

I've just run across this Twitter thread from Rob Vaux, the former brand manager for 7th Sea 1e, discussing how the Paizo discussion has reopened old trauma from his interactions with John Wick.

There's a full thread, but relevant issues include bullying:

"@wickedthought bullied other staff members on a daily basis, in ways that went beyond verbal abuse. He engineered whisper campaigns, made open threats behind closed doors, and would actively sabotage projects in order to make others look bad."

threats to colleagues:

When pressed on uncomfortable topics, @wickedthought could fly into sudden, violent rages. He once shoved the knickknacks off of my office shelf while telling me how badly he'd like to physically hurt another writer whom he had authority over.

And plagiarism:

Twice @wickedthought was credibly accused of plagiarism, and when I confronted him on one of them, he didn't deny it. He simply said, "no one will believe them."

Vaux links the instances of abuse sliding to personal networks and chummy connections (such as those that form at GenCon), and calls upon folks to conduct more stringent interrogations of the companies they're purchasing from.

Last edited: Sep 19, 2021

KungFuFenris

Oh for fucks sake.
Yeah, unfortunately, this does not surprise me that much.

When someone buys into their own "the great artist" persona, it's usually not an especially good sign.

The trainwreck that is 7S2E just keeps on rolling.

I'm not in the least bit shocked that this came out about John Wick. He came across as a bully in his earliest writings of Legend of the Five Rings rpg. There's a section in the Gm's Guide for 1st ed where he talks about how a player showed up with a minmaxed character that didn't fit with the party at all, and even took a fellow PC as an enemy. Instead of dealing with it like an adult and explaining how the character isn't acceptable, he spent like 20-30 minutes of game time having the lord berate the minmaxed PC before then telling the player to make the character again.

Waaaaaay back in time, on the old email lists for L5R and 7th Sea, JW ruled the roost, and frequently banned people that disagreed with him. I remember one guy who complained about the lack of Black and Arabic NPCs in 7th Sea, to which JW replied with something like "well, that's because there were no famous Arabic or Black people from the time period." So the OP replied with a long list of famous Black and Arabic people from history. And was promptly banned from the list for doing so. That, to me, sums up JW.

Dragon_Blooded

I was a huuuuuge JW fan back in the day, and even then I found some of his behavior kinda shitty/bully-ish. I think it was his shenanigans around Jared Sorensen's fake death announcement "joke" (which, IIRC, got JW permananned from RPGnet for the first time), and the multiple GM advice across multiple games and products they can basically be summed up as "be an asshole to your problem player in-game instead of having a conversation like two adults" that finally opened my eyes. But this is even worse

Eduardo Penna

I must say John Wick stuff sucks more than Paizo as I was always eyeing giving his "Play Dirty" book a read, especially that some big names of Polish RPG scene wrote several books as "sequels" to his and those were very helpful to me as a GM, been thinking of giving the whole series a let's read once I finish my current one, here on these very forums. Now I consider skipping Wick's book for it.

I do have some Paizo stuff but it's all digital copies, majority bought through Humble Bundle or other promotions. Kinda no easy way to get rid of them and in no way that would be felt by Paizo (I of course am not considering anything involving piracy as that's illegal, so spare me those suggestions). But slim chances I will be using them anytime soon anyway, I forgot I had them for a long time already.

ConayR

JW admits on his YT channel that he used to be a piece of work back in the day and his writing (or what I've seen of it) always came across as abrasive. So I'm not at all surprised about that. I hope he's changed but I'm not betting on that.

As far as Paizo goes, previously posted account of abuse on their forums around the critique of a xmas card is one of the first (and last) times I had any interaction with them. Even my younger, dumber self found that behavior appalling.

Not entirely comfortable with redirecting the Paizo conversation about structural intolerance in the workplace towards criticism of John Wick as an individual, nor how much of that is spent conflating his behavior with Donald Trump, clinical narcissism, and work productivity ...

I am not much versed in ins and outs but isn't he somehow connected to Paizo? That was the impression I got from the Twitter thread. But I suspect we could ask mods to separate it into a second thread?

John Wick Game Designer Divorce

Source: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/abuse-allegations-against-john-wick-formerly-can-someone-sum-up-this-john-wick-game-designer-thing.887003/

Posted by: darnelldayer1948.blogspot.com